Beautiful, Kind and Friendless

[matril]

After noting the absence of decent mother-daughter relationships among the canon of princess movies, I realized something else is missing - ordinary human friendships. Consider, after all, that the Disney princesses never look at each other or acknowledge each other's existence. It's not just that the heroines tend to develop bizarre relationships with animals (sometimes verbal and sometimes just vaguely anthropomorphic), it's that those are usually their only friendships.


This is often a symptom of a larger pattern in princess stories. She is isolated and lonely, possibly because of an abusive parent figure or a villain's strictures. Rapunzel has her tower, Cinderella and Snow White are servants/slaves in their own households, Aurora has been expressly forbidden to talk to anyone while the fairies keep her hidden in the woods, Jasmine is cloistered in the sultan's palace. What about Ariel and Belle? Ariel has no friends among her fellow mermaids. Six sisters, but no friends. Belle can't seem to relate to any of the villagers on even the most basic level.

So we have birds, deer, squirrels, mice, owls, fish, a tiger, and just for a change of pace, a chameleon. Belle's companions are technically just humans in disguise, but they have the same cutesy, not-quite-human quality as the animals. The one and only exception I can think of is Charlotte from the Princess and the Frog. And she serves primarily as a foil for Tiana as a spoiled, vapid, prince-hungry girl - an awfully subversive portrayal considering she would be a prime target for Disney's massive Princess Industry. Still, I do like Charlotte in the end, because she shows genuine concern for Tiana's happiness even if it's hard for her to wrap her mind around anyone's experience outside her own privileged life.

Why, outside of plot necessity, do princesses have to rely on animals instead of people for friends? Well, we can't ignore the primary audience. Little kids like talking animals. They're cute, they fuel the imagination, and they do make fun toys when they bring out the movie merchandise. Heaven knows I played my share of anthropomorphic animal make-believe as a child. On its own, the trope is fairly harmless. It's just that it emphasizes the isolation and disconnect that is already so prevalent for Disney heroines, as they move directly from the custody of a parent (good or bad) into the passive safety of marriage with the hero. There are other important relationships in life, and female friendship is one of them. Every little girl watching these movies knows something about being friends with another little girl - they probably play princesses together, for heaven's sake. Yet this sort of relationship is entirely absent from most movies.

Could it be that, in an overwhelmingly romance-oriented story, another girl could only represent a potential rival? There's certainly shades of that with Charlotte. I hope we're not teaching young girls to view their peers with envy or suspicion. I can't help thinking of the stories that attract girls once they've moved past the Disney stage - young adult books with girls who meet that Special Someone and promptly forget about every other relationship in their life, particularly their female friends. What a shame. I do believe that my relationship with my husband is the most important in my life, but it's not the only one. Nor should it be.

Comments

[sonetka.livejournal.com]

I don't know if Disney can be faulted for this really (well, for cashing in on the animal toys, yes, but the original plotlines, no :)). I can think of very few fairy tales where any girl has a friend who isn't her eventual spouse -- when another girl appears (usually a sister) they're very often rivals if not outright enemies. Imagine Disney tackling one of the stories where one sister kills another and tosses her into the river, binnorie, O binnorie! There's just something about a fairy tale or ballad which excludes cooperation -- it's all about the lonely struggle, and a best friend who was essentially your equal would detract from that. Kind of like all those dead mothers -- it's not that mothers are considered a bad thing in ordinary life, but in a story they'll get in the way of an unfolding plot what with trying to protect their children, help out etc. Charlotte in the TPATF is a big exception and of course that's not a fairy tale in any but the most nominal sense. I love her as a character but it's hard to imagine someone like that being recorded by the Grimms or Francis Child. It would be nice if they did more stories like those, but they'd be telling new stories, not old ones, because one very strong characteristic of the old stories is that friendship with equals, or any kind of joint effort or cooperation, just doesn't feature much. I think that's why modern ballads about mass uprisings etc which are set hundreds of years ago are always so jarring, because that kind of thing just wasn't written then. Peasants were not singing songs about how they joined forces with fellow peasants to demand their rights as human beings, they were singing songs about a lone peasant who discovers she's actually a princess.

The animal companions are interesting -- they weren't invented by Disney, though the latter have certainly cashed in on them. I'm not even close to being a psychologist, but there are some interesting theories about the animal friends in old stories -- how they were supposed to be outside personifications of the hero's soul, how they were supposed to show that Nature was on the side of the hero. This was taken to somewhat ridiculous lengths in Pocahontas but the idea has been around for a good while.

[matril.livejournal.com]

It's true; this really can't be blamed on Disney. It does seem inherent to fairy tales that the protagonist is friendless, usually family-less too. It wouldn't trouble me so much, except this idea of peers-can-only-be-rivals-not-friends seems to be perpetuated in other mediums as well.