Ah, to be a Disney Girl! To possess beauty so divine it can melt the hearts of charming princes and gruff miners alike. To be able to use the same gift to tame temperamental beasts, while you attract, through angelic song, otherwise timid forest creatures. To know that, in the end--despite the fact that your wicked stepmother has forced you into a life of servitude and an evil queen is seeking your mutilated heart--yes, in the end, some day your prince will come.
The image of the perfect girl according to Walt Disney can be described, with little exception, in this way: She is always pretty, always fair, always model-thin, always endowed with a beautiful singing voice and always the victim of some malevolent, often jealous, woman. The Disney Girl also has what one writer says she expected to receive when she became a woman: a life filled with "debonair men so overcome by [her] loveliness they burst into song" (Nirenberg 23).
Though originally products of medieval and Victorian literature, these female characters have been adopted into Walt's family and have so often been dipped in his colorful animation and sprinkled with his magical fairy dust that we have forgotten their origin and given them an identity that can only be described as, well, Disney.
Let's start with the first Disney Girl, Snow White. Now, Snow epitomizes what "gorgeous" represented in the 1930s. In other words, Disney allows her to be a little fat by today's standards (or is it the design of her dress?). Still, most of us agree with the evil queen's magic mirror, that this Disney Girl, with her skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as black as ebony, is, indeed, "the fairest one of all."
Setting the pattern for Disney Girls to come, Snow's beauty is of such magnitude and innocence and downright sugar-and- spiceness that even animals (in her case, forest creatures) love her--even help her out with the housework! With these same qualities, she charms her way out of death; the huntsman hired by the jealous queen to kill her and retrieve her heart as proof of the murder is so touched by her beauty that he lets her go. Snow then wins over seven coarse dwarf miners (even one whose grumpiness is his trademark) and--wouldn't ya know it?--a handsome prince, who just happens to be riding through the forest at the time when she happens to be singing.
And how many of us formerly-deceived-little-girls-turned- enlightened-women want to strangle Ms. White for introducing one of the loveliest, and most deluding, ballards the world has ever known? You know the one that proclaims, in tremulous soprano, "Some . . . day . . . my prince . . . will come . . . ."
Then there's Cinderella, blonde, thin, beautiful and fair--but not "snow" white; she has something of a tan. Her beauty is such that, even without the aid of Revlon or Cover Girl, it evokes great jealousy in her stepmother and ugly stepsisters, and they assign her to a life of thankless servility. With her loverly voice (while washing the castle floors on hands and knees, she bursts into an angelic rendition of "Sing, Sweet Nightingale"); she charms the house dog, yard animals, and castle mice. She also exhibits good inner qualities, such as humility, industriousness and patience, but none of these is what captivates the handsome prince whom she meets at a royal find-a-wife-for-the-prince ball. Instead, he decides to marry her on the basis of her physical beauty and tiny feet!
Good-hearted Cindy is perhaps the reason why many women endure intolerable situations at home, before marriage and sometimes afterward, because we believe that rescue is around the corner for us--either in the form of a benevolent fairy godmother who will grant us all our wishes and make us breathtakingly beautiful, or in the form of a man, hopefully a husband, who will fall madly in love with us, launch an all-out effort to win our heart, and then take us away to a life of luxury. If Cindy and her prince had worries of divorce or aging, you can't tell it by the way they ride into "happily ever after."
Next is Princess Aurora, better known as Sleeping Beauty, a slender, blonde teenager whose loveliness, again, enchants sylvan creatures, and whose physical beauty and heavenly singing capture a prince who happens to be riding through the forest. S.B.'s life, however, is virtually care-free because she is watched over by bumbling, well-meaning fairies who protect her from the knowledge of a dreadful truth: At her birth, a spurned sorceress placed a curse on the little princess that proclaimed that before her sixteenth birthday she would prick her finger on a needle of a spinning wheel and die. This happens, and of course the forest creatures and inhabitants of the king's domain are saddened.
But not to worry! In steps the handsome prince, who delivers her from death twice--first, by kissing her back to life, then by slaying the evil sorceress, who has taken on the form of a fire-breathing dragon. In the end, the prince weds Sleeping Beauty and the two of them live, we assume, happily ever after.
The image of the Disney Girl has changed throughout the years, although many of the basic elements remain the same. For instance, a few years ago, Disney burst on the scene with a Disney Girl who is not a girl at all, but a fish! But Ariel, the beloved Little Mermaid, however ichthyo, is still fair and lovely, with auburn-colored hair and a shapely figure. And like any good Disney Girl, she has a prince, handsome and daring Eric, who falls in love with Ariel's enchanting voice. Ariel's antagonist, the wicked sea witch, Ursula, envies the kingship of Ariel's father and uses the beautiful mermaid as a lure to get to the throne. In the end, however, Eric slays the sea witch and marries Ariel, sweeping her onto her feet to begin life as a human being.
Belle, of "Beauty and the Beast," with light-brown hair, fair skin, pretty face and graceful features, fits the physical image of the Disney Girl, but change is evident in that her prince comes in another form: he is a man transformed into a beast. Also, unlike Disney Girls of the past, Belle effects change instead of waiting around for it to happen: She sacrifices her own freedom to release her father from durance, and it is the power of her inner beauty, and not just her outward appearance, that eventually brings to the fore the beast's good nature. However, true to the Disney Girl tradition, Belle receives, in the end, a reward in return for her goodness. For her, it is life as the wife of a handsome, very muscular, prince, a small change from the soft-looking heroes Snow, Cindy and Beauty got.
Still more evolution of the Disney Girl phenomenon can be seen in the heroine in Disney's latest venture, "Aladdin." Princess Jasmine is not blond or fair, but is a woman of color: Indian. Instead of waiting for a prince to deliver her to a life of luxury, she already lives in such a state and falls in love with a fascinating, good-hearted peasant boy. However, like a true Disney lass, she remains pretty, and her voice remains distinctly Caucasian, and in the end, she still gets her man and lives happily ever after.
What about this image of the ideal woman that has been presented to the world through the eyes of Disney? Is it mere animation, or does it ill-prepare females for life so that every one of them, somewhere in the recesses of her heart, is really clinging to the hope that relief will show up one day on a white horse or with a magic wand?
Perhaps a safer alternative would be to provide little girls with a balanced view of what to expect in life. In addition to these lovely animated icons, parents can provide their girls with role models who are real--who have menstrual cramps and morning breath and bad-hair days, whose "princes" turn out to be portly, blue-collar, and dragon-shy. Some of these flesh-and-blood individuals in a girl's life after whom she can pattern herself are her mother, a teacher, an older sister, or even a maiden aunt.
I can remember that as a child, I was not very pretty. In fact, I was funny-looking, but I pacified myself with the notion that something magical would happen to me during adolescence. I would become, without any effort on my part, but with nature's uncontrollable hand, a raving beauty, a Sleeping Beauty, a Cinderella. Or--if you can believe I thought this, with my Black self--a Snow White.
No such thing happened, of course, but then, that is my point. Let's enjoy these tales, but let's make sure--for ourselves and especially for our children--that we understand what is happening here. Though the animation is superb and the stories are full of enchantment, wizardry, and the basic good-and-evil conflict, we should not be misled into believing that Cindy, Snow, Belle, et al., are the epitome of the ideal woman. Those who do this might find themselves often in the same predicament as that of Cinderella after the midnight chimes: sprawled on their butts in the dust, with their dreams dashed to pieces around them.
Work Cited
Nirenberg, Sue. House Beautiful. Aug. 1991: 23+