In the crowded superstore that is the internet, perhaps one of the easiest ways to get clicks and likes is to use the words ‘Disney princess’ in a headline. Disney princesses — those beautiful, dulcet-voiced girl-women who save the day, or themselves, in the course of a less-than-two-hour movie — continue to reign at the box office and in mainstream cultural imagination. This is quite a feat in an industry that still privileges male voices over female, even when it comes to over-the-top, super-powered narratives meant for adults.

It’s almost as though the only places where young women can be the stars of the show are dystopic universes, where everything has been shot to hell already, or magical neverlands populated by cursed princes and talking animals.

But first things first: Who is in the Disney princess pantheon? Who qualifies? The current holders of this title include the ‘classic’ Snow White (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937), Ariel (The Little Mermaid, 1989) and Belle (Beauty and the Beast, 1991) as well as younger entrants Merida (Brave, 2012 ) and Elsa (Frozen, 2013). The princesses of colour are Pocahontas, Jasmine, Tiana and Mulan, each hailing from a distinct, non-European culture. Disney’s latest entrant, Moana, has not yet formally been inducted into the club, but if we are to take her companion Maui’s words to heart (“If you wear a skirt and have an animal sidekick…”) then it’s only a matter of time before she joins their ranks.

The Disney princesses symbolise many things, but what really brings them together is a sense of idealism: they are physically idealised, with their slim figures, expressive eyes and, for the earlier heroines at least, impossibly perfect hair. They are also extremely idealistic in thought, carrying their principles of integrity, honesty, and hard work to (often) dangerous extremes. Indeed, they are often thought of by their larger communities as peculiar, mostly because they want outrageous things, like ‘adventure in the great wide somewhere’, becoming part of a whole other world, or, worst of all, wanting to marry for something so flighty as ‘love’.

Are the Disney princesses rebellious? In one sense, they are. To be a charismatic heroine entails having to stand out in a crowd, and Disney is unlike the current crop of YA universes, in that it does not rely on making everyone around the heroine dull or beaten down in order to make her charismatic by default. The princesses are usually surrounded by a well-meaning, if rather strait-laced, community, which cannot comprehend why they feel the need to shake the status quo. There is hardly anything obviously ‘evil’ about their circumstances; rather, any negativity is encased in a single villain, such as Jafar or Ursula, whose defeat entails a return to the placid happiness of before, often spiked with an added bonus of ‘love’, or the girl having proven herself and her ‘oddity’ right.

This lack of initial understanding from the community is the first and, in some cases, strongest indication we as viewers have of the princess’s individuality. Often, an entire song is dedicated to the princess expressing her frustration with not her community but herself, for wanting something more than what she’s been given. During, for instance, Beauty and the Beast’s ‘Belle’, the song through which the heroine is introduced to the audience, the townspeople comment on how “it’s a pity and a sin” that she “doesn’t quite fit in”, as Belle sings wistfully about finding more than ‘this provincial life’. Pocahontas, for all that she belongs to a community that seems to allow women a comparatively greater degree of freedom than Belle can dream of, finds herself wondering if “all [her] dreaming” is “at an end” when her father places before her a proposal of marriage from a warrior, Kocuom. Seemingly an understanding father, and certainly a respected chief who loves his daughter, Powhatan cannot understand why Pocahontas would baulk at the idea, or not see the honour inherent in the offer. Ironically, Elsa, who is actually peculiar’ first wins the title not for her powers but because she, in the effort to not “let them in” and be the good girl, shuts herself from the world, feeding rumour and speculation about her.

Bittersweet victory

In a darker universe than Disney, these oddities would maybe have the princesses hunted down, or cast out — certainly that is what happens to Elsa, and it’s only through the graces of her sister, Anna, that she is saved from the label of monster. But in their sunny, child-friendly settings, true evil is bested simply because of the princess’s reliance on, or refusal to play down, her individuality. Mulan saves her father, and later all of China, because of her inability to bow down to social convention and stay home like a good Chinese girl. Pocahontas averts a war because she listens to her heart, unlike the other Indians and the settlers. Tiana’s hard work and unwillingness to compromise on her dreams have the double effect of making them come true, winning her a handsome heart-throb as a delicious bonus. The villains, in this case the Hun horde, Ratcliffe, and Dr Facilier, are bested and safely put away; good wins and society goes back to its charming, well-meaning ways.

And that’s where most of the princesses trip up. Sure, they win wonderful victories for themselves, but the more endemic problems that caused them to be viewed as odd in the first place remain. Jasmine protests about the law that makes it mandatory for her to be married by a certain age, but, at the end, she bows to it anyway, her only victory being that she chooses a suitor for love and not convenience. Belle finds adventure and a castle, but though it’s a huge step up, socially, from the provincial town, she’s still acceded to marriage, the very system she ran away from when it was proposed by Gaston. To be fair, the Beast is no Gaston. But he still embodies a certain kind of domesticity, if a well-read one in a well-furnished home.

Betting on the future

In the quest for a happy ending, the stories loop these women back into the fold, and replant them firmly in the embrace of their community. Often, we have no idea whether these triumphs will mean anything for the other women in their world, since the battles are fought against a particular individual, and not a larger malaise.

With that individual’s defeat, the happy ending is achieved, regardless of whether the problems that created him/her in the first place persist. In fact, the only princess to have some sort of long-term effect on her community is Moana, but even she simply reminds her people of a time that has already passed; she does not bring them a new future.

This is not to deny the progress the princesses have made, nor the importance of what many of them stand for. Disney’s princesses are icons, that is for sure. They are inspiring in so many ways — can anything compare to Pocahontas’s unmitigated love and connection to nature, or Tiana’s unwillingness to compromise on her dreams in a time of great difficulty for the African-American community, or the gutsy Ariel’s tenacious desire to explore a world she knows nothing about? They take stands for what they believe in, and they win, validating themselves and slaying monsters along the way. In a world that still cannot seem to extend the same basic courtesies to women that it does to men, where every victory comes at the cost of a hard, unrelenting struggle, the Disney princesses are small bursts of sunshine, soldiering on in pursuit of new worlds, radiant with hope and song.

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