Bibbidi-bobbidi-feminist: Cinderella Through A Feminist Lens
I recall there was a time in my life when my biggest battle was fighting over what Disney princess I wanted to be when playing “Disney” with my cousins at a young age. A time when the most devastating words my cousins could tell me were, “and you’ll play Jasmine!” Come to think about it now, I can really understand what people mean about the influence media has on children, teenagers and even adults. Isn’t it strange how a little girl’s world will seemingly end if she doesn’t get to play the wife when playing “house?” As a child, I always wanted to go to a party, meet a boy, and leave my shoe on the bottom of the staircase only for him to show up the next day on my doorstep and, of course, ask me to marry him. Sadly, as a child I didn’t know that’s not the way things work. If I had, I would’ve saved myself a whole lot of wishing and waiting.
A few days back in my English class, we were discussing representation and how it affects children’s beliefs, and whether or not we thought little girls would aspire to become scientists if they replaced Snow White with a chemist or Ariel with a marine biologist. Adding to the conversation, I shared my own personal experience, recalling that I would get very upset when I would play “Disney” with my cousins because I always wanted to be Cinderella; but I never could play her because I wasn’t blonde, tall and skinny. Instead, I would get “stuck” playing Jasmine from Aladdin (whom, at the time I thought was the ugliest Disney princess because she didn’t wear pretty dresses, she had brown skin and she was the one who looked like me the most). This recollection of memories from an early age led me to agree with the class discussion: if little girls grew up admiring independent women with successful careers, they too will aspire to those standards. If more Disney princesses would’ve been from many other cultures, kids could have an easier time identifying with characters without perceiving certain characters (and themselves) as less than.
When the new adaption of Cinderella (featuring Lily James) aired last year, I was eager to see how similar it would be to the Grimm’s fairytales and how much the Cinderella story had changed over the years. I came to realize that besides representation in ethnicity, Cinderella also influenced a lot of young women to stop everything they were doing and just wait for a man to come save the day. In other words, Cinderella pretty much represents the archetype of a “damsel in distress.”
Cinderella is one of the best-known and most loved fairytale stories of all time because it turns out to be sort of a success story. But where does all of that success come from? The prince, the hero, the protector, the man in the story, the knight in shining armor. And what did Cinderella have to do? Go to a dance, wear a sparkly dress, and be pretty. We are never really shown in the story how smart or opinionated Cinderella is. However, we are always constantly reminded of how kind and forgiving she is, which are both very classically“feminine” and maternal traits.
Cinderella is a servant in her own home, and her character diminishes due to the degrading daily tasks that are forced upon her by her evil stepmother. In the story, Cinderella is in a place of acceptance that ‘this is her life and she will always have to do these tasks and be a worthless person:’ but still she is in the hopes for rescue, which is a very common pattern with female characters in ‘damsel-in-distress’ type of stories. One of the many things that frustrated me the most about the story is how it tries so hard to evoke a sense of identification with young children. The story does not evoke identification, the Cinderella story for young children becomes an exemplar. It becomes not just a dream, but The dream.
Another problem that I had with the story is how the prince falls in love with this made up Cinderella fantasy. Cinderella was never a person of pretty sparkly dresses and balls. All she ever knew was rags, dirty clothes, attics and sleeping on dusty floors. One of the only times when the prince sees Cinderella in rags is when she tries on the glass slipper, but he barely even recognizes her! The Cinderella that the prince met was never the person she really was, so the idea comes to mind of how women change themselves for men. Women are always expected to be understanding, but a lot of the time do not get the same understanding and respect in return. For example, sometimes girls act “dumb” around guys because it’s considered something cute, and girls are taught to keep their voices down and to not express their opinions because it’s something not “appealing” to men.
When I ask young girls, cousins, or friends who they want to be, whether it’s a princess, a character in a TV show or a film, the most common answer is the protagonist. And although Disney has hugely progressed throughout the years with characters like Mulan, Tiana (Princess and the Frog) and Merida (Brave), sadly these are not the widely popular Disney characters that young girls look up to. Disney has created a trope, and with that creation it’s also their responsibility to undo those expectations on young children and to start creating characters with different ethnicities, sexualities, beliefs and personalities. With that in mind, I just hope that the film industry (Disney and many others) takes their target audience into greater consideration. Because their movies have the power to shape and deeply affect people’s lives.
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