From Snow White to Brave: the evolution of the
Action Princess
Jaclyn
Friedman
A new type
of heroine is hitting our screens. It's progress, but does a girl always have to be a princess to get the starring role?
@jaclynf
Tue 26 Jun
2012 17.21 BST
When I was a little girl, I used to twirl around and around in my bedroom, stopping only to deflect imaginary bullets with my
nonexistent indestructible cuffs. There was
never any question about which kind of Underoos I wanted: I
was a Wonder Woman girl. What I didn't know then
is that my first role model belonged to a very rare tribe:
the princess who is also a bona fide action hero. Or, as I like to call her, the Action Princess.
This month, their tiny ranks swell by two big-budget badasses:
Snow White (of Snow White and the Huntsman), and Princess Merida (of Brave,
which owned the US box office this past
weekend).
Twirl
around: If you
twirl something or if it twirls, it turns around and around with a smooth,
fairly fast movement. Twiddle, turn, rotate, wind.
Deflect: If you deflect something that
is moving, you make it go in a slightly different direction, for example by
hitting or blocking it.
Bullet: A bullet is a small piece of
metal with a pointed or rounded end, which is fired out of a gun.
Cuff ( kʌf
) : The
cuffs of a shirt or dress are the parts at the ends of the sleeves, which are
thicker than the rest of the sleeve. In this case, as in Catalan or Castilian,
refers to a closed hand used to fight.
Underoos: Underoos is a brand of
underwear primarily for children, produced by the Fruit of the Loom company.
The packages include a matching top and bottom for either boys or girls,
featuring a character from popular entertainment media, especially superhero
comics, animated programs, and fantasy/science fiction. In many cases, the
garment mimics the distinctive costume of the character, encouraging the wearer
to pretend to be the character.
Tribe: Tribe is sometimes used to
refer to a group of people of the same race, language, and customs, especially
in a developing country. Some people disapprove of this use.
Bona
fide: If
something or someone is bona fide, they are genuine or real.
Action
hero: The
hero in an action film
Tiny
rank: Little
group
Swell
by: Grow,
increase.
Budget: Your budget is the amount of
money that you have available to spend. The budget for something is the amount
of money that a person, organization, or country has available to spend on it.
Badass: Some people use badass to
describe something they think is very good or impressive.
Box office: The box
office in a theatre, cinema, or concert hall is the place where the tickets are
sold.
Entire books have been written about the
negative impact of the "princess ideal" on girls and young women. And
for good reason: standard princess tropes
teach girls that their value is in their beauty and femininity, and that the best thing they could possibly dream of is to be saved by
a handsome prince. Dig deeper and the messages get worse: beauty and goodness
are always young and almost always white-skinned. Older, "ugly"
and/or darker-skinned women – especially ones with power – are out to get you.
Queer people don't exist. Men are sometimes
clueless or poorly behaved, but never the enemy.
Trope: Cliché
Queer: Odd, strange.
If you're pretty and pure enough (and you're
not already a royal yourself), you can marry into the 1%. Which
is inherently a good thing, never requiring soul-killing
compromises or oppressing anyone else.
Marry
into: to
become a member of (a family) by marriage
Soul-killing: Destroying the soul; ruining the
spiritual nature.
So, when a princess comes along with the
potential to subvert all that, it's worth a notice. When
two arrive in the same month, it's downright shocking. I
can count only two-and-a-half Action Princesses ever to star in their own
big-budget vehicles on US screens: my beloved Diana Prince, 1980s merchandising
dream She-Ra, and (though only sort of)
Xena: Warrior Princess. (For the record: Xena's
not actually a princess by birth or station. She's a nasty warlord when we first meet her in the Hercules series,
and only gets slapped with the "Princess"
title card when she decides to repent for her ways by becoming a do-gooder.
Because one thing princesses – even ones who aren't really princesses – can
never do is be bad, at all, in any way.)
Downright: You use downright to emphasize
unpleasant or bad qualities or behaviour.
Station: A position or standing, as in a
particular society or organization
Nasty: If you describe a person or
their behaviour as nasty, you mean that they behave in an unkind and unpleasant
way.
Slap: If you slap someone on the
back, you hit them in a friendly manner on their back
Repent: If you repent, you show or say
that you are sorry for something wrong you have done.
Do-gooder: A person who seeks to correct
social ills in an idealistic, but usually impractical or superficial, way
How subversive are these new Action Princesses?
Well, like Wonder Woman and She-Ra (but unlike more traditional princesses),
our two newcomers both star in stories that refuse to make marriage any part of
their happy ending. And both have it better than their elders in one key way:
we never see their cleavage.
Cleavage: The separation between a
woman's breasts, esp as revealed by a low-cut dress
But full-coverage battle armor
aside, the rebooted Snow White is hardly a feminist triumph. Even with all the
girl-power trappings, it still bristles
with nasty princess tropes. Snow
White's inherent "goodness" is completely equated with her
"fairness" (of beauty, yes, but also inescapably
of skin tone). Her life depends on being kissed
by the right guy. And let's not forget the girl-on-girl
virgin/whore gagfest embodied by the Evil Witch
Who's Just Jealous.
Armor: Covering worn to protect the
body against weapons
Trappings:
Accessories
Bristle: If the hair on a person's or
animal's body bristles, it rises away from their skin because they are cold,
frightened, or angry.
Trope: Cliché
Inescapably:
Inevitable
Girl-on-girl: Originally it refers to
lesbianism but there’s a new meaning: the feminine gaze.( http://www.good2b.es/girl-on-girl-charlotte-jansen/ )
Gagfest: An event, film, etc. that
involves many jokes.
Brave fares a lot better,
replacing the catfight with a fairly nuanced exploration of the strains
that can wear down a mother-daughter relationship as the daughter comes into her own and rejects her mother's ambitions for her. The
movie also passes the Bechdel test with flying colors,
which should be a given for a movie with a female hero, but is more than can be
said for Snow White. Also in the plus column: despite my temporary fear that Merida would be called upon to save the day by sewing,
she is given ample opportunity to live up to the
movie's title, and she does so with smarts, strength, skill and unwavering gusto.
Fare: If you say that someone or
something fares well or badly, you are referring to the degree of success they
achieve in a particular situation or activity.
Catfight: A catfight is an angry fight or
quarrel, especially between women
Nuance: To give subtle differences to
Strain: Strain is a state of worry and
tension caused by a difficult situation.
With
flying colors: With notable victory or success (idiom)
Call
upon = Call on: If you call on someone to do something or call upon them to do it, you
say publicly that you want them to do it.
Live up: To fulfil (an expectation,
obligation, principle, etc)
Unwavering: If you describe a feeling or
attitude as unwavering, you mean that it is strong and firm and does not
weaken.
Gusto: If you do something with gusto,
you do it with energetic and enthusiastic enjoyment.
It's also more than notable that no one in the
entirety of Brave so much as comments
on Merida's looks. Not her suitors or their
fathers, not her family, no one. (There is one moment that finds the Queen
admiring how suitably princess-like Merida looks in her betrothal
outfit, but even that comment is about her living up to the Queen's standards
and not her intrinsic attractiveness or lack thereof.)
So much
as: If you
say that someone did not do so much as perform a particular action, you are
emphasizing that they did not even do that, when you were expecting them to do
more.
Suitors: A woman's suitor is a man who
wants to marry her.
Betrothal: A betrothal is an agreement to
be married.
Thereof:
Thereof
is used after a noun to relate that noun to a situation or thing that you have
just mentioned.
What's truly revolutionary about Merida as an
Action Princess is our heroine's cause: she's not fighting to avenge anyone's
death, to save a kingdom, or defeat an evil power. She's fighting for her
own freedom, for her bodily autonomy and her happiness. She is her
own cause. If there's any Big Bad in Brave it's
princess-dom itself, with all its patriarchal trappings. And Merida's not universally "good"
either – she's a stubborn daredevil,
sometimes selfish and even spiteful.
Hardly surprising for a teenager, but downright subversive for a Disney
princess.
Big Bad: Big Bad is a term originally
used by the Buffy the Vampire Slayer television series to describe a major
recurring adversary, usually the chief villain or antagonist in a particular
broadcast season
-dom: State or condition: …freedom
Trappings: The trappings of power, wealth,
or a particular job are the extra things, such as decorations and luxury items,
that go with it.
Stubborn: Someone who is stubborn or who
behaves in a stubborn way is determined to do what they want and is very
unwilling to change their mind.
Daredevil: Daredevil people enjoy doing
physically dangerous things.
Selfish: If you say that someone is
selfish, you mean that he or she cares only about himself or herself, and not
about other people.
Spiteful: Someone who is spiteful does cruel things to hurt
people they dislike. Malicious, nasty, vindictive, cruel
The tragedy of Brave, however, is that while
it's clear that our new Snow White is an actioned-up old-school princess,
Merida is a princessed-out action hero. Brave producer Katherine Sarafian made no bones about this in a recent interview on NPR,
saying:
"We tried making her the blacksmith's
daughter and the milkmaid in various things … There's no
stakes in the story for us that way. We wanted
to show real stakes in the story where, you know, the peace of the kingdom and
the traditions are all at stake."
Make no
bones: If you
make no bones about something, you talk openly about it, rather than trying to
keep it a secret.
Milkmaid: In former times, a milkmaid was
a woman who milked cows and made butter and cheese on a farm.
Stake: Bet
Let's take that in for a minute: the studio whose most iconic heroes include a
toy cowboy, a rat, a fish, a boy scout, and a lonely trash compactor (all
male-identified, of course), couldn't figure out how to tell a story about a
human girl without making her a princess. That's the problem in a nutshell: if
the sparkling minds at Pixar can't imagine their way out of the princess
paradigm, how can we expect girls to?
The past decade may have seen a welcome
increase in on-screen female action heroes, but we're still far from gender
parity in the genre, and even when they're not princesses, they're nearly all
trained assassins or Chosen Ones. Joseph Campbell wrote indelibly about the
power of The Hero with a Thousand Faces – an ur-hero
who's living a mundane life when he's faced with a challenge through which he
can discover his greatness. It's easy to see why this matters: everyman hero
stories teach every boy that he can make himself great through his own actions,
regardless of how dull or difficult the lot in life he's been handed.
Ur-: Primitive
Dull: If you describe someone or
something as dull, you mean they are not interesting or exciting.
Princess stories – even Action Princess stories
– inherently fail the Campbell test. That's why, until we've got as many Mulans
and (un-whitewashed) Katniss Everdeens as we do Frodos, Batmans, Kung Fu
Pandas, Rangos, Shreks, Woodys – I could go on here … to infinity and beyond –
even the most liberated of princesses will always be failing girls.
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