Princesses Without a Prince: A Consideration of Girls' Reactions to Disney's "Princess" Movies
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Abstract
In Fall 2004 I taught a course on "Folklore and Fairy Tales" at Florida Southern College. For that course, I assigned, among other works, a number of psychoanalytic and feminist arguments about what fairy tales, especially in their "disneyfied" incarnations, had to say to young girls. By and large, the critics stressed the negative qualities of the stories, notably how the heroines rarely have any "heroic" qualities about them. Yet I noticed that the critical works tended to rely on anecdotal or limited evidence of girls' reactions, or were simply out-of-date. Thus my students and I decided to survey and interview real, live second- and third-grade girls about their understanding of the "disneyfied" fairy tales and their heroines, specifically those whom the Walt Disney Corporation, in recent years, has very actively and aggressively packaged as "princesses." The results of this preliminary study suggest that a re-evaluation of girls' responses to the popular fairy tales is in order. The girls, who were absolutely familiar with the animated versions of the stories (and also of course their"princess" heroines), were not necessarily blinded by the marketing. As can be expected, the girls exhibited a wide range of reactions and attitudes, from those who were absolutely enchanted by the tales to those who recognized the absolute fantasy within the stories. Still, despite this lack of singular interpretation, the girls did tend toward one general reaction: they want the life of the princess-just not necessarily the prince himself.
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