Princesses by Marina Warner
Liking Disney is a bit shameful. The Princesses in the early classics Snow White gambolling with the seven dwarves, Cinderella polishing the
floor uncomplainingly, Ariel the Little Mermaid - are too wasp-waisted, too
goody-goody, too pink. This year, Tangled, based on the Grimm Brothers'
fairy tale Rapunzel, becomes the fiftieth film from the Disney animation
studios, and features the tenth of the Disney princesses. She has 70 feet of
hair and a pink cross-laced bodice (and can be bought with all her
predecessors in a set of ten dolls). It's rumoured Disney spent $260 million
on it, which makes it the most expensive animation film ever made.
By the time I grew up, the ideal of femininity which the famous
Disney princesses personified made my generation gag; it also filled us with
rage. Even in the l960s the aspirations were retro: marriage as the only way
for a girl to have a life, and with a prince who's a cipher, a bore. And then
there are the figures of evil: all women, powerful women of a certain age.
They dominate the films with their height and noses, their vicious, towering,
diva-like passions.
So owning up to wanting to catch the latest Disney 'Princess film' puts
me on the spot. It's uncomfortable; why does it still appeal to me? Why are
the princess fairytales so enduringly fascinating?
I first read and loved fairy tales in Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books – the
Red Fairy Book, the Rose, the Blue etc. - which were packed with stories
from all over the world. They were illustrated in an elaborate, heightened art
nouveau style by John D. Batten and I wanted to belong to the world they
depicted. So my mother made me a satin, lace-trimmed party dress with
gauze wings and a tinsel wand. Alas, in the surviving photograph, my solid
seven-year-old self is performing a travesty of a girlish curtsey. This was
also the period when fairytale fantasies began leaking into celebrity realities:
my nanny was pointing out to me meaningfully how pretty Princess
Elizabeth and Princess Margaret were in their flower-trimmed sun bonnets;
not long after, Grace Kelly was marrying Prince Rainier of Monaco in the
pages of the gossip magazines my mother read. Princess Diana was still on
the far horizon; but lashings of silks and satins, rings, thrones, and the
revival of big weddings were coming into view. Posh and Becks gave theirs
a royal theme, while Katie Price rode to church in a pink pumpkin carriage.
And many of us know little girls who are wildly attached to their sparkly
princess dresses (much to the grief of their mothers).
The rags-to-riches element has always been part of the stories'
fascination. The earliest Cinderella, which is ninth-century and Chinese,
features a high-status scholar rather than a prince, but represents the same
climb up the social ladder.
But much of the fairy tales’ attraction rises from something hidden
underneath, which children still sense, as I did. The orphans and the dead
mothers touch on the deepest fears of loss, the cruel families and unjust
treatment, hunger and poverty, confront realities. The sources of Charles
Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Andersen and Italo Calvino were old
biddies, grandmothers and nurses – their own, sometimes. They told stories
that had been passed down by generations of society’s unnoticed, voiceless
women and the tales open onto their nightmares as well as their dreams.
But the Disney studio prides itself on family values. Like its
predecessors, this film steers clear of the weird or uncanny and wraps the
material in sunshine and laughter. 'We wanted to keep the iconic imagery
which we love,' says Byron Howard, one of the two directors of Tangled.
For decades the American academic Jack Zipes, one of the most vocal
advocates of fairy tale, has denounced the company for sentimentalising and
sanitising the difficult psychological matters the stories face - and for
peddling a global ethos of American greed.
The directors of Tangled protest against this view: 'Rapunzel's a rock
hippy chick,' says Howard, 'She's very Bohemian, with bare feet. If you
asked her if she wanted the castle and the gold and the prestige, she'd say
no.' Nathan Greno, the co-director, says that he saw his nieces playing with
the Mulan doll (the legendary Chinese princess who goes to war to spare her
old father) and was impressed how important it is for little girls to have
active, strong women as role models. So Rapunzel is cast in the feisty mould
of the more recent princesses: Belle in Beauty and the Beast, and Tiana from
The Princess and the Frog.
It's moot however whether Tangled's ideas of a strong hippy chick
would pass in a juvenile court. Rapunzel thwacks the hero again and again
with a frying pan and, once he's properly concussed, trusses him up in her
long hair before shutting him up in a cupboard. The yards and yards of her
hair ripple and glow like the glossiest shampoo ad; this golden waterfall is a
traditional sign of the innocent but nubile girl (of the Virgin Mary before
she's betrothed, and all the virgin martyrs in heaven), and Rapunzel's has
been animated by the veteran Disney artist Glen Keane to act as the visible
emanation of her 'inner life force'; her sexuality. Her hair has an almost
prehensile animal presence. It made me feel queasy watching all the rearing
up, swinging, lashing and lassooing its sinuous coils get up to.
In an earlier version of the story Rapunzel is called Petrosinella (Little
Parsley) after the herb the mother craves and steals from the witch's garden.
There is no father, just 'the poor pregnant young girl'. Parsley was a
traditional abortifacient. So concealed inside the fairytale might be a very
different story - about a childless older woman taking an unwanted baby.
In Tangled, the baby princess is kidnapped because Mother Gothel
wants to use Rapunzel's magic hair to preserve her youth and beauty. So this
older woman is aligned with the other evil females of fairytale who can't
bear a younger rival: the queen with her magic mirror in Snow White, and
the prince's mother in Sleeping Beauty who, in the lesser-known second part
of the story, orders the cook to serve up for dinner the young bride and her
two children.
Although fairy tales are so often women's stories - about women and for
women - they aren't by any means always on the side of women. They
sometimes warn against wolves and ogres, giants and bluebeards, but the
most loved fairy tales focus on deadly conflicts between women: sisters,
mothers and daughters, mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law. The misogyny
in the stories can't be pinned solely on the male writers who collected the
tales. In Tangled, the song 'Mother Knows Best' is a masterly study in
maternal cruelty; it includes several lines which, Greno told me, were
provided verbatim from a session where they gathered together female
members of the team and asked, 'Tell us about your mothers'. 'It became like
a therapy session, with them remembering remarks like ''Aren't you getting a
little chubby?'”
'Our Rapunzel,' says Greno, 'is a journey movie'. Tangled has updated
the princess by adding a lot of rough-and-tumble and verbal banter to her
slow-burning romance with the charming rogue Flynn Rider. I have to admit
I was touched when they each sacrifice themselves for the other; the scene
captures the power of a true fairytale redemption.
Redemption, recognition, revenge: these are some of the motives that
make Tangled a genuine fairytale. The princess who is lost but then found,
like Perdita in The Winter's Tale or Sara Crewe in Frances Hodgson
Burnett's children's book, A Little Princess, embodies an essential principle
of the genre. These fairy tale heroines are hidden from view, either locked
up in a tower or disguised by soot and rags or a wooden cloak or under a
foul donkeyskin. The happy outcome reveals her true worth. The story
promises vindication; one day you too will be discovered and understood
and seen to be special.
Of all the different fairy tale books I read as a child, it was Arthur
Rackham who imprinted the images most lingeringly on my imagination.
His retellings are plain and succinct (unlike Lang's), and his pictures are
sinister and spiky and Gothic: I still can't see gnarled branches silhouetted
against a street lamp without feeling they might grab me as I go by.
The darkness in Rackham leads me to the heart of the Disney princess
problem. The flavour of fairy tale is violent and deeply frightening – until
the final sigh of pleasure at the metamorphosis, the reprieve, at the villains
overcome, the princess found. At Beasts and Beauties, for example, created
by Melly Still and Tim Supple at the Hampstead Theatre this Christmas, the
Beast was a blood-streaked, fanged zombie monster, absolutely terrifying as
he grabbed Beauty with his crooked vulture's claws. She didn't tie him up in
her hair or whack him heartily over the head with a frying pan, but saw
through to his inner life: she recognised him beneath the mask.
Disney princesses by contrast have always avoided the stark depths of
knowledge opening up beneath the stories.
It's recently been announced that Monica Ali has written a new novel
called Untold Stories, which imagines what would have happened if Princess
Diana had survived. In a different way, Tangled also tries to keep the
Princess dream alive. But real life has bumped against the genre and shaken
it to its foundations, and trying to make a new princess for our times tied up
the makers of Tangled in knots. They want their princess to be a feminist and
a beauty, a good girl and a tomboy, sweet-natured but what Monica Ali,
talking of Diana, admiringly calls 'a gorgeous bundle of trouble'. Their
struggle inadvertently reveals something, as fairy tales so often do: the
chaotic state around modern concepts of masculinity and femininity,
individual autonomy versus coupledom, money versus virtue, social display
versus moderation, experience versus innocence. Tangled keeps going
against the grain. Where Cinderella is meek and mild, Rapunzel is a
tearaway, where Snow White lies dead in her glass coffin, Rapunzel swings
like Tarzan from her hair. The new princess is testing the water and this
show us how deep it really is. At the end of the film, it's Princess Rapunzel
who pops the question, repeatedly, until Flynn finally agrees to marry her.
Wishful thinking is still the chief dynamic of Disney fairytale, and here
it's gone far beyond custom. However much we talk of equality in love and
bed, however much my generation thought we were changing the rules,
asking someone to marry you still remains a male prerogative. Could Kate,
the new Princess, Queen Katherine to be, have proposed to Prince William?
No more than the princess who would have been her mother-in-law - had she
not left the story. As good mothers do in fairy tales.
Tangled is out 28 Jan
ENDS