Last week my wife took our very young daughters to
Disneyland, where they were excited to pose with a few of the Disney princesses.
The fantasy is a thrilling one for little girls, which I’ve
written about before for Acculturated, but the Disney princesses also seem
to be fertile ground for adult artists, who wring out all the fun and fantasy from
those icons in order to make grim socio-political observations.
The most recent example is the domestic abuse awareness
poster campaign from an artist known as Saint Hoax. “When did he stop treating
you like a princess?” goes his slogan, emblazoned beneath the bruises, blood,
and black eyes of a battered Cinderella, Ariel, Jasmine, and Sleeping Beauty. “Disney
princesses are perceived as ideal females,” Hoax explains.
“They belong to a fairytale land where happy ever afters are bound to happen.
But what happens after the happy ever after?”
Saint Hoax has a similar poster campaign
called “Princest Diaries” depicting Aurora, Ariel and Jasmine as victims of
incest; it notes that nearly half of all raped minors are victims of family
members, and encourages those minors to report their attackers.
Animation storyboard artist Jeff Hong’s photograph series “Unhappily Ever After” inserts
the princesses into “environments they wouldn’t be associated with”: Mulan with
a facemask to filter out Beijing’s murky air pollution; an oil-soaked Ariel
crawling ashore in the wake of an ocean spill; Tiana in the segregated South; a
post-ball Cinderella abandoned in a dirty back alley. “I realized a lot of
social issues that are always important to me could be woven in,” Hong says.
“I'm glad it has started debates and discussions on the issues of racism,
animal abuse, drugs, etc.”
And then there is artist Dina Goldstein’s photographic presentations
of “Fallen Princesses,”
depicting a barefoot Snow White burdened with a gaggle of babies and a former
Prince of a husband who now sits slumped with beer and chips watching TV; a
depressed Cinderella nursing a drink in a darkened dive, surrounded by leering
men; Rapunzel sitting downcast in a hospital room, having lost her hair to
cancer; Belle undergoing a facelift and lip injection to stay beautiful;
Pocahontas as a lonely cat lady; and more.
Domestic violence, incest, and the issues Jeff Hong lists are
very real problems, no question; who wouldn’t applaud effective efforts to
bring attention to them, or to view them in a new light to spark debate? And
“happily ever afters” do sometimes
end less than happily, as Goldstein and the others suggest.
But not always.
The Disney princesses, as emissaries of the Happiest Place
on Earth and enduring symbols of fairy tale endings, are easy targets for the
bitter, the angry, the pessimistic. When the princesses are depicted as lonely
and broken, as victims of domestic violence, in loveless relationships or
dangerous environments, it is a disheartening subversion (even if unintentional)
of Disney’s message of dreams, hope, happiness, and romantic love. It tells
young women that fairy tale endings are illusory and that happily-ever-afters don’t
exist.
Believing that they can
exist is not naïve optimism; it’s the perspective of a realist, who
acknowledges that life serves up bad and
good. Sure, relationships go wrong sometimes. Tragedy and misfortune strike.
Dreams fall hard. But sometimes they come true. Sometimes a woman gets her
prince and her fairy tale ending (though she might have to kiss a lot of frogs
first, as the saying goes).
(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 7/22/14)
