The revelation comes at bathtime:

“Mommy, you know what?  All the Princesses meet a Prince in their movies!”

My daughter’s eyes grow wide with the thrill of discovery.  At age 4, she’s utterly captivated by the Disney Princesses, despite my best efforts to downplay them.  These nine highnesses shine like beacons of magic, beauty and power, the way the Greek goddesses did for me when I was little.

“No, Ava,” corrects Carmen, age 2.  “Cinderella meets a godmother.”

“But then she dances with the Prince at the ball!” insists her sister.

“Hmm, ” I say.  ”You’re right.  They do all meet princes.  I wonder why…”

I’m trying hard to remain neutral and not launch into another feminist diatribe that will sail right over their soapy little heads.  We are firmly ensconced in a Princess Phase at our house.  We started with Cinderella, that demure, soft-spoken belle of the ball, who happens (paradoxically) to be my wild toddler’s favorite.  Then we moved on to the rest of the crew.

These days, the Princesses exist as an entity.  They’re packaged as an alluring group of nine characters, a marketing ploy launched by Disney in 2000 to boost flagging toy sales.  Cinderella, Aurora, Snow White, Ariel, Belle, Mulan, Jasmine, Pocahontas, and Tiana appear together in royal garb, but they never make eye contact, preserving their individual “mythologies”.

The Princess brand is now worth billions of dollars, perhaps the largest girls’ franchise on earth.  Disney has tapped into a powerful archetype that my daughters adore.  We can’t buy toothbrushes or pull-ups without seeing the Princesses smiling coyly out at us.  They inspire dramatic play for the girls, and furious anxiety for me.

“Mommy, why do mermaids have bubbies?” asks Ava after we watch The Little Mermaid, fast-forwarding through the scary parts with the evil sea witch.  Good question.  Why DO mermaids have bubbies? Why is my 4-year-old enthralled with a half-naked teenager?

Ariel is one sexy sea nymph, with her mane of red hair, huge green eyes, tiny waist, and cleavage spilling out of a seashell bikini.  All the Princesses project a similar beauty, in fact, despite their alleged diverse ethnicity (Mulan is Chinese, Pocahontas Native American, Jasmine Arabian, and Tiana, the latest princess, African-American).  But they are all size zero, with wasp waists and round breasts.  They all have long hair, heart-shaped faces, symmetrical features, and big, thick-lashed eyes.

Research on eating disorders and body image shows that girls start absorbing images of female perfection at age 3.  I trashed my glossy magazines because I didn’t want air-brushed celebrities and models posing in our family bathroom.  But sometimes, the Princesses seem like a precursor to Glamour and Vogue.

Certainly the classic trio– Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White– present troubling gender messages. Snow White blissfully keeps house for the seven slovenly dwarves, baking pies while they go off to work mining jewels.  But Aurora (Sleeping Beauty) is the absolute worst.  A passive, sweet-natured blonde, this gal is not the sharpest tool in the shed.  Her main feats include picking berries, falling under a spell, and being saved by a brave prince.  She is currently Ava’s obsession.

“But Aurora doesn’t really DO anything,” I observe.  “She’s boring.  I mean, Ariel swims and Belle reads and Mulan rides horses…”

Ava considers this and agrees, “Yeah, she’s kind of boring.  But she has long blonde hair and her name starts with A.”

My girl is drawn to Aurora like a moth to a flame.  The Princesses may reinforce stereotypical notions of beauty, but they are also emblems of another world, one of fairy-tale magic and adult rites of passage.  While playing princess, Ava invites me to her wedding with Prince Phillip.  “Mommy, I’m sixteen, and it’s time for me to get married,” she says.

If Bristol Palin is any indication, even in 2010 we need to counter outdated stories of female identity.  I’m sickened by these princes saving the day, riding their damsels off into the sunset.  On my end, I try to promote the adventurous princesses, who have some purpose in life beyond finding True Love.  Mulan, a cross-dressing warrior in the Chinese army, seems like a good role model until we get to the war scenes.  Ava starts crying when Mulan finds a child’s doll abandoned on the smoking battlefield, and we stop the show.

Disney is often too frightening for my children.  From dead parents and evil stepmothers to witches and wars, the dark images haunt their dreams.  But they still beg to watch the movies.  Maybe if I provide some counterbalance, it can’t do permanent damage.

So I try to bust open Disney’s heterosexual paradigm (that Happily Ever After where the Prince gets the girl). What if one of the princesses discovered she was a lesbian?  Maybe one of my daughters will grow up to be gay, and wonder why she never watched any alternative movies. So one day during dramatic Princess play, I tell Ava, “You know, people can marry whoever they love.  A girl can marry a boy, or a girl can marry a girl.”

She looks at me like I’ve lost my mind.  “Well, I’m going to marry a boy, Mommy.”

Apparently, when little girls play Princess and enact pretend weddings, the groom is actually a trivial figure.  What matters is their dramatic play, the creation of story.  ”Fantasy play nourishes the growth of cognitive, narrative, and social connectivity in young children,” writes Vivian Gussin Paley in A Child’s Work.

I still want my daughters to know that they can love whoever they choose and I’ll support them, and by god this is Vermont, and they can marry that person, too.

At night I stay up worrying about the Princess Phase.  I wish I could lighten up about the patriarchal narratives, but I can’t let go.  Then we discover Dora the Explorer, who I once deemed annoying but now admire.  I’ll take Dora over Cinderella any day.  A bold, bilingual tomboy with a monkey for a best friend, Dora is always prepared for adventure and saves the day herself, every time.  We may have Sleeping Beauty on our toothbrushes, but we have Dora on our band-aids.

Doing his part, the girls’ Daddy invents a new character called Aurora the Warrior Princess, who hears the call of the wild elk and runs off to save people and animals in danger.  She carries a spear and runs like the wind, taking down bad guys.

She reminds me of the Greek goddess of the hunt, Artemis, that fierce virgin huntress with her pack of wood-nymphs.  I wish I could say she was my childhood heroine, but back then, I was enthralled with Aphrodite, the irresistible goddess of Love.  Aphrodite arrived naked on a swirl of sea foam, her blonde hair down to her hips, leaving men helpless with her angelic beauty.  I used to gaze at her picture in D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, imagining I could transform myself into her form.  Perhaps she was the distant foremother of the Disney princesses.

Tags:   Ariel · Aurora · Cinderella · Disney princess · Dora the Explorer · preschooler · princesses · Snow White1 Comment