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Something's Fishy: My Feminist Attempt to Justify The Little Mermaid
I was seven years old when I first fell in love with Prince Eric, the dashing, young sea-farer in Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Partially because he was the first prince that did anything besides ride a horse or provide electro-lip-shock therapy to his comatose would-be girlfriend. Eric was also mildly more interesting than the usual white bread cookie-cutter princes that Disney usually manufactured. (How many freakin’ Prince Charmings were there anyway?) This has to do with the fact that Walt died in 1966 and Disney fell into shambles, producing uninspired animation flops until Michael Eisner entered the studio and made an impressive comeback with The Little Mermaid in 1989. With its rockin’ soundtrack (“Under the Sea” won an Oscar) and painstakingly intricate animation (the directors insisted that every one of the millions of bubbles should be hand-drawn, not Xeroxed), Disney proved that it still knew how to turn a few tricks. One of these improvements was the revamping of the female protagonist, Ariel, whose creation marks the inception of Disney Princesses that are more than just window dressing to their generic male counterparts. Take Snow White, for example. Innocent, virginal, ridiculously cheerful about cleaning an enormous, dusty castle day in and day out—Snow White has no personality and no qualms about being forced into domestic servitude because she knows that if she’s nice and virginal enough, a white, upperclass member of the nobility will come and sweep her off her feet (purportedly into another castle where she can continue her house-cleaning sans wicked stepmother).
Ariel, on the other hand, albeit no feminist poster child by any means, possesses the characteristics of a heroine—headstrong, adventurous and independent. She continually rebels against her patriarchal father’s efforts to keep her under water “where she belongs,” thus creating her own kind of mobility that is otherwise denied to her and her sisters. Ariel also resists her father’s attempts to display her as a kind of commodity. In the opening scene, instead of attending her “coming out” concert, as her other six sisters did once they hit puberty, Ariel is off fighting sharks and searching for human booty (the material kind, in this case) for her secret treasure cove. It’s curious that her fascination with the relics of the human world pretty much stops as soon as she ogles Prince Eric and decides he’s the hottest thing since Pound Puppies. But, who can blame her?
Ariel’s voice is one of her defining characteristics, and also a significant gender marker for feminist critique. Ariel’s outspokenness against her father’s demands is what causes him to erupt and destroy her treasure cove, thus igniting her decision to seek out Ursula the Sea Witch’s aid. Ariel is frustrated by the fact that no one listens to her needs, wants or desires, especially her tyrannical (but loving) father, her clone sisters, and the cowardly crustacean Sebastian. Voice is also a means of policing gender norms and behaviors. The ideal Disney Princess (and woman in general) is one who is silent, withdrawn and obedient. Ursula informs the viewers of this prevalent ideology when she instructs Ariel on how to land her man:
“They’re not all that impressed with conversation.
True gentlemen avoid it when they can.
But they dote and swoon and fawn
on a lady who’s withdrawn.
It’s she who holds her tongue
who gets her man”
Ariel is literally silenced by her desire for Eric’s love and approval when she trades her falsetto for stilettos, which is sadly ironic because Ariel’s voice is the single determining factor in Eric’s quest to find her and marry her. As a mute, knob-kneed human, Eric is not at all smitten by Ariel and is instead lured by Ursula, albeit under a spell, who’s borrowed Ariel’s pipes for her own nefarious purposes. In typical Disney tradition, Ursula represents the older woman seeking power who must be annihilated at all costs. And in a Freudian reading, Ursula acts as Ariel’s mother figure stand-in, whom she must destroy in order to achieve her status as a healthy, mature, heterosexual woman. It’s disappointing that Eric is the one who kills her in the end, impaling her with one phallic thrust of a ship’s broken mast, which reinforces Ariel as a weak, helpless female and not the independent heroine she starts out as.
By choosing the prototypical and limiting role of marital domesticity, Ariel is forced to leave her family, friends and identity as a mermaid behind her. This, unsurprisingly, made some waves among women, who heavily criticized Ariel’s gender portrayal and forced Disney to rethink their old-fashioned ideals. So Disney hired a woman to make the next female protagonist, Belle from Beauty and the Beast, into someone more “modern” and “feminist.” How’d they do that, you ask? Well, Belle reads. Books! How progressive, right? Go Disney! But before all that, and before Ariel tied the knot with my first Disney crush, she represented the potential for change and acted as a catalyst for other gutsy heroines to follow, from Bookwormy Belle to colonialist-crushing Pocahontas to sword-slinging Mulan. I know that Disney has a long way to go before reaching any remotely recognizable feminist standard (not to mention a historical, racial and non-Imperialist standard), but in my seven year old mind (and twenty-three year old body) The Little Mermaid still floats my boat.
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