The Princess and the Magic Kingdom

The Princess and the Magic Kingdom: Beyond Nostalgia, the Function of the Disney Princess is an article by Rebecca-Anne C. Do Rozario. It discusses the Princesses' roles in their Kingdom's, exploring interesting relationships between women within the Disney films and how female authority effects this.

The Disney Princesses don't experience your typical motherly relationship. Quite to the contrary, the role of mother and grandmother is replaced by step-mother and fairy godmother to erase familial bonds and, instead, represent socially constructed relationships.

Additionally, there is a wicked maternal substitute, such as The Evil Queen, Cinderella's Step-Mother, and Maleficent. This relationship plays on the power and authority between the wicked figure and the Princess. It can be argued that the wickedness of these figures is caused by a power dynamic. The evil older women seek to maintain power by oppressing the Princess from childhood, keeping her obedient and passive.

I find particularly interesting the work of Vladimir Propp (1968) that is brought to attention in this article. He put forward that there are seven key roles, around which the action centers, in fairy/folk tales: villain, donor, helper, princess and her father, dispatcher, hero, and false hero. Notable, the mother-figure is missing. And it is true, that in Disney's films there is no mother-figure. Even if the Princess actually still has a loving mother, like in Sleeping Beauty, she plays no role in the film, aside from being a stage-prop; without her, the film plot would remain just the same. Other female characters simply fit better into one of the 7 defined roles anyway. The Evil Queen (name kind of gives it away there), Cinderella's Step Mother, and Maleficent, fit best as villains. Cinderella's fairy-godmother and the Good Fairies from Sleeping Beauty are helpers, or arguably hero's. There is no role for a mother. Even more so, the father figure is combined with the Princess in 1 category, suggesting that you cannot have one without the other. So, while the mother's role is non-existent, the father is key.

"We have false memories of the Disney films of our childhoods, I think. In retrospect, they seem sugar-pie sweet and neatly detached from the problems of the culture in which they were conceived, made, and marketed" 

- Karal Anne Marling, 1999