I love Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty. I first saw it as a three year old child, and when I first heard Aurora sing, I said to myself that one day I'd sing just as beautifully. Ever since then, I have worked on my voice, training it to do what I want. At nineteen, I think I have made it pretty far; in the sixteen years I have been working on it, I think my voice has formed itself fairly well.
It shaped me into who I am. Even today, I try to model myself after Aurora even personality wise, because I believe that she is a very good role model for girls.
Some would disagree, saying that she teaches girls to be weak and dreamy. I ask you, what is wrong with that? Not all the time, but I think that, as a woman, every once in a while it's a good idea to stop and remember one's femininity. Dreaminess is a classic feminine trait, and not a bad one at that. Dreams are the result of a creative mind, and I can't remember when creativity was considered a bad thing.
I would hardly call Aurora weak. She is a victim of birth; born into royalty, a role not of her choosing. On her sixteenth birthday, she falls in love with a dashing young suitor, and is dismayed to find out on her returning home that she is betrothed to the prince of the next kingdom, automatically dashing her dreams of marrying her handsome stranger that she met Once Upon A Dream.
But does she protest? No! She has a good cry, then quietly follows her three Fairy Godmothers to the castle of her birth, awaiting an unwanted marriage to an unknown prince, barely used to the fact that life as she knew it was a lie, a scheme designed to protect her from her parents enemy, the fairy Maleficent, so that she could be married off in the name of a union between two kingdoms. And she does this because she knows that in order to keep peace, she must go quietly and create this union for the sake of her people.
Does this sound like a weak woman to you? Sure, she ends up with her dashing suitor in the end (He's actually Prince Phillip, her betrothed!), but what if she hadn't? What if she had been cursed to leave behind her true love all in the hopes that her people wouldn't be war torn? Some would say that she was only a political pawn and that she was forced to choose this fate. But, let's compare her to another Disney heroine who has been described by our Feminist society as a perfect example of girlhood, and is placed in a similar situation.
Princess Merida from the Disney/Pixar film Brave is a feisty headstrong lass from 10th century Scotland. She has been raised her entire life to be a princess by her mother, Queen Eleanor, but wishes to be free and choose her own fate. When faced with the inevitable fact that she must choose a husband, she violently protests, choosing to risk her family's reputation and possibly her entire kingdom simply because she doesn't want to get married. She even confirms this in the paralleled scene between her and her mother as she's cleaning her horse's stable, having an imaginary conversation where she says:
"You could just say 'The princess is not ready to get married, and she might not ever be
ready, soooo thank you for coming, but we're cancelling; we can expect your declarations
of war in the morning.'"
Or something like that. Nonetheless, you can definitely see the differences between the two princesses; while Princess Aurora's main concerns are the fates of her people, Princess Merida's concern is with only one person: herself.
That is not to say that Merida is a bad person in the slightest; she obviously has a mind of her own and chooses to spend her time with the things she likes to do rather than princessy things, and she is no weakling either. In the end, she is willing to sacrifice herself to marriage in order to prevent war, but is saved by her mother, who insists that Merida and the princes of the other clans should be allowed to choose their own fates and fall in love in their own time.
What I am saying is that society has a very interesting view on what they believe the ideal woman is. Obviously times have changed and that is why the characters are so different, for Sleeping Beauty was released in 1959, and Brave was released in 2012. But is progress always positive?
If anything, I think that Merida hints at a very underlying theme in today's society: the unwillingness to make sacrifices. We've gotten so caught up in ourselves as a society, that the younger generations are becoming more and more selfish as time goes on. Little girls are getting bossier, taking examples from the growing levels of spunk present in the characters of the shows that are broadcast for their amusement, being told by their mothers that being bossy means having good leadership skills, and that there is nothing wrong with it.
Now, I don't know about you, but I have to say that when I think bossiness, I think "rude". Plain and simple. Bossiness is a pushy, insistent, gloating way of getting people to do what you want. I can guarantee you that if you take that kind of attitude into a workplace, you'll be packing up your desk within a year. Because let's face it: no one likes getting bossed around; we make this clear in our preschool and kindergarten days when we stick our tongues out at the one person in the class who fancies themselves the classroom police officer, saying "You're not the boss of me!". It's the same way in the work place, only now instead of raspberries and a verbal protest, you get reported by your peers to your boss and possibly lose your job over it.
Some people manage to be pretty successful being bossy financially, but do you hear good things about them as a person? Probably not. Those kinds of people have labels like "bitch" and "douchebag" attached to their names, and most likely don't have many friends; if they do, they are usually just as bossy as they are.
I guess the point I am trying to make is that I think women have gotten a little out of hand as of late; as you will find as this blog goes on, I am not a fan of Feminism. I believe that as a gender we have not changed for the better; women think being strong is being rude and mean, especially toward their male peers. The days of the soft but well spoken woman are over, and a new breed of griping, nagging magpies have taken over. Honestly? I say that today's women should be more like Queen Eleanor, who I view as a good balance between Merida and Aurora. Headstrong, confident, and passionate, but soft, feminine, and graceful at the same time. And above all, unselfish. That, I believe is a perfect example of what modern day womanhood should look like.
In the end, I choose to be like Aurora. Because there is still a part of me that still believes in grace, beauty, softspokenness, and old fashioned dreaminess.
No comments:
Post a Comment