By Brooke Lynch
The Disney princesses are an iconic group of female characters. Serving as role models for many young women, they often reflect the ideals for women of their time. Taking this further, Disney makes a point to deliberately choose fairytales which already reflect the societal and political ideals of the era they were released in and transform them to conform to society’s standards. Through a case study of The Little Mermaid, which parallels Ariel’s journey navigating the human world to women navigating the working world, it becomes apparent that Disney closely reflects the current events and political attitudes of the eras in which each Disney princess is introduced.
Disney released its first princess movie, Snow White, in 1937. The movie followed the fairy tale of the same name, following the princess Snow White as she tried to escape her evil stepmother and find true love. In both the fairy tale and the movie, Snow White was valued for her household work. She is able to stay with the seven dwarves because she does all of their chores, such as cleaning the house and making them dinner. Because she performs the role of housewife, the dwarves come to love her. She is seen as having value and deserving love because of what she does for others, specifically the men in her life, and specifically through chores. The same can be said for the following two Disney princesses. Both Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty were also tales about women who were good housewives. Cinderella, just like Snow White, spends most of her life and time doing chores. Sleeping Beauty, in a different but similar take, is seen as achieving value through her beauty, hence her name, and is asleep when her prince meets her (in the fairy tale). While Disney does change her story so that she meets the prince before she falls asleep, it is only briefly, and he is drawn to her not for her personality, but for her beauty and singing voice. Sleeping Beauty is essentially the modern equivalent of a trophy wife.
These three Disney princesses who are mostly valued for their beauty and ability to perform household chores/work fit specifically into the political climate of the era they were released in. Ranging from 1937-1959, these three films were all released in the ‘housewife era’ when women were expected to be housewives, where their work was to raise the children and do household chores while their husbands worked in the real world and were the ‘breadwinners.’ While you could fit chores and household work into most fairytales, these three fairy tales already had those ideals built into them, which is why Disney deliberately chose them over other tales such as Rapunzel or the Princess and the Frog, but no deliberate choice is quite as accurate and deliberate as The Little Mermaid.
The Little Mermaid was released in 1989, a period of transformation for American society. Just as American society was undergoing transformation, the Disney princess was too. Ariel stood out compared to the three princesses who had come before her, for many different reasons but, mostly, Ariel objectively had more of a personality. She was outspoken about her wants and desires, but she also advocated and fought for them. Unlike the other princesses before, Ariel actively seeks out Ursula to give her access to her desires. While we see Snow White and Cinderella yearning for love and a life without abuse, they don’t put up a very strong fight against their current situations. Their entire happily ever after is completely reliant on the prince saving them, by either true love’s kiss or a magical slipper. While Ariel too is reliant on her prince to save her in the end, by kissing her as well, she still gives herself more agency in her ending because she consistently makes her best effort to persuade Eric to fall for her. But most importantly, what we see with Ariel, is that she fights for her future outside of just Eric. She wants to be human, not just because Eric is one, and she actively seeks out her way into that lifestyle.
Ariel’s breakthrough into the human world parallels exactly what was happening to women at the time of The Little Mermaid’s release. In the eighties, women were already an established part of the workforce, but this was the first time they were beginning to truly be acknowledged for their work. Around this time, women started to fight against the barriers placed around them in the workplace, they “fought for equal pay, persuaded employers to enact family-friendly policies, and protected equal opportunity rules in the face of an unfriendly federal administration,” (“1980s”). Beginning in the 30s and 50s, World War I and II made it possible for women to enter the workforce while many men were drafted into the military, but once the men returned from war, the women were looked down upon for keeping their jobs if they hadn’t immediately been replaced by a man. Women, instead, were encouraged to do their work in the home, just as we can see in Snow White, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty. “Ariel’s ascent to the ‘real world’ easily becomes metonymic of women’s access to the white male system.” (Sells 177). Disney almost outright compares Ariel with women during this time. In Ariel’s song “Part of Your World” she states, “Bright young women, sick of swimmin’, Ready to stand” (The Little Mermaid). Just as Ariel is physically “ready to stand,” “Bright young women” in the 80s were also beginning to figuratively stand for their rights and their place in the workforce.
Despite breaking the barrier between the sea world and the human world, Ariel is not allowed to enter the human world as a mermaid, she has to undergo a transformation in order to fit in. The Little Mermaid once again mirrors present events as women too had to undergo a transformation in order to fit in the workplace. Laura Sells compares the two, stating, “Autonomy and independence, as many feminists have recognized, is never easy; the cost for participating in the white male system can be quite dear. About to enter the real world, Ariel faces the pain of conforming to impossible ideals as she physically mutilates her own body by exchanging her fins for the mobility of human legs,” (179). Not only does Ariel physically mutilate her body in order to fit in, but she also loses her voice in the process. Similarly, women were largely expected to act in certain ways in the workforce where they were silenced as well. To be offered any high-paying job position in the workplace was advertised as a privilege to women. “Like so many women who enter ‘the workforce’ or any other ‘male sphere,’ Ariel wrestles with the double-binding cultural expectations of choosing between voice or access, but never both,” (Sells 179). Women were offered a seat at the table but they were expected to sit and look pretty, not speak, and Ariel reflects just that.
While women were welcomed into the workforce, they were not allowed to be the ‘breadwinner’ of the family, and they were not allowed to make the same dollar to a man’s. They were allowed to have jobs but their first priority was expected to be their marriage and their family. Similarly, in The Little Mermaid, Ariel has wanted to explore the human world her whole life, however, when she is finally able to break through into the human world, what does she do? She does not explore the human world nor does she seek out all the different parts of human culture. Instead, Ariel’s “interest in the role of citizen becomes supplanted by her interest in the role of wife” once she saves Eric from drowning and quickly falls in love with him, transforming all of her desires from freedom to romance instead (Sells 180). While Ariel was a Disney princess that had never been seen before, who had more agency in her ending, she still is seeking exactly what her predecessors had sought as well, and in the end, her story/ending is reliant on a man, not on herself, parallelling the expectations that were still being felt by women in the 80s.
Disney was well aware of these parallels before producing and releasing The Little Mermaid. The original Hans Chrisitan Andersen version of “The Little Mermaid” has become widely interpreted as a depiction of Andersen’s own journey as he reckoned with transitioning from the poorer class to a more aristocratic class (Sells 179). Easily transforming the story from fiscal hierarchies to social hierarchies, Disney deliberately chose to depict this fairy tale in order to actively portray the current events being felt by women in the 80s. Disney, however, would go on to change major features of the fairytale which would ultimately change the entire message of Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.”
In Hans Christian Andersen’s version of the tale, the little mermaid does not win over the prince. Instead, he falls in love with another girl, and the little mermaid loses her chance of earning a soul, instead dying and turning into sea foam. However, we later see that she is a member of “the daughters of the air” who have the opportunity to “earn [a soul] for themselves,” (Andersen 300). While we don’t see her achieve the soul in the story, the tale ends on a hopeful note that she eventually will. It is argued that Andersen’s ending of the fairy tale was to ensure that the little mermaid could achieve her desires on her own instead of “as an attachment of someone else” but instead “Disney subverts the mermaid’s self-actualization process” (Sells 180).
Some may argue that Disney changed the story of the Little Mermaid because its ending is more depressing than what children are used to or want, which is likely a leading factor in the major change. I would suggest, however, that Disney changed the ending to reaffirm women’s place in society at the time. That even though they were being given new opportunities, they were still expected to focus on love, marriage, and family first, not work. Women were vilified for being too committed to work, and their husbands were looked down on for ‘allowing’ it. Due to Disney’s adamancy in sticking to the status quo, Disney likely changed Ariel’s ending to fit with the societal ideals of the eighties. By allowing Ariel to achieve her happiness outside of her relationship with Eric, Disney would essentially be encouraging women to focus on what they truly desire which was not what society was advocating for women to do.
While The Little Mermaid appeared to take a feminist twist on the stereotypical Disney princess, it did not in fact go against any of the previous standards set against women. In actuality, it reinforced them by pushing women to seek out love above all else, including work. Notably, Ariel’s agency is completely diminished by the end of her story as “Ariel passes from her father’s hands to her husband’s hands” and the “autonomy and willfulness that she enacted early in the film becomes subsumed by her father’s ‘permission’ to marry Eric,” (Sells 180). Ariel’s story further enacts the idea that women are allowed to work but aren’t allowed to care too much about work, they have to either give it up or give up their higher positions within the workforce once they are married.
Disney mirroring The Little Mermaid so closely with the social and political climate of the 80s for women would hold true for both the princesses that came before and after Ariel. Just as we saw Snow White and Cinderella during the housewife era, we would also go on to see Mulan, Tiana, Rapunzel, and Moana in the new feminist and #Girlboss eras of the 90s and 2000s as they would take charge in their own wants and desires, and don’t always find love along the way. With new Disney princesses still being introduced today, we can expect that they will continue to reflect the current ideals and politics of their time.
Works Cited
Andersen, Hans Christian. “The Little Mermaid.” The Classic Fairy Tales. Edited by Maria Tatar, 2nd ed., W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2017, pp. 283-300.
“1980s”. Women Employed. (n.d.). Retrieved December 12, 2022, from
Sells, Laura. “‘Where Do the Mermaids Stand?’ Voice and Body in The Little Mermaid.” From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture, edited by Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas, Laura Sells, Indiana University Press, 1995, pp. 175-192.
The Little Mermaid. Directed by Ron Clements and John Musker, Walt Disney Pictures, 1989.
