A few weeks ago I received an email from Disney recommending that I “Download a Disney Book App for your Princess!” (yes, I am on Disney’s mailing list. I don’t exactly remember when I registered for it or why, since I usually avoid these things), and once I opened up the email, I knew immediately that I would have to write a blog post about this. 

First of all, let me say that it amazes me that they market iPad apps to such a young audience— what would a five year old do with an iPad? 

Now, on to discussing the App itself. It’s a Disney Princesses sticker book (to me, though, part of the fun of sticker books is lost when it’s in digital form). And you can dress up the different princesses in all sorts of outfits, mixing and matching and accessorizing to your heart’s content. But what really gets me is the feature that allows the child to become a princess. Disney’s website explains that using the interactive camera feature,  ”your child’s face will appear as a favorite Disney Princess—Cinderella, Ariel, Aurora, Snow White, Jasmine, Belle, or Tiana. 

With a swipe of a finger, you can change outfits and accessories, add tiaras, and then send your child’s royal portrait to friends, family, and fellow princesses”. 

Is it just me or are those images terrifying? Here, we have more than little girls simply fantasizing by playing with dolls. They are becoming the Princess— the doll— themselves. Seeing this reminded me of something I have been thinking about and struggling with a lot in terms of this project: Lacan’s “mirror stage”.

Essentially, the mirror stage represents the moment in a small child’s life when they are able to look in a mirror and recognize themselves, thus realizing the separation of the self from society, the separation of the natural self and the social self. The child realizes that he or she is a separate entity from the mother, and from everything else in the world. This is especially important when discussing Disney because children are exposed to it at such a young age, in many cases before they even reach this “mirror stage”- dolls, blankets, clothes, even baby bottles all have Disney Princesses plastered across them. Little girls are immersed in the Disney Princess franchise from birth. 

With the “mirror stage” comes a desire for a perfect completeness- the child sense that there is something missing. With subjectivity being formed, a void is felt. What the Disney Princesses do is provide an imaginary, a way to access the ideal feminine existence and fill the void. With this App, this has been taken to an entirely new level. This isn’t a little girl dressing up in the Disney branded Cinderella dress. This is a little girl placing her face onto the body of Cinderella. It’s a camera, not a mirror, but the effect is the same. They are looking at the image of themselves, not as they are, but as the ideal Princess figure. Part of what is unsettling about this image, perhaps, is the implication of maturation: the Princesses whose bodies these children’s faces are taking over are much older, they have a womanly body- the breasts are clearly visible. Looking at this image of herself could cause the little girl to feel even more distanced from her identity, and from who she should be. She doesn’t look like her image. 

Which is the “right” image? The one she sees here— the one that she can accessorize freely, adding elements of fairy tales to her own existence— or the one she sees in a real mirror? How is a little girl who has been exposed to this all her life to know?

One more quick note: I couldn’t help but notice in the second image, the accessory on the girl is a necklace shaped like a shell. This is a necklace worn by Ursula in The Little Mermaid, and it contains Ariel’s voice. It represents a loss of autonomy, or, alternatively, a gaining of control over someone else. Of all the accessories from Disney films to include, and to show in the promotional images, why this? 

Welcome to anyone who comes across this page! This is the very first entry to my Disney Princesses blog. Basically, this blog started because I came up with this idea for doing my undergraduate thesis on the Disney Princess Franchise- looking into how this incredibly popular line schools girls into certain modes of femininity, affecting how they perceive themselves and their relationship to the world. My supervisor suggested that I make a blog about it, and since I love blogging, I thought I’d go ahead and get started on that! My thesis doesn’t technically start until September, so keep that in mind while reading the posts over the next few months. Things will likely get more interesting as I get further into my thesis and have more research and experience to draw on. 

But for now, I wanted to talk about a trip I had been looking forward to for a long time. My best friend and I are both huge Disney fans, and we both proudly describe ourselves as “eternally five years old”. We had been planning to go shopping at the Disney Store since school ended. But we were incredibly disappointed to find that the mall we had gone to no longer had a Disney Store. So our trip was postponed, and we finally made our way to a still-open Disney Store just yesterday! 

As we walk in, this is the first thing we see: 

As I’m sure you’re all aware, Disney is currently gearing up to release its latest installment to the Princess line, Brave. There are walls and walls of dolls depicting the main character Merida in a variety of forms- baby dolls, plushies, Barbie-style dolls, etc. And I have to admit, the immense amount of advertising is working. I really want to see this movie. Aside from the obligatory slapstick humour, the film looks incredibly stylish and I have high hopes that Merida will set a positive example for young girls looking to break from typical gender norms. 

My goal for this trip was to buy one of the Disney Animators’ Collection dolls (which is what the Merida you see above is from). If you’re not familiar with these dolls, they are basically heavily stylized young versions of each of the most well known Disney princesses (the anime fan in me wants to call them “chibis”). 

That’s just a small zoom in of an enormous wall full of these dolls. Being the 90s kid that I am, I had already narrowed down my choices to between Belle and Ariel. Both are adorable, and I had a lot of trouble deciding which one to buy, but eventually I settled on Ariel. When I excitedly opened the box after getting home, I was amazed at the amount of effort that went into ensuring that no part of the doll could possibly move out of its place while in transport, not even a single hair on her head. But I’m used to this, I have a box full of Barbies in my basement, after all. I was a little bit disappointed to find that despite claiming to be a depiction of a young Ariel, she has feet- you know, the thing that she, as a typical rebellious teenager, so longed for, and yet couldn’t remember the name of? I am, of course, not surprised in the least by this, despite my disappointment. Clearly this makes them easier to manufacture, when each probably has an identical mold with only slight superficial modifications. And that way she can stand up with the rest of the dolls in the collection- each at identical height, looking up at you with a coy, sidelong glance. 

It’s an absolutely adorable doll, and I love it very much. But I can’t help but think that many of these dolls fail to capture what made me fall in love with the stories they’re meant to represent. Each of these Princesses is an individual, with unique characteristics, interests, and flaws. The more modern ones tend to push for this individuality more explicitly, rebelling against expectations to come into their own, to become their own kind of woman instead of the kind of woman others want them to be. But as I’ve already said, these dolls, for all the variety in their outfits and hairstyles, seem oddly uniform. Should Belle not be buried in a good book? And Ariel not be investigating some new human gadget she’s discovered? Rather, each looks up with almost the exact same expression.

I’m currently reading a book called “Cinderella Ate my Daughter” by Peggy Orenstein. She points out the same thing that I have just done: that the Disney Princesses merchandise doesn’t seem to project the same values, or the same constructions of femininity, as the films do. An excellent example of this is basically every doll made of Mulan ever:

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