Sarah Creighton, pd. 2
A Princess Perfect Paper
A couple months ago, Disney premiered a movie about two sisters named Anna and Elsa. Anna and Elsa were princesses of a faraway land named Arendelle. There' s a lot of singing, dancing, and ball gowns. The movie's name is Frozen, but you probably guessed that. If you didn't, I'd be compelled to ask you where you've been for the last six months, because the movie was huge. I've always been a bit of a girly girl, so when I went to see Frozen with my friend, I was expecting to like it. I mean, come on, Idina Menzel is in it! What I wasn't expecting is for it to blow up the way it did. Everywhere I turned, girls were talking about it. The little girl I babysit has two Elsa dolls, two Anna dolls, and one of each costume. I even heard a couple guys from Stuy singing the theme to Let it Go in the cafeteria. Let me remind you that these are teenage boys! So yeah, Frozen was a hit.
I babysit for a little girl named Mayle, and she has no less than eight princess barbies. Pretty much all of her things are pink, and she loves to have tea parties and dress up. I really love her, mostly because she reminds me of myself as a six year old. Listening to her prattle on about Frozen, especially, makes me think about what I did when I was her age. Surprisingly, though, all I can remember about my own life as a kindergardener was a blur of itchy fake satin, Velcro, and plastic tiaras.
The first time I dug up these memories, I was astonished. Is that all I did? Didn't I like to play tag or eat bugs or something? That night, when I got home, I asked my mom what my friends and I liked to do when we were little. The answer? "Oh, you guys liked to play dress up and princesses." Needless to say, I was kind of appalled. These days, when we think of wannabe princesses, we think of whiny brats, low IQs, and Sharpay Evans's hot pink convertible. (You know, from High School Musical?) We call people "princess" derogatively, to imply someone is spoiled and spends way too much time looking in the mirror. Now, this stereotype is super unfair; just because a person likes to look good or wear pink doesn't mean that they are shallow or superficial. But I have to wonder, with ideas like this out there, why is it that most little girls want to be princesses more than anything else?
To understand why princesses are so beloved in the modern day, I decided to first research the Middle Ages and the origin of fairy tales. Fortunately, I had my trusty world history textbook on hand. I flipped it open to the chapter on feudalism, since fairy tales are most often associated with the medieval era, and started to read about the daily life of a peasant. Turns out, you do not want to be a feudalistic peasant. For people of that time "life was work and more work. Their days revolved around raising crop and livestock and taking care of home and family." And as if that wasn't miserable enough, there's more. Serfs paid a tax on pretty much everything, suffered from malnutrition, and lived, on average, for about 35 years. So yeah, it sucked.
A princess or noblewoman, however, had to do very little. She had food, shelter, and security, just because she was born into a noble family. To a medieval peasant, being a princess must have seemed like heaven on Earth, which is probably why princesses loomed so large in fairy tales. For a peasant girl to ascend to nobility, like in Cinderella, must have been to peasants what winning the lottery is to us today. Princesses are popular because, "the princess ends up the winner -- there's always a happy ending" (Strauss).
So the princess mythos "…rose from a medieval culture that faced all manner of economic and social upheaval" (Orenstein). Peasants liked fairy tales because princesses were predictable. People knew that a story beginning with 'once upon a time' can only end with 'happily ever after'. The stories were a kind of 'safe haven', full of magic and miracles to combat the drudgery of everyday life. This is still true today.
If you think about it, the average person knows fairy tales. Heck, the average six-year-old knows fairy tales. This makes them comfortable and familiar, something where there are no surprises and no mysteries. Normally, that's one of the most important reasons people read, to escape the pressures of everyday life. In a fairy tale, everyone knows the princess is beautiful, the prince is brave, and they all live happily ever after. Happily ever afters happen to so few people in real life, as Gail Carson Levine, author of several princess books, says, "We live in a world where bad things are happening. Fairy tales are nice places, especially now" (Strauss). Young girls playing princesses makes them–and their parents–feel safe, untouchable in their fairy tale world. If this sounds implausible to you, remember that sales from Disney's "Princess" brand took a huge jump "…right around the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and continued to rise throughout the recession" (Orenstein).
After researching all this, I was feeling pretty good. Girls play princesses to feel safe. Case closed. But, the more I thought about this answer, the more dissatisfied I became. I felt like I had only partially answered my question; if girls only play princesses to take comfort in the familiar, why didn't they just play with doll houses or something? There had to be more reasons why 'princess' was the unanimous career choice for girls aged three to six. I just needed to look harder.
I spent a long research session looking up terms like 'gender roles' and 'societal expectations' that night, getting nothing but scientific mumbo jumbo. Finally, in frustration, I typed in 'Cinderella'. Maybe she'll help me find something understandable, I thought wryly. And shockingly enough, she did. Halfway down the second page was an ad for Cinderella ate my Daughter. The book was written by Peggy Orenstein, a journalist who specialized in writing about young girls and their behavior. I checked out a copy (whose cover was nauseatingly pink and sparkly, understandably, I guess), and started reading.
One of the more interesting theories presented in the book is that it's not the girls who like princesses at all, but their parents. As Orenstien, a mother herself, says, "Princesses are… something solid we can understand and share with them…They provide a way to play with our girls that is similar to how we played, a common language of childhood fun" (Orenstein). At first, I was a bit skeptical, but the more I though about it, the more sense it made. I thought about my own mom, who's a professor at CUNY. She's normally a pretty busy person, so it's important to me to spend time with her when I can. And what do we do nearly every time we have a day out? We go shopping, something that I don't really like to do. For me, 'shopping' is pretty much the teenage equivalent to 'princess', a way for me to spend time with my mom, a sort of common language.
In an article I read about Disney, Mattel (the company responsible for Barbie), and other companies aimed at little girls, it said that "marketers [of all things pink and glittery] are tapping into guilt among parents who believe they aren't spending enough time with their kids. Lavishing girls with makeovers and merchandise is a way to compensate" (Strauss). It makes sense. For a girl who is not getting enough attention, princesses are perfect. If the girl likes princesses, their mom sees an easy way to connect with her daughter, and the daughter gets a bunch of princess stuff. It's a win-win! Quality time for the mom, and new stuff for the girl!
Playing princess is wonderful for moms, because it's something they understand. And in a world where iPads, Facebook, and other technological advances are appealing to younger and younger kids, having a 'common language' that both moms and kids understand is important. "This generation has lost a lot of it's wide-eyed innocence," said Mechele Flaum, a marketing behavior expert, in a news article by Gary Strauss, "So playing princess is a safe bet for kids and parents."
So princesses are good for times of crisis. They're good for moms. They're even good for medieval peasants. But I still hadn't found anything on why almost every girl in the world goes through the dreaded "princess phase" from ages three to six. What is it about this age that makes girls so in love with princesses? To understand that, first I had to understand a little bit about that age in general.
One of the last parts of the brain to develop in young children is the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that deals with understanding of the future. (Orenstein) This is the reason young children struggle to understand the death of a pet or a loved one. They just don't understand permanence all that well. This principal, interestingly enough, applies to gender, too.
Between the ages of two and three, children start to understand that some of them are 'male' and some of them are 'female', and that the two are somehow different. What they don't understand is why. I mean, come on, not many parents explain the birds and the bees to their kids in preschool, and they don't understand that their identities are fixed until about age five. So what exactly makes a boy a boy and a girl a girl in the minds of six year olds? In a word, princesses.
Okay, not just princesses. Gender to children, says Orenstein, is in "your clothing, hairstyle, toy choice, favorite color" (Orenstein). Boys play with trucks and girls play with dolls. Boys play Superman and girls play Cinderella. This, aside from being pretty sexist, is also a pretty inconvenient philosophy for kids. One misstep, and you could be labeled something you're not, something foreign, something (if I recall my preschool days correctly) utterly gross and full of cooties. And we can't have that.
So girls "latch onto the most exaggerated images their culture offers in order to stridently shore up their femininity" (Orenstein). They know things like dolls, dresses, the color pink and most importantly, princesses, are super girly, and they cling to them "to prove they are girls" (Orenstein).
Okay, so I had looked at journalists. I had looked at authors. I had looked through my world history textbook. But at this point in my search, I still hadn't talked to an actual flesh-and-blood pre-tween girl. So one Wednesday after school, I strapped on my rollerblades and went down to the West Village, where Sela Quinones and her parents live.
Sela is eight. She and her parents are old friends of the family, so before we began the interview, I gave both Sela and her mom, Paula, huge hugs. Then we settled down at the kitchen table, munching cookie crisp thingies (those things were delicious). Sela, the good interviewee that she was, had already written down a list of things she wanted to say.
"Girls want to be princesses for a lot of reasons," Sela informed me, "They all get to wear pretty dresses and live in castles and ride in carriages. And some have magic powers, like
Elsa." (Elsa, from Disney's Frozen, has ice powers)
"Also, people listen to princesses. They're probably treated different because they're royalty. They have more responsibility and respect. People listen to them." Another girl I asked, Maggie Strattener (who's also eight), said the same thing, "Being a princess would be fun, because they get to rule the world."
Of course! Young girls like princesses because people listen to royalty. Being young is hard. Nobody takes you seriously or listens to what you say. You don't really have any control over your life until you get older. So to be a princess, someone who pretty much has control over an entire kingdom, that's pretty spectacular. Naomi Wolf, a writer, says something similar in her New York Times article, "What other female figure can command an army, break open a treasury, or even… simply bestow, with her presence, a sense of magic, excitement and healing?" (Wolf).'Nobody likes being powerless.
Little girls love princesses for a multitude of reasons. Princesses are safe, they hold power, they are the pinnacle of femininity, they are something fun to do with mom. It largely depends on the girl. But, as I started winding down my research paper, a new question occurred to me. Is this love of princesses a bad thing? After a lot of thought, and several heated discussions with my friends, I have to say that I don't think so.
As I mentioned in the beginning, there are a lot of negative views on princesses. When I started this paper, I bought into most of them. But the more I researched, the more I started to see princesses through the eyes of my six-year old self. Yes, princesses may be a bit silly, but I don't think they should be dismissed so quickly. I see the point that many mothers are making about the impossibility of 'true love's kiss' or 'happily ever after', and I understand where they are coming from, but, honestly, it's not a sparkly dress's job to teach a child about reality. It's not Disney's, and it's certainly not Cinderella's. At the end of the day, it comes down to the parent. The guardian has to be responsible for teaching and spending time with their child, and I think that if princesses are a means for that to happen, then more power to them. Princesses are good the same way as everything else: in moderation.
Princesses aren't supposed to be about learning. They're supposed to be about belief. These days, people grow up too fast. They stop believing in happy endings and magic, and I think this is truly sad. Playing princess reminds girls that they are beautiful and magical and intelligent and special, and it gives them something to believe in. I think it was Sela's mom, Paula, who said this the best. "The fantasy part of princesses is great, we want it as kids and we want it as adults. It's nice to believe in something just because it's fun to believe in. Just because it's fun."