“Are you carrying that basket to your grandmother?” asked the wolf. Finally, a little girl did come along and she was carrying a basket of food.
One afternoon a big wolf waited in a dark forest for a little girl to come along carrying a basket of food to her grandmother. When I think of a clear-cut feminist allegory, one based on a classical fairytale, I immediately think of the words of James Thurber and his story, “The Little Girl and the Wolf.” Like Schrodinger’s famous cat-in-the-box, it exists in more than one state, it’s both dead and alive at the same time. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.” Barthes argues neither the author nor the reader can determine the final meaning of a work. Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. Is The Little Mermaid feminist, or not?Īnd, as a guy, can I determine whether or not it is? Or does my outsider status preclude me from having a valid feminist opinion? Is feminism its own “n-word” that outsiders don’t get to use the same way? Do I have to agree if a whipsmart female feminist tells me The Little Mermaid is bullshit? Should I waste time arguing that she’s wrong? Like, would it be cool at a feminist poetry reading if I argued that labeling The Little Mermaid as anti-feminist was total bullshit?Īllegory is difficult to firmly ascertain, mostly because as the French essayist and critic Roland Barthes suggests in his essay The Death of the Author, there is first the author’s view of the work, but once he or she sets to writing they turn life and meaning into symbols, and thus the author dies away and words become codes for anyone who interprets them. This reading of the film seems far more feminist. But one could also argue Ariel’s story is the tale of an adventurous young woman who challenges the patriarchy to explore an unknown world that she wants to experience “more” of and is willing to go to extreme lengths for an opportunity. A girl who trades her voice to gain a man? That can’t possibly be a feminist ideal. But I sometimes wonder if, like the overt racism of Peter Pan, years later we’ll all notice how sexist and obviously anti-feminist the story is. One of my favorite Disney films of all time has to be The Little Mermaid. The music is insanely and memorably good, the animation is classical yet visually sumptuous (admittedly, very phallic), and I love mermaids, so I totally enjoy hanging out with Ariel in her world.
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