The Little Mermaid as Knight in Shining Armour

“Believe me, Grim, when I find the right girl, I’ll know, without a doubt; it’ll just – bam! – hit me, like lightning.”

The Little Mermaid (1989)

 

So there’s this artist Azalea who makes some of the prettiest dress-up games on the Internet, including the Fantasy Girl Creator that I plundered for this quick impression of the Little Mermaid. Do check out her stuff if you’re at all into that sort of thing: http://www.azaleasdolls.com/index.php.

I’m sure it hasn’t escaped your notice, O Culturally Informed Reader, that Disney princesses often get a lot of flak for the messages their stories are perceived to be advocating to their (frequently young and impressionable) audiences. I’m sure I don’t need to reel of a list of the kinds of criticisms that tend to be levelled at our beloved royal protagonists – and at any rate, the following case study should illustrate a fair few of them, because Ariel is one of the most avidly censured examples. She’s a reckless sixteen-year-old who willingly sells her soul (and her voice) to an evil witch in order to stand a slim chance of getting together with a guy she literally saw once and didn’t even speak to properly; indeed, for the sake of pursuing that goal, she’s quite prepared not only to leave behind her family and her whole society, but also to have major changes made to her physical body. Not much of a role model for the young girls who like to deck themselves in her official merchandise, right?¹

But then, let’s flip things round a bit. Suppose Ariel were a role model not for girls, but for boys. You see, I have a bit of a theory going that if The Little Mermaid’s central couple were gender-swapped – not Ariel and Eric, but Arius and Erica, shall we say – our protagonist would come across rather differently. Allow me to work through the specifics.

Prince Arius is a daring, adventurous sort of youth, whose casual disregard for the rules of the kingdom in which he lives (not turning up to important ceremonies) is perfectly matched by his casual disregard for perilous situations (exploring shipwrecks with no fear of being ripped apart by vicious sharks). When we meet him, he’s not particularly looking for love or anything; most of his time is taken up working on his illicit personal project of finding out about the forbidden world above the ocean’s surface.

On one trip up into prohibited territory, Arius catches sight of a human more beautiful than any he’s ever seen; captivated by her exquisite appearance, he can but stare. This is Princess Erica, and the key theme of her life at the moment is the pressure her advisers are putting on her to get married. She, however, is a firm believer in true love and won’t settle for anything less (as per my opening quotation).

Suddenly, disaster strikes: Princess Erica’s ship is caught in a storm and sinks. She herself seems on course to drown helplessly, unconscious among the wreckage, but Prince Arius steps in to rescue her and carry her safely ashore.² He spends some more time staring at her and remarking on her attractiveness before declaring a determined intention to pursue a relationship with her, but then has to retreat to avoid being seen by any other humans. She for her part wakes up dazed and totally enamoured with her rescuer. In fact, she starts spending all her time moping about the palace beset by an undimmable yearning to marry him.

Meanwhile, Prince Arius’ resolve hasn’t weakened: he’s rescued his damsel in distress and he’s jolly well going to claim her hand, whatever it takes. He’s prepared to give up everything for her: his family, his society, his voice, his species; he will stake his very soul on the smallest chance of winning her. Unfortunately, Princess Erica isn’t exactly the sharpest harpoon on the ship and doesn’t twig that the mysterious guy that has randomly materialised on her favourite beach is the same mysterious guy she’s been obsessing over all this time.³ That said, not all the blame can be laid at Erica’s door, because it doesn’t exactly help when the evil villain (also gender-swapped for our purposes) shows up again and puts the princess under a spell so that she will marry him instead of Arius. Arius rushes to stop the wedding and, with the help of a comical sidekick or two, manages to break the spell. The lovers rush into one another’s arms, but their joy is short-lived: the villain is still at large and meaning them harm. During the ensuing confrontation, Arius saves Erica’s life once again by grabbing hold of the villain’s stolen weapon as he directs it against the princess.

At this point the gender-reversal stops working quite so well, because it wouldn’t exactly accord with the princess stereotype for Erica to navigate a ship through inclement conditions in order to impale the villain on its prow. Still, I think that’s about the only major plot point that doesn’t fit. Note that it is major plot points that I’m talking about: I don’t think transplanting the film’s every frame and line of dialogue onto my gender-swapped version would achieve quite the effect I’m talking about.

And what effect exactly is that? Well, just look at the number of fairytale tropes that crop up in my gender-swapped version. The adventurous prince saves the life of the beautiful but slightly dim princess; he is the one who takes the initiative that enables them to be together despite the circumstances that would prevent them, while she doesn’t seem to do much but mope about; the villain almost snatches the princess’ hand from under the hero’s nose, but the hero stops him. In a lot of ways, Ariel actually plays the traditional role of the knight in shining armour, while Eric makes almost as good a damsel in distress as anyone.

And perhaps this is just me, but the protagonist’s actions strike me as rather more acceptable when that protagonist is Prince Arius rather than Princess Ariel. For a woman to give up that much for her beloved seems distastefully needy, for a man to do so seems endearingly, romantically self-sacrificial; for her it’s pathetic, for him it’s heroic. Now, why is that?

I hope you won’t be too disappointed to learn that I don’t propose to answer that question here. Nor is it my aim – at least not today – to point out some flaw in the way Disney has presented the Little Mermaid’s story. Rather, I hope to prompt a bit of self-reflection as regards the expectations we have of fictional characters, the standards to which we hold them, based on their gender. I’m not saying the right thing to do must necessarily be to wipe the slate clean altogether, as if male and female made no difference, but I’d anticipate that the expectations and standards we do have in our heads are probably based more on a murky cocktail of social and cultural factors than a clearly thought-through interpretation of what God has revealed to us about his design for men and women; as much is certainly true in my own case.

Another question that might be worth posing is, while we might not think too much of Ariel as a female role model, would we consider my theoretical Erica at all a better one? Similarly, would my theoretical Arius be perceived as any better a male role model than Ariel is perceived to be as a female one? Or, alternatively, are Ariel and Eric just both a bit daft and both pretty rubbish role models entirely regardless of gender? Come to think of it, that sounds about right, actually…

Footnotes

¹ And if you think Disney might be about to try to correct that in a live-action remake, please be assured that the following trailer that has recently popped up, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWhmheEtIdI, has nothing to do with Disney – just as well considering the film doesn’t look like a particularly outstanding one, though I’m entirely prepared to be proved wrong.

² I have it on good authority that the scene in question took a full year to animate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LjROkIrn8U.

³ See also the relevant scene in Buzzfeed’s hilarious take on what Disney princes might be like to date in real life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ct-CdyT4HkM.