The Little Mermaid: A (Surprisingly) Feminist Text

Reviewing UP yesterday got me thinking about feminism in relation to Disney films.  I freely admit that I am an unabashed, unapologetic fan of the Disney musical comedy oeuvre, and have spent countless hours watching, rewinding, and re-watching my favorite animated films.  One of my all-time favorites is The Little Mermaid. When it came out on DVD in 2006, I bought it for myself as a birthday present.  As a little girl (and as an adult), I sang “Part of Your World” in the shower, and every time I went swimming at the YMCA with my family, I let myself sink to the bottom of the pool and then leap to the surface like Ariel right after she got her legs for the first time.  (I don’t do that anymore, but only because I don’t go swimming very often – if I did, I would be embarrassing myself in public quite often, I assure you).

To this day, The Little Mermaid remains a sentimental favorite of mine, and I maintain that it’s more feminist than it originally appears. 

1. The female characters drive the action of the story and are not purely motivated by romance or jealousy. Unlike many Disney or fairy tale princesses, Ariel is more than a pretty puppet who exists to get captured or rescued by male heroes or villains.  She’s a young woman who craves adventure and loves to explore new worlds.  She is often criticized for wanting to “give up her life and family just for a guy,” but this is a deliberate misinterpretation of the story – she wanted to become human long before she ever met Prince Eric.  Meeting him gives her the extra push to do something about her dream, but the desire to become “part of that world” existed long before she met him.  She doesn’t always make wise choices – trusting Ursula is the mermaid version of Bad Idea Jeans – but her willingness to pursue her goals is admirable.

Similarly, Ursula is, quite simply, one of the best Disney villains of all time.  (This is another point of debate in my family – my father often contests that Scar from The Lion King is the best Disney villain because of Jeremy Irons’ excellent sarcastic delivery.  I agree that Irons’ performance is great, but in terms of villain songs, “Poor Unfortunate Souls” beats “Be Prepared” any day of the week and twice on Sunday).  I like Ursula because she is hungry for power, proud of it, and lets nothing get in her way.  I also like that she’s different from the Evil Queen in Snow White, or Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty, or the Evil Stepmother in Cinderella. Jealousy was the primary motivation for those characters; they weren’t as pretty or popular as their stepdaughters or younger rivals, so they set out to kill and/or imprison said younger rivals.  Ursula, on the other hand, never seems to be jealous of Ariel, or even thinks much of her at all.  She only uses Ariel as a pawn in her larger goal of manipulating King Triton and taking over the ocean.  She just wants to be in charge, and if Triton had had a son, she would have made the young prince her target instead.

2. There is equality between the two young lovers. People who whine that Ariel does nothing except flail about while she waits for Eric to rescue her are forgetting about the first half of the movie.  Ariel saved Eric’s life long before he saved hers.  When he finally steers his boat into Ursula’s heart, in a scene that left me screaming and ducking under my seat in the movie theater when I was a wee five-year-old, he’s not rescuing the helpless damsel in distress – he’s only returning the favor.  By the end of the movie, they’ve each saved the other, putting them on equal footing and laying the foundation for a true partnership.    This brings me to my final point:

3. The movie inverts and comments on stereotypical gender roles.  In many fairy tales, the princess has to sit around in a castle and choose among multiple suitors for her fair hand, while the prince or knight embarks on some quest to rescue her and impress her.  In the beginning of The Little Mermaid, however, Ariel is the bold adventurer who has run-ins with great white sharks and explores shipwrecks, while Eric is the prince pressured to settle down and get married as soon as possible.  Then, as I mentioned earlier, she saves him from drowning, and he vows to marry the girl who rescued him and wooed him with her lovely singing voice.

Ariel soon seeks help from Ursula, who tricks the gullible young princess into conforming to stereotypical gender roles in order to win Eric’s heart: “They’re not all that impressed with conversation/True gentlemen avoid it when they can/But they dote and swoon and fawn/On a lady who’s withdrawn/It’s she who holds her tongue who gets the man.”  Taken out of context, this song is incredibly sexist and reinforces traditional roles for women, but that’s the point – Ursula plays on the sexism ingrained in our society to trick Ariel into sabotaging herself.

And, of course, the “keep your mouth shut and smile prettily” approach doesn’t work with Eric at all.  He’s initially attracted to the pretty, scantily-dressed girl marooned on a rock (because he is a warm-blooded male, after all), but loses interest when he realizes she can’t talk, and therefore can’t be the woman he was looking for.  He still takes her back to his castle because she’s alone and he’s a decent human being, but he’s bewildered and put off by her dingbat behavior (brushing her hair with a fork).  Even as he slowly grows more attracted to her, it takes an entire song to even get him to think about kissing her, and once Flotsam and Jetsam overturn the boat, the moment is ruined.  The next day, when the spell is broken and Ariel’s voice returns, he realizes that she’s the woman with the lovely voice, she’s the woman who saved his life, and he tries to kiss her right away.  When Ursula kidnaps her, he will stop at nothing to be with the woman he loves – because Eric isn’t attracted to fawning dingbats who can’t talk.  He wants the brave woman with the voice to be his wife.  He’s pretty progressive as far as Disney princes go.

Final thoughts: For the record, I’m not trying to say that The Little Mermaid is above criticism.  The movie has several plot holes and ambiguous character choices – for instance, Triton sacrificing himself and the safety of his subjects to rescue Ariel makes him a good father, but a pretty lousy king.  The movie never addresses why the merpeople are perfectly okay with Ariel marrying a human, considering the humans eat seafood and the merpeople live by the “Fish are friends, not food” mantra.  There is also something ironic about Ariel as a character: every little girl who watches the movie is going to want to be a mermaid, while Ariel wants nothing more than to be human.  Prince Eric may be a dreamboat with a capital D, but there’s something unsettling about watching her become human, when I’m inclined to agree with Sebastian: “Life under the sea is better than anything they’ve got up there!”  I’m also not trying to claim that The Little Mermaid is on par with The Handmaid’s Tale in terms of feminist fiction.  But I do think the movie is more feminist than meets the eye.