The bad fairy’s back, but it’s not for revenge; it’s for a backstory.
Angelina Jolie as the title character in the new Disney film Maleficent.
Disney
"She's not what you assume she is," Angelina Jolie said of the evil fairy she plays in Maleficent, a 2014 take on the 600-or-so-year-old story of "Sleeping Beauty." We assume, of course, that she's senselessly evil, for what else could explain a person — and a woman, no less — effectively sentencing a baby to a teenage death? The new film aims to tell the "truth" about the would-be princess-killer, to explain what precisely could make a character so cruel. This new Maleficent has been betrayed; she's lost something, she's done battle. But perhaps the explanation for Maleficent's cruelty has been in the centuries of patriarchal history all along.
In Disney's 1959 version and its source material, Maleficent curses a baby princess to seek revenge for a real or perceived insult. Despite being harsh, this villain is, remarkably, the only female character who is consistently pursuing her own agenda in every version of these stories. (The princess heroine, as the Disney title suggests, sleeps through the good parts.) Yes, the fairy is "bad," but part of her "badness" is that she demands respect from a king; the only "good" female characters here are the obedient or unconscious ones. As Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar explain, within Jacob and Wilhelm Grimms' "Snow White" (who similarly falls into a deathlike sleep), the good heroine is "the heroine of a life that has no story," a completely compliant figure.
That the passive princess is as much of a snooze-fest as her fate is obvious in the Disney version of Sleeping Beauty: Where Maleficent speaks 541 words, the princess Aurora speaks 263 and sings one song, which adds an additional 141. (Perhaps unfairly, I did not count Aurora's insensible vocalizations.) Five percent of the words she speaks are the word "oh." She doesn't speak at all after she learns she's a princess. (Incidentally, this movie with an almost non-verbal heroine was the second highest-grossing movie of 1959, Susan Sackett writes). Aurora, the narrator says, is her parents' "most precious possession." The three good fairies in the film — Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather — psychologize their nemesis, Maleficent. Fauna says that Maleficent doesn't understand "love or kindness or the joy of helping others," concluding, "I don't think she's really very happy." Three feminized things — love, kindness, and the joy of helping others — are what Maleficent can't grasp. Her masculinity, coded as her refusal to help others, is what makes her so evil. And we shouldn't assume anything about her, really, before we understand where she came from.
Maleficent at home.
Disney
Maleficent is based on the 1959 Disney movie Sleeping Beauty (originator of the name "Maleficent"), which was based on the 1696 Charles Perrault story "Sleeping Beauty," which was likely based on Giambattista Basile's 1630s story "Sun, Moon, and Talia," which was likely based on the first-known European sleeping beauty, "L'histoire de Troylus et de la belle Zellandine" from the 1300s romance Perceforest. The Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm version, "Dornröschen," was first published in 1812 and drew on Perrault's work. The offended fairy who curses the infant princess is crucial to all versions except Basile's, which has an ogress antagonist and not a fairy.
Tying together the Grimms, Perrault, and Basile are their similar source material, their bourgeois backgrounds, and their desire to pin folktales down in writing. All four writers, in a way, felt they were serving as the voice of "the people," despite the actual voices "the people" were already using to tell these stories, writes fairy tale scholar Jack Zipes. The Grimms went as far as to (falsely) claim that their sources were all German peasants (in fact, they were largely middle class, like the brothers themselves). The Grimms had an explicitly nationalist aim ("preserving ostensibly pure German culture"), as did Perrault to some extent, according to Zipes: Perrault's work, along with the morals at the back ends of his tales, were part of a movement toward institutionalizing storytelling in the home for the French upper classes as well as celebrating "civility." Basile's efforts, on the other hand, predate the Italian state.
European fairy tales, as Zipes writes, are rooted in a pagan oral tradition (although there is no evidence for sleeping beauty oral stories predating Perceforest.) The tales' pagan origins are both potentially transgressive with respect to Christianity and conservative with respect to the disciplining of the female characters in them (of all the morals in fairy tales, "male supremacy" is a particular favorite). However, per Zipes, Perrault and the Grimms all changed certain fairy tales in which female characters rescued themselves so that the heroines instead were rescued by male characters (e.g. the addition of a hunter-savior to "Little Red Riding Hood"); the Grimms in particular worked to make their tales more Christian. The sexist values of the literary fairy tales persist in the way we consume them today: In 2003, Lori Baker-Sperry and Liz Grauerholz published evidence that fairy tales in which "feminine beauty" is emphasized have had more enduring popularity, which is to say that in the six centuries that have elapsed since Sleeping Beauty was set to paper, consumers of fairy tales have clung to stories of pretty girls more than any other type of story (or, as Gilbert and Gubar put it, "the eternally beautiful, inanimate objet d'art patriarchal aesthetics want a girl to be"). In fairy tales, these pretty girls are often menaced by another woman, who is usually, if not ugly, much meaner. Enter Maleficent.
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