Would I Become the Next Snow White? Essay -- Personal Narrative, Autobi

Would I Become the Next Snow White? Ah, to be a Disney fille To possess beauty so divine it pot melt the hearts of charming princes and gruff miners alike. To be able to physical exertion the same gift to tame temperamental beasts, while you attract, through beatific song, otherwise timid forest creatures. To know that, in the end-despite the fact that your heavy stepmother has forced you into a life of servitude and an evil queen is seeking your mangle heart-yes, in the end, some day your prince will come. The image of the perfect daughter according to Walt Disney can be described, with undersize exception, in this way she is always pretty, always fair, always model thin, always endowed with a pulchritudinous singing voice and always the victim of some malevolent, much jealous, adult female. The Disney Girl also has what one writer says she expected to receive when she became a woman a life filled with debonair men so belabor by her loveliness they burst in to song (Nirenberg 23). Though originally products of mediaeval and Victorian literature, these female characters have been adopted into Walts family and have so often been dipped in his colorful animation and sprinkled with his magical fairy patter that we have forgotten their origin and given them an identity that can still be described as, well, Disney. Lets start with the first Disney Girl, Snow White. Now, Snow epitomizes what beautiful represented in the 1930s. In other words, Disney allows her to be a little fat by todays standards (or is it the design of her dress?). Still, most of us take with the evil queens magic mirror that this Disney Girl, with her skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as black as ebony, is, in... ...art, but with natures uncontrollable hand, a raving beauty, a Sleeping Beauty, a Cinderella. Or-if you can believe I thought this, with my Black self-a Snow White. No such thing happened, of course, but then, that is m y point. Lets enjoy these tales, but lets make sure-for ourselves and specially for our children-that we understand what is happening here. Though the animation is superb and the stories be wax of enchantment, wizardry, and the basic good and evil conflict, we should not be misled into believing that Cindy, Snow, Belle, et al. are the epitome of the ideal woman. Those who do this might find themselves often in the same predicament as that of Cinderella after the midnight chimes sprawled on their butts in the dust, with their dreams dotted to pieces around them Work Cited Nirenberg, Sue. House Beautiful. Aug. 1991 23+