‘Children show no trace of the arrogance which urges civilized men to draw a hard and fast line between their own nature and that of other animals.’
Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo
Disney’s first animated feature was a landmark film, distinguished both for the richness of its engagement with the forms of wild nature and for the sheer quality of its graphic art. In expanding the Grimm brothers’ spare little narrative of Snow-drop into an 80-minute feature, Disney poured nature into his animation cells with such profusion, grace and visual delight that the film sets a benchmark against which subsequent achievements may be judged. The story of Snow White is simple enough in outline. The Disney film seems to play down the role of motherhood, which had been such a powerful ingredient in earlier versions of the fairy tale plot. Disney’s version begins with the stepmother queen already established and dominant over Snow White, who appears to have been relegated uncomplainingly to the position of scullery maid in the lower reaches of the castle. Unlike in Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty, the young girl and her mother substitute are not portrayed as having any direct interaction at the start of the film. Thereafter the story unfolds along familiar lines: the stepmother’s order to have Snow White murdered at the edge of the forest; Snow White’s escape, eventually finding sanctuary in a forest cottage with the seven dwarves; the witch/stepmother’s apparently successful attempt to kill her with a poisoned apple; and the young prince arousing her from death-sleep in the glass coffin before taking her as his bride. A number of details have been changed from the Grimm brothers’ version but the most striking single feature of the film’s realization springs from the way in which Snow White is persistently shown surrounded by animals, plants and flowers. From the opening scene in which her movements scrubbing the steps at the castle entrance are subtly echoed by the gestures of attendant white doves, through her courtship by the young prince, gracefully framed with arched branches and hanging tendrils of blossom, to the multiple scenes depicting the sympathetic attention and practical help from her animal friends in the forest, Snow White’s association with the natural world dominates the imagery of the film and this aspect accounts for much of the emotional appeal. To be sure, the pretext for Snow White’s association with nature can be found in the folk tale form itself, where animal helpers feature persistently as guides or magical aids to protagonists whose resilience and good-heartedness are eventually rewarded in the plots. But in the traditional tale such associations are developed in a schematic or functional way. Disney, by contrast, allows the basic motif of the animal helper to be elaborated so extensively that it becomes the heart of the film. In the process the theme of sympathetic nature, which in traditional tales is a narrative function, becomes transformed into a whole mode of being. The effect is a heightening of those feelings of both being in sympathy with and working within nature that are at the centre of the pastoral mode. As in traditional pastoral, the medium that gives lyric shape to these interwoven strands of sympathy is song. Snow White’s song with the animals in the forest clearing, in which musical phrases are picked up and uttered in alternating patterns by the girl and birds, is at the centre of the film, but the keynote songs at the wishing well and at the house while the animals are working also consolidate and extend these core associations.
Although the core values of Snow White are enshrined in a modernized pastoral vision of sympathetic nature however, those values are contested in the film. If we ask what ideas of nature are projected in the film, especially from a child’s point of view, then we are struck immediately by the strength of its contrasts. The film is constructed around a very clear set of oppositions, inspired, no doubt, by its fairy tale origins, but constituting, in effect, a dual, or even polarized, arrangement of qualities in the natural world. These oppositions are organized, of course, around the key figures of Snow White and the Witch/Stepmother. Whereas Snow White is surrounded by a multitude of sympathetic, charming and peaceful animals, the Queen is accompanied by a single raven, which we assume is her ‘familiar’ in her witch role. Where Snow White is depicted mainly in an outside environment with plants, trees, flowers and blossom (Disney had developed his inspiration for Snow White in drawings for the figure of Persephone, goddess of spring, who was the subject for one of the Silly Symphonies in 1934), the Queen is shown mainly in enclosed rooms within the castle – beautifully designed but sterile, devoid of live plants or flowers (Finch, 1995: 136). Where Snow White’s identifying colour is white, associated with light and purity, the Queen’s is black, associated with night and death. Snow White’s positive attitude towards all things is clearly an enhancement of life and its natural energies. But when the Queen is shown outside her castle, even the landscape is different: it is more rocky and barren, living trees are sparse, and we are aware of the dead tree trunks and of strewn branches that appear to be rotting back into the ground. The only animals that manifest themselves in this region are vultures, whose ecological function is the swift processing of dead bodies; just as, we assume, the rats in the lower reaches of the Queen’s castle have picked clean the bodies whose skeletal remains proliferate there.
Some of these oppositions are subtle, but many are stark and it is not difficult to categorize them in a schematic form that emphasizes the structural principle of duality: Images of nature associated with:
Snow White |
Queen |
Sympathetic |
Terrifying |
Helpful |
Destructive |
Pure |
Corrupt/poisonous |
Charming |
Alienating |
Ordered |
Chaotic |
Life enhancing |
Death seeking |
Growth |
Decay |
Light |
Dark |
Yet these stark oppositions do not tell the whole story. Some writers have seen links, as well as strong contrasts, between the figures of Snow White and the Queen. Joyce Thomas, for instance, writing about the Grimms’ version of the story, asserts that the Queen is ‘the dark shadow of Snow White’. Drawing on a Jungian theory of archetypes, she suggests that ‘the shadow represents the personality’s dark aspects and inferiorities which have an emotional, autonomous, and obsessive or possessive quality’ that is experienced as ‘a projection onto another … a replica of one’s own unknown face’ (1989: 73). The shared characteristics of a beauty defined by black hair and red lips, and the competitive battleground within which the Queen construes this shared identity, certainly support a reading in which one figure may be seen as a dark projection of the other. Readings of the Snow White story that draw on this kind of insight have generally been developed psychologically. In particular, the Queen’s role as a mother figure is drawn into sharp and sometimes illuminating focus in a number of recent feminist interpretations. But it is possible to read such archetypal ‘doubling’ in other ways too. Here, I would like to suggest that it may take us further in understanding the starkly polarized views of nature that are projected in the film.
The key episode which encourages viewers towards a perception of polarized views of nature as ‘shadowing’, rather than as simply opposing, each other is undoubtedly the terrifying journey that Snow White undergoes as her initiation into the forest. As Snow White runs away from the glade in which the huntsman reneges, at the last moment, on the Queen’s command to murder the innocent girl, the film rapidly leeches all the colours of its vernal landscape to immerse us in spectral darkness. This darkness is, of course, the Queen’s domain and the experience of the film’s new nightmarish mode constitutes a kind of dramatic paradox; it is as though, in fleeing from the Queen, Snow White is not only entering more deeply into the Queen’s world but has actually internalized its qualities as paranoid terror. In the Grimm brothers’ version of the story, the forest Snow White must traverse is a place of fear; yet the reader is reassured that Snow White is ultimately safe and the forest never loses its objective reality. ‘Then poor Snow-drop wandered along through the wood in great fear; and the wild beasts roared about her, but none did her any harm’ (Grimm, 1977: vol. 1, 130). Within the Disney film, Snow White becomes lost, not just in the forest itself but in her own subjective imagination. Every feature of the natural world that Snow White now perceives is transformed into something alien and threatening. An owl’s eyes stare out of the undergrowth at her in predatory alarm: the eyes of other forest dwellers multiply around her like an inescapable, moving tableau of unseen assailants; even the branches seem to grasp at her, their bony, finger-like structures reminiscent of the evil Queen’s hands when she later transforms herself into the shape of an old hag. The natural forms that Snow White perceives with such alarm in this phantasmagoric vision are a dark version of her delightful forest friends, the animals and birds, as we perceive when light from another clearing finally floods through to reveal their normal aspect. But while she is in this state Snow White’s ‘nature’ is not just linked to the Queen’s: it is subsumed by it.
It is interesting in this respect that Snow White’s recovery of her normal vision is preceded by an episode in which she falls and is temporarily immersed in water. The anthropologist Mircea Eliade has suggested that:
Immersion is the equivalent, at the human level, of death at the cosmic level, of the Cataclysm (the Flood) which periodically dissolves the world into primeval ocean. Breaking up all forms, doing away with the past, water possesses this power of purifying, of regenerating, of giving new birth. Water purifies and regenerates because it nullifies the past, and restores – even if only for a moment – the integrity of the dawn of things. (quoted in Douglas, 1984: 161)
Snow White’s recovery from subservience to her ‘shadow’ appears to occur spontaneously, but symbolic associations undoubtedly enrich our perception of this process. Certainly, the easy intimacy of her relationships with the animals when she emerges into the light of the forest glade could be construed as recovering ‘the integrity of the dawn of things’, a dream that has been repeated in different forms in nearly all cultures. If immersion is the human ‘equivalent of death at the cosmic level’, moreover, it suggests that Snow White must pass through the symbolic domain of the Queen in order to regain both her purity and her separation from the Queen’s realm of morbidity. The liminal role played by the water in marking Snow White’s progress is also interesting in another respect. For the film clearly depicts the pool as an area of swamp within the forest, with rotting stumps and aquatic vegetation round its dark margins. Swampland has long been recognized to have particular significance within the overall ecology of the forest and swamps certainly held an intense fascination for Thoreau throughout his lifetime. Thoreau’s feelings on entering a swamp, as he declares in his essay ‘Walking’, were akin to those generated by ‘a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum’ (Knott, 2002: 55). Thoreau often fantasized about literally immersing himself in the swamp. As Knott goes on to observe, the biological richness of the swamp enables it to become a place where Thoreau ‘can “recreate” himself because its teeming vitality suggests the possibility of a vibrant life that Thoreau understood as spiritually as well as physically invigorating, outside the dull and ordered world of the village’ (ibid.). In the Disney film the swamp, although initially a site of terror and revulsion, acts as a transitional zone leading Snow White also to ‘recreate’ the forest in her perceptions – ultimately as a kind of sanctuary. Interestingly, the swamp episode paves the way for Snow White’s engagement with the ‘teeming life’ that fills the forest glade once she has emerged from the water.
If one of the functions fulfilled by Snow White’s immersion ritual is to enable a fuller separation from her shadow image of the Queen, however, we should recognize that this separation may not be complete, for the film bears the hallmarks of other kinds of ‘shadowing’ in the sequences that continue after Snow White’s recovery of her more independent self. The owl’s eyes, for instance, which confront Snow White with such hallucinogenic terror at the start of the dark forest sequence, proliferate in more benign form in the supposedly safe house of the dwarves. The dwarves’ house, though apparently simple and rustic in design, is decorated on nearly every exposed beam and piece of wooden furniture with intricate carvings that largely take the form of forest creatures. Of all the motifs in the dwarves’ cottage however, it is the image of the owl’s eyes that is repeated most prolifically; the motif occurs at the end of every one of the wooden stair boards, leading up to the dwarves’ bedroom, and at many other points on exposed beams, furniture and the fire surround. It is curious that this figure should have attracted Disney’s animators so persistently that it becomes a virtual leitmotif within the profusion of loving detail they bestowed on the heroine’s foster home environment. For, detached from the bird’s body, this owl mask becomes both attractive and disturbing, reminiscent both of the isolated, inhuman eyes staring terrifyingly from the blank darkness of the forest and of their more appealing embodiment, revealed in the benignly solicitous image of the friendly bird that appears in the forest glade scene afterwards. One suspects a rather wonderful piece of unconscious artistry on the part of the animators here, who have responded to the deeper resonances in the story’s internal dynamics with great subtlety.
The issue of whether there is some connectedness between the seemingly polarized views of nature that structure Snow White is of more than merely formal interest. What is at stake here is a judgement as to whether the symbolic structure of the film affirms one of the master narratives of western modernity – humanity struggling to control nature in an attempt to transcend the natural processes of decay, toxicity, disease and ultimately even death – or whether, even in sentimental form, the film offers glimpses of a more holistic view of the natural world, where such processes may be experienced as integrated within a fuller, more complex ontology. Leo Marx’s blunt distinction between two kinds of pastoralism within American culture – ‘one that is popular and sentimental, the other imaginative and complex’ – (1964: 5) might, indeed, need to be qualified here. Marx suggests that popular forms of sentimental pastoral are essentially of a lower order than their more fully achieved literary counterparts. Sentimental pastoral deals in stereotypes, he opines; it cannot challenge conventional ways of seeing and responding to the world because it is too simplistic to engage audiences at a deeper, more imaginative level. But is this always or necessarily the case? Although Disney’s Snow White is clearly both popular and sentimental, its imagery suggests a more layered and ambiguous consciousness, engaged with archetypes that express inherent contradictions rather than the linear straightforwardness of stereotypes, where good is clearly separated from evil at all levels. As such, I would argue, the film lays claim to embodying elements of the more ‘imaginative and complex’ experience, taken by Marx to be the hallmark of a modern pastoral mode that is socially engaged and emotionally challenging. In terms of the views of nature it encapsulates then, Disney’s first feature may, largely through its imagery, push a ‘popular and sentimental’ mode towards realizing a more ‘imaginative and complex’ vision. But to test the degree to which this may be so, we need to examine more carefully some of the critical objections that have been raised, at times quite stringently, towards the film.
Three main areas of Disney’s Snow White have received critical, and at times intensely pejorative, attention in recent years. Firstly the figure of the evil queen, which began a process of being made more ‘un-natural’ as early as 1819, when the Grimm brothers replaced the biological mother of earlier versions with an estranged stepmother (Zipes, 1988; Warner, 1995), has been taken as expressing patriarchal viewpoints in increasingly intensified forms. The stereotypical roles that are used to dramatize conflict in Disney’s film, it is argued, potently reproduce those limited and distorted images within patriarchal discourse that position women as either innocent angels or destructive demons. As Maria Tatar puts it, ‘what makes Disney’s Snow White difficult to applaud as an example of a liberating fairy tale is precisely the way in which it works too hard to efface any trace of maternal goodwill and to construct an image of feminine evil overpowering in its cinematic depth’ (1992: 232). In a parallel mode, the image of goodness represented through Snow White as a character is often invoked as embodying the opposite extreme. Snow White’s ‘saccharine sweetness’ is taken to disarm young viewers from perceiving her role as exemplar of a stifling mid-century ideal of female conformity. Building on the latter perspective, a third strand of critique holds the film accountable for a sentimental appropriation of the natural world in its elaboration of the spare narrative lines of the fairy tale upon which it is based. This appropriation, it is argued, while designed to delight and entertain young viewers, is anything but innocent in terms of the implied attitudes that are inculcated. This last view is expressed in determined fashion in a recent essay by Patrick Murphy, who suggests Snow White is an example of the way ‘that Disney animation consistently displays static, absolute depictions of both nature and women, rather than just one or the other’ (1995: 120). Jack Zipes is, if anything, even more categorical when he argues that in all Disney’s early films based on fairy tales (Snow White 1937, Cinderella 1950, Sleeping Beauty 1959)
… evil is always associated with female nature out of control … The ultimate message of all three films is that, if you are industrious, pure of heart, and keep your faith in a male god, you will be rewarded. … Wild nature can be tamed, and the depiction of nature in the films reveals to what extent man can arrange everything in harmonious order and in agreeable pastel colors to create the perfect American idyll. (1988: 44–5)
The ‘taming of wild nature’ is thus taken to be co-extensive, in such critiques, with the way plots work to suppress or eliminate the power of female figures. These figures – like the forces of nature that need to be contained – are also construed as fierce, wild or dangerously out of control.
The cultural and ideological work that Disney films perform acquires a particular potency, in terms of this kind of argument, because it takes place primarily within the confines of the home environment where it is viewed as part of a process of domestication. This is especially apparent in Snow White where the heroine, as Byrne and McQuillan point out,
like the rabbits, squirrels and birds, achieves her domestic transformation through her reliance on the body itself. She domesticates the wild animals in the wood through her singing, transforms the neglected cottage with the help of the newly domesticated animals, who use their bodies to perform household tasks in ways that labour-saving machines of 1950s America would achieve. … Snow White even manages to domesticate death itself with a kiss. (1999: 62)
Yet, if one looks at the way the process of domestication is configured in detail, it turns out to be neither as absolute nor as univalent as such an analysis might suggest. Snow White’s relationship with the animals, for instance, is founded on a flow of sympathy and a recognition of equivalence in their respective positions; but this does not eliminate a crucial sense of difference between the human heroine and the creatures who surround her being registered as well. As is the case in the later Bambi (1942), for instance, the animators depict an unusually large number of different animal species within Snow White. Identifiable species that throng to meet the heroine in the forest clearing include deer, rabbit, raccoon, skunk, squirrel, terrapin, owl and bluebird. The respective habitats of these different animals are also clearly indicated, from the semi-aquatic pond domain of the terrapin, through the earth burrows of the rabbits and the dwellings in lower parts of the trees of small mammals, to the fully airborne birds. The degree of both biodiversity and species differentiation that are represented here is unusual within the relatively low mimetic form of animated story. Even today, this aspect is striking and remains distinctive. Also distinctive, indeed possibly unique within the Disney canon, is the restraint that is placed on a fully developed anthropomorphism, imposed by not allowing the animals to speak. Mute animals retain a greater potential for their species integrity – in particular their otherness from human beings – to be retained. This potential is, as we shall see, exploited with more self-conscious political awareness by later animated filmmakers such as Hayao Miyazaki and in DreamWorks’ Spirit, but it is present in more limited forms in Disney’s earliest feature. Disney’s Snow White is also notable for the effort that has been made to capture a realistic sense of movement for each of the species depicted. Although this extension of realistic movement to the realm of animals does not go as far as in Bambi, made a few years later, enough is done to configure differentiated movement of the animals in Snow White for a distinctive sense of species being to be conveyed clearly. In themselves, each of these aspects may seem like small details. Taken together though, I would argue, these represent strategies whose collective force imbues the natural world depicted with a sense of integrity and separateness from the human that is at least partially respected. In terms of children’s early learning this would seem to link potentially to perspectives such as the Norwegian environmental philosopher Arne Naess puts forward when he states that a ‘joyful experience of nature is partially dependent upon a conscious or unconscious development of a sensitivity for qualities’ (1989: 51). Snow White herself seems to acknowledge some intrinsic sense of otherness or difference in her appeal to the animals for some dwelling that might be suitable for her overnight: ‘… I do need a place to sleep at night. I can’t sleep in the ground like you [to the rabbits], or in a tree the way you do [to squirrels], and I’m sure no nest could possibly be big enough for me’. The animals’ nodding approval of each of these assertions implies a general acceptance of such difference as a kind of ‘truth universally acknowledged’. If the form of the dwarves’ cottage where Snow White takes refuge – with its thatched roof and low doorway, arched like the entrance to a burrow – expresses continuity with the forms and materials of nature, then it also marks a boundary, a different space within which cultural forms predominate.
Criticisms of Snow White often make the assumption that it is in the space within the house that the process of domestication of ‘wild nature’, as represented by the animals, is most evident and becomes completed. Once inside the cottage, Snow White ‘teaches’ the animals to clean, wash up, dust cobwebs and clear away dishes, and to do so with joy – expressed most fulsomely by the keynote song ‘Whistle While You Work’. In the process, Snow White magically enthrals them, it is implied, to the servitude of housework (a servitude which, incidentally, also identifies ‘nature’ with the role of women in terms of labour within the home). But, as in the initial presentation of the animals, this image of domestication is not really complete or absolute and the sequence as a whole – long recognized as being endowed with exceptional ‘creative élan’ (Tatar, 1992) – is subtle enough to bear the weight of more than one reading. In part this is because the animators remain highly sensitive to the issue of boundaries, both within the cottage and between the building and the outside world. Rather than collapsing these boundaries, once ‘animal nature’ has entered in and taken up its domestic tasks, the boundaries are used to make subtle discriminations. For instance, when the dwarves return to their cottage, the animals flee the domestic space they had inhabited with such a profound sense of belonging that they were even depicted as tenderly joining Snow White in the relaxed abandonment of sleep. On the dwarves’ return they immediately go back to the space of the wild, however. While their fairy tale function as Snow White’s ‘helpers’ is retained, the animals’ nervous sensitivity to the boundary between the cottage and their own ‘natural’ domain outside remains in place, whenever anyone other than Snow White is present. Hence the birds only attack the Queen when she is outside and first tries to offer Snow White the poisoned apple. But when Snow White is duped by feigned illness into bringing the disguised Queen inside, the animals respect the boundary, looking on helplessly until the moment it becomes clear that Snow White will eat the poisoned offering, when they set off like lightning to secure assistance from the dwarves.
Just as the initial meeting with the animals, then, retains a respect for the variety and difference of natural forms of life that is, I have argued, more than simply tokenistic, so also the ‘domestication’ of the animals in the cottage is signified as incomplete. ‘Wildness’ is the animals’ default position in the film, subtly indicated through the animators’ use of space, boundaries and natural movement in their depiction of the animals’ bodies. It might be argued that these more subtle indicators are effectively overpowered by the sheer weight of visual rhetoric brought to bear on the central conceit of this episode – the animals’ propensity for housework developed with such alacrity under Snow White’s gentle tutelage. But even here a more complex response is possible, qualifying the initial impression of a thoroughgoing annexation of wild nature to the rituals of domestic work. The key to a more complex understanding of the way this scene works lies in the delight it consistently engenders, even among sophisticated adult viewers who are resistant to its more sentimental blandishments. Maria Tatar has remarked on the way ‘Reviews of the film underscore the way in which the housekeeping sequence … seems to have captured the imagination of viewers. The episode is repeatedly singled out as the film’s highpoint …’ (1992: 234). As in the earlier episode however, the delight engendered by this sequence is founded not on a collapse of the difference between the wild and the domestic, but on the defamiliarizing effects brought about by retaining a sense of the wild in the depiction of domestic tasks, that are then perceived strangely, afresh. The estrangement that so delights us here is realized through the close attention to detail. The sensuous apprehension of the animals’ bodies within this squalid human environment is enhanced by our sense of their movements. The swirling and flicking of tails that might be observed in the wild, the manipulation of small objects with potential food or nest building interest by legs, beaks or paws, and the fantastic agility of squirrels are all recontextualized – with a panache that seems to relish its proximity to the absurd – as household chores. The effect is not only to unfurl a (no doubt ideologically charged) banner whose message is that housework is both pleasurable and natural for young women; it is also to experience that work in new ways, defamiliarized by the incursion of wild nature into the household domain. The evidence that a sense of wildness is reconfigured rather than (literally!) wiped out in this process comes especially from the humour that is such a strong feature here. Consider, for instance, the incident that initiates the animals washing up. As one creature manipulates a plate into position facing a young deer’s head, the deer’s tongue comes out to lick the plate, lovingly removing from its surface what we imagine to be encrusted food and dirt left by the dwarves. It is the same gesture that a deer would use to clean its newborn fawn’s body in the wild, of course, and the joke works because it brings the loving, physical intimacy of wild nature to bear on a context where higher standards of hygiene are normally expected within contemporary human culture. Snow White tactfully redirects the animals towards the use of water in the sink, but the point is beautifully made: it is the perceived disjuncture between wild nature and domestic ritual, as much as the artfully contrived conformity, that accounts for the appeal of this central episode.
If it is the interplay between elements of the wild and human culture that stands at the heart of Disney’s depiction of nature in Snow White then, we are perhaps now in a position to pose a larger question as to what the significance and function of the fantasy that fuels this interplay may be. For, even if the arguments advanced so far for a more complex and dialectal engagement with wild nature are persuasive, it remains true that the narrative coordinates such effects around a central idea of nature as responsive to human needs rather than, in any sustained way, as independent. Why has this image of nature become so important within the modern world and what is significant about the way this theme is handled within Disney’s films? Some clues that may take us a little further in answering these questions may be found in Marina Warner’s analysis of the emergence of cuddly animal toys within the culture of modern childhood. Warner writes:
Just as the rise of the teddy bear matches the decline of real bears in the wild, so soft toys today have taken the shape of rare wild species. Some of these are not very furry in their natural state: stuffed killer whales, cheetahs, gorillas, snails, spiders, snakes – and of course dinosaurs – are made in the most invitingly deep pile plush. They act as a kind of totem, associating the human being with the animal’s imagined capacities and value. Anthropomorphism traduces the creatures themselves; their loveableness sentimentally exaggerated, just as, formerly, their viciousness crowded out empirical observation. (1995: 306)
I have argued that part of the distinctiveness (and perhaps even originality) of Disney’s Snow White is that its predominant anthropomorphic spirit does not wholly ‘traduce the animals themselves’. And indeed there are elements of ‘empirical observation’ in the much-vaunted realism Disney’s features bring to the animated film tradition. We will look at the latter aspect more fully in the next section, when we examine Bambi. But it does seem likely that, even within Disney’s first feature, animal forms may act partly as totemic devices, soliciting the power of nature for young humans at a time when, as more and more species face possible extinction, we sense that the power of animals within the real natural world is diminishing. What then, is the underlying function of such ‘totemic devices’? Warner’s analysis continues:
The distinction between humans and beasts is yearningly cancelled: soft toys wear clothes and perform human tasks, even by going deep sea diving. By giving a toy in the shape of a wild animal, the giver encourages the goodness of the wild in human nature, male and female. For mankind is still the issue; Keith Thomas comments ‘(such) fantasies enshrine the values by which society as a whole cannot afford to live.’ Tapping the power of the animal no longer seems charged with danger, let alone evil, but rather a necessary part of healing. (ibid.)
In encouraging the ‘goodness of the wild in human nature’ then, Warner suggests, the social ritual of giving soft, animal toys may become ‘a necessary part of healing’. What is ‘healed’ through such acts is the separation from wild nature inherent within western (and increasingly global) living. It is this separation, philosophers such as Naess and Heidegger have argued, that divides us from a full sense of our humanity. And so we re-invent the primary conditions of such separation emotionally, in fantasies that satisfy our desire ‘yearningly’ to cancel the distinction between ourselves and beasts.
To what extent may these larger speculations be relevant to the underlying pattern of meanings available, not only in the apparently simple act of giving soft toys, but also in the more complex symbolic structure of the fantasy that is developed within Snow White? It is certainly possible to see the Disney version of the fairy tale as developing, much more fully than in traditional renditions, ‘the goodness of the wild in human nature’. This ‘goodness’ is secured within Disney, as we have seen, through identification with the figure of Snow White and her wild animal entourage. But there are also more specific forms in which the separation between wild and human is worked on in the film and perhaps ‘healed’ through the enactment of ritual. To test this idea further we need to return to the space of the dwarves’ cottage to see whether some deeper significance may be implicit in the interaction between the human and the natural that is dramatized there. It is worth noting first, as other writers have done (Zipes, 1988), that the Disney script changes the conditions that prompt the work taking place in the cottage. In the Grimm brothers’ version of the story, for instance, Snow White finds the inside of the cottage in a state of order that would satisfy even the most house-proud of visitors:
Everything was spruce and neat in the cottage: on the table was spread a white cloth, and there were seven little plates with seven little loaves, and seven little glasses with wine in them; and knives and forks laid in order. (Grimm, 1977: 130)
Disney transforms this exemplary bourgeois, domestic space into what is frankly a disordered mess. To even see inside the cottage initially, Snow White must first wipe a layer of dirt from the window: inside unwashed dishes, clothes and utensils lie around in heaps, while every surface is festooned with cobwebs and covered in dust. As the shocked heroine observes, the broom has never been used. The effect of this drastic change to the image of the home environment is often analyzed as heightening the gendered implications of Snow White’s housekeeping role, emphasizing how much the male dwarves’ domestic arrangements need sorting out by a willing and energetic female. But there is another aspect to the image Disney chooses that may be equally significant. For the dimension of the dwarves’ living arrangements that Snow White chooses to focus on primarily is dirt and ‘dirt’, as anthropologists remind us, is, in its various forms, of fundamental significance within most human cultures. Mary Douglas, for instance, poses the question of how ‘dirt, which is normally destructive, sometimes becomes creative’ (1984: 159). Her analysis of tribal ritual suggests that the power inherent within dirt resides in the ‘danger which is risked by boundary transgression. … Those vulnerable margins and those attacking forces which threaten to destroy good order represent the powers inherent in the cosmos. Ritual which can harness these for good is harnessing power indeed’ (ibid.). In Douglas’s study, those ‘powers inherent in the cosmos’ – represented through the boundary blurring power of dirt – are primarily associated with death. In certain rituals such powers can be harnessed for collective good, however, by individuals immersing themselves in the dirt that is normally avoided or fastidiously swept away. Within a tribe who are normally ‘not tolerant of filth and highly pollution conscious’ for instance,
… the central act in the ritual of mourning is actively to welcome filth. They sweep rubbish onto the mourners. The rubbish is the rubbish of death, it is dirt … a voluntary embrace of the symbols of death is a kind of prophylactic against the effects of death … If anyone held the idea that death and suffering are not an integral part of nature, the delusion is corrected …. (ibid.: 177–8)
Snow White’s seemingly implacable cheerfulness and sweetness of nature might be taken as a precise emotional equivalent of the ‘idea that death and suffering are not an integral part of nature’. It is this innocence that makes her vulnerable to the evil Queen’s predation, indeed. When Snow White comes out of her traumatic experience of the forest she even blames herself for having temporarily given way to such dark perceptions. ‘You don’t know what I’ve been through’, she tells the forest animals, ‘and all because I was afraid. I’m so ashamed!’ But the film as a whole makes claims on us that are larger than its heroine’s consciousness and it is worth pursuing the idea of dirt a little further before deciding whether Douglas’s construction of its significance is wholly irrelevant.
It is worth noting at the start just how much weight the film gives to the discernment and expulsion of dirt from the home environment. The ‘housework’ sequence of the animals cleaning the cottage lasts approximately five minutes. After the dwarves have returned home Snow White, by now in full matriarchal flow, insists that they wash the dirt from their bodies before being allowed to sit down for dinner. This sequence lasts about eight minutes, far too long for its contribution to the narrative development of the film (indeed, in my judgement, this is an artistic flaw which would have benefited from some judicious editing). But the unwarranted time allocated to this episode is testimony in itself to the importance the filmmakers felt this key theme had within the movie as a whole. In total, about a sixth of this eighty-minute film is taken up with the depiction of cleaning activities that barely advance the plot at all. What is this all about? The theme is especially important, in part because Disney films in general have been attacked for offering children a sanitized image, not just of a domestic environment, but beyond this, in Richard Schickel’s memorable phrase, of ‘the whole wide world … scrubbed clean’ (1986: 53).
The housekeeping sequence would appear, at first sight, to point in precisely the opposite direction to the ritual Mary Douglas describes and analyses. Although the movements are choreographed, the upbeat, spontaneous, inventive and joyful energy that runs through the sequence suggests lightness rather than formality, play rather than ritual. It is an idealized image of unalienated labour – work fully integrated with the pleasure principle rather than the death instinct. Disney’s playful image of cleaning seems to replicate, in this respect, idealized visions of such work projected by early leaders of the domestic science movement. Lynne Vallone, for instance, has suggested that Catherine Beecher, founder of the movement in the United States, devised, in her imaginary description of young girls working together in the washing room, a sentimental image of female labour, ‘painting it in neo-republican pastels that elevate washing to all that is enjoyable and artful’ (1994: 263). Beecher’s evocation of this scene, with its emphasis on pleasurable interaction, movement and singing, appears remarkably similar in tone to the laundering and housecleaning scenes in Snow White: ‘some thirty or forty merry girls, superintended by a motherly lady, chatting and singing, washing and stretching, while every convenience is at hand, and everything around is clean and comfortable’ (ibid.: 264). The mess and dirt, which is ritually embraced by the tribes-people described by Douglas, is here dispelled, along with any negative symbolic associations, by the activity depicted in Beecher’s ideal seminary, just as it is within Snow White’s cottage.
The film version does allow some distinctions to be developed in its depiction of this process. Whereas Snow White, as a human, protects herself from direct contact with the dirt, as far as possible, while working on it (she alone uses the broom and keeps the duster at arms length, with her head turned away, as it is shaken out), the animals do indeed ‘embrace the dirt’, through direct contact with their bodies. As Snow White conducts her review of the different forms of detritus and mess left around the cottage, almost the first animal we see is a chipmunk whose body becomes caught up, almost enshrouded, in one of the cobwebs Snow White is busy itemizing. Where Snow White sweeps dirt with her broom, the animals use their tails, and while she minimizes contact by expelling dirt through the window at arm’s length, the animals’ attempts to imitate her do not prevent their breathing substantial amounts of dust in and then sneezing. It is indicated moreover, that the animals’ natural mode of cleaning involves taking a certain amount of dirt inside their bodies, as the young deer and chipmunks’ first attempts to wash the dishes involve licking them clean. In almost every instance the animals’ engagement with dirt is depicted as direct, physical, through their bodies.
It is hard to know how much to make of this since, unlike the tribes-people’s ritual, no collectively sanctioned meaning would normally be attributed to the activities described above and, indeed, most viewers are unlikely consciously even to notice the distinctions identified here. However there is no doubt that, in terms of ideas of human relations to nature, this imagery is linked to major developments within contemporary experience. The period between the 1930s and 1950s saw the emergence of an idea of the home environment, within American society especially, as not just relatively clean and ordered but actually sterilized. Standards of hygiene which, around the beginning of the century, had begun to be recognized as necessary for the successful treatment of disease within hospital environments, began to be imported into the home. The impetus behind this change was largely generated by the chemical industry’s desire to create an outlet for a greatly extended range of products designed to attack, not just the grime that was obvious and could be seen, but also the spectre of unseen presences that had now been identified and categorized within the new science of microbiology (Hoy, 1995: 104–8). Housewives’ energies were redirected from a goal of general tidiness towards a war on germs and bacteria that required a full array of the latest technologically evolved products for success to be achieved. As a result the home environment was increasingly reconceived, within advertising and related discourses of the period, as a kind of battleground in which bottles, sprays, gels and caustic agents were the necessary weapons to destroy, within domestic space, all trace of those unseen, thronging, microscopic life forms found throughout the natural world outside. Spending on cleaning products in the United States went up eightfold in a mere twenty-year period leading up to the 1930s, escalating from an estimated six million dollars in 1909 to 46 million dollars in 1929 (Scanlon, 1995: 73). When central heating and (in the United States) air-conditioning came in as standard home requirements later, the notion of a domestic environment fully sealed off from the natural world outside achieved its apotheosis.
We are now in a position to return to the issue of whether and to what degree the structured fantasy Disney offers viewers may be seen as attempting to ‘heal’ the separation from nature that is so integral to modern human existence. Social processes promoting the ideal of a sterilized, hermetically sealed home environment have, with increasing force from early in the twentieth century, clearly tended to exacerbate that separation. But in Snow White, at least, an image fraught with contradictions is projected. On the one hand the home (nostalgically construed in a quaint, rustic setting) is seen, under Snow White’s motherly influence, as regularly opening itself up to the benign incursion of surrounding nature. In this fantasy, instead of the mid-century housewife being engaged in incessant struggle with bacteria and microbes, larger, cuter life forms – in the shape of animals – are envisaged as actually assisting in the daily routines of cleaning and cooking. This compensatory fantasy does not entirely suppress social anxieties which associate dirt – via micro-organisms – much more potently with disease and, potentially, death however. For the film keeps returning to the site of this anxiety and is absorbed, far in excess of the requirements of its narrative, with configuring the work of cleaning. Here too the message is mixed. While the labour of cleaning is directed towards expelling dirt from the home, this entails full physical engagement with dirt, even partial absorption of waste matter, on the part of the animals. Within some primitive societies, the ritual enactment of such willed and direct engagement with dirt leads, as we have seen, to the recovery of a more holistic experience of natural processes and a positive response to death. Within Disney’s film the roles of human adult and animals appear to be more differentiated. One might speculate that, as viewers, children are invited to identify more fully with the figures of the animals; the animals, after all, like the dwarves, are treated like children by Snow White as she inculcates within them a new discipline of cleaning. Insofar as the child viewer is identified with the animals then, the film offers them a space within which they can imagine and vicariously experience a version of that fuller, more physical, human existence that rituals encompassing dirt have made available in other contexts. This fuller existence involves an understanding of death as part of the natural order and the acceptance of an interdependent relationship with wild nature (albeit figured largely as cute animals within Disney). It is interesting, in this respect, that the animals in the film are also (unlike Snow White) instinctually in touch with the threat of death as manifested by the Queen’s disguised presence. They shy away from the Queen and try to alert Snow White to the danger while she remains unconscious of the threat posed.
Yet the more integrated version of being that is embodied within the animals’ behaviour has limits inscribed within it. The figure with whom children may also identify, Snow White, appears to be both childlike and adult. Within the rather specialized mode of the fairy tale, she represents many of the core values of adult society and acts as a sentimentally idealized role model, especially for girls. Hence her unfussy, but more fastidious, attitude towards dirt may be taken to be instructive. She is what children will grow into. Children (via animals and dwarves) are implicitly being trained in a particular regime of cleanliness that, in the real world, will be translated into living environments increasingly sealed off from the forces of the wild.
The ending to the film of Snow White is, in this respect, especially interesting. Terry Eagleton has commented that, within the kinds of rituals Mary Douglas describes, ‘There is something sacred about collective meanings, as well as about the disruption of them’. He speculates that, in modern as well as more traditional societies, collective identity is stronger and healthier if ways can be found to face ‘unflinchingly’ what is feared as marginalized, rejected ‘otherness’. Such forces can then be ‘carried back into social life in a movement of renewal’ (2003: 290). It is noteworthy, within Snow White, how much emphasis is given to the collective in the activities that give dramatic shape to the rituals of managing and eradicating dirt. The animals, for instance, are configured as a spontaneous and joyful army, whose small units are each dedicated to the particular cleaning task assigned to them. Moreover, much of the comedy within the dwarves’ washing scene is focused around bringing the recalcitrant figure of Grumpy into line with the new collective enthusiasm for personal hygiene. The social energy directed towards shifting dirt from the domestic environment generally in the film clearly points towards the establishment of a sense of shared, communal values. Yet the ending of the film, though it may be a fulfilment of romantic determinants in the plot, is, equally clearly, a separation from the forest community of the dwarves’ cottage and from the communal values represented there. Almost as soon as Snow White has been brought back to life she is led away from the forest by her young prince. As the couple move away, so an image representing the imagined ideal of their future life together emerges in front of them, a romantic (archetypal Disney) castle, floating amongst pink and golden clouds on the near horizon. Clearly the image is designed to be an attractive fulfilment of romantic desire; but in insisting on so abrupt, and iconographically absolute, a separation from the forest and the communal life that has so defined it, the film suggests a fault line or rupture within its the dominant values. The ideal of romantic, heterosexual, adult love does not appear to be able to coexist with a fantasy in which the gap between nature and humanity is magically healed. The isolated pair now move off into a realm whose soaring towers and buttresses appear to be remote from both the ordinary and the natural worlds. Almost for the first time in the film, the imagery severs any connection with nature. The film abandons the domain of the collective for a rose-tinted image of a transcendent new order, just as it abandons the realm of the natural for the sterile (and stereotypical) dream of that castle in the sky. Arcadia has gone and the romantic ideal that supplants it – for all its shimmering otherworldliness – appears less rich, less fully human and less creatively integrated with the natural forms that surround it.
Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves was a land-mark film in so many ways that it must have made the animated fairy tale, initially, a difficult genre to revisit without raising the spectre of invidious comparison. Certainly, in the extraordinarily creative five-year period following the release of Snow White in 1937, Disney experimented boldly with a variety of genres. This period still represents, for many critics, the golden age of classic Disney animation. The sheer variety of these projects – ranging in concept from animal stories like Dumbo (1941) and Bambi (1942) to the hugely innovative Fantasia (1940) – was as impressive as their artistic quality. Of these films Pinocchio (1940) comes closest to the fairy tale format, but even this is really more a literary variant. When Disney eventually returned to the realm of the traditional fairy tale in the 1950s therefore, it was perhaps inevitable that the results would appear derivative in comparison to the groundbreaking achievements of the past.
The two classic fairy tales that the Disney studios produced in the 1950s are nevertheless worth reviewing here more briefly. The films reveal limitations imposed on the links to wild nature that were forged in Snow White, whilst also extending the potential of the Snow White project in some relatively minor ways. A more radical, exploratory development of the traditional fairy tale’s potential for engagement with themes of wild nature did not take place till the Disney ‘revival’ in the late 1980s and early 1990s. We will examine these more recent developments in detail in the next chapter.
Steven Watts has argued persuasively that the projects with which Disney was engaged in the 1950s were highly attuned to a changing post-war culture within which a new sense of American identity needed to be forged. The key values that Disney productions had espoused had always been a populist amalgam of dynamic individualism and the nostalgic conservatism of the small-town community. In the Cold War years of the 1950s, Disney began to harden these core values in a form that would both shake off the perceived threat of communism and assert the primacy of the American way of life for a new age. As Watts puts it,
With communism offering a dramatic rendering of social reform and historical evolution, Americans felt compelled to mount a countervailing crusade to identify a distinct vision of the good society. The Cold War inspired explicit attempts to explain the nature of the American people, American history, the American character, and the bedrock values that supported the whole. Walt Disney engaged his enterprise to grapple with these broad issues and emerged as a key figure in the process of national self-definition. (2001: 287).
In responding to the exigencies of the new era, Watts argues, Disney had to adapt the more inclusive version of the ‘libertarian populist’ values that had been shaped by the experience of the Depression era to form a more limited and defensive posture. While continuing to offer ‘a sentimental celebration of common American people’, Disney’s ‘images of hard-working, God-fearing, community-building citizens increasingly were inspired by a homogenized vision of the WASP folk whose values he enshrined and prospects he proclaimed’ (ibid.: 288).
Nature – and especially wild nature – played a crucial role in forging the imagery that supported this renewed definition of American identity. After the, perhaps unexpected, critical and commercial success of Seal Island in 1948, Disney invested heavily in a series of nature documentaries which he called True-Life Adventures. Filmed in a variety of wild landscapes throughout the 1950s, the documentaries became some of the studio’s most popular productions. These films, however, may have had a deeper level of attraction than the potent mix of environmentally concerned education and rampantly anthropomorphizing sentiment that they offered on the surface. Watts argues that contemporary responses to the documentaries ‘suggested that nature did not really appear here on its own terms. Instead it was a kind of cultural canvas upon which Disney and the audience painted an array of Cold War concerns and values’ (ibid.: 305). Watts goes on to present an intriguing analysis of a contemporary review of Beaver Valley (1950), where enthusiastic approval of the hard-working animal’s life is construed as affirming ‘social competition as a natural process that enabled the best to emerge – an unspoken rejection of the hovering Communist spectre of artificial government direction and centralized planning’. Even more tellingly however, Watts suggests that these narratives engage viewers through their ‘subtle domestication of nature’:
However much these documentaries underscored the struggle for survival, they also depicted a taming of natural forces that appealed to an American audience becoming increasingly suburbanised and family-oriented. Morality was presented as a curious exponent in the survival-of-the-fittest equation, particularly a domestic morality that seemed to enlist wild creatures as loyal members of the suburban homeowners association, the PTA, and the community improvement council (ibid.).
Disney then, was using the supposedly objective format of the natural history documentary to embed a historically determined set of cultural and political concerns firmly within the domestic context of the family.
I have quoted Watts at some length here because his argument is both stimulating in its own right and has a particularly strong resonance for the animated films I want to examine now. Disney’s Cinderella was first released in 1950, at the beginning of the period we have been discussing, and it brings together the themes which Watts identifies – survival in a competitive environment, industriousness and domesticity – in a distinctive new form. At the very heart of the values which the film projects onto its fairy tale narrative, I would argue, is an especially thoroughgoing version of the domestication of wild nature. The figure of Cinderella herself – like a number of other fairy tale heroines – has long been represented as having strong affiliations with animals and nature. In the Chinese version of the Cinderella story, whose provenance is known to go back over a thousand years, the heroine’s animal helper takes the unlikely form of a fish (Warner, 1995: 202). Closer to home, in the Grimm version of the tale that is one of the sources for Disney’s film, the heroine has recourse to a hazel tree that embodies the spirit of her dead mother. In this version the beleaguered heroine is gifted with the finery she requires to attend the prince’s ball by a bird of unspecified origin. But although there is nothing unusual about the Cinderella figure being tagged with a particularly close association to different kinds of wildlife, the Disney version develops this association in distinctive ways.
Almost from the opening scene of the main story – where we are introduced to Cinderella being tenderly awoken by a pair of birds dressed in shoes and headscarves, who proceed to assist her in the final stages of bed-making – we are confronted with an image of wild nature thoroughly annexed to the daily rhythms and rituals of domestic life. Cinderella has been reduced to a life of demeaning subservience within the household’s dominant human regime. But she is the central, authoritative figure in the organization of a half hidden domestic realm that is largely constituted by vibrant forms of animal life. Cinderella takes charge of a whole range of dependent animals, whose presence is barely acknowledged by the other members of her oppressive family, yet who each contribute to the life of the household in different, at times conflicting, ways. Not only does Cinderella feed the courtyard chickens, try to calm the embattled rivalry between cat and dog, and gracefully host the fleeting incursion of (not very) wild birds to her domestic circle; Gulliver like, she also plays the role of benign mother-cum-protector to a growing family of mice, whose thronging presence at every level of the domestic environment evinces an ebullient energy singularly missing within the back-biting, competitive circle of the dominant humans.
This twin focus on animals and the domestic labour associated with food and cleaning can also be found in Disney’s Snow White, of course, and many of the most prominent features of both Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty are clearly derivative of the earlier film. Where Cinderella differs, however, is in the degree to which the wild aspects of animal identity are subsumed within the realm of the domestic. This is not simply a matter of animals being dressed in clothes as well as taking on human behavioural characteristics, including a diminutive kind of chirpy speech. The visual style of Cinderella owes more to Beatrix Potter than Snow White, taking unashamed pleasure in togging tiny creatures up in twee outfits in the Victorian manner. But Potter’s animals combined human clothes with vestiges of their wild animal instincts as well as, often, their real animal fates. No one doubts the reality of the pie on Mr McGregor’s table that Peter Rabbit, like his father, may end up in. By contrast, the rotund blob of fur that passes for a cat in Cinderella may be convincingly spiteful, but its corpulent lack of agility makes it barely a match for even the stupidest of the mouse clan and its feline powers are easily defeated by the collective élan of the mouse group. The animals represented in Cinderella are almost entirely domestic or farmyard in provenance and any trace of wilder energies that remain within them are wholly directed towards comedy operating within a strong comfort zone or towards domestic tasks that support the heroine. Robin Allan has described Disney’s idealized figure of Cinderella as that of a ‘dutiful heroine who must stay at home and do all the housework, an example of Hollywood’s reflection of post-war society’s wish that American women should return to their pre-war domestic subservience’ (1999: 210). One effect of reconfiguring all natural life within the film wholly within the domestic sphere is to naturalize this version of the female role and to make it all encompassing. Perhaps in consequence, Disney’s Cinderella betrays none of the interest that was evident at times in Snow White in recognizing the otherness of animals and the qualities characteristic of particular species. When, in the Grimm brothers’ version of the story, the heroine Ashputtel calls for animal assistance with the seemingly hopeless task of picking tiny peas out of the ashes, she differentiates the birds by their exact species names:
Hither, hither through the sky,
Turtle-doves and linnets fly!
Blackbird, thrush and chaffinch gay,
Hither, hither, haste away!
One and all come help me quick,
Haste ye, haste ye – pick, pick, pick! (1977: vol. 2, 37)
Not only are individual species recognized in this refrain but, in addition, the particular nature of the domestic task with which the heroine requires assistance is singularly well adapted to the bird’s facility at pecking up small items of food. ‘Pick, pick, pick!’ is the very business of bird life and it hardly needs Ashputtel’s exhortation to encourage them. In Disney’s Cinderella, by contrast, the generic birds and the mice are set to work on pillow smoothing and dressmaking respectively, tasks for which their animal talents would appear completely ill fitted.
It might appear from the above that Cinderella has departed from the pastoral conventions which, I have argued, were deployed in Disney’s Snow White to extend the range of connections with the natural world that the traditional fairy tale makes available. Domesticity would appear to be the very antithesis of the pastoral idyll that seeks accommodation with wild nature. In fact, however, it is still possible to see Disney’s Cinderella also as a rather specialized form of pastoral. Within the confines of her domestic environment, Cinderella’s role is akin to that of the lovelorn shepherdess, managing her somewhat incongruous flocks of chickens and mice, which she protects from their natural predator, the cat. From this perspective the metamorphosis of animal and plant forms into Cinderella’s carriage for the ball makes sense as a kind of witty pastoral conceit and it is interesting that this plot device occurs in Perrault but is omitted in the Grimm’s version, which was tailored for more bourgeois tastes. Pastoral, in the seventeenth century, was directed largely towards the sensibilities of courtly audiences. Within Disney’s second fairy tale adaptation from the 1950s however, the pastoral motifs are developed in more conventional style. When Princess Aurora, the sixteen-year-old heroine of Sleeping Beauty (1959), sings of love’s dreams to the birds and animals of the forest, she unwittingly takes her place in a line of innocent rustics with a noble pedigree that goes back to the renaissance and to classical writers beyond. There is even a hint, in the birds’ counterpoint responses to the princess’s sweet refrains, of the image Spenser drew on for his Epithalamium, in which ‘all the woods may answer and your echo ring’.
Sleeping Beauty is generally richer in imagery relating to wild nature than is Cinderella, though both films lack the complexity of response and feeling that can be found in Snow White. Aurora’s credentials as a child of nature are established early on in Sleeping Beauty with a flurry of classical signifiers. Her name means dawn, of course, and the opening song implies that she is invested with an aura of perpetual springtime. Moreover, her surrogate parents, the three good fairies who bring Aurora up in the forest in a vain attempt to elude the death spell that has been cast on her by the wicked queen, are called Flora, Fauna and Merryweather. One would be hard pressed indeed, in an era of climate change, to put together a more felicitous trio of natural signifiers than this. The plant association implied by Flora’s guardianship is pressed a little further and perhaps taken slightly more seriously in the film. At one point Flora proposes that the fairies should use their magic to change Aurora into a flower so she can avoid the fate intended for her by the aptly named Queen Maleficent. When the obvious point is made, that flowers enjoy only a brief lifespan, Flora has second thoughts, however. This, in context, constitutes a fairly frivolous aside, though it does carry a distant echo of the biblical commonplace ‘All life is but hay’, which provided a stimulus for rather deeper reflection and moralizing for writers, artists and preachers throughout early modern Europe. Within Disney’s Sleeping Beauty the practical objections raised to the scheme of floral metamorphosis do not prevent the fairies renaming their princess ‘Briar Rose’, when they reach the forest, to hide her true identity. Aurora becomes flower in name, if not in body, and the longstanding metaphorical connections between the rose and sexual love allow the twisted sea of thorns, that Maleficent later throws around the castle to prevent the Prince gaining access to his ‘rose’, to acquire added significance as a barrier to erotic fulfilment.
Perhaps the most imaginative configuration of vegetation imagery within the film, however, takes place within the architecture of the rustic cottage where the fairies attempt to conceal their royal charge. The cottage, with its thatched roof, oak beams and the proliferation of flower motifs covering nearly every exposed surface, is in many ways simply a reprise of the dwarves’ dwelling in Snow White. Plant figures have replaced the carved owls and rabbits from the earlier film. More strikingly and subtly, however, the viewer gradually becomes aware that the apparently damaged thatch on the cottage’s roof masks the fact that the building is integrated within the huge trunk of a living tree. It is hard to know how much to make of this image, which is so subtly designed that many viewers may miss it first time around, although the great circular blocks that compose the staircase and the exposed wooden surfaces that retain their bark covering inside the cottage provide clues to the building’s highly unusual design. The cottage, almost subconsciously, evokes an integral connection with the living strength of the great tree, whose structural symbiosis with the human dwelling it encloses is so total that it passes virtually unnoticed. This is a brilliant visual device, even though it is rather isolated within the iconography of the whole film, so that only a small part of its potential is effectively realized.
More typically in Sleeping Beauty, animal and plant figures take up an essentially marginal role as charming or comic adjuncts to the human drama. The use of animals as props for staging human emotion can be seen most clearly in the scene where Briar Rose, meets her prince for the first time. The heroine begins this set piece repeating a haunting musical phrase, with variations that are picked up and reiterated as birdsong; the alternating performance becomes a kind of wordless duet, in which the human voice leads and nature sympathetically responds. The theme of sympathy is developed further as the heroine, now in full song, articulates the traditional lover’s complaint: every natural creature in the forest, apart from her, appears to have a partner. Taking their cue from this complaint, the animals gather round solicitously while Aurora’s serenade to an imaginary lover, ‘Once upon a dream’, is performed and the prince’s arrival is delayed by comic impediments. The animals then act as go-betweens, stealing the prince’s boots, cloak and hat, so that he will be drawn towards the heroine to recover them, and taking the prince’s place in an interlude where they use his stolen clothes as props in a comic dance ensemble that both burlesques and prefigures the real lovers’ embrace. The forest backdrop to this scene has a still beauty reminiscent of the Duc de Berry’s Très Riches Heures and the landscapes of the Italian primitives – ‘I wanted stylised, simplified Gothic’ said the artistic director Eyvind Earle (Allan, 1999: 233) – while the animals’ burlesque of human roles generally shows an inventive charm that avoids the full blast of potential mawkishness. But the animals’ role is completely defined by their acting as agents or surrogates for human desire. When the lithe movement of fur and feather inside the prince’s clothing, and the absurdly solemn, lugubrious face of the caped owl reveal themselves during the dance, they create awareness not so much of the animals’ essential difference as of an aching gap between the reality of Aurora’s current human isolation and romantic desire encrypted in dreams. The pathos of the heroine’s situation is diffused, in this instance, through comedy but it is clear that the anthropomorphized animals stand in for a human relationship: they represent a temporary form of consolation, an emotional stop-gap, rather than being meaningful in any substantial way in their own right. When the prince arrives, the animals retreat to a background role as audience. There are no gaps within this version of pastoral within which nature can display a presence even partially independent of human agency.