We’ve been having an interesting discussion over the past week or so about Twilight, the Hunger Games, and the place of empowerment in feminism. Specifically, does a feminist heroine need to be empowered and in control of her own life? Or is the experience of disempowerment — including passivity (or selflessness) and irrationality (or emotional sensitivity) — valuable in itself? Or to put it another way, is feminism’s goal to integrate women into the male world on equal terms, or is it’s goal to change the world in accordance with female experiences?
The 2004 film Ella, Enchanted has an interesting take on these questions. Based on a (better than either Twilight or the Hunger Games) book by Gail Levine, the movie is a reworking of the Cinderella legend. Ella (Anne Hathaway) is as an infant visited by her incompetent fairy godmother Lucinda (Vivica Fox). The godmother gives Ella the gift of obedience.
As Ella’s mother instantly recognizes, and as Ella herself learns as she grows older, the gift is not really a gift, but a curse. Ella has to do everything anyone tells her to do. If her mother tells her to practice her music lessons, she has to practice her music lessons. If she’s told to shovel cake into her mouth, she shovels cake into her mouth. More painfully, after her mother dies and Ella’s evil stepsister discovers her secret, she is forced to perform a series of ever-more-terrible tasks — giving away the broach her mother handed her on her death bed; stealing from a store; and finally, insulting her best friend and telling her she will never see her again.
The film, in other words, is one long treatise about the dangers of disempowerment; the traditionally female virtue of obedience is presented as a kind of fierce and unrelenting slavery. The film, in this sense, is clearly, and strongly, in favor of empowerment — not least in the way in which it takes pains to demonstrate that, while Ella is controlled by her curse, she is not defined by it. Whenever she can, Ella thinks her way around her obedience — when an antagonist tells her “bite me!”, young Ella obliges instantly; older and told to gather bouquets for her stepsisters, she smirkingly collects poison ivy. Moreover, it is not Ella’s obedience, but her feisty independence and her refusal to be charmed by his beauty or rank which attracts the romantic lead, Prince Charmont (Hugh Dancy.)
And yet…is it so clear that Ella is not what she is because of her obedience? The narrator at one point says that Ella’s gift is actually what gave her strength of mind — it is the ordeal of having to obey everyone all the time that made her so determined to think for herself. Even more telling, one of the ways in which Ella has most conspicuously thought for herself is in her political views. She doesn’t like the prince because his uncle’s government has been systematically enslaving other races — ogres, giants, and elves. Ella makes the link quite explicit for the viewer in a discussion with the prince (who is not in on her secret.) After seeing some giants being forced to work in the fields, Ella tells him: “No one should be forced to do anything they don’t want to. Take it from somebody who knows.”
The dichotomy here between obedience-as-a-curse (slavery) and obedience-as-a-gift (source of wisdom and character) can perhaps be traced to the fairy tale source material. As I said, this is a retelling of Cinderella, and a retelling in a feminist vein. The original tale is about a woman being saved by marriage and love; the new tale wants to be a story of an independent woman. At many moments, you can see the fissures. For example, the climactic scene involves a (quite entertainingly silly) battle with a horde of ninja-knights. Prince Charmont battles ferociously — and so, too, does Ella, who has not previously shown any particular capacity for battle (except in one scene where someone ordered her to fight skillfully, that is.) Diagetically, there’s no reason for her to be able to defeat trained warriors; it’s just thrown in to make her look empowered and equal. As such, it comes across (for all its obvious goofiness) as almost condescending. You want empowerment; okay, we don’t really believe in it, but we figure you’re easily satisfied. Here you go.
The tension between Cinderella and Ella is perhaps most apparent, though, at the film’s emotional climax. Prince Charmont’s evil uncle Edgar (Cary Elwes) finds out Ella’s secret and orders her to stab the Prince through the heart at the moment when he asks her to marry him. Despite desperate attempts to escape, Ella has no choice — and as he asks her, she raises the knife. But…a miracle occurs. The strength of her true love releases her from her curse, and she lets the knife drop to the floor as she weeps in relief.
The movie makes some effort to suggest that the breaking of the curse is the result of Ella’s will-power, rather than of true love per se. But…well, come on, now. It’s true love. And even if you insist that it’s true-love-providing-incentive-for-will-power, you’ve still got some explaining to do. After all, as I mentioned, obedience made Ella break off her friendship with her closest friend whom she had known for years. Why wasn’t her love for that friend enough to break the command, while the love for some guy she’d known about a week was? However it’s parsed, heterosexual romantic love, and, indeed, the offer of marriage, is what breaks the spell. Which makes it hard to shake off the sense that the reason Ella is no longer under compulsion to all the world is because she’s under compulsion to one man in particular. And, indeed, Ella at the film’s end is not her own person, but a bride. Her signature achievement is not becoming a lawyer (like her elf friend) or ruling a kingdom (like Charmont. Instead, it’s marrying the king, and influencing him through her love to be a better man and a better ruler.
It would be possible to see these tensions as a sign of the film’s failure to shake off the Cinderella’s stories gushy romance of disempowerment; Ella is more empowered than Cinderella, but she’s not truly empowered.
I think, though, you could also see the ambiguity as a potentially more thoughtful conclusion. When the film goes for empowerment-for-empowerment’s sake in essentially male terms — beating up ninjas — it seems crass and stupid. It’s at its best when it reaches for an empowerment that learns from, rather than entirely rejecting, the Cinderella story. That fairy tale, after all, is about both the injustice of slavery and the beauty of love. Both of those insights, it seems to me, come out of distinctively female experience, and so it makes sense that Ella, Enchanted build its feminism — not perfectly, but still with some conviction and heart — on both.
Gratuitous Harry Clarke illustration, because Harry Clarke is bad ass.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
And yet…is it so clear that Ella is not what she is because of her obedience? The narrator at one point says that Ella’s gift is actually what gave her strength of mind — it is the ordeal of having to obey everyone all the time that made her so determined to think for herself.
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Hm, arguably so. Yet am reminded of a recent “Reader’s Digest” article (skimmed through at the supermarket line) about how all these current economic travails can be actually a good thing: teaching the cash-strapped masses not to put so much emphasis on material things, on doing “family activities” instead of expensive stuff, learning the value of thriftiness.
(God forbid the cash-strapped masses instead demand the rich pay their fair share of taxes, call for tighter regulation of financial speculation…)
Haven’t women forever been told how being a slave to Baby and their spoiled Hubby is a good thing, teaching the saintly virtues of selflessness and self-sacrifice, proves how pure and noble they are, “protects” them from getting involved in dirty stuff like business and politics?
For every person forced to obey others all the time who grows from the experience, there are countless others damaged by it: their self-esteem crushed, or grown bitter and cynical…
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Specifically, does a feminist heroine need to be empowered and in control of her own life?
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Yes. (Which doesn’t mean she has to be a macho warrior; that’s seeing empowerment in dimwittedly adolescent male terms.)
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Or is the experience of disempowerment — including passivity (or selflessness) …valuable in itself?
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If it’s chosen; if it were to be forced upon one, you might as well acclaim slavery as a means of personal growth!
Speaking of different ways of being “empowered,” I only heard about this story (and saw the videos) this morning:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/uc-davis-pepper-spray-incident-reveals-weakness-up-top-20111122
Who comes across as “empowered” here, the armored-to-the-nines, pepper-spraying riot cops, or the nonviolent students? Who repeatedly chant “shame on you,” photograph and video every act of brutality (indeed, “the whole world is watching”), their unity ending up unsettling the cops, who finally back away and ignobly leave after the crowd dismisssively chants, “You can go. You can go…”
In another video at the bottom of the article in http://www.salon.com/2011/11/20/the_roots_of_the_uc_davis_pepper_spraying/ , “UC Davis Chancellor Katehi [who ordered the pepper-spraying police on campus] walks to her car,” the utterly silent disapproval by the watching crowd (only finally broken by some journalists asking typically shallow, idiotic questions) is a powerful, palpable presence…
“you might as well acclaim slavery as a means of personal growth!”
George Elliot often argued that slavery was bad because it damaged the morality of slaves. If slavery didn’t damage the morality of slaves, she said, then slavery would be justified.
But that’s not right. Slavery is wrong because it’s wrong to oppress people, not because being a slave makes you a vicious person.
Ella’s disempowerment is forced upon her. But as a result of that disempowerment, she learns sympathy (or solidarity) with other people who are oppressed. The prince,on the other hand, has led a life of privilege, and as a result, though he’s nice enough, he’s fairly callow towards the suffering of others.
I think there are problems when you push that too far; slavery isn’t a means of personal growth, and often oppression just makes people miserable, not wiser. On the other hand, the idea that being disempowered just destroys people, that anything taken from disempowerment must be worthless, has it’s problems too. That’s the rationale that was used to argue that, after slavery, black people were not fit for self-governance because their oppression had crippled them.
I guess I’d argue that the experience of oppression can be valuable, but that that doesn’t justify oppression. Ideally, everyone would be free. As long as everyone is not free, though, everybody is tainted by oppression. The question is, are you tainted by being an oppressor, or by being the oppressed? If you phrase the issue that way, I think it’s possible to see why the experience of oppression might lend you insights that the experience of being the oppressor might not.
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It’s interesting that in the movie, she breaks the curse by refusing to stab the man she loves. In the book, she breaks the curse by refusing to marry the man she loves. I wonder why they changed that?
I’m sure it’s because they felt it would be more visually dramatic to switch it.
Just thinking about it a little more…there are a lot of changes from the book, which I think I’ll discuss in a later post. But one of the big things they did was change the whole evil king plot; that’s basically all added in for the movie. In the book the conflict was a lot more internal and focused on the sisters rather than on the political issues and the king. I think it’s partially like I said because they thought the louder, splashier conflict would work better on film.
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Elana J. says:
It’s interesting that in the movie, she breaks the curse by refusing to stab the man she loves. In the book, she breaks the curse by refusing to marry the man she loves. I wonder why they changed that?
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Noah Berlatsky says:
I’m sure it’s because they felt it would be more visually dramatic to switch it.
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Sure, more visually dramatic…
But couldn’t it be some Hollywood thinking along the lines of “Oooh, we can’t have the heroine refusing to get married, unless it’s to someone ugly or evil! What’s next…she’ll be refusing to have babies?”
If a new bio of Gandhi featured him fighting the British with Kung-Fu instead of resisting them with nonviolence, would the filmmakers’ crass, violating alteration be defended as “they felt it would be more visually dramatic”?
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…one of the big things they did was change the whole evil king plot; that’s basically all added in for the movie. In the book the conflict was a lot more internal and focused on the sisters rather than on the political issues and the king. I think it’s partially like I said because they thought the louder, splashier conflict would work better on film.
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And which — like that refusing to stab bit (how Freudian!) — “just happens” to alter the dramatic focus from stereotypically interpersonal female areas of interest, “internal and focused on the sisters,” into outward, stereotypically male stuff, with evil kings, political issues.
At least we can be grateful they didn’t add dragons, car chases and explosions to the movie; because all that would “work better on film” than boring scenes of people talking about their feelings.
(Does this then mean that Michael Bay’s “Transformers II” “works better on film” than, say, Ingmar Bergman’s “Cries and Whispers”?)
Now, I can see the changes being pushed by purely commercial considerations (“let’s add an evil king and political intrigue,” to make it appeal more to guys, make it less of a “chick flick”), and respect that for what it is…
But to think that they were motivated by aesthetic considerations is, um, awfully idealistic…
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…does a feminist heroine need to be empowered and in control of her own life? Or is the experience of disempowerment — including passivity (or selflessness) and irrationality (or emotional sensitivity) — valuable in itself? Or to put it another way, is feminism’s goal to integrate women into the male world on equal terms, or is its goal to change the world in accordance with female experiences?
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Next thread, “Sleeping Beauty, Feminist”; in which the “female experiences” of inertly, passively waiting for Mr. Right to come along and awaken you to life are defended as feminist…