Tag Archives: Ella Enchanted

Cinderella, Feminist, Part 2

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The Godard Roundtable will pick up later today, but I thought I’d sneak this post in since we have a little space.
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Since I wrote my last post on the movie Ella, Enchanted, I reread Gail Carson Levine’s book Ella Enchanted, on which the movie is based.

The book is very different…and I’d say a good bit better. Ella wins the prince over not because she’s spunky, but because she’s smart and funny — and Levine is a good enough writer to endow her creation with actual wit. The love story is a lot more convincing too; the book lets it develop over months rather than over weeks.

The story is also much darker. In the film the obedience is definitely shown to be a curse…but it’s also fun, and funny (Ella grabbing her own tongue when told to hold her tongue; Ella hopping away when told to hop to it.) And sometimes the curse is actually even something like a blessing. Ella is, for example, magically able to obey commands to become a fighter and beat up ogres early in the movie; she’s able to become a talented singer when told to be so.

In contrast, in the book, the curse confers no magical powers. When Ella is sent to finishing school and told to behave like a lady, she just has to do the painful, grinding work of training herself to act like a lady. The book does a much better job of making you feel the oppression of slavery, not as a painful occasional trick, but as an everyday weight on the spirit.

Another difference is that in the film Ella’s father is distant and flighty, but not actively cruel. As a result, a lot of the movie doesn’t really make sense — why doesn’t Ella tell him about her curse, for example? Why does he marry the repulsive Dame Olga? In the book, though, Ella’s father is actually a grasping, cruel man — not completely evil, perhaps, but certainly caring far more for money than for Ella. This is made especially clear in a painful scene in which her father attempts to marry Ella off to a wealthy, older earl. He sees her as a possession; as chattel. And her obedience forces her to be just that.

The political ramifications of this are interesting. In the film, of course, politics is figured in terms of authoritarianism and revolution. The uncle-on-the-throne is evil and racist, and Ella’s obedience makes her sensitive to the need to treat others justly. In the book, though, the king is a good sort, and there’s no sense of widespread injustice. Instead, the injustice is gendered. It’s in the way Ella’s father treats her as a thing, and in the way that her stepmother and stepsisters treat her as a servant doing traditional woman’s work.

Ella’s escape from the curse in the book follows through on the logic. In the film, the prince asks her to marry him and she frees herself, as if becoming his makes her no one else’s. In the book, though, Ella finds the strength to break the curse by refusing the Prince when he says “marry me”. Ella knows that with her curse, others could use her to betray the Prince; an obedient wife would destroy the kingdom. It’s only when she breaks the curse and gains her independence that she can be a good wife — a person, rather than a chattel.

The book, then, is much more sensitive to patriarchy’s specificity; to the way that fathers and husbands are not just loved ones, but potential oppressors. It’s much less interested, though, in class injustices — Ella never extrapolates from her own servitude to wonder about the conditions of other servants, for example. It seems like you can have narratives about authoritarian regimes (like the Hunger Games) or you can have narratives about patriarchy (which I’d argue is the case with Twilight, where Bella is constantly thwarting Edward’s plans for her) but combining the two seems difficult.

Perhaps that’s because, when you do combine the two, it starts to seem much more difficult for our heroine to win? You can take public authoritarianism seriously or you can take private authoritarianism seriously, but both at once is maybe just a little too much reality for a fairy tale.
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This is part of an occasional series on empowerment.

Cinderella, Feminist

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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.