Dancing around my living room with a dress up ballgown on singing along to "Once upon a dream" from the Disney Princess sound track; life seemed like a fairy tale as a 5 year old. Well sorry to say life is not a fairy tale as most of us have now found out as college students. I grew up surrounded by Walt Disney's Princesses, being the oldest of 3 girls. My little sisters and I loved watching the movies, reading the books, listening to the soundtracks, and playing the fairy tales out with our Barbie Dolls. Eventually I grew out of the dress up/ Barbie doll phase and stopped wanting to only watch Disney movies, however, the impact those beautiful, kind, love struck princesses had on me is, as I realize now, overwhelming.
While reading the article "Unlearning the Myths that Bind Us" by Linda Christensen, I found my self relating to Justine, a senior in Christensen's Literature and Society class, who journal-ed about her reactions from dissecting her childhood dreams. Ariel Dorfman wrote a book titled "The Empire's Old Clothes: What the Lone Ranger, Babar, and Other Innocent Heroes Do to Our Minds" in which she quests "to dissect those dreams, the ones that had nourished my childhood and adolescences, that continued to infect so many of my adult habits." Like Justine wrote in her journal, "my-whole self-image has been formed mostly by others or underneath my worries about what I look like are years of being exposed to TV images of girls and their set roles according to media", I came to the same realization when dissecting my own childhood dreams.
After reading Christensen's article and applying it to my life, I, like Justine, realize, that those childhood dreams, based on what I saw in the Disney Princess movies, are not unrelated to my everyday life. I often think about getting married or having children of my own. One of my life goals is to be a wife and mother and to have a happy healthy family of my own, which is not uncommon or wrong but is a strong theme in the princess movies. However, is this a goal of mine because I grew up watching the Disney princess movies? Would I still have a great focus on finding a husband and settling down into family life in a happily ever after setting if I had not watched those movies so much as a child? I am very curious after reading this article about how much influence Disney had on making me who I am today. I, to this day, support little girls being exposed to the Disney Princesses but only as part of a well rounded environment as I now see the hidden (or at times blatant) messages they contain.
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