Frozen was lauded as a feminist breakthrough for Disney when it finally voiced what audiences were thinking: ‘You can’t marry a man you just met’. But to what extent does the cultural feminism we understand today in advocating for a woman’s romantic agency translate into the feminist critical practice pioneered in the 1960s?
Critics Gilbert and Gubar’s central thesis in their essay ‘The Madwoman in the Attic’ describes a tendency in female writers to ‘dramatise a female author’s own self-division’, which they argue manifests in ‘a desire to both accept the strictures of patriarchal society and to reject them’. This is exemplified in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Bertha Mason or in Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein and the Monster. The screenplay of Disney’s Frozen is indeed written by a woman, Jennifer Lee, but this convention is more applicable to Elsa’s creations than those of the screenwriters. Elsa creates both affable, non-threatening Olaf the snowman, and a vengeful, destructive, snow-monster, so uncivilised that he does not have a name or a coherent pattern of speech.
Elsa’s powers are lazily defined in the film, from dressmaking to summoning flurries of snow, but this indicates a power of ontology, of bringing something else into being. From a feminist point of view, this corresponds with the powers of female fertility and, by extension, sexuality. Sure enough, in the scenes where Elsa is trying to repress her abilities, such as her coronation, she wears a high-necked, long sleeved gown in a dark, dour colour, a demure hairstyle, and gloves. Yet when ‘it’s time to see what she can do, to test the limits and break through’ and Elsa reclaims her powers with pride, she deliberately conjures a dress with a wide, almost off the shoulder neckline, and even a leg slit, which no Disney heroine has sported before. Quite literally, Elsa lets her hair down.
This scene and its reclamatory exuberance also includes Elsa building her ice palace. This may hark back to Virginia Woolf’s argument that to attain true independence, a woman needs ‘a room of one’s own’: appropriating the domestic or ‘private’ sphere that feminists like Wollestonecraft railed against as an imprisonment of women; and giving women control of the space. It also invokes the Freudian argument that in literature, a room or building alludes to the body. This idea is all the more fascinating in light of Elsa’s powers as a metaphor for sexuality: in building the palace, Elsa reasserts bodily autonomy and ownership of her sexuality; and therein finds independence.
On the surface, and indeed to the target market, the feminism of Frozen is a skin-deep assertation that women should not be constricted to the transactional, heteropatriarchal strictures of marriage typical for royalty. But inspected more closely, through the lens of a feminist critic, it is also a celebration of a uniquely female inner life.
