**Disclaimer: NSFW Language**
If you're offended by that. As a child of two New York drivers, I tend not to be. (I also tend to find Bernie Sanders' accent very familiar and comforting, which I realize is probably not normal. It just sounds like family dinners and holidays to me.)
But I digress.
Anyway. Buzzfeed posted this a few days ago: "
17 Times Disney Princesses Had No [Effing] Chill."
I love the subtitle: "Because crying on your bed always makes things better."
"17 Times" may be a bit of a stretch--since a large portion of the article focuses on the same scene, just different shots of it.
But it basically is an account of every time the Disney Princesses cry.
Like Cinderella (1950):
Or Aurora (1959):
Or Ariel (1989):
Actually, Ariel cries *a lot* for a Disney princess. Most have that ONE SCENE; Ariel has like 3, maybe 4. Definitely one of the more emotional ones.
Or Belle (1991):
There's actually quite a lot of flinging oneself down on a surface -- a bed, a bench, a rock formation -- and sobbing.
The crying may decrease as we move forward in time...I can think of Rapunzel and Tiana and even Anna getting emotional, but I don't remember any super dramatic sob fests.
Charlotte might be the exception -- and this is like a textbook Ugly Cry:
And, as the Buzzfeed article does point out, these are all teenage girls. And puberty & hormonal changes are hard enough without having to deal with learning your entire identity is a lie or realizing that you just gave up your freedom and dreams to save your father's life.
So, yeah. They cry.
You know who else cries a lot? Hermione Granger -- the anti-Disney Princess if ever there was one.
I remember reading an article once about Rowling's depiction of Hermione as constantly crying -- and it infuriated me:
"Yet throughout her role development thus far, Rowling allows Hermione to lose sight of her own strength and revert to stereotypic behavior and she facilitates this by employing gender-related stereotypic words to Hermione's behavior again and again. Repeatedly, Rowling has Hermione "shriek," "squeak," "wail," "squeal," and "whimper," verbs never applied to the male characters in the book. [...] Throughout the books, Hermione often bursts into tears.... [...] Her hysteria and crying happen far too often to be considered a believable part of the development of Hermione's character and are quite out of line with her core role in the book. They add nothing to an understanding of her persona or its individual caricature nor, for the most part, anything to the story. Thus, they can only be interpreted as "how [silly, weak] girls act," which is unfortunate from the viewpoint of feminist analysis." --Lana Whited
As someone who is a self-professed Crier, I find this really insulting. I'll admit it -- I cry. A lot. I cry when I'm happy, when I'm sad, when I'm stressed. It's just how I, personally, deal with emotions -- in part, I think, because they usually run fairly close to the surface. I can compartmentalize and suppress with the best of them, but, as a general rule, I'm very easy to read emotionally.
Does this make me any less feminist? I hope not. Just as
not crying doesn't make a person any or more less feminist. Showing a character has crying or displaying emotions -- and like Hermione, many Disney princesses don't just cry -- they show quite a range of emotions, particularly the later we go, chronologically -- shouldn't be a reason for criticism.
Life is, for lack of a better phrase, going to suck every once in a while -- and I think it's okay to show that you don't have to maintain a preternatural level of optimism and cheerfulness when you encounter it. It's okay to falter, to stumble, to be "down." (Look at women in the 1950s -- when they were expected to be cheerful all the time, it did not end well for them.)
