Image: Chelsea Beck/GO Media
I grew up reading fiction about Improper Princesses; novels with one foot in the folktale boom and the other in feminism. These books are about princesses who don’t quite fit into their assigned gender roles and, despite material comfort, want more than they’re given. They want skills, adventures, dignity, power, success—usually traditionally masculine forms of success.
Robin McKinley published Beauty in 1978, a retelling of Beauty and the Beast in which the protagonist is bookish and not particularly beautiful. Then in 1980, there was Tamora Pierce’s Alanna: The First Adventure about a girl who disguises herself as a boy and takes her brother’s place in knight school. That year also saw the publication of M.M. Kaye’s The Ordinary Princess, a book about plain Princess Amy who craves adventure rather than romance. McKinley won the Newbery Medal in 1985 for The Hero and the Crown a story about a princess who teaches herself magic and swordplay instead of learning embroidery and etiquette. The genre was expanding beyond high fantasy in the 1990s with Patricia C. Wrede’s humorous Dealing with Dragons about a princess who volunteers to work for a dragon instead of marrying, and enjoys the happy ending of a promotion instead of a romance—and Catherine Called Birdy, Karen Cushman’s less wry and more historically accurate tale of a girl in a castle finding herself and refusing her lousy father’s plans for her. The trend crested with Catherine Called Birdy, because Cushman’s later books examine the lives of historical girls who aren’t born in castles—girls who were expected to have jobs all along.
As I was timing out of the target age group, I began to see the flaws of the genre. Even though they were close to cutting-edge feminism when they were written, some of the assumptions about gender and power now seem like old-fashioned, relics of their era. The tension of the Improper Princess book is that the protagonist needs to choose between paid and unpaid labor, as society pushes her toward the unpaid.
The tension of the Improper Princess book is that the protagonist needs to choose between paid and unpaid labor
While racist and sexist works are often treated as relics “of their time” and allowed to stand as classics, the work of writers who struck out for equality but fell short somehow seem to age worse. The straight-up sexist books from the 1970s feel dated but not uncomfortable like some of the second wave feminist tropes that now feel painfully unaware, like protagonists that scorn other girls—other girls being passive, pretty, and having boring feminine interests, where the protagonist likes sword fighting. Many of the Improper Princess books seemed so centered on the concerns of white women, and the form of “she’s not like other girls” feminism began to seem unworthy of the name.
The tropes of the Improper Princess left YA long ago, but are still alive and well in Disney movies like Moana, Tangled, Frozen, and other similar properties. Earlier Disney feature cartoons are, of course, a major source of our cultural information about proper princesses—Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White—they’re soft-spoken, good-natured and spend their screen time cheerfully doing housework.
When The Little Mermaid came out in 1989, Ariel was an updated Disney princess—an Improper Princess who wants more than she’s offered—though she never seems uncomfortable with her gender role. The following year, Disney released Beauty and the Beast, introducing their truly gender-role-questioning improper princess. Disney’s film borrowed so heavily from McKinley’s Beauty, it could almost be a loving recreation of her work except that she is not credited. The elements Disney used are both large and small. McKinley’s Beauty is bookish and her Beast romances her by taking her to the castle’s library. They sit on a marble bench together outdoors and she teaches him how to feed birds. The smaller borrowings wouldn’t be particularly notable if not for the liberal pastiche of large-scale plot machinery, the similarities make watching the movie like a Highlights magazine “spot the difference” between two nearly identical images.
As the recent live-action remake of Aladdin has been praised for giving Jasmine a bit of a feminist edge, I was thinking about Beauty, and the single profound difference between McKinley’s book and Beauty and the Beast—in the book, Beauty is the one with a character growth arc, and not the Beast. Disney’s Beast transforms from rude and abusive to polite and loving by the end. In McKinley’s book, it’s Beauty who changes, and the Beast is reliably restrained and mannerly the whole time. I found my old copy and reread Beauty for the first time as an adult and found in some ways it had aged better than I had remembered. Using the full subtlety of a novel, the story McKinley wrote remains enchanting and surprisingly modern.
Unlike most of the Improper Princess books that came after it, Beauty is not metaphorically or actually about a woman who wants to succeed in a man’s world. It’s about a person who doesn’t easily fit into the gender roles prescribed by the society around her. She names that as “not beautiful,” unlike her sisters, but this is how she describes it:
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