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Page 189 violent transgression within centers of power. With anxiety deflected from the court, the film conservatively presents its “Prince Hal” as a beneficent figure, whose political self-fashioning does not share a continuum with ambition. Gender difference provides another reason why The Lion King tolerates Timon, while The Little Mermaid demonizes Andersen’s witch. Although some of Ursula’s traits are generic to female villains, Disney invests them with a misogynist ideology by framing them within The Tempest’s arrangement of characters. In transforming Caliban into Ursula, the American patriarchal corporation re-genders a Shakespearean scheme, making the patriarch’s opponent not merely feminized, but feminine. As Patricia Parker (1987) has shown, writers, including Shakespeare, have since biblical times identified women with “fatness”: with a lack of sexual discipline and with inflation, multiplication, and proliferation, including especially the proliferation of texts and words. Ursula tells Ariel in song that men do not like girls who talk:
Yet Ursula, who has multiple octopus “legs,” is also a copious speaker. She is, more specifically, a puritan nightmare of the female sexual body. When singing ‘‘Poor Unfortunate Souls,” Ursula jiggles her breasts and swings her wide hips to underscore her points. The film marks Ursula’s temporary triumph near the end by having her blow herself up to gigantic proportions, while lightning, storm, and fireworks issue from her. The triumph of Eric and Ariel, the creations of a large patriarchal corporation, over Ursula is the disciplining of the female “fatness” she represents. Created out of Shakespearean discourse, Ursula, like Scar and Timon, demonstrates how easily Shakespeare can be coopted by large corporate bodies for the imposition of marketplace control. IIIBy appropriating Shakespeare, The Lion King and The Little Mermaid— as films targeted at children, adolescents, and their parents—manage not just patterns of desire, but also cultural attitudes towards “growing up” and entering culture. Michiko Kakutani provides a high-concept summary of The Lion King: “Simba, the conflicted lion cub…over- |
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