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Page 192 restored to his father’s role, the ending of The Lion King therefore narrows Shakespeare’s double signifying: initially a sign of transgression and authority, by the end of the film Shakespeare as dramatist signifies only the discipline of culture. While Shakespeare reifies Disney’s products, Disney in turn alters or fixes Shakespearean economies of reception. Discipline asserts itself differently when Disney surveys Oedipal development in girls or women. Differences between Ariel’s struggle and Simba’s “Oedipal” plight arise partly from an intersection between contemporary American and early modern cultural attitudes. In The Little Mermaid, as in Shakespeare, maternal sexual desire is dangerous. Ursula’s largest sin is, in fact, combining sexuality with the maternal instincts of Shakespearean women such as Gertrude (Hamlet) and Tamora (Titus Andronicus). When two of her eel-servants are killed by Eric in the grand, final battle, Ursula whimpers, “Babies …my poor little poopsies.” Ursula’s stylized breasts, and hips in particular, present her body in terms of maternity. Visual clues suggest, however, that this mother wants her children never to grow up or separate, much like Tamora in Titus Andronicus, who finally (although unintentionally) consumes her children. People swim into Ursula’s lair through vaginal-looking tunnels. She imprisons captives there after reducing them to small but large-headed creatures with tiny, thin tails. Their appearance recalls that of tadpoles, even sperm. Either way, we see Ursula as a mother who wants her ‘‘children” to regress, even to the point of returning to the womb.5 In a pattern that Janet Adelman (1992) finds to be pervasive in Shakespeare, the film links a mother’s expression of her sexual desire with destructiveness to her children. The Little Mermaid therefore encourages us to believe, with Hamlet, that a mother’s blood should be tame (3.4.68), a point he makes to Gertrude in the closet scene when he warns her away from Claudius’s bed. The film’s misogyny therefore lies in making Ariel’s triumph over a competitive, sexualized maternal figure a pre-requisite to maturity. This scheme of development conforms to the ideology of a puritan, American market: while depicting an independent, physically flirtatious girl in a sea-shell bra, the film reassures audiences that it respects domestically bounded desire. The Little Mermaid’s rearrangement of The Tempest, particularly the assignment of Caliban’s role to a woman, makes this dynamic possible. The Little Mermaid also reconfigures Shakespeare by de-politicizing his play, neglecting or rejecting a postcolonial reading of The Tempest that sympathizes with Caliban, seeing him as a feminized |
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