A fascinating new scholarly essay collection, The Disney Middle Ages: A Fairy-Tale and Fantasy Past, looks at Disney’s portrayal of the middle ages and reflects on how these are inextricably linked to other Disney settings, from Tomorrowland to Frontierland, and how the “Americanized” medieval narrative has played out over the decades.
John McChesney-Young sent me a great review of the book by Yale historian Paul Freedman, which is in the current issue of The Medieval Review (but not yet in its online archive):
Fantasyland is the home of neo-medieval stories, especially of princesses and their accoutrements; it has been gendered female. Adventureland, Frontierland and Tomorrowland incline towards a male audience, or at least they did in their heyday. Changing public perceptions have meant that the Old West as a setting for the making of rugged American character runs up against an appreciation of the fate of Native Americans, while with the fading allure of pre-internet “Gee Whiz” technology, Tomorrowland has been partially reinvented as “Retroland,” a kind of self-mocking “Jetsons” take on what we once thought the future would look like (p. 69).
Fantasyland remains the core of the Disney imagination, and it is lightly dusted with medieval fairy-sparkle. It can’t really call to mind even a first-order artificial nineteenth-century romantic Middle Ages, because that would interfere with the goal of presenting Disney’s modern world as “the happiest place on earth,” a happiness that is more goal-oriented and, one might say, middle-class values-centered than escapist or expressive of discontent with the present. The pastness of Disney’s fantasies is tempered and in effect denied by anti-elitist, can-do characters. Amy Foster in “Futuristic Medievalism” shows how the medieval past is shaped by American anti-elitism and the promise of technology. Unidentified Flying Oddball was a 1979 reworking of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in which a NASA engineer is transported to Camelot. Not only does he amaze the court with his scientific knowledge and gadgetry, his “regular guy” nature is paramount. He treats peasants, servants and King Arthur alike, for example. Bob Gossedge, in an essay devoted to the 1963 animation of The Sword in the Stone, points out that young “Wart,” the future King Arthur, is the only principal character in that film with an American accent. Merlin, in a cultivated English voice, instructs Wart that he needs to get “these medieval ideas out of your head–clear the way for new ideas: knowledge of man’s fabulous discoveries in the centuries ahead” (pp. 127-128). One sees similarities in the all-American rendering of underdog heroes like Zorro in the 1957-1959 television series or Remy in Ratatouille (2007). Disney’s principal characters tend to be resourceful Americans (whatever their putative nationality) stuck in a past that is attractively fantastic, but irritatingly hierarchical and behind-the-times.
Disney’s egalitarianism is about universal opportunity, not economic equality. It amounts to what Foster (p. 164) refers to as “sentimental populism” based on Horatio Alger, not Marx. Anyone can be a princess, anyone can cook (in the non-medieval Ratatouille). The mistreated Snow White and Cinderella are eventually exalted and not only does “happily ever after happen every day,” but it happens to anyone receptive to the Disney message or “magic.”
The Disney Middle Ages: A Fairy-Tale and Fantasy Past [Pugh and Aronstein, eds]
(Thanks, John!)