The normalization of the impulse to deny women dominance led Disney cinema to illustrate strong women as murderers. In both Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Cinderella, the stepmothers are powerful, but slightly depicted as killers in the movie. This causes the Evil Queen and Lady Tremaine to be in a quarrelsome position in relation to their families, resulting in failed family relationships. This trend begins to fade well within Mulan and Maleficent, where these women gradually become nurturers of their families. In Snow White, Snow White initially tries to be caring towards the Evil Queen, but the Evil Queen has no desire to be familial. Contrastively in Maleficent, Maleficent developed a care for Aurora and became a mother-figure for …show more content…
In Cinderella, Lady Tremaine was harsh towards her own stepdaughter. Not only was Lady Tremaine in a pugnacious relationship with Cinderella, so were the evil stepsisters. The stepsisters constantly wanted to perform better than Cinderella at everything. When Lady Tremaine disregards Cinderella’s desire to attend the ball, she takes her stepsisters in place of her. This caused the failure of Lady Tremaine and the stepsisters to create a familial relationship with Cinderella. Disney even designated specific body figures and movements for Cinderella aside from her stepmother and stepsisters. According to the article, “Somatexts at the Disney Shop” by Elizabeth Bell, “The language of ballet, and its coded conventions for spectatorship of “high” art, are embedded in the bodies of young Disney women.”. This well represents how Disney cinema agreed with the patriarchal gender schema. Ballet, one of the most beautiful forms of art, was used to construct the most feminine-like Disney princesses to normalize the denial of women dominance. High class protagonists like Lady Tremaine and Cinderella’s evil stepsisters, “are animated as antitheses to correct dance carriage and movement. Their strides are always heel first, bent knee exaggerations of incorrect ballet postures and movements.”. The creators not only use incorrect ballet movement, but the dancing roles of the stepsisters were performed “by men in drag, parodying gendered constructions of classical dance roles.” As a result, in early Disney films, dependent women were stereotypically feminine, while independent women were constructed with masculine characteristics, shown demolishing family