“It Simply Isn’t Done:” Princesses, Agency, and Gender Roles in The Enchanted Forest Chronicles: Par
This is part 1 of an essay about the princess trope and gender roles in The Enchanted Forest Chronicles. For part 2, go here.
“Kazul has not enchanted me, and I do no want
to be rescued by anybody,” Cimorene said,
alarmed by the knight’s sudden enthusiasm.
“This place suits me very well. I like polishing
swords and cooking cherries jubilee and
reading Latin scrolls. If you don’t believe
me, ask anyone in Linderwall. They’ve
been complaining about my un-princesslike
behavior for years.”
-Dealing with Dragons
The princess waits in the castle for her prince to save her from the dragon. She waits in the tower for her prince to wake her with a kiss. She hides from her evil step-mother with a group of dwarves. She waits, patiently, until her true love can rescue her. The princess trope shows up over and over again, from fairy tale to Disney movie. Patricia C. Wrede, however, in her Enchanted Forest Chronicles, chose a different version of a princess to write about. The Enchanted Forest Chronicles is a series of four books, which follow Princess Cimorene as she decides to leave her home and become the princess to the dragon Kazul. Throughout the series, Cimorene has adventures and excitement, makes new friends, and refuses to be pigeonholed based on what is expected of her. The series has been pointed to as being full of humor, while also presenting the feisty female protagonist going on rousing adventures. As one lover of the series puts it in a blog post on website io9, “We’re living in an age where everyone keeps revisiting fairy tales with modern commentary or villainous backstories, or some other high concept. Wrede did all of that before it was cool—and she did it better” (Trendacosta). The online magazine Bustle points to the series as one of “8 Often Forgotten YA Novels That Should Totally Make A Comeback,” noting that “you’ll love this take-charge heroine, and the story’s light-hearted tone” (Miller). Do a quick search on fan-art website DeviantArt for “Cimorene” and a plethora of drawings of various levels of skill will appear. Clearly, something about the books appeals to its many fans. Perhaps part of what makes the series so appealing is that Princess Cimorene is strong-willed, smart, filled with personality, and able to solve her own problems. This is a princess who is not waiting to be rescued, but is instead taking agency over her own life and well being. This is a princess who does not care what her detractors think about her choices. This is an accidentally feminist princess.
Wrede presents her feminist princess in a number of ways, which I will examine in this essay. The first is in the way that she titles her chapters with active verbs. Wrede then shows that her princess doesn’t follow typical princess or gender roles by her actions. The reactions from other characters show just how far away from the princess trope Cimorene has gone. Cimorene’s refusal to conform to typical princess and gender roles works to subvert the expected tropes of the fantasy and princess literature that she exists under. In addition to the subversion of the princess trope, I will also briefly examine other ways in which Wrede subverts gender expectations throughout the books. Before looking at the books themselves, however, I will look at the conditions and mindset under which Wrede wrote The Enchanted Forest Chronicles, which will address the idea of accidental feminism, as well as the context of why presenting diverse gender roles is important in children’s literature.
In the current pop-culture climate it is especially important to look at how feminist role models are created. While Cimorene began her journey thirty-one years ago, it is certainly not over. Even though there are multitudes of similar characters that act as positive role models for upsetting gender expectations such as Harry Potter’s Hermione and The Hunger Games’ Katniss Everdeen, there are just as many frustrating examples of characters pushing gender boundaries who are pushed to the side and ignored, or even getting outright hate for their actions. Most recently, the reboot of Ghostbusters featured a cast of all women. Months before the release of the film, a concerted effort was a made on the part of a group of men to make sure it became a flop. Women who want to read about these types of character have also had to see the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies campaign in relation to the Hugo awards. The Puppies campaign was an attempt to stop giving awards to progressive science fiction and fantasy works that sought to create more characters like Cimorene. With that in mind, this study of Cimorene as a gender-busting princess is especially important.
Stereotypical Princess Tropes
The history of children’s literature is littered with princesses who would be described in a certain typically ‘feminine’ way. According to Lourdes P. Dale et al., “Because children are developing their understanding of what it means to be a princess from the observable characteristics in these books, it is imperative to understand everything that is portrayed in these books. More often than not, the princess characters are overly concerned with their physical appearance and are value primarily for their beauty” (185). The value based on beauty can be jarring to kids dealing with trying to live up to an impossible standard. When authors show the princesses caring more about appearance, it makes the level of appearance an impossible standard to live up to, while at the same time downplaying the importance of taking actions or making decisions. Janet Evans, in her study on childrens’ responses to non-traditional gender representation in fairy tales, notes that “the roles played by both male and female characters frequently conformed to traditional, stereotyped images, with women in submissive, “in-the-home” type roles and men involved in more active, outdoor activities” (5). The active role of men compared to the passive role of women again sends a message to young readers about what different genders are capable of doing. In looking at gender issues in children’s literature and continuing the idea of men as active and women as passive, Ya-Lun Tsao notes that, “Also consistent with gender stereotypes, male characters were more often described as potent, powerful, and more active than female characters” (110). Looking at examples of the typical fairy tale princess makes this even more obvious. Rapunzel waits patiently in her tower. Sleeping Beauty, in the most passive act possible, sleeps. Snow White lays in a coma awaiting a kiss that she has no power to reject. More specifically, and in relation to roles in fantasy and fairy tales, Elizabeth Marshall notes that, “In the Grimms’ Tales heroines receive harsh physical penalties for their inquisitive natures while heroes are generally rewarded for their curiosity” (263). The lesson given from the curiosity conundrum in fairy tales is that women should not be questioning their situations or circumstances, but should instead be blindly accepting of their lot in life. All of these examples point to the fact that there are pre-conceived ideas of gender roles that are a part of children’s literature. The stereotype is that women/princesses are passive, valued for physical properties, and don’t hold power over their world, while the male heroes are active and present to rescue girls and women, whatever their role in the world.
So why does it matter that these images exist? It can be the pressure it puts on readers: “As these gendered stereotypes reflect beauty and goodness as equivalent, they put increased pressure on young girls to aspire to achieve a certain type of physical beauty.” (Dale, et al. 186) It can be the message it gives about the spaces that different genders can exist in: “The opportunity to respond to and begin to deconstruct the meaning of as many non-stereotyped texts as possible is therefore a crucial step along the road to allowing children to become aware of how they can be positioned by texts.” (Evans 10) It can even enact change in how we view the world: “(children’s books) can play an important role in eliminating sexism by presenting egalitarian gender roles.” (Tsao 109) To sum up, the various presentations of gender in these texts can put pressure on girls, take away the ability to see themselves in the text, or allow them to see a way to escape the sexism of the world around them, depending on how the text handles gender. These are all important reasons to continue to strive to produce children’s literature that doesn’t fall into the trap of stereotypical gender representations or roles. As Kirkscey puts it, “Because of their unique position, children’s book authors themselves have the responsibility to generate characters that portray women in ways that enhance their position in the world and lead society closer to equality of opportunity and equality of condition in both genders” (103). The concept that it is up to the authors to make sure they generate such characters makes it seem like they need to be completely intentional in their creations. While some authors may intentionally write their novels with characters that exist outside of gender expectations, Cimorene is an example of a character that did not begin her fictional life as an intentional role model. The success of her reach shows just why it is important that authors don’t need to worry about creating specifically feminist characters in children’s literature, and should instead concentrate on creating honest representations of the world around them.
Explanations from the Author
In order to fully understand how Cimorene came in to existence, it is important to look at the words of her creator. In the introduction to Dealing With Dragons, Wrede writes about the process she went through in designing her protagonist. Wrede wrote the last book in the series first, and then went back and wrote the prequels. She notes that, knowing how Cimorene would turn out in the final book, she knew that she needed “to be someone who would grow up to become that kind of person: strong, smart, self-assure, practical, curious, and willing to take on all sorts of problems. […] I already knew the general outline of her adventures, which, again, required someone smart, practical, and sure of herself” (Introduction). Going in, Wrede knew exactly the kind of protagonist she wanted, knowing how that particular character would turn out. It is possible to look at Princess Cimorene as an obvious icon of feminism in children’s literature, as someone who bucks the established tropes of fantasy stories, and as something that must have been done on purpose by the author. To add some context on the definition of feminism that I am using for the purposes of this study, Bell Hooks, once defined feminism as “the struggle to end sexist oppression” (33). The examples later in this essay will make it clear that Cimorene is acting as a feminist according to that definition, even if she is not doing so consciously. She finds a way to end the oppression that those around her seek to put on her, and at times, on other women. Wrede goes on to even more of an explanation of the context under which she created Cimorene:
Explaining this occasionally confounds people who think
that I wrote Cimorene as some sort of feminist statement
about what women can achieve. I find their surprise hard
to understand. My real-life family and friends are full of
women like Cimorene, from my twin cousins, who have been
fur trappers in the Alaskan bush for most of their lives,
to my mother, who became an engineer long before women’s
libreration officially opened “nontraditional careers” to
women, to my grandmothers, aunts, and cousins, who
were office managers, farmers, nurses, nuns, geologists,
and bookkeepers, among other things. None of these women
takes and guff from anyone. They aren’t proving a point
about what women could, should, or can do; they are ignoring
that whole question (which none of them considers a question
worth asking at all) and getting on with doing the things that
interest them most. (Introduction)
The idea that, as Wrede says, the questions of feminism are not worth asking for women who just do what they want to do feeds directly into the character of Cimorene. As for Wrede’s assertion that she did not create a feminist character, I would content that the very philosophy (or lack of philosophy) on creating a character based on people she knew, who were just “getting on with doing the things that interest them most,” and putting her into the fantasy setting where women are often just plot devices for the male characters, was an act of feminism in its own way. Wrede may not call it as much, but children of all stripes who read these books would surely be inspired by such a character. More recent examples of the princess in pop culture have made that clear, from the horseriding, arrow shooting Merida of the Disney film Brave, to the monster fighting princess of children’s book series The Princess in Black, there is an apparent desire for princesses that fall more in line with Cimorene than Sleeping Beauty. Still, the dominant image of the princess is very different from what Wrede created, and according to one 2016 study that looked at 58 princess books, “the most common characterizations of the princesses were as being kind, intelligent, naïve, and nurturing” (Dale, et al 189). Compare that image to Cimorene and it is apparent that there are alternate ideas of the princess that are more interesting and true to life than the ‘typical’ princess. In that regard, even though Wrede protests that she wasn’t acting as a feminist when she wrote the books, it seems that perhaps the very act of creation was itself an act of feminism, and one which other authors should consider copying.