Essays

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“Riding the Emotional Waves: Interiority and the Pathetic Fallacy in Frozen II”

Submitted to the ALSCW panel “The Six Most Beautiful Minutes in the History of Cinema”

Abstract:

Do Disney princesses have interiority? Sure, they display feelings by laughing or crying, but do they have a hidden inner life? Many people are skeptical, viewing these characters as basically equivalent to the dolls made in their likenesses. However, consider this sequence in Frozen II (2019): Elsa and Anna find the wreck of the ship in which their parents died and discover that they perished in search of answers about Elsa’s ice powers. Elsa sobs that she is to blame for their deaths. In the next scene in which she appears, Elsa is on the shore of the Dark Sea trying to make it through the massive waves that drowned her parents. The symbolism seems obvious to me: the waves represent her grief, which is projected outward onto the natural environment in an example of the pathetic fallacy. Nevertheless, I have yet to encounter a critic who comments on the connection. According to scholarship on the movie, the scene is just another episode in the plot. 

This critical oversight is particularly surprising given the prominent use of the pathetic fallacy in the first Frozen movie, which tells the story of Elsa’s frozen heart by externalizing it as the eternal winter that she unleashes on her kingdom. Accordingly, I will argue for continuity between the two films: Elsa’s interiority in Frozen II also manifests primarily through the pathetic fallacy, including personifications of the elements. While I use Ruskin’s term “pathetic fallacy,” the literal realization of emotional content in the film challenges his distinction between emotional perceptions and the outside world. Certainly film characters have no access to a world untinged by their projected psyches. Perhaps we likewise can productively process emotions as objective, external realities.

Books

Disney Therapy blends literary criticism and memoir to explore the psychological possibilities opened up by identification with Disney heroines, focusing on post-2010 heroines. It’s based on my own experience of doing “Disney therapy,” using Disney characters to conceptualize the “parts” or sub-personalities described by Richard C. Schwartz in his Internal Family Systems model and to plot narrative arcs to help my parts heal. People often label their parts (ie “my anxious part”), but imagining them as characters instead empowers us to think about what the characters we identify with needed to learn and then apply the lesson to our own lives.