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Jeanna Kadlec| Longreads | April 2021 | 2,936 words (11 minutes)

Disney often codes their villains as queer: This is widely known and accepted. First noticed by scholars during the Disney Renaissance of the late ‘80s through the ‘90s, critical observations about characters like Scar (The Lion King) have since disseminated into pithy, viral tweets and TikToks. A quick Google search of “gay Disney villains” will turn up dozens of articles, all repeating the same litany of facts: That The Little Mermaid’s Ursula is based on the iconic drag queen Divine, that Hollywood often uses British accents and effeminate mannerisms in men like Robin Hood’s King John to signal moral decrepitude.

But those are observations without analysis, which is to say: pointing out the obvious without asking why or how. The subtext of these clickbait articles and listicles is often: Disney codes villains as queer because Disney thinks being gay is bad. Which is one way to read it.

However, simply saying “Disney is bigoted” has never sat entirely well with me for one reason: In spite of what the Supreme Court of the United States may rule, Disney is not a person. Disney is a corporation that wields the power of a nation-state, and, consequently, has one central obsession — the preservation and expansion of that power, a theme that is prevalent and evident in every story they allow their employees and contractors to tell. 

If queerness is consistently coded a certain way, it has something to do with how Disney wants power to function — who can wield it, and how. 

***

Millennials are the generation whose childhoods were shaped by the stories of the Disney Renaissance, a period generally considered to have begun with 1989’s The Little Mermaid and concluded with 1999’s Tarzan. It includes favorites like Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and Mulan — which, incidentally, are at the heart of the corporation’s “live-action” remake strategy, intended to further monetize a now-grown generation’s nostalgia for the stories that formed us, stories we can share with our own children (or group texts). 

The Disney Renaissance was birthed after a decade of HIV/AIDS ravaging queer communities; its height marked by political milestones such as President Clinton’s signing of the Defense of Marriage Act (1996) and the institution of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” for LGBTQ+ members of the military. Divergent, non-normative sexuality was purportedly a threat to society, and Disney, ever the quiet institutional soldier, answered by providing a veritable stable of queer-coded villains who were ill-suited to lead or assume power. 

Indeed, there were so many queer-coded villains in this period that it’s hard to remember them all — let alone the different lessons they taught us. To wit, you probably remember Scar, Jafar, and Ursula, but you have probably forgotten Governor Ratcliffe from 1995’s Pocahontas: the fashion-conscious, social-climbing, crown-appointed governor in charge of the colonizing “mission” to the “New World.”

Pocahontas has one of the top-five highest-grossing Disney soundtracks of all time, but that’s generally where any lingering nostalgia dies. To say that the film itself is problematic is an understatement. While the screenshot of Chief Powhatan, Pocahontas’ father, saying “these white men are dangerous” has found a rich afterlife on social media, the film’s historical inaccuracy and deliberate whitewashing of colonization and its aftermath have cycled it out of many a millennial’s “comfort film” rotation, something that has generally gone unaddressed by the corporation. (The fact that Mel Gibson voiced John Smith hasn’t helped, either.) 

Pocahontas may seem like a strange vehicle for discussing queer villainy. But that’s the thing: Disney gets inventive when they need to circumvent white people’s historical responsibility for genocidal atrocities, and what better way to do that than to displace the heart of the film’s conflict onto contemporary cultural anxiety: queerness and its incumbent specter, masculinity. 

Disney’s attitudes toward colonization and queer coding are, it turns out, inextricably linked. By using a queer-coded villain, the corporation entirely elides white responsibility in retelling a historical tragedy, letting the cowboy-type colonizers off the hook for any wrongdoing and, instead, reframing them as the heroes of the story. In Pocahontas, Disney pulls off the magic trick of telling a story about colonization and genocide where the only thing that’s actually punished is the “wrong” kind of masculinity. 

***

Governor Ratcliffe is not set up as the villain because he is a colonizer, or even because he is in charge of the mission to invade the Powhatan nation — or, as Disney has framed it, dig for gold. To criticize him for these positions would implicate and damage the purported “heroism” of every other white character on screen. 

Something else, then, must indicate his villainy, and Ratcliffe violates Disney’s favorite American norms — individualism, hard work, modesty — immediately. He wears bows in his hair and a literal feather in his cap. His twinky manservant, Wiggins, helps dress him, and is even in charge of bathing his dog … and let’s take a moment to discuss the dog. Unless fighting, Ratcliffe is rarely seen not carrying his white pug, Percy, who is always adorned in a collar that is fancier than anything the crew are wearing. Disney villains’ animal familiars tell us something about their personality, and Percy’s taste for luxury speaks volumes about Ratcliffe’s lifestyle. 

Ratcliffe prefers to delegate rather than do physical labor himself, a standard managerial practice, but not something heroes do. He belittles his workers when things don’t go well, seeing his crew as a means to an end and insulting them as “witless peasants” behind closed doors.

The narrative works to align the audience’s viewpoint with that of the other colonizers: in the words of one of the laborers, “Look at us! No gold, no food, while Ratcliffe sits in his tent all day, happy as a clam.” The audience is clearly meant to sympathize with the worker instead of Ratcliffe, the villainous manager, even if that worker is also occupying stolen land and explicitly fantasizing about killing Indigenous people. (What “audience,” exactly, is this for? You already know the answer.) 

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However, it isn’t just that Ratcliffe is a bullying, well-dressed boss in an environment where no one is impressed by designer wares. He’s deeply insecure and concerned about what other people think, as opposed to the naturally popular, carefree everyman that is the Captain of the ship (and Pocahontas’ eventual love interest) John Smith. In fact, we learn that this mission is something of a last-ditch effort to salvage Ratcliffe’s reputation with the king. For him, success means falling in line, trying to do right by the crown, to reap the reward. When he says “it’s not that I’m bitter,” we understand that he is, in fact, deeply bitter.

Ratcliffe’s real fantasy is power — bringing his enemies at court to heel, being so celebrated that “My dear friend King Jimmy will probably build me a shrine” — precisely because he feels so ironically powerless.

This is not the kind of chaotic, burn-it-all-down villain who has been canonized by drag shows. 

***

A casual Google search reveals that Ratcliffe does not even show up on most “Gay Disney Villain” lists. Something about him elides memory and decisive categorization as other, encouraging a certain slippage. 

He isn’t as easy to pin down as the Queer Villains of Excess: the Scars and Ursulas who you can spot by their muchness, their refusal to conform to rigid social structures, their wild desire to usurp the throne. Excess is the singular quality that usually drives queer-coded villains to crave power at all costs, their appetites monstrous and unnatural. 

Ironically, even the most chaotic queer-coded villains are rarely bent on creating their own power structures — they only ever desire the kingdom and, seemingly, the lives of their straight-coded, heroic counterparts. Jafar wants to be sultan, but has no conception of what to do with that power once obtained, to the point he cannot strategize enough to realize that the genie is beholden to others. Scar believes himself to be the rightful ruler of the Pride Lands, only to drive the kingdom into a barren wasteland: The queer failure of reproduction, on which society so purportedly rests, made manifest. “Fuck the social order and the child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized,” queer theorist Lee Edelman writes in No Future — the anthem of Disney villains everywhere. 

The opposite of excess is moderation, and restraining oneself to fit into the boxes society has prescribed — well, this is assimilation. 

Assimilation is when a group of people assumes the values, behaviors, and beliefs of another group — when something core and essential to one’s culture and sense of self and identity is lost in the interest of resembling the social majority. In the U.S., this has had many iterations around the suppression of non-English languages, the forced Christianization of Indigenous peoples, and more. For the LGBTQ+ community, it looks like our communities having been largely underground until the last 50 or so years, because social legibility meant imprisonment, exile, or death 

In many ways, for many people, various forms of assimilation are pure survival in a white, heteronormative, and otherwise profoundly difficult world. But assimilation used against one’s own community, assimilation used to turn the target off your own back and toward communities with less cultural power than yours, becomes an alliance with the oppressor. 

Ratcliffe is a queer-coded villain whose trademark is assimilation, not excess. This is why he slips and slides through millennial memory — hard to remember, hard to pin down. He isn’t an outsider, an icon to queer children everywhere, an individualist who has chosen himself at all costs, someone who we grew up both terrified of and wanting to become. No. He is trying desperately to fit in, to use the white supremacist system to his own benefit. But working for the system always comes with a price. 

***

There is a queer anxiety to Ratcliffe, because he knows his attempts to fit in are pretense. This is, as he says himself, “my last chance for glory.” Does he exile himself from the crew of colonizers because he thinks he’s better than them, or because he thinks they’ll see through him? Or both? Captain John Smith can have a beer with the guys. Ratcliffe, not so much.

Holding the title of “governor” in a servile bureaucracy doesn’t guarantee respect. Rugged masculinity and physicality — the kind Smith has — does. On a certain level, Ratcliffe both understands and resents this: “The men like Smith, don’t they?” he asks his manservant Wiggins. Even their voices tell the story: Ratcliffe is the villainous bureaucrat, complete with an English accent. Smith is the heroic adventurer — with Mel Gibson’s American accent intact and unfettered. 

John Smith has swagger — and a reputation that precedes him. “You can’t fight Indians without John Smith!” one of the colonizers declares in his introductory scene, as Smith literally rides a cannon onto the ship. Depicted as a natural leader, he’s respected by his men for his physical prowess and bravery that borders on stupidity. Smith has a martyr-like willingness to put himself in harm’s way for his men that, while not explicitly labeled as Christian, is certainly coded as such. “You’d do the same for me,” Smith says jokingly to his companions, after leaping into the ocean during a storm to save a man who fell overboard. He is, in essence, exactly the kind of leading man that Mel Gibson, the actor who voices him, spent a career playing — the mythic American cowboy and ideal leading man of Hollywood cinema. (Complete with the domestic abuse and antisemitism bona fides.) 

Queer-coded Ratcliffe is trying to earn a place in the system by being its most traditional guardian, but he also represents a kind of masculinity that has long since gone indoors to the Royal Court, concerned with accumulation through relationship and intellect. Americans recognize this as the masculinity of the educated, high-born (or aspirational) cultural aesthete, anxieties about which would soon manifest in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s under the term “metrosexual.” John Smith, conversely, represents the rugged, individualist masculinity that defines itself not by social status but by a cowboy mentality, by connection with God, family, and the land.  

In many ways, Pocahontas is structured like a Western, and John Smith may as well be John Wayne. John Smith saves the man who fell overboard; Ratcliffe is the government lackey in a suit who hunkers down in his cabin and only emerges once the danger has passed, clutching his pug while his manservant shields him with an umbrella. Government intervention is often a primary conflict in Westerns, resented by white colonizers played by actors like Wayne, who have gone west and figured out a way to live (with varying levels of hostility to the local Indigenous community) outside of federal oversight. The men in suits have effeminate mannerisms, a lot of education, and virtually no physical strength (coded as natural, God-given virility), with very little idea on how to practically connect to the world around them. Set aside for a moment the well-documented historical phenomenon of white, Black, and Latino gay cowboys throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and apply the genre of American Westerns and their ideology of masculinity, expansion, and, consequently, who gets to have what in Pocahontas. 

What do the colonizers want, respectively, in Pocahontas? (Obvious question, but stay with me.) In Ratcliffe’s villain anthem, “Mine, Mine, Mine” — which is, and I cannot stress this enough, a duet with John Smith — Ratcliffe is singing about the gold allowing him to accumulate wealth and reputation and status, delegating the digging to the crew. Smith is the one actually singing about the land while climbing trees and waterfalls, activities which seem unnecessarily strenuous. But don’t they want the same thing: to take whatever land they land on in the interest of colonial expansion? Haven’t Smith and Ratcliffe already been shown to be very much on the same page about the murder and displacement of Indigenous peoples? But Disney’s edit would have you think otherwise. 

Beneath the surface, anxieties about all-too-contemporary masculinity and what constitutes manhood are relocated to the center of the driving conflict of Pocahontas — one that allows a corporation to elide reckoning with the violent historical subject matter of the actual plot. 

And therein is the issue: Ratcliffe becomes the villain because Smith, his fellow colonizer, cannot be. 

***

In the end, Ratcliffe’s men turn on him. At first glance, it might seem like they are doing so out of sympathy for Pocahontas and her people, as Ratcliffe had been trying to assassinate her father, Chief Powhatan. But this is not it — the other white men don’t try to stop him when he first aims his gun, not until he accidentally shoots John Smith, who is shown taking a bullet for the chief (which is, please note, a fictional event that did not happen). 

“You shot him!” one accuses. “Smith was right all along!” another cries hypocritically, as all of them had been worked up in a racist war song (“Savages”), fantasizing about genocide only the night before. The white colonizers mutiny in favor of the preferred masculine archetype: The Cowboy. Ratcliffe is tied up, gagged, and set to be tried upon return to England. 

It is deeply satisfying to see the avowedly racist Ratcliffe in chains. But is the colonizing and racist rhetoric what he’s being punished for? No. The other colonizers are still walking free, many of them staying behind to continue to build up their Jamestown settlement. 

Colonizing isn’t worthy of punishment in this film, nor is racism, otherwise every white character — John Smith included — would be in chains. The reality is that Ratcliffe is punished for failing to assimilate within the crew successfully, for not embodying the right kind of masculinity, for not reading the room, and attacking the much-respected cowboy-esque leader who the men ultimately mutiny for. This is his crime: not trying to assassinate Chief Powhatan, but wounding one of his own. Meanwhile, Thomas, a colonizer who explicitly murders an Indigenous warrior, Kocoum, is given … a redemption arc, complete with Pocahontas’ forgiveness. 

How tenuous the conditions of acceptance for white gays doing the bidding of white supremacy. 

***

Ratcliffe is, simply put, a Corporate Gay, a Log Cabin Republican, a Cyrus Bean, the Disney equivalent of (allegedly) that one senator from South Carolina. Ratcliffe has bought into the idea that serving the system will benefit him, and that if only he does its bidding, things will ultimately work out. But queerness renders you automatically suspect within any system of power, even white supremacy. What Ratcliffe, and other white gays like him, fail to realize is that assimilation is not acceptance; it is merely borrowed time. 

There is a savvy to the Queer Villains of Excess like Scar and Ursula, who understand that there is no utility in trying to fit in, who know that there is no box possibly small enough to cram your queer ass into. But, truth be told, even these villains have boundaries they won’t cross, only ever wanting to kill the king and usurp his throne — but never outright abolish abusive systems of power. 

There is no queer revolution amongst Disney villains, see. There is no abolition, no truly radical liberation within the fairy tales that ultimately serve to codify what “happily ever after” means, and for who. In Disney, queerness is only ever an imitation of the hetero original, never a full expression of itself. Gay villains are depicted as the dog who caught the car: Once they get it, what do they even do?

* * *

Jeanna Kadlec is a culture writer living in NYC. Her writing has appeared in ELLE, O the Oprah Magazine, LitHub, NYLON, Allure, and more.

Editor: Carolyn Wells

Jeanna Kadlec| Longreads | October 2020 | 3,234 words (12 minutes)

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How do you tame a witch? Historically, you don’t: You kill her. Burn her. Hang her. In tales, the witch is often a her. A she-devil, if you will, a woman who sleeps with Lucifer, who is Satan’s mistress, who bears a demonic mark. Read the 15th-century witch-hunters’ Malleus Maleficarum, it’ll tell you. Her very existence, her body itself, is a portal from this world to others, and she must be put down, lest she tears a rip in reality itself.

Wicked witches, the stuff of historical legend and nightmarish fairy tales, inspire a terror that verges on the sublime, that feeling Edmund Burke articulated so long ago — of standing on the edge of a cliff where you feel the simultaneity of danger and spectacular awe. Mountains are sublime. Milton’s Satan is sublime. Sublimity only exists in things that could kill you, which bring you to the edge of yourself. The untamed feminine, then, surely falls into this category: Witches exist on the margins, in the shadows, ever threatening to invade and disrupt the sanctity of the social order.

These days, Disney doesn’t kill witches — at least, not as often as they used to. These days, Disney is interested in the ultimate rehabilitation project: How do you make these archetypal wonders, this sublime femininity, less frightening? Less powerful — particularly to people invested in women and queers behaving in normatively gendered ways?

You make the witch a mother.

***

Maleficent is the most sublime of Disney’s witches. Disney — one of America’s prime cultural exports of social norms, the unofficial mythographer of western childhood — has been remaking their most well-known classics for years in response to decades of feminist criticism. It was only a matter of time before they took on one of their villains. In the original Sleeping Beauty (1959), Maleficent is a horned witch-monster who can fly, apparate out of nowhere, shape-shift into a dragon, command the thunderous sky to do her bidding, and, of course, issue death curses at an infant christening she wasn’t invited to. She is extraordinarily powerful, more so than any good fairy or benevolent god. The 2014 live-action Maleficent stars Angelina Jolie, whose personal brand is synonymous with edgy motherhood. In the reboot, Maleficent is the most powerful fairy in the Moors — an egalitarian, femme- and queer-coded society rich in natural resources — with Maleficent’s role a trusting, de facto community leader of sorts, helping to defend the Moors from the neighboring human kingdom who would seek to take it. This Maleficent is childhood friends and, later, teenage lovers with Stefan, the human who eventually becomes king. Her curse on his firstborn child, Aurora (Sleeping Beauty), is revenge for the most brutal of betrayals — for him drugging her and cutting off her wings.

In the reboot, Aurora, raised near the Moors, develops a strong relationship with Maleficent, who she understands to be her Fairy Godmother. That Maleficent eventually experiences a kind of compassionate softening and internal transformation through her relationship with Aurora is not, in and of itself, problematic. However, this is a Disney film, and it is no accident that a maternity narrative is represented as the primary way for a woman to experience self-realization. The 2019 Maleficent sequel, Mistress of Evil, only affirms that a mother’s abilities are not ultimately for herself, but for her children. Although a witch is an autonomous, unchecked power, when she becomes a fairy-tale mother — especially the mother of a princess — she still devolves into a plot device with no individuality to speak of. She is beholden to the continuation of the nation-state. Her success lies in self-sacrifice.

This is Disney’s ultimate magic trick: Rebooting “feminist” stories where women, even if they are witches, obliterate themselves.

***

However, if Disney has a historical penchant for dramatically, symbolically killing witches, and thus excising feminine power from the narrative, they have an equally well-known history of writing stories with entirely absent biological mothers. The list of princesses with dead moms is long: Snow White, Cinderella, Ariel, Jasmine, Belle, Pocahontas, Elsa, and Anna. Rapunzel and Aurora are separated from their biological mothers for their entire childhoods. These absences are a source of tension that is largely unaddressed, even when the mother’s death is an obvious catalyst to the plot. French philosopher Luce Irigaray claims, “The whole of our Western culture is based upon the murder of the mother.” Easier for Disney to elide the mother, to disappear her, than to introduce her to the narrative and be forced to reckon with the interiority of the child, let alone a grieving husband. But this also further emphasizes the identification of the princess-daughter with the father and his legacy and goals for her life — both individually and on a collective, patriarchal level. Writing specifically about Disney, scholar Lynda Haas has said, “There is no maternal genealogy, no importance attached to a mother’s heritage.” Before Elsa and Anna, whose parents’ death is the unlikely subject of Frozen 2, none of the dead mothers are even named in the films, including Pocahontas’ mother, whose spirit is visually present, guiding her and other characters throughout the entire story. Contrast these unnamed mothers with Tiana’s late father James in The Princess and the Frog, who is explicitly named in a flashback. This difference highlights the importance of the mother as a plot catalyst, as a vital role that all of these heroines are purportedly hurtling toward — and yet, they will ultimately be nameless, faceless.

Which is to say, given Disney’s seeming lack of respect for the role of mothers and primary caregivers, one might wonder why they would try to marry the archetype of the witch with that of a Good Mother. But then, perhaps the answer is obvious. Fairy-tale mothers are easily discarded and erased in ways that witches, so deeply unforgettable even when ultimately murdered — physically or psychically — are not.

And this is the goal for a dangerous witch, these days: To not make them a martyr to their cause, but to render them powerless and unable to challenge, disrupt, and potentially dismantle the nation-state.

***

While 2014’s live-action Maleficent is ground zero for this new rehabilitation experiment, there are two previous films from the Disney vault that do, in fact, feature magical mothers. However, the mothers are also archetypally evil witches: Tangled (2010), which is based on the Rapunzel story, and, of course, the one that started it all, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).

Tangled and Snow White both present us with adoptive witch-mothers who have different relationships with the heroines. In Snow White, jealousy drives the Evil Queen, who also has state power, to try to kill her stepdaughter; in Tangled, possessiveness drives Mother Gothel to kidnap the princess, who is the sole source of a Fountain of Youth-type magic. Both women are presented as extremely powerful, selfish, beauty-obsessed isolationists. Gothel’s emotional manipulation of Rapunzel, in particular, is a distinctly modern take on codependency as villainy. But there is something else at play in both of these stories.

Villains are characters who violate the normative rules set down by society, and witches like Gothel and the Evil Queen are violating the greatest rules of all. In “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Adrienne Rich introduced the notion that heterosexuality is not necessarily a natural state of being but, rather, that “heterosexuality has been both forcibly and subliminally imposed on women.” The idea is that cis-gendered women — specifically, their bodies — are needed to propagate the species. Thus, these women must believe that their bodies are accessible to men. Marilyn Frye defined this as the patriarchal imperative: “That [cis-gendered] men must have access to [cis-gendered] women.” These ideas permeate fairy-tales. Sleeping Beauty awakens from her cursed slumber and, still in a daze, seemingly consents to marriage, though in some versions of the story she wakes up literally giving birth to twins, having been raped by the prince. Rapunzel, locked in a tower, “falls” for the first man she ever meets. A traumatized and abused Cinderella agrees to marry the powerful man offering her freedom from her enslavement. Heterosexuality is compulsory, and marriage is a mandatory part of the game.

For Disney, these villains’ real evil is not their emotional abuse and outright physical endangerment of their daughters (though there is, of course, that); it is that they are keeping the girls from getting married. At the end of the day, Rapunzel and Snow White are horror stories. The villains invoke a primal kind of terror: The mother who raised you can just as easily kill you. The Queen and Gothel, represented as powerful magicians who either rule their own realm or who do not honor the sovereignty of a kingdom, are, consequently, decisively killed, although never by the young women represented as their antagonists.

***

Maleficent is an unlikely maternal figure. Like Snow White’s Evil Queen, this Maleficent is represented as having some kind of state power; even though the society of the Moors is introduced as a communal, egalitarian society (“they needed neither king nor queen, but trusted in one another”), she crowns herself Queen and raises up a thorned border after she curses Aurora, who she proceeds to spend most of her free time spying on. But she has seemingly little interest in either active rule or conquest. Mostly, she observes and quietly takes care of the world around her. This includes looking after “Beastie,” the nickname she gives the infant princess, who she saves from childhood death on at least one occasion. The chaotic triad of bumbling fairies is seemingly unable to rise to the task of raising Aurora, so Maleficent does it from afar.

Even witches are caregivers, is the loaded suggestion. Early in the film, we are shown a younger Maleficent healing trees and encouraging her fellow fairies. These compassionate instincts, buried deep underneath a grown woman’s pain, are drawn out by the arrival of the baby girl she sentenced to a sleep-like death. Maleficent’s desire to care for Aurora ensures that she gradually develops a relationship with her, particularly once Aurora has grown to “tween” phase and finally meets Maleficent in person, instantly recognizing her as “my fairy godmother” whose distant presence she has sensed her entire life. The humorous misnomer is smart in how much it reveals; namely, that Aurora trusts Maleficent, who doesn’t know what to do with this earnestness, this desire for a relationship. She is caught off guard, forced to reckon, face to face, with how fond she is of this girl she has spent a lifetime nurturing. Maleficent and Aurora spend hours walking the Moors together. Maleficent stands over a sleeping Aurora in a moment of foreshadowing, desperately trying to revoke her unbreakable curse. In a twist reminiscent of Frozen, it is ultimately Maleficent, not the prince, who bestows True Love’s Kiss on Aurora’s forehead, unexpectedly waking her from her cursed slumber.

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Maleficent is, in many ways, a remarkable reboot in the Disney canon in that it accidentally posits a construction of a women-centered chosen family — one, perhaps, that only a witch could make. “I want to stay in the Moors with you,” Aurora tells Maleficent upon waking from her cursed sleep in Stefan’s castle. The identification with the maternal is singular, perhaps for the first time in a Disney film. It is a queer family structure in the sense that it deconstructs and deprioritizes the centering of heteronormativity: Men’s power over women has no relevance here. There is no need or desire for procreation. In fact, there is restoration: While the final battle is ongoing, Aurora stumbles upon Maleficent’s wings, locked up and displayed like some kind of sick trophy, and frees them — restoring Maleficent’s wings to her in the heat of battle. At the end of the film, Aurora gives her castle, inherited from the father she had no connection to, back to the people. There is, seemingly, no desire for conquest, for assimilation into the patriarchal, monarchical order that drove Stefan to brutalize Maleficent and pursue the destruction of the Moors and ownership of Aurora at all costs.

Or is there? When we first meet Maleficent, before she has ever had any relationships with humans, she is still living as a part of a communal society with no official leadership, let alone a monarchy. After Stefan betrays and assaults her, and after she subsequently enacts revenge on him by both cursing his child and having him kneel before her in front of his entire court, Maleficent crowns herself Queen of the Moors — a hostile takeover, essentially. But her love for Aurora, in the end, does not inspire her to restore the Moors to the egalitarian society they once were. No: Instead, Aurora is crowned collective ruler, “uniting the kingdoms,” so that she co-rules the Moors and the human kingdom that is her birthright. Maternity has incited, in Maleficent, both the desire to abdicate her own power, and also to provide for and ensure her daughter’s. The consolidation of Aurora’s power supersedes the restoration of the fully functional society that the Moors once had.

Even so, the end of the first film is still threatening: Aurora ruling two kingdoms, independently, untethered to any man, her all-powerful witch-mother at her side. These women must be tethered to biology, to bloodlines, to societies with men; the investment in the nation-state is ultimately worthless if they don’t have an investment in heterosexual procreation. Aurora, specifically, must marry and have children. What are women without an interest in furthering the bloodline, even if they do sit on a throne? Witches, hags, lesbians, selfish. We cannot let those words hang over Disney heroines, over Good Mothers.

Enter the sequel, Mistress of Evil. Like Frozen 2 did to Frozen, Mistress of Evil guts any of the potentially rich and wildly queer readings that are possible within Maleficent. The shortest possible summary of the post #MeToo 2019 sequel is that, upon the eve of Aurora’s marriage to Prince Philip, Maleficent is framed for a crime by Philip’s mother, who is revealed to be a very Evil Queen. The framing is only possible because of Maleficent’s proximity to monstrosity and Aurora’s surprising shame around it, a self-consciousness of Maleficent’s difference and their unique relationship that is not at all previously present. Aurora, on the verge of marriage to a man, has moved back into her father’s castle and discarded her identification with the maternal, but Maleficent is having trouble letting go. Shadows of the Rapunzel-esque witch-mother who desires that her daughter never leave lick at the edges of the screen.

The underlying problem is simple: Maleficent’s rehabilitation from an all-powerful, threatening witch is entirely predicated on her maternity. So what happens to her goodness when the child grows up? Without motherhood, what is she? A power-hungry, war-mongering monster witch, it turns out. “I have no daughter,” she declares. For Maleficent to actually detach from Aurora — which is, of course, demanded by a princess’ heterosexual marriage — Maleficent must move into another maternal position. In an extremely deus ex machina move, we meet her long-forgotten natal tribe of fairies, the Dark Fae, a group on the verge of extinction. Maleficent has the opportunity to take on the role of “Mother of the Nation.”

However, life outside of Aurora is only half of the story. Their fractured relationship must be reconciled: Not through an honest, heart-to-heart conversation, but through a mother’s ultimate sacrifice. In the final battle, Aurora pleads with Maleficent to stop fighting, saying “You’re my mother,” and in that moment, Maleficent takes an arrow aimed at her child, dying and scattering to ash.

To return to Irigaray, who once said that the whole of western culture is built upon the death of the mother: It is also true that the cult of motherhood is built upon the death of women’s selves. The Maleficent films are exemplative of this. Motherhood is rarely represented, in pop culture, as a role or identity that can exist in simultaneity alongside other roles and interests; it is all-consuming to the point of psychic or literal death. The most traditional culmination of a woman’s narrative is not what you can do or be, but ultimately, what you are willing to give up — a storyline still being peddled by Disney under their feminist reboot guise.

At her most powerful, Maleficent is also her least wrathful. Upon sacrificing her life for Aurora, she is reborn as a gigantic phoenix, a symbol of her people — herself now capable of shape-shifting, as the Maleficent of the 1959 Sleeping Beauty was. Maleficent is alchemized as a surrogate mother for an entire nation; her sublime, terrifying presence brings peace to a battlefield, where weapons are put down as everyone stares up in an awful wonder of her. Realistically, it’s the kind of peace that occurs because one is aware of the destruction that would be caused by provocation — but that isn’t how Disney represents it. Maleficent quickly reverts, shape-shifting into her human form, and embracing Aurora in front of everyone. This is the mother who took an arrow for her child. Who proceeds to cry at her daughter’s wedding. Really, there is nothing to fear from this incredibly relatable witch who has no interest in using her newfound state power for violence, let alone as a threat against human kingdoms. Her extraordinary magic has the greatest leash: Maternal love.

The idea that women and femmes will be neutered of any desire for violence or rage if they become caregivers is, of course, inaccurate. Mothers and caregivers are, in fact, people who get to experience the full range of human emotion. But it is a useful cultural narrative for perpetuating the idea of the Good Mother and, more broadly, the Good Woman: Look, here is the most powerful villain in the Disney pantheon, and even she can learn to quiet her wrath out of love for her daughter.

There is also the timing of the sequel to consider. Releasing a story about a witch-mother’s suppression of rage and prioritization of forgiveness after the rise of #MeToo feels irresponsible, at best. The fact that the canonical text at hand is Sleeping Beauty — a fairy tale which is, in its most traditional tellings, a rape story, and which even in the 2014 retelling contains a brutal assault — makes its not-so-subliminal messaging all the more egregious.

While the Maleficent reboots open up rich possibilities for maternity outside of biological reproduction — a rarity in any Disney property — these wells of potential are still fundamentally wedded to cis-hetero assumptions about women and caregiving, about the biological necessity of legacy. The mother is the unspoken, underappreciated linchpin on which the production of the nation-state rests. To integrate the Maleficents — the unruly women, the witches, the queers — into the state is to enroll them in the project of motherhood and parenting, and so tame their shrewish selves in the interest of raising the next generation.

But this is the greatest irony of all. A witch’s power, sublimated, is merely put to sleep. And sleeping witches can always be woken back up.

* * *

Jeanna Kadlec is a culture writer living in NYC. Her writing has appeared in ELLE, O the Oprah Magazine, LitHub, NYLON, Allure, and more.

Editor: Carolyn Wells

Jeanna Kadlec | Longreads | December 2019 | 10 minutes (3,028 words)

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Frozen came out the year I came out. The film was released in November 2013, one month after I’d sat in a courtroom, a newly out, 25-year-old lesbian finalizing my divorce from my fundamentalist Christian ex-husband. I went to see Frozen its opening weekend and listened to a newly crowned Disney queen with hidden magical powers accidentally out herself after a lifetime of repression (“Couldn’t keep it in, Heaven knows I’ve tried”). Elsa sang “Let It Go” on an icy mountaintop, and my baby gay self sobbed my heart out, sitting alone in a dark theater, at what was obviously a coming-out anthem. I had let go of so many things: my marriage, my faith, a complicated friendship with the woman I was in love with. “Here I stand, in the light of day — let the storm rage on” was a prayer and a promise to myself, to keep putting one foot in front of the other, to commit to my own healing no matter what anyone in my life thought. 

***

It’s been six years, which in both gay time and Disney time is a lifetime. Frozen has become its own billion-dollar industry within the Disney empire, in no small part because it did away with focusing on traditional romance in favor of the sibling relationship between Elsa and her younger sister, Anna: the heir and the spare of the obviously Scandinavian-inspired kingdom of Arendelle. Elsa has been marketed as a feminist princess who “doesn’t care about romance and is focusing on herself!” But adult audiences see her for what she obviously is. Repressed powers often function as queer allegory (see: the X-Men and numerous other superheroes; comic book scholar Ramzi Fawaz has argued that mainstream superhero comics of the 1960s and ’70s, themselves outcasts, responded to and expanded on the social justice movements of the era). Critics and viewers alike interpreted Elsa as gay from the start, which doesn’t seem to have been Disney’s intention — and, based on the sequel, one they are not particularly pleased about.  

Audiences anticipated that Disney’s intentions around Elsa’s sexuality would be clarified in Frozen II. Exciting as the #GiveElsaAGirlfriend campaign was, the more cynical among us did not expect it to actually happen and were unsurprised that it didn’t. The sequel illuminated and confirmed a number of issues, among them a range of already-existing problems within the Disney canon when it comes to the representation of people of color and Indigenous populations, along with a particular desire to have your cake and eat it, too, when it comes to attempting to right the wrongs of colonialism. But what particularly stood out was how uniquely committed Frozen II was to continuing Disney’s overarching project they have taken on with every princess film since their co-production with Pixar, Brave: the relocation of anxiety around women’s agency from romantic relationships to the stability of the nation-state. How much does women’s independence, agency, or bodily autonomy support or threaten the state? This is the project that every Disney Princess movie of the past 10 years has engaged in. 

***

Probably one of the most successful aspects of recent Disney princess films is that audiences often forget that the princesses are, in fact, princesses: Critics of the genre can get caught up with the term as it applies conceptually to a pastel-pink childhood femininity and anti-feminist subjugation. Merida, Moana, and Elsa and Anna are all, in fact, the daughters of kings and chiefs, born and bred heirs to their collective thrones, and the films focus on watching these women train for a seamless transfer of monarchical power. 

Disney films are obsessed with power and who wields it, and Frozen is no exception — which is why so many of us fully lost our minds at the obvious queer undertones of Elsa’s story. But the company’s lackluster response to the outcry around Elsa’s queerness and the release of the sequel indicate that Disney has anxieties around not only queer heroines but women in power. They will represent women leaders, but only when they are bracketed a particular way. Did they understand what they were doing when they created Elsa, whose obvious queerness cannot, at this point, be taken back? Maybe some folks working on the film did (see: shop owner Oaken’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it very gay family), but it seems to have eclipsed the higher-ups, who have taken pains in the years since to erase queerness from other Disney-owned properties — even canonically queer characters like Valkyrie in 2017’s Thor: Ragnarok (played by bisexual actor Tessa Thompson, who put Disney-owned Marvel on blast for cutting the one scene that would have confirmed her character’s bisexuality). 

***

So, yes, it matters that Elsa is gay — or interpreted as gay — because that is unwieldy. Her powers, too, make her unwieldy — too much a target, too dangerous, too suspect. Too much, you could say, and, in fact, Grandpapi, the film’s troll elder, says exactly that. 

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Recent Disney (and Disney/Pixar) movies have moved away from focusing on marriage (learning from the misstep that was the anti-marriage plot in Brave, which ultimately lacked bite); rather, they eschew romance almost entirely and focus on girls stepping into their own power. But for princesses like Elsa — and Moana after — this means literally stepping into power. They are the uncontested heirs to the throne in their respective monarchies. Finally learning from decades of feminist criticism (but unwilling to, say, give Elsa a girlfriend), Disney puts romance on the backburner, only to thrust the heroines into epic stories that conflate their bodily autonomy with the survival of their respective nation-states. Elsa’s father, Moana’s father, and even Merida’s father treat their daughters a lot differently than, say, Aurora’s, Ariel’s, or Pocahontas’s — other heroines born into royal families who would, perhaps, inherit the throne. Perhaps it’s feminism; perhaps it’s kingdom-making, queen-making. When Moana’s father, for example, takes her to the top of the mountain to place their stones, it harkens back to The Lion King, and Mufasa telling Simba All this will be yours. Who gets power, and why? 

***

The idea that Disney princesses could ever be politically progressive while simultaneously affirming their rule in absolute monarchies is, itself, wildly fraught. American audiences might be awed at the idea of a woman in power (any woman in power), but it is important to remember that, compared to numerous other nations, we are unique for never having had a woman head of state, democratically elected or otherwise. But Frozen introduces a compelling complication to the traditional journey of a Disney heroine with the fact that Elsa is not just a princess waiting in the wings — she’s queen. 

Traditionally speaking, Elsa has all the markings of a Disney villain: she’s an isolationist with magical powers. Think Ursula, think Maleficent, think Jafar; think, incidentally, a good number of the villains who are coded as queer. (Ursula was modeled on drag queen Divine, and Jafar’s British accent, effeminate mannerisms, and, of course, magic read as queer stereotypes.) Think, quite literally, the Evil Queen from Snow White, who does, in fact, also have state power. Where Elsa differs from the villains is that she is not thirsty for power; her assumption of state power is an obligation, and, notably, she is secure in that power — she feels no threat from her sister, as the Evil Queen did of Snow White. 

And this is interesting: That an isolationist who is presented as having virtually no human contact would still be assured of the security of their power over the realm. This kind of monarchy is, truly, absolute, in the most medieval sense of the word. The first film knew that it had to reckon with this obvious parallel, which is why part of the project of Frozen is also redefining monstrosity, redefining the (queer) “other” as not monstrous. Women who are too much, whose traditions and powers exceed the explanation of science, are historically witches — monsters, even. Elsa is explicitly called a monster by the Duke of Weaseltown after she accidentally reveals her powers at her Coronation Ball. 

This is recognizably queer anxiety; that the body will reveal itself at the most inopportune of times, in the least safe of environments. That she is a pretty monster, in this world, means little; once her powers are recognized, hundreds of people recoil from her in fear, with some giving chase to try to catch her. You have only to look at the history of violence against LGBTQ+ folks — and the current epidemic of murders of trans women of color — to see how pressing and prescient anxiety around the body (e.g., “getting clocked”) is. Isolation is safer; ironically, isolation also breeds fear. After her outing, Elsa flees to the North Mountain, where she sings “Let It Go”; the mountain is her own island, and she is the Circe of it all. 

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However, this is the irony: that Elsa is both the most monstrous, unruly (queer) body in all the realm, while simultaneously being the queen of it all. That this is the body of the monarch also means it’s the body of the state that is at risk. It is, remember, Elsa’s coronation in Frozen that is the site of crisis. And yet, even with the film’s (soon to be dispatched) villain attempting a coup, her throne is not destabilized by the entire ordeal and her rule is, seemingly, unquestioned. The stability of the state remains intact, while presenting the idea that the state can indeed be governed by the kind of unruly woman that institutions historically have sought to suppress. “When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her,” Adrienne Rich once wrote. Taken as a whole, Elsa’s pursuit of truth is presented as the kind of rare (queer, feminist) hero’s journey that reclaims “monstrous” bodies beyond the margins. 

***

 But the body has a lineage, and the royal body, especially — the body that represents the continuation of the state, of the status quo — must have an explanation. Disney, of course, prefers its explanations to come from biology, rather than from independent sources. A woman alone cannot decide meaning in Disney films, and one of the great illusions of the magic-making corporation is its presentation of stories about the reification of tradition under an umbrella story arc of young princesses “discovering” themselves. (See: Moana learning that her people were voyagers.) If Frozen turned on the question of who are you, Frozen II turns on the question of, where do you belong, suggesting that where do you come from is essential to understanding the former. 

It turns out that the royal sisters are descended from a line of colonizing bigots. (Unsurprising, you might say, if we take the history of the real world rather than the fantastical one.) The plot twist is that it’s not Elsa’s magical (queer) body that has put the nation-state at risk, as the film’s opening — and, indeed, the first Frozen — would have us believe; what is currently occurring in Arendelle is a result of her magic-hating grandfather’s attempt to colonize the magic-honoring indigenous people of the Enchanted Forest. Suddenly, the concern with generational legacy and stability of the nation-state is also concerned with colonization, reparations — and, potentially, a half-Indigenous queen? (Given the critiques of the Frozen franchise as overbearingly white, the sudden, plot-hole ridden, very afterthought-ish introduction of an Indigenous heritage to Anna and Elsa is … a lot.) 

The villain of Frozen II is not located in one specific body but rather in the ephemeral spectre of the girls’ own ancestral legacy of colonialism, and Disney is ultimately unwilling to fully lean into the implications of that legacy. This guts the progressive message of reparations the film seems to have been aiming at, and there are other implications as well (they had a grandfather who hated magic, then ended up with a magical granddaughter on the throne; the LGBTQ+ parallels really aren’t subtle). 

However, Frozen II also leaves Elsa’s simultaneous search for the source of her magic riddled with the baggage of the decidedly not queer, and in fact distinctly heteronormative, “biology is destiny” undertones. Elsa’s powers are represented as a reward for her (Indigenous) mother saving her (royal, Arendellian) father long ago, during her bigoted grandfather’s attempt at colonization. “You were a gift,” Anna interprets for the audience, for the fact that their mother saved her enemy’s life. Elsa being born with her powers (not cursed) in the first film felt like a callback to a “born this way” queer ideology; is fate a gift? 

Breaking generational curses continues to emerge as a Disney theme in both Frozen and Moana, where women’s bodies are represented as being vital to the nation-state in part due to their ability to reconnect with nature, with the recovery of the lost (feminine) maternal lineage. With the climate crisis looming, I’m all about returning to nature. I am, however, uncomfortable with the cis-centrism of how the maternal is represented in these films, of the stark gender constructs and especially, in Frozen II, how Elsa, whose magic proves essential to the survival and recovery of both the Indigenous people of the Enchanted Forest and the people of Arendelle, abdicates as queen.

Having experienced a magical transformation into a spirit-like being and having been invited to stay among the Northuldra, Elsa chooses to abdicate her throne and stay up north — the Jon Snow comparisons simply cannot be overstated. Queer Twitter, of course, noticed that all it took was one woman her age, Honeymaren, saying “Your place is here” for Elsa to be like Peace out, y’all, nice being queen but I’m gonna stay up here and ride horses with my girlfriend now! Anna takes the throne of Arendelle as queen and — now engaged — returns south with Kristoff to rule. Anna and Elsa meet up every Friday for charades. Domestic bliss. 

Part of me says: yes. Leave, go off with your new girlfriend Honeymaren, ride horses on the river. Leave, and never come back, except to see your sister: This is, actually, the life I’ve lived for years. What is there for you, once you know who you truly are? What can man do to me? (Psalm 118:6). As a lesbian, I, of course, want to see Elsa define herself for herself; I want to see the kind of heroine whose example conjures up the words of Audre Lorde: If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive. 

But this is Disney, which means that the ending is ultimately about the preservation of the (rightful rulers of the) nation-state, and for that to happen, we need a stable, obedient body — at the very least, one that doesn’t hear voices, shoot ice out of its hands, and have no interest in procreation. A cisgender, heterosexual body. Enter: Anna, the younger sister whom Elsa has no problem giving her throne to. Anna is royal, perfectly in the line of succession, and very much about to marry a man. 

Frozen II does, see, end with a happy (heterosexual) ever after.

***

Does it matter if, in the end, Disney tells us that Elsa has a girlfriend, or if we all just know that she and Honeymaren are off riding horses into the sunset? This is the tip of the sword on which the question rests: At what point does representation become assimilation? When it comes to the kind of behemoth nation-state corporation like Disney, it is extremely telling that they have lagged behind on the representation of every marginalized group, that they still struggle to get even the most basic things right (like, for example, not retroactively giving white characters a Native lineage!). There’s a reason, of course, for all of this, and it’s often because, even as diverse as marginalized groups are, Disney stories are, generally, about the preservation of tradition, of the status quo. Disney stories, generally, protect the “good” people who are in power; the “villains” are the disruptive ones, those who are chaotic or power hungry, who seek to upend the way of things. Where is there space for folks on the margins? There is no revolution here, and expecting it from Disney is a fool’s game. 

There is one moment on the subject of Elsa’s canonical perception of her own history that is telling. Elsa sees a vivid, life-size memory of herself singing “Let It Go,” arms outstretched; Frozen II has a number of callbacks to the first film, and this is one of them. But in response to witnessing her first moments of total freedom, she flinches in embarrassment.

She flinches, and the audience I watched with laughed. 

It felt like I’d been hit in the chest. 

A moment beloved by queer audiences, and fundamentally interpreted as queer, got played for laughs. No, this wasn’t important to her. No, this didn’t count. No, you didn’t see what you thought you saw. 

***

This is the Disney of it all. Disney princesses ultimately operate in service of the empire, their adventures limited in scope to some kind of moral restoration of tradition. Elsa is, on the other hand, wildly powerful, her sense of purpose exceeding the bounds of the story — the most magically powerful Disney heroine ever created, with her powers seeming to even outstrip some of the most famous villains. And I love her for this; I love everything she means to LGBTQ+ audiences. I have a deep investment in queer joy, in seeing myself and my community on-screen, in seeing many versions of ourselves, in fact; in indie media, indie film, and even the occasional reboot of an early 2000s TV show, and even in Disney films, even in spaces where they so obviously don’t want us but where we emerge anyway — because this is real life and when you commit to telling a real story, there will be queer people in it. Elsa might be too much for Disney: too powerful, too traumatized, too independent, too gay. That’s all right. She can sit with the queers anytime.

* * *

Jeanna Kadlec is a culture writer living in NYC. Her writing has appeared in ELLE, O the Oprah Magazine, LitHub, NYLON, Allure, and more.

Editor: Carolyn Wells

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

Jeanna Kadlec | Longreads | December 2019 | 9 minutes (2,136 words)

Some stories get inside you in that way where, later on, it’s unclear if you’ve built your life out of the seed that was the art.

To grow up queer, especially if you don’t have the language or the worldview framework for understanding queerness, can be an isolating experience. It is profoundly strange, to feel unrecognizable, beyond language, even to yourself. This can create a gravitational pull toward characters who, for the first time, hold up a mirror and say, me: you’re like me. This phenomenon of first recognition has inspired an entire category of queer art, like the song “Ring of Keys” in the Tony Award-winning musical Fun Home, sung by the child version of the protagonist (Young Alison) when she sees an older butch for the first time: “Someone just came in the door — like no one I ever saw before! I feel… I feel!”

This was my experience with Jo March, the protagonist of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.

***

The internet is abuzz over Greta Gerwig’s new adaptation of Little Women, but for some of us, the film is only sparking nostalgia around another formative adaptation: the 1994 film starring Winona Ryder as Jo. For me, in particular, the Little Women Renaissance has brought up just how much the story was formative for me, as a child, informing my desire for community with other women, and also affirming my sense of innate difference — a difference it would take decades to attribute to queerness.

Little Women was never sexual for me, never a beacon of burgeoning desire or even tomboyish proclivities (Jo famously declares her desire to be a boy within the first few pages of the novel; conversely, I couldn’t get enough of Barbie, Disney, and Pretty Pretty Princess). Rather, the world of Little Women — centered on sisterhood and women’s bonds — seemed the opposite of the conservative, rural Midwestern world I grew up in. In Little Women, there were (it seemed, to my childhood self) no men to answer to. It was a kind of Themyscira, with men decentralized from the narrative. To my childhood self, it seemed a utopia, for reasons that were beyond what I could articulate at the time.

First, it’s vital to understand that, for me, the Little Women story — focused on the four March sisters and their mother, as they traverse domestic life in Massachusetts during the Civil War, while the patriarch is off fighting with the Union — ultimately means the 1994 film, not Louisa May Alcott’s book. I know; I know. Introduced to the movie first. I still tried the book on at various points throughout life, including during graduate school (an English Literature PhD), but the film always felt truer, somehow. Maybe it’s the brain chemistry of nostalgia; maybe it’s the fact that this particular film was explicit in its political commitments in ways Alcott, writing in 1868, was never free to be on the page. Robin Swicord, screenwriter of the 1994 adaptation, kept the bones of the story arc but crafted the dialogue from scratch, reimagining the conversations and emotional lives of the March family as Alcott might have had she been “freed of the cultural restraints” of the mid-19th century. In Swicord’s script, the March family boycotts silk mills due to their use of child labor, and Marmee (in the film, named after Alcott’s very real, very political mother Abigail) imbues her daughters with an awareness of — and in Jo’s case, a passion for — women’s suffrage. “Feminine weaknesses and fainting spells are the direct result of our confining young girls to the house, bent over their needlework, and restrictive corsets,” Marmee (Susan Sarandon) says offhandedly in casual conversation with her (male) neighbors. The 1994 film was my first introduction to feminism, without ever using the word.

***

The March family is a matriarchy, where women are active participants who create their own lives and livelihoods. Even today, this kind of story feels rare. “Woman-identification is a source of energy, a potential springhead of female power, violently curtailed and wasted under the institution of heterosexuality,” Adrienne Rich writes in her seminal work, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” When stories center and focus on a group of women living in community, supporting each other and truly thriving, this kind of energy and potential springhead of power becomes visible, tangible.

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Never mind that it was a matriarchy of white women whose relative independence was tolerated solely due to wartime, or that the patriarch was a constant spectre, present even in the first scene of the film when a letter of his is read aloud: a man’s words of instruction carried out even in absentia. But I craved that kind of peace and solitude from a young age; my father — ever shouting at the television with a beer in hand, pushing my mother against a wall or down a staircase — was a disruptive force. When I watched Little Women, it showed a fantasy world where men were seemingly inessential.

Men (and their approval) were particularly inessential to Jo, the second oldest March, known for her independence, flaming temper, and commitment to writing strained at the social structures that bound her. I strained at mine, too: at the expectations of evangelical Christian obedience and submission, of the conservative cultural pressure that my life and dreams would always be secondary to my husband’s — because there would, of course, be a husband. In my small Iowa hometown comprised of about 1800 people, my friends doodled their names with Mrs. {Boy Crush’s Last Name} in school notebooks and wanted to play “wedding” on the playground. I, meanwhile, wrote fantastical stories, started researching colleges in third grade, and listed the potential names of characters the way my friends listed the names of their future children. I didn’t know what it was within me — even as a teenager, I never quite knew what it was (Being smart? Being called by God?) — but there was a dissonance, a friction, between my own innate sense of self and the paths available to me in the rural Midwest. Marriage and motherhood wasn’t for me. Get out get out get out get out. A siren song, always calling.

It was Jo’s own anxiety about where she was from, about the limits of her options within the town of Concord, that spoke to me. On a good day, it looks like, My dreams are too big for this. On a bad day, I am too much for this; I do not belong here – do I even belong anywhere? I am too much. Crying to her mother, Jo says, “I’m ugly and awkward and I always say the wrong things…. I love our home, but I’m just so fitful and I can’t stand being here! I’m sorry Marmee. There’s just something really wrong with me. I want to change, but I — I can’t. And I just know I’ll never fit in anywhere.”

I want to change, but I can’t. What young queer person — even closeted to themselves — has not thought this? It would be easier if I was different. Easier if I just wanted what everyone else wanted, even if what everyone else wants feels intolerable to my spirit. Jo said she couldn’t stand it, and I felt my heart leap, every time. Even today, in my 30s, I cry during this scene. “Do you feel my heart saying hi?” Young Alison asks, later in “Ring of Keys.” “I know you. I know you.”

I am you, I felt, watching Jo on screen: who so loved her family, but was so deeply unsettled by the burgeoning sense of something crawling inside her, trying to get out. The pain of the inexpressible sense of difference that was irreconcilable with heteronormative society, with the stifling expectations of gender conformity.

It’s hard to describe the depth of the inertia and ennui that settles itself in so many of the people, where I’m from, even as the land and the crops follow the changing of the seasons: seed, growth, harvest. It’s easy to liken this to the centuries-old inertia of heteronormativity: those deeply dug pathways baked in practical, Midwestern Protestantism that it’s so easy to tumble down with so little thought to how one got there. My childhood dream of being a writer (probably not insignificantly influenced by Jo) and of living anywhere-but-here might seem normal, even expected, to many; in my hometown, trust, it was not. For some girls in a church I attended, even going to college was still, in fact, a very big deal; better to get married right out of high school and start a family as soon as possible, as that was our God-ordained destiny. One of my best friends (who would stop speaking to me after I came out) did exactly that; I held her first newborn in the hospital when we were just 19.

Jo gets out. Like so many queers before her, she runs toward the city and all it offers: opportunity, anonymity, freedom to take up space in decidedly untoward ways. She can kiss men in the wings of the opera house and publish lascivious fiction under a male pseudonym; she can drink alcohol and argue with men in public and find her voice. She can do all the things she never thought she’d do. Even if some things don’t stick, the point is, she isn’t crying in her bedroom I’ll never fit in. She’s experimenting: seeing what fits, and what doesn’t.

“You have so many extraordinary gifts. How can you expect to lead an ordinary life?” Marmee says to Jo, before she leaves for New York. “Go and embrace your liberty.”

I got out. It took me longer to come out, but I always knew that getting out was a possibility, that there was a world beyond – and that I could leave. That, in fact, cities like New York were full of people like me, people who didn’t fit back home, who were looking for a home somewhere else. I knew, because Jo March did it first.

***

When I go back to Little Women, now, what I see is possibility. What I, personally, was — and remain — drawn to in Jo is her unabashed shucking of societal norms and her pursuit of freedom, even at a personal cost, even with anxiety. Jo March is not ashamed of who she is. Jo March owes nothing to her mother or her father or her sisters or God. Jo March does not give a shit about whether or not she gets married; Louisa May Alcott did not want to marry off her heroine and was famously furious at being forced to do so. In response to pressure from her publisher, she married Jo not to fan-favorite Laurie (who ultimately marries the youngest of the March sisters, Amy), but rather to the decidedly unromantic and stodgy Professor Bhaer, a German philosopher she meets in New York.

I’m not the only one who considered myself to be like Jo; Louisa May Alcott based Jo on herself. There is, of course, Alcott’s own purported queerness to reckon with. For one, Alcott famously never married. When asked to write an advice column for her fellow spinsters, Alcott titled the essay “Happy Women.” Truly, the sincerest nineteenth-century fuck you title in existence.

But more pressing are small quotes buried in interviews that seem to be bright flashing lights to a modern queer audience. Alcott, like Jo, was explicit about her identification with men rather than women; unlike Jo, she was also explicit about her love for women. In an 1883 interview with Louise Chandler Moulton, Alcott said, “I am more than half-persuaded that I am a man’s soul, put by some freak of nature into a woman’s body… because I have fallen in love in my life with so many pretty girls and never once the least with any man.” While language around sexual orientation and gender identity has undergone shifts over time, this certainly goes beyond the suggestive and into the definitive of what a modern audience would call a legibly queer experience.

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Alcott was surprised at the life Little Women took on, the wild fandom it created even in her own lifetime, the way that people would identify themselves as “a Jo” or “an Amy.” But that’s the power of a story that pulls back the curtain on your own life, that shows you who you are, and who you could be. Even though Jo ultimately returns to Concord, it is her own choice — and she is profoundly changed, no longer knotted up in her roots the way she was before. This is the power of a queer heroine’s journey: to define herself on her own terms. (I know you. I know you.)

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Jeanna Kadlec is a culture writer living in NYC. Her writing has appeared in ELLE, O the Oprah Magazine, LitHub, NYLON, Allure, and more.

Editor: Sari Botton

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Jeanna Kadlec | Longreads | June 2019 | 12 minutes (3,114 words)

When we call Anne Lister, the 19th century British diarist and adventurer reimagined in HBO’s hit series Gentleman Jack, the “first modern lesbian,” what do we mean, precisely? Critics don’t seem to know. The catchy tagline coined by Lister’s devotees and perpetuated by the show’s marketing is good branding, but makes for a slightly confusing moniker: what is it, exactly, that makes Anne Lister a “modern” lesbian, let alone the first?

The answer goes beyond a casual Wikipedia-esque list of Lister’s propensities and accomplishments that most coverage of the show has thus far relied on. To understand what makes Anne Lister unique, you have to understand how lesbianism and identity were understood in the 1830s — and it’s far too simplistic to say that women with women was simply “unimaginable” for the time, that Lister was completely solitary in her pursuit of as public a commitment as would have been socially acceptable.

Lesbian content was not unfamiliar to 17th, 18th, and 19th century audiences. From lesbian eroticism in pornographic texts such as the psuedonymous Abbé du Prat’s The Venus in the Cloister: or, the Nun in Her Smock, published in 1683, to the trope of a “Female Husband” (which had historical grounding in famous figures like Mary Hamilton) to the romantic friendship of Ladies of Llangollen, who were contemporaries of Lister’s, the idea of women loving (and fucking) women was hardly new, if deeply socially unacceptable. Among women of the upper class with means, Lister was hardly alone in forging her own kind of life. The “first”? No.

Lister was ahead of her time, but not in the obvious way: not because of her desire, or even her willingness to throw off norms. Rather, her desire to live what we would identify as an “out” life (or, as “out” a life as possible) was informed by a distinctly Enlightenment-informed conception of her individuality and her psychosexual identity that would have been more at home in 2019 than 1839. In Lister’s time, lesbian wasn’t the distinct identity category it would later become. Lister’s prescient insistence on a cohesion between her public and private personas — an insistence on her sexuality as a vital component of her identity — was remarkable. Thanks to her diaries, we also have unprecedented access to how she herself thought of her identity and sexuality, as well as an explicit record of sexual activity. Ultimately, this means that Lister is a historical figure made for 21st century consumption, onto whose life we can easily project (if anachronistically) ideas like that of the closet and the difficulty of living an “out” life in Regency England.

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The first published use of the word lesbian to connote what the Oxford English Dictionary calls “A woman who engages in sexual activity with other women; a woman who is sexually or romantically attracted (esp. wholly or largely) to other women; or, a homosexual woman” dates to 1732, in Oxford don William King’s vicious satire The Toast, which fictionalizes the Duchess of Newburgh (Lady Frances Brudenell) as a witch and lesbian named ‘Myra.’ In this, he beats 20th and 21st American conservatives like Pat Robertson to the punch of collapsing witches and lesbians together. He writes, “This little Woman gave Myra more Pleasure than all the rest of her Lovers and Mistresses. She was therefore dignified with the Title of Chief of the Tribades or Lesbians.” (Not a bad title, I think.) Though intended as revenge for Newburgh’s victory over him in court, it also is our first recorded instance in the English language of the word lesbian in its modern sense, of a woman whose sole sexual interest is other women.

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, lesbian was one word among many: tribade, sodomitesse, sapphist, amazon, tommy, anandryne. As Susan Lanser notes in The Sexuality of History, there were numerous labels applied to homoerotic behaviors and the women who practiced them, although these would not have categories of identification as we think of them today. “Lesbian” was not a word you’d have put on your Tinder or Twitter bio if either platform had existed; it was, essentially, slander.

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Lister had contemporaries who lived quite openly, though these couples were certainly uncommon. At the time Gentleman Jack, the series, takes place in 1832, a real life couple, Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake, had just celebrated their 29th anniversary. Bryant and Drake lived an openly married life together in Massachusetts that would be quite publicly recorded during their lifetime by Bryant’s nephew, who wrote about his aunts’ 40th anniversary in the New-York Evening Post, of all places. While sexual discretion was a part of their public life, as it was Lister’s and that of other queer women of the time, their relationship was well known to their Weybridge community. Bryant called Drake her “help-meet,” an early American synonym for wife taken from the Book of Genesis. Rachel Hope Cleves, who wrote Charity & Sylvia: A Same Sex Marriage in Early America, says, “Charity’s sister-in-law, and good friend, Sally Snell Bryant, wrote to the women in 1843, ‘I consider you both one as man and wife are one.’” Cleves also notes that their community was delicate with the relationship, as when Drake’s brother “likened the women’s relationship to a marriage [in his memoir],” explaining that his sister had never married but, rather, had spent her life “in company with Miss Charity Bryant.” Bryant and Drake, active in their community and well beloved, were ultimately buried together, a right typically reserved for married couples.

More common was for Regency women to live under the guise of so-called “romantic friendship,” a same-sex category for both men and women that afforded an intense public physical and emotional intimacy that simultaneously shielded any sexual intimacy that took place. While scholars often uses the term “romantic friendship” to indicate emotionally intense but nonsexual relationships, the term is still important to consider for the fact that the category was embraced by the women to whom it afforded a complete freedom from compulsory heterosexuality and marriage. As Valerie Traub has discussed in “The (In)Significance of Lesbian Desire,” one of the most prominent characteristics of female sexual representation is the persistent questioning of whether something sexual is there at all.

The two women most famous for their romantic friendship in the 18th century were the Ladies of Llangollen, Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby. Slightly older contemporaries of Lister’s who were downright obsessed with each other, their families tried to keep them apart in their youth and failed spectacularly, with the women ultimately moving from their native Ireland to the Vale of Llangollen in Wales, where they lived together for 50 years. Again, social rank is relevant: Butler was from a noble family, and they had education, money (though they were often in debt), and the ability to live independently and receive visitors from the highest echelons of society. Like Lister, they wore top hats; visitors like Anna Seward and William Wordsworth both wrote and dedicated poetry to them. They even received a pension from the Queen for the example they set with their relationship.

Because they were so famous, many of the Ladies’ letters have survived. There are a number in the Pforzheimer Collection at The New York Public Library. While many of the NYPL’s letters are somewhat typical correspondence, one — to conservative education reformer Hannah More (the woman to whom we can credit modern-day Sunday Schools) — speaks to the Ladies’ mutual religious devotion and conservatism, as well as to their breadth of social circle: they entertained people as varied as More, Lady Caroline Lamb (the married lover of Lord Byron), and even Anne Lister, who was purportedly inspired to go home and get married after visiting with them. Eleanor and Sarah often signed their letters on behalf of the other (as one from Sarah: “kindest regards from myself and Lady Eleanor”), signifying their mutual duality as a paired couple, even if they were not interpreted as a romantic one, in the modern day sense of the word.

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In her letters — and as is represented in Gentleman Jack — Anne Lister entreats Ann Walker to a romantic partnership that would appear completely respectable to polite society. Privately, they would marry; publicly, they would live together as two wealthy women in respectable, partnered friendship — essentially, exactly as the Ladies of Llangollen. “Might we not live together, set up home together, as companions?” Lister asks Walker in episode three.

“Like a marriage?” Walker asks.

“Quite as good, or better,” Lister responds.

Sexual discretion within romantic friendship — even if that “friendship”  is essentially an open secret, as with Charity and Sylvia, or Anne Lister and Ann Walker — was essential for complying with the sexual mores of the time. Explicit sexual activity between women, while not criminalized as it was with men, was still grounds for public shaming and ostracization; pornographic lesbian materials were disseminated to discredit Marie Antoinette during the French Revolution, and independently minded, unmarried women in Romantic and Victorian-era England who lived alone, and not with a companion under the umbrella of “romantic friendship,” were often followed by suspicion.

Part of the fascination with Lister is that she viewed herself and her sexuality in a way rather consistent with our contemporary views of sexual identity. It also cannot be overstated that Lister kept a sexually explicit diary — a rarity for any historical queer, but especially for a woman. There has been speculation for years, for example, about whether the Ladies of Llangollen had a sexual relationship — some argue they were too conservative and religious to have had sex, which seems an odd argument, to say the least (Lister was religious, too); others point to a lack of explicit eroticism in their letters, and still others point out the rather obvious fact that the two women shared a bed for decades, so: draw your own conclusions. In comparison, Lister’s blatant, so explicit it is impossible to misinterpret diaries recording how often she made her various lovers orgasm seems a blessed relief for historians who are so often left having to parse the nuances of whether people even considered themselves queer, let alone the details of how they actually lived their lives. Lister, like Walt Whitman after her, was so obsessed with recording herself that it she makes it easy for us.  

Whereas Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake and the Ladies of Llangollen provide a more direct comparison to Lister, there are other prominent examples of what we would call queer relationships between women and queers of the time. In the Pforzheimer Collection at the NYPL, the Ladies of Llangollen’s letters are marked under the following designation: Women in Trouble/Lesbians, Female Husbands, and Other Passing Women. “Female husband,” looking through a contemporary lens, is a wildly loaded term, bringing to mind all manner of transphobic arguments about who does and doesn’t count, arguments brought by sects of society as varied as the Religious Right and Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist (TERF) lesbians.

Shifting conceptions of identity and a significant lack of historical documentation (in the Lister sense, of having sheaves of diaries) can make it difficult to understand precisely where many of the Assigned Female at Birth (AFAB) people who took on this “female husband” identity were coming from. A problematic aspect of queer historiography, particularly in regards to gender identity, is that people we would today identify as transgender, or perhaps non-binary or genderfluid, have certainly always been here. The language and constructions of self-identification have not always been the same; how did the person see themselves and their desires, is a constant question when considering historical queers. Language is constantly shifting, creating a process of untangling for historians that can feel more morass than mosaic. However: those who renamed themselves Charles or Walter, worked professionally (and, obviously, in the closet) in careers that were exclusively available to men (such as medicine), and took wives, certainly seem, by modern rubrics, to have lived lives which are identifiable, as Victorianist Grace Lavery writes, as “a kind of trans experience.”

What is unique about the “female husband” is that, in the most famous historical cases (which is to say, ones where the individual was publicly outed and typically prosecuted for fraud), the women they had married claimed absolutely no knowledge of her spouse’s sex. Charles Hamilton, who was christened (and later written about as) Mary Hamilton, worked as a doctor and took a wife. Hamilton is perhaps the most famous 18th century case, in part because Henry Fielding published a highly sensationalized (and cruel) 23-page fictionalized “biographical” account, The Female Husband, in which he presents Hamilton as “unnatural” and “monstrous.” Fielding claimed the novella to have been based on interviews with Hamilton, a claim historians have thoroughly challenged. What is certain is that in 1746, Hamilton’s wife of two months, Mary Price, reported Hamilton to the authorities, claiming total ignorance of her spouse’s sex prior to marriage. Ultimately, Hamilton was given a six-month prison sentence and publicly whipped.

A female husband figure who was more contemporary to Lister was Walter Sholto Douglas, who also wrote as Charles Lyndsay and has been written about in scholarship under their christened name, Mary Diana Dods. Douglas’ story, best documented in Betty T. Bennett’s groundbreaking Mary Diana Dods: A Gentleman and a Scholar (1991), highlights the nuances of a life — and identity — that begs to be adapted for the screen, but, due to a lack of clarity around their precise consideration of their own gender and sexuality, would be a fraught enterprise for adaptation. Douglas wrote professionally (and successfully) under the name Charles Lyndsay for years, and fully taking on the Douglas name when they lived as a diplomat and writer abroad. Douglas fled England, to the best of our knowledge not due to anxieties over the expression of gender or sexuality but rather because they were significantly in debt. As anyone who’s read a Dickens novel knows, people in nineteenth century England were regularly imprisoned for debt. But Douglas also found another reason to flee: to wed a friend, Isabella Robinson (also a friend of Mary Shelley’s), at least in part as a cover for Robinson’s illegitimate pregnancy. Letters between Douglas and Mary Shelley indicate that Shelley assisted in the couple’s escape from England, a progressive ally who was fully aware of Douglas’ history. Douglas and Robinson lived together with their daughter, who considered Douglas to be her father and who she later listed as such on her marriage license, for the duration of their lives.

The “female husband” was both a fictional trope and a lived experience for a number of couples. To a less extent, Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake themselves adopted roles that we might more consider to be an extremely traditional forerunner to butch/femme. Anne Lister, who in her diaries represents herself as a woman who wanted a wife, went by “Freddie” with many of her lovers, a nuance of self-expression that is represented in the pilot of Gentleman Jack and continues throughout the first season, with her ex-lover Mariana continually addressing her as “Dearest Fred” in letters. Relationships are ever changing, and language is slippery, so often less precise than we would like; “language forces us to make such choices when we refer to things, alas,” Lavery writes, when discussing the complex terrain of navigating transness, queerness, masculinity, femininity, and the whole scope of it all among historical figures. What is certain is that we were here.

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The point is that queers took lovers, took wives, and lived as openly (or privately) as they could, assuming codes and ways of being that felt most real, whether it was “romantic friendship,” an identity as a “female husband,” or something else altogether. It is noteworthy that, for the most part, the cases we know of are either those tried under the law (like Hamilton), or women who occupied a sphere of society which guaranteed a certain amount of historical documentation and legacy, as with Lister and the Ladies of Llangollen. But there is nuance: there is an understanding of the codes like romantic friendship which allowed people like Bryant and Drake to thrive; there is also a need for understanding that how we conceive of identity would have been completely foreign to virtually all of the individuals being discussed in this article.

In this, Lister’s conception of herself, and the sheer amount of information we have to work with, easily lends itself to a modern audience of an HBO series. Because of Lister’s insistence on a permanent, sexual partnership — indeed, on a marriage, even a private one — an adaptation of her life does not necessarily require an audience to understand the veil of romantic friendship.  

It was not easy to be queer, in any sense, then. But even for the strides that the 2010s have made in representation, and particularly trans representation, on television — such as with FX’s nearly all-POC, all-trans cast on Pose, and Netflix’s regrettably now-canceled One Day at a Time, which featured Sid, a non-binary partner for the newly out Elena — historical dramas featuring queer characters still tend toward the direction of early 2000s representation for queer women, which is to say: femme on femme. Recent critical darlings like The Favourite and Colette feature actresses like Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone and Keira Knightley; even cult favorite Killing Eve, run me over with a car as it is, relies heavily on sexual tension between two cis femmes.

So Gentleman Jack is doing quite a bit in terms of historical representation for butches, for masculine-presenting and androgynous folks, in that its lead, and driving force, is a butch woman who wears a tophat, is a top in the bedroom, goes by Fred with many of her lovers, and sees no reason why she shouldn’t do literally everything that men do, since she can do it better.

But Gentleman Jack also brings to life a story about someone who, due to the voracity of her self-documentation, can be represented with a degree of accuracy and responsibility that is extremely unusual for a historical queer, someone whose private and public life historians and the show’s creators are quite certain of and agreed upon. Anne Lister was absolutely remarkable, a force of nature — but it is vital that we remember she was not alone, nor singular, nor “the first” in any sense of the word. And this is important: “The first modern lesbian” is good branding for HBO, but to repeat it without consideration for Lister’s own queer foreparents and contemporaries is to forget of our community’s extraordinary history — and capacity for survival.

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Jeanna Kadlec is a freelance writer living in New York City. Her work has appeared in O the Oprah Magazine, Nylon, Allure, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, and more.

Editor: Sari Botton