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The Princess Story: Modeling the Feminine in Twentieth-Century American Fiction and Film Sarah Rothschild. New York: Peter Lang, 2013.
Princesses have won the attention of little girls, creating a phenomenon that many find troubling. In The Princess Story, Sarah Rothschild offers a historical account of princess stories in fiction and film, arguing that they form an important subgenre of fairy tales that influences and educates American females throughout their lives. Rothschild contends that "the figure of the princess has five primary incarnations from five different eras, three belonging to feminists of different waves and two belonging to Disney Studios, whose patriarchal princess stories serve as counterpoint and resistance to the feminist creations" (2). She uses the princess story to chart American culture's changing meanings of femininity and its struggle between feminism and patriarchy, progress and tradition.
Rothschild begins her book with a chapter defining the princess story and the messages it sends. The princess character, she writes, embodies "extreme femininity" and "both reflects and inculcates socially desirable behavior and beliefs in and about girls and women in the culture that produces her" (1-2). Princess stories teach and reinforce gender roles at pivotal times in the lives of girls and women. According to Rothschild, at transitional times in developmentsuch as toddlerhood, early adolescence, marriage, and the birth of a child or grandchild-females may experience gender intensification that draws them to princess stories. Thus, princess tales affect women and their perceptions...