Lisa brocklebank

Disney's "Mulan"—the "True" Deconstructed Heroine? Author(s): Lisa Brocklebank Reviewed work(s): Source: Marvels & Tales, Vol. 14, No. 2 (2000), pp. 268-283 Published by: Wayne State University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41388562 . Accessed: 05/01/2013 23:22

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Lisa Brocklebank

Disney's Mulan -

the "True" Deconstructed Heroine?

The familiar and traditional fairy tale often seems a repository of culturally approved values and behavior. In this sense, it forms an imaginary world which reflects the same process of defining differences and distinguishing categories by which we construct and apprehend the world around us. These fairy-tale distinctions may extend from good and evil to rich and poor, to earthly and sublime, to male and female. They form motifs and patterns which surface and resurface, weaving their way in and out of tales, traveling from fireside stories to the gossip of women at the loom, to the songs of workers in the field, to the notebook of the collector. This process of delineating differences becomes as familiar as the process of storytelling itself, and its topoi as recognizable. The tale, moreover, often falls within the guidelines of established social morals and mores. It becomes, if not a pedagogical tool to instill cultural values, and often a means of enforcing the status quo, then certainly the narrative voicing of a society's most pervasive patterns of belief, behavior, and conviction.

Some tales, however, reveal an inherent subversiveness that projects a deeply rooted Utopian vision of change and transformation. For, as part of the genre's continual engagement with some aspect of the marvelous, amazing, or unexpected, the fairy tale, in its very essence and role, must inevitably transcend expectations. Indeed, it must contain and offer the possibility of a vision which circumvents the conventional knowledge of society: a vision which exists beyond the dichotomous categories shaping our beliefs, which poses a riddle that challenges habitual patterns of thought, and which seeks to somehow redefine notions of reality.

Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies, Vol. 14, No. 2 (2000), pp. 268-83. Copyright © 2000 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI 48201.

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DISNETS MULAN

The Utopian vision of an ideal society created by these alternative and subversive tales often arises out of the imaginative dreamscape of those who dwell at the bottom or on the outskirts of the social order. As primarily oral tales these visions have, for the most part, their origins in the narratives and stories of peasants (Zipes, "Once" 5). They then "express the creative fantasies of the rural and less educated layers of the population" (von Franz 1). The tellers of these tales seek to express through the stories their hopes of change and transformation, and to criticize the reality which prevents such dreams from