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.