Spoiled Princesses

A girlboss princess is a moral monster

Lucas Cranach the Elder, A Princess of Saxony

Princess culture: I, too, dislike it. I have no children of my own¹ but I have felt, with my youngest sister and with the kids I’ve nannied, the silly poignancy of their yearning for those tawdry little costumes, with the fat Disney markup on that polyester tulle and costume satin. How sad it is when they put it on and ask, “Am I beautiful now?”, totally innocent of the fact that, if beauty is the power to change how someone else acts with how you look, they are of course incredibly beautiful—that their big anime eyes and chubby cheeks and the smell of their hair transforms me ineluctably from someone who is not super patient, unselfish, or well-organized into someone who can (mostly uncomplainingly)² wait on them for hours, keep to their routine, that my temptation is not to ignore their whims but to give in to them more than is really good for them, that their beauty even weakens my disgust reaction, makes me able to handle their foul messes with less fuss than the fuss I feel even seeing the foulness of less adorable people³—and that no princess dress (and certainly not a polyester one) does or could possibly add anything to my caring. I just feel my heart ache for the future when these children will work out which styles and colors of clothing, which colors and textures of makeup, work best for them, a future when something like a dress really will matter a lot to how people treat them, when they will succeed in figuring out how to be more beautiful, trained by the pain they will feel when they fail.

When I’m in the grips of this feeling it seems very morally loaded, but, currently somewhat sobered by having no children under my responsibility, I notice that caring for a child makes me more tender and patient with any child I see, but it does not naturally tend to make me act in the interests of children I don’t see. Like. When I want some little girly luxury, a blouse or a lipstick or a lotion, I often think guiltily of the people (some of them children) who suffer so that these treats can be cheap. And the guilt does nudge my actions, I try to shop ethically. When a kid I’m caring for wants a princess dress, I think of her self esteem, but I literally never, in that moment, think about whether other kids are sewing those dresses in a sweatshop.⁴ Put a pin in that.

Backlash against princess culture has created and is creating a market for stories that deconstruct the princess role. Unfortunately, most of these deconstructed princess stories are really, really bad—not realistic about people, especially not realistic about women, and also, like, morally horrific.

Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V is free on YouTube right now, so I just watched it for the first time since I watched The King, a 2019 contemporary-language Henry V adaptation. Jesus Christ, Shakespeare’s treatment of Kate is so much better. The King is mostly really good but their handling of Catherine of Valois is illustratively bad, perfect example of how the basic contemporary pop-feminist approach to princesses, fails. (Yeah, I’m like six years late writing about this. Officially a cold button issue. But sometimes it takes me six years to get my thoughts together!)

I feel bad for Lily-Rose Depp here. She did the best she could with a screenplay and a director that could hardly live up to Shakespeare writing a romantic heroine or Branagh directing Thompson. Let’s talk about her major scene—Michôd’s answer to Shakespeare’s Act V Scene 2 bilingual flirtation between Hal and Kate.

The first false note I couldn’t ignore: when the conversation switches from French to English, the movie clearly wants us to understand that, like, Henry is winning a status struggle by setting the terms of their conversation, but that Catherine then gets him back and regains status by turning out to be fluent in English. The dynamic is as if they’re two students at an elite high school, competing for limited spots at Ivy League colleges, and she’s just mogged him with an additional extracurricular. It is actually hilarious how neither the screenplay nor anyone in the movie shows any recognition that her grasp of English could be read as a romantic invitation, when the play that it’s adapted from makes this very clear. Like, oh, out of every language you could have learned, you spent your time getting really good at English? Why? Did you plan on speaking a lot of it? When she says “Je ne parle pas Anglais” & then, surprise, she very much does, it isn’t just her showing that she’s smarter than she might seem—it’s equivalent to your date telling you that she has to wake up early tomorrow, then several hours later pulling a toothbrush out of her purse.

I don’t think Hal should like, verbally, explicitly point this out—a wise man can notice that kind of little discrepancy quietly, remembering that flirtation proceeds more smoothly when lubricated by at least a thin film of plausible deniability. But Chalamet acts totally “caught off guard” and “befuddled” by her English, doing a great job following the screenplay parentheticals and, I’m sure, the direction, without showing even a hint of smugness or satisfaction at seeing that Catherine has clearly thought about and planned for being Queen of England.

Then let’s move on to what she actually says: “You must earn my respect.”

The choice of the word “earn” is unfortunate, in terms of her relationship with Hal (which we’ll deal with first because it’s less important), but also in terms of her understanding of her broader position. Between her and Hal. Yes, people have to earn each other’s respect. Well, Hal has done something to earn her respect, he just won a war; maybe that’s good or bad or enough or not enough, but it’s literally something, which is more than she’s done to earn his. On a broader level: as this princess says “earn,” I can’t help but look at the fancy room she’s sitting in, the fancy clothing she’s wearing, much fancier than the mud-spattered tents and blood-spattered tunics that have housed and clothed not only Hal and his men, but more importantly, the French peasants fighting against him, for much of the movie we’ve just watched. (Lily-Rose is really, really unlucky she had to do the girlboss princess in a movie with an actual war in it, most girlboss princess movies are kind of out-of-sight, out-of-mind about all that.) She’s also supremely comfortable ordering her ladies-in-waiting to leave, expecting and receiving their instant obedience. When did Catherine earn any of this?

Catherine is in the position to enjoy this luxury and ease of command because of an implicit deal. The people of France have funneled their surplus (often more than their surplus) towards her, largely to have someone who can make a political marriage to end a war. This implicit deal isn’t something the nation voted for or can opt out of, they have to pay their taxes whether this seems like a good deal to them or not, but Catherine can opt out. She could have excused herself from the duty of a political marriage by giving up her right to bear children who could cause more turmoil by claiming the throne⁵ and also giving up (some of) her unearned luxuries to live in a spiritually idealistic women-led commune⁶—and that choice would have been defended by the Catholic Church, which meant a lot more in the 15th century when it had, like, armies (and also defended by by any royal house that didn’t stand to benefit from her proposed political marriage). In the words of the bard, “You ain’t no nun, bitch.”

In real life, Catherine’s sister Marie made this choice. Marie and Catherine were both educated in the convent; when their mother Queen Isabeau came to try to convince Marie to make a politically advantageous marriage, Marie refused, and her refusal was accepted. Marie lived the rest of her life as a nun, where the privilege of her birth afforded her some wiggle room around that vow of poverty, and also a little local social/political power as a prioress. If Catherine had also wanted to be a nun, then she and Marie would have both had a very serious problem in 1414, when France really needed a princess for political negotiations. But there’s no reason to think that that the historical Catherine of Valois was “defiant” (quoting the screenplay again) about her marriage. And again, we know that in her own nuclear family, when a woman objects to a political marriage, that objection is both recorded and respected. So, probably, Catherine was okay with marrying Henry. Which shouldn’t be that much of a surprise. I doubt that this is the first time someone has told you that women tend to want to sleep with powerful men.⁷

I think one reason that people (accidentally???) write such horrific princesses is because when they write princesses, even for non-children’s movies, they’re thinking about their own daughters and what they want for their own daughters, or at least thinking that their audience will be thinking about their own daughters, and I think possibly that narrows your vision in a way that really doesn’t work when you’re writing a character who is defined by extreme privilege which she retains by continually accepting duties to the people who suffer for her privilege. The current habit of trying to rewrite every princess as a stifled girlboss results in princesses who are genuine moral monsters. But that’s not the only option besides Cinderella.

I hear a lot of people talking about wanting to find princess books about highly agentic heroines who have ambitions beyond looking beautiful and getting married. Well, being raised kind of tradcath had pluses and minuses, but one of the pluses was that a lot of my princess stories fit that bill. They weren’t about women going along thoughtlessly with the default lifestyle where they trade their own autonomy for extreme luxury, or about women who rankled at their lack of autonomy without questioning their right to luxury, they were about women who realized, “I am living a life of insane privilege while other people are suffering, I am going to do something about that,” and then actually did it.

And there are other options besides the lives of the saints! You could write stories about the women who didn’t renounce the world, who exercised power in it. Catherine of Valois’s mother Isabeau was functionally the monarch of France due to her husband’s incapacity. She had less power than a man—for instance, she didn’t have the power to make Marie get married, which Marie said her father could do, on the other hand it was easy for Marie to say that and sound dutiful when she knew her father couldn’t take her up on it—but the fact that a woman was somewhat less free than a man to exercise absolute power over a nation is not, like, the first historical injustice I would choose to correct. (Maybe an inspiring story could be written about someone who has the bravery to start a war against Salic law?)

One thing I hate about the girlboss princess trope is that I get so contrarian when I see it. I have to actively remind myself that, like, women probably didn’t usually act like that, and also that I enjoy freedoms that princesses didn’t, while at the same time enjoying luxuries and security that they never had, frozen fruit, cheap spices, antibiotics. But one reason that I have more freedom than they did is that I have a lot less power, my choices, especially my sexual choices, matter less, and to fewer people. Even back then, non-princesses had more freedom than princesses when it came marriage, “not counting other company in youth, for thereof there’s no need to speak.”

It makes sense to care more about the stories of powerful people. (Not that I think that this is why my little toddlers love princess stories.) Stories about very powerful people are really good tools for handling themes of agency, duty, responsibility; rulers and monarchs represent our will and agency.⁸ Also, like, powerful people read stories about powerful people, they learn about power from those stories. It’s bizarre but true that mafiosi picked up ideas about honor from the Godfather, and that White House staffers act out practices that they are sure are institutional traditions but which they really picked up from watching the West Wing. It is frankly insane that artists, who have very rarely wielded particularly much power, have themselves the power to adjust the behavior of powerful people. Princesses are powerful, so it makes sense to tell stories about them. It doesn’t make sense to try to make them relateable directly by making them act like we want or expect normal people to act. When someone with power and responsibility acts like a normal person, that doesn’t make them seem normal, that makes them seem evil!

1. …yet! Growth mindset! 🙏

2. “Mostly not complaining” has been easy for me because I get paid, and I get to go home. When I am blessed with children and neither of those things apply, I reserve the right to complain.

3. I have been blessed recently with many chances to check this empirically, because I’ve been seeing a lot of shit in the streets, and the shitters have been less adorable than the toddlers whose diapers I’ve changed.

4. If I were in charge of the universe, this particularity on my part would be pretty awful. But I’m not. Also, I think it’s better to strive for a world where some children are specially favored by some people than a world where people try to treat all children equally; among other reasons, I think the first goal fails more gracefully.

5. Because reliable female-controlled birth control was unavailable, this unavoidably meant committing to either celibacy or to being sneaky.

6. I’ve seen enough of Berkeley that when I say “spiritually idealistic women-led commune” I definitely do not mean “commune that lives up to its ideals.”

7. I hate that I feel like I have to say this, but that desire obviously does not justify powerful men in mistreatment of the women who sleep with them, even as it makes it very easy for men to abuse women.

8. Also, like, powerful people read stories about powerful people, they learn about power from those stories. It’s bizarre but true that mafiosi picked up ideas about honor from the Godfather, and that White House staffers act out practices that they are sure are institutional traditions but which they really picked up from watching the West Wing. It is frankly insane that artists, who have very rarely wielded particularly much power, have themselves the power to adjust the behavior of powerful people.

Maybe, possibly, this is a way that movies are morally speaking better than novels? One of the big reasons that I like writing is, unfortunately, that it minimizes the amount that I need to depend upon or command (which ultimately amount to the same thing) other people in order to achieve my goals. Directors at least have to be in charge of a crew and actors.

Also maybe this is like, what we can do with presidents once they’ve been put out to pasture? They’re not allowed to keep seeking power and growing cabbages gets old, but they know more about power than artists do, maybe we should have them team up with highly technically skilled artists to tell good stories about power. I guess we kind of do this? I’ve seen Bill Clinton’s name on a thriller.