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Cinderella's Castle
Nov. 9th, 2012 09:10 amI'm working on my course syllabus about American carnival, so I've been looking for articles about Disney World. Everyone writes about Frontierland and Tomorrowland - because they're easy to slot into narratives about the tension between American nostalgia for nature and hope for technological utopia, the American mythic West, etc.; and of course Main Street USA slots nicely into the nostalgia paradigm too.
No one seems to write about Fantasyland.
Given that Disney is described as having a "mystical bond" with the American psyche, I find this a little weird. Apparently the American psyche has a great honking fairytale castle plopped down in the middle of it! What does it mean?
Do we secretly yearn for monarchy? Or are princesses merely a metonymy for our yearning to be special, the center of attention? Does the anachronistic castle - a castle with little in common with real, defensible castles - point to an inherent romantic unreality at the center of the American soul, and if so, is that good or bad?
Or are the people who talk about Disney's mystical bond with the American psyche just full of it? Maybe the castle is just a castle.
No one seems to write about Fantasyland.
Given that Disney is described as having a "mystical bond" with the American psyche, I find this a little weird. Apparently the American psyche has a great honking fairytale castle plopped down in the middle of it! What does it mean?
Do we secretly yearn for monarchy? Or are princesses merely a metonymy for our yearning to be special, the center of attention? Does the anachronistic castle - a castle with little in common with real, defensible castles - point to an inherent romantic unreality at the center of the American soul, and if so, is that good or bad?
Or are the people who talk about Disney's mystical bond with the American psyche just full of it? Maybe the castle is just a castle.
