Jessica Gazzola

“It’s funny how some distance makes everything seem small.”  Queen Elsa

When Frozen hit the box office and smashed it to smithereens, I went into austerity mode.  “My daughter must not see it!” I thought.  “I don’t want her walking like a Disney princess, talking like a Disney princess, being needy and codependent like a Disney princess.”  For over a year, my home was shut tighter than the castle gates.

Then, I cracked.  One time, what’s the harm?  (Why does it sound like a crack dealer just won a new customer?)  She sat on the edge of our torn brown sofa in the Frozen trance.  Elsa built her castle of ice singing, “Let it go! Can’t hold it back anymore!”  And there was no stopping it!  Today, any unscheduled moment, no matter how brief, my shy three year old flings a blanket off her shoulders and, fists clenched, pronounces, “The cold never bothered me anyway!”

I’ve adjusted my thinking.  Kids are really doing a number on those more rigid positions I adopted in my self-righteous twenties.  Like when my brother-in-law caught me half-heartedly “shooting” my six-year-old with a Star Wars laser gun.  “Pacifist,” I muttered.

Feminist I am, but a feminist that today finds herself living side-by-side with Queen Elsa.  In spite of her freakishly large baby eyes (because women are more attractive when their proportions are infantile), toothpick waist, and thigh high slit in her dress (to accent her provocative hip waggle), I like Elsa.  I can relate to Elsa.  Elsa’s story has a mythic quality and maybe that’s why she’s so enthusiastically embraced by young girls (that and her sparkly dress).

It’s the mythic hero’s journey[i] packaged for women and girls with the pizazz and endorsement of one of the world’s largest conglomerates, Disney!  I love it!  It’s surprising and ironic.  Elsa leaves the known and travels to the magical world of the unknown, glorious, at first, and then frightening.  She travels to the point of death, the world and all she loved threatened or dying.  And she returns transformed as a gift to her community.

This is the spiritual journey I’ve spent my professional life trying to understand, describe and enact.  This is my experience of life when it’s lived with courage and integrity.  There are moments in life when the hero’s journey means we need to let go of the “good girl” and venture into the unknown of our own freedom and power.

I don’t think Disney’s Frozen is perfect, but letting go has been good for me.  Storms rage on that are out of my control.  If Elsa introduces my daughter to the path, I hope to model walking it so she can be courageous enough to stand and be free to build her own life.

[i] Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, or the hero’s journey, is a basic pattern that its proponents argue is found in many narratives from around the world. This widely distributed pattern was described by Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949).