Letting Go of Our Heroic Image of Ursula from 'The Little Mermaid'
Meetmeatthemuny: A scene from The Little Mermaid at The Muny in 2017. Featuring Emily Skinner as Ursula.
Ursula, the sea witch, the many-tentacled monster of the seven seas, has always been the villain in Disney's retelling of The Little Mermaid. She is the magical creature our mermaid heroine Ariel bargains with to be able to walk on land. The ever-crafty and manipulative Ursula demands our protagonist's voice (and a three-day time limit). She unfairly sets Ariel up to fail, all so the sea witch can enact revenge on the girl's father, King Triton.
Surprisingly, there was a period when some (though certainly not a majority of people) championed the idea that she was a hero. As KT Hawbaker writes in Bustle: "I no longer hide from the villain — and in fact, I've come to think that Ursula is actually the hero of The Little Mermaid" or "…anti-hero," as she clarifies one sentence later. "[She] isn't exactly the villain of the story we were led to believe," argues someone on Tumblr. "She tries. She gives Ariel options. She wants what we all want: to be heard, to be acknowledged, and to be taken seriously."
And yet, while Ursula is working against King Triton's patriarchal monarchy — not a good government, in my opinion — it seems a bit of a stretch that she is a figure worthy of admiration. She is, after all, a shark, a saleswoman who tries to trick Ariel into servitude. We surely shouldn't see her as anything less than a villain, and yet, clearly, other people disagree — some for perfectly valid reasons.
Many viewers' identification with Ursula reveals a fascinating tension with “villain-worship,” as not all reasons for her admiration are created equal. Some love the monster Ursula because they see something of themselves in her ostracized figure, while others want to rule the world.
But feminism…
In a text, there is a difference between a protagonist and a good person. A protagonist is the leading character whose story we follow, and an antagonist is a person resisting whatever goal that character tries to achieve. In The Little Mermaid, Ariel is the protagonist. She has a goal: to walk on land, learn about the "somewhere up there" she fantasizes about, and, more broadly speaking, bridge the divide between her two worlds. It's her story: everyone else is secondary.
You can make the case that King Triton is antagonistic toward Ariel's initial goal of walking on land; he provides the initial impetus for the story, but by and large, her biggest barrier is Ursula. The sea witch may give Ariel what she thinks she wants (i.e., legs) but does so by removing her voice, denying our protagonist the agency to navigate this new, unfamiliar world. She also, you know, puts in a clause in the contract saying that if Ariel fails to win the heart of Prince Eric in three days, she becomes Ursula's property, which is definitely not hero behavior.
What people mean when they argue that Ursula is the hero is not that she is the protagonist — she structurally cannot be — but that her intentions and actions are not as cruel as we first believe. The most significant cause for sympathy for the sea witch is that she is an otherized figure — both narratively and thematically. She not only was spurned by King Triton, who within the text is shown as possessive and unreasonable, but is portrayed as a loud, unapologetic, fat, queer-coded woman. As Ariane Lange writes in Buzzfeed:
“Ursula herself is not a tongue-holder, which is her downfall. She clearly did something to get herself “banished” from the halls of power…She is overweight in a world that doesn’t like overweight women….she is unapologetically fat. And that, of course, is the most unruly kind of fat.”
The demonization of otherized identities has generated a rich history of marginalized people seeing themselves in the fictional monsters on the Silver Screen. Queer readings, for example (and Ursula, modeled after the Drag Queen Divine, is definitely queer-coded), have been done on everything from Godzilla to Freddy Krueger. This type of film analysis not only ties into the historic demonization of queer characters in cinema (See the “Hay’s Code” and the “Television Code”) but the feeling of otherness that comes with societal stigmatization. As written in the book It Came From The Closet:
“Though the current horror landscape is slowly (slooooowly) telling more queer-centered and -adjacent stories, we largely remained tasked with reading ourselves into these films we love, to seek out characters and set pieces that speak to, mirror, and parallel the unique ways in which we encounter, navigate, and occupy the world.”
If you are a large, loud woman suffering under the oppressive forces of patriarchy and anti-fatness or just an otherized person in general, I can very easily see how you could identify with Ursula, and that's fine. We are allowed to love and admire problematic evil characters, especially if we see shades of ourselves in them. Liking "bad guys" on TV because society also considers you (perhaps unfairly so) a “bad guy” is not the same thing as condoning that behavior in real life.
And yet, this context aside, I feel like I must stress that your identification with a character is not the same thing as that character being a hero within the text. Disregarding for a moment that Ursula traffics enslaved people, she is not a freedom fighter in The Little Mermaid. She is not trying to free the Seven Seas from authoritarianism but to become the authoritarian herself, which is a key difference. We don't know many details of what her position was before she was ostracized, and we certainly don't know what the process of her removal was like, but we know her motivation: resentment. She wants Triton gone because he wronged her, and she does not offer any other ideas for how she would rule differently.
For the people in the back, just because a character has been wronged in a text doesn't justify the violence they perpetuate as a result of that violence. It depends on the context (i.e., what they are trying to do and what they materially accomplish), and in this case, Ursula's desire for vengeance is not the same thing as justice for the residents of the Sea — a lesson that is important for people in the real world as much as it is for characters.
She is also, again, a slave trafficker, which brings me to my next point for why people claim not to see Ursula as a villain. Can Ursula be bad if Ariel agrees to her villainy?
But Capitalism…
The most frustrating argument for why Ursula is a hero is that her actions are validated because Ariel willingly signed a contract and shouldn't complain just because she failed to adhere to it. Ariel, the argument goes, must now face the consequences — that doesn't make Ursula the villain. As argued in the blog In dubio pro coffee:
“The plot of this movie is the perfect fact pattern for a contract law exam…Ursula offers feet and the chance to keep the feet in exchange for Ariel’s voice, and Ariel agrees to that and signs the contract, accepting the terms and conditions….Ursula agrees to give Ariel feet in exchange for Ariel giving up her voice and kissing the prince in three days. Finally, there is clearly an intention to be legally bound, as they have a contract in writing and everything. Since Ariel agrees that if she doesn’t kiss the prince within three days she will have to work for Ursula forever.”
I cannot stress how repulsive I find this argument because it is one that validates the existence of indentured servitude or slavery simply because there is the pretext of consent. There are people alive in the modern day who signed unfair contracts because they are economically desperate, only to realize that they will never be let out of them.
If you are the type of person who thinks that slavery is okay because of imagined "consent," ignoring the complicated reasons that bring someone to such a position, I don't think we are going to find common ground here. In the same way, the inhumane conditions at sweatshops aren't acceptable simply because people sign onto them; the power dynamics at play with voluntary slave contracts cannot be ignored. As Andrew Sneddon writes in their piece What's wrong with selling yourself into slavery?:
“Slavery, including voluntary slavery, is wrong because it is unjust, not because it infringes on the value of freedom. In general, slavery is unjust because it treats equals unequally. In particular, it treats people who have the same physical structures grounding the same sorts of cognitive capacities as having different rights regarding the exercise of those capacities. Selling oneself into slavery runs into the same problem.”
Circling back to The Little Mermaid (that was a heavy tangent, wasn't it?), it seems disconnected from reality for a legal expert to suggest that this contract deserves to be honored. There is a level of one-sidedness happening here in this contract negotiation between Ariel and Ursula. Not only is Ursula lying about the seriousness of the terms, facetiously calling herself a saint, but she's suckering a naive person. Ariel is a privileged princess who does not understand the terms of the deal she is signing. How could she? There is nothing that makes selling yourself permanently to someone worth it, and those who strike such a bargain either don't understand the terms or are so desperate to achieve their short-term goals that they are taking the risk: one they will most likely come to regret.
In fact, the most refreshing part of the live-action remake is that they double down on just how unfair such contracts can be. Ursula adds "a little something extra" to her spell, making Ariel forget that she needs to kiss Prince Eric to break the curse so that she can all but assure Ariel's failure. It's this change that, without a shadow of a doubt, shatters the illusion that the contract is in any way fair.
Ursula is not heroic here, merely yet another unscrupulous woman stacking the deck, and if you are applauding her for her business acumen, I question your priorities.
A drowning conclusion
Ursula, the Sea Witch, tries and fails to capture the mantle of power. She uses Ariel as a bargaining chip in her bloodless coup of the Seven Seas, and it doesn't go too well for her. The narrative ends with Ariel reconciling with her father while Ursula's dead corpse sinks to the bottom of the ocean.
Otherized and manipulative, there are many reasons that someone can see a hero in Ursula. For some, it's her struggle against society that they identify with. She may resort to evil means, but she is doing so because she has been pushed to the margins, and if that's where you, too, reside, there is a certain catharsis that comes with rooting for the villain. Some can go too far with this identification, believing that she is in the right, but there's nothing wrong with wanting the bad guy in fiction to win, especially one you identify with.
Others, though, honor not her otherness but her business savvy, and it's this reverence for contracts and "consensual coercion" that I think needs to be left behind as we advance forward into the 2020s. You are not a hero for taking advantage of someone's desperation for profit, and whether we are talking about the ocean down below, the stars up above, or the land in the here and now, you never were.