MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Maleficent is in many ways a feminist re-visioning of the sleeping beauty story. The film posits an alternative to the traditional conception of true love found in the animated (1959) version or the darker events found in many of the older written tales—that true love is the love of a mother for her child. But the bond in this case is not biological, nor is it rooted in a traditional nuclear family. Maleficent is a queering of the sleeping beauty fairytale on multiple levels—it complicates our ideas about heroes and villains, makes a case for nurture above nature as an explanation for evil, questions the authenticity of a history written by the victors, and celebrates the love of one woman for another. But diegesis is not feminist utopia. The gynocentric love story only exists because Maleficent is deceived, drugged, and de-winged by her childhood friend. Bloggers like Hayley Krischer have interpreted this violation as a sexual assault, arguing that, “[Stefan] rapes [Maleficent] of her ability to fly.” I agree with Krischer when she says that, “Maleficent is a commentary on current male and female relationships…it’s a story that allows a woman to recover. It gives her agency. It gives her power. It allows her to reclaim the story.” However, I contend that, while the violence Maleficent suffers bears much in common with rape, it is more productively viewed as a castration or decapitation (Cixous) and, thus, Maleficent is a film that speaks to the phallogocentrism inherent in the fairytale by destabilizing the power of the penis as an implement necessary to wake the sleeping princess or to rule the land. Maleficent, then, is a figure of female power demonized by a phallogocentric world (diegetic and not), but to quote Cixous “she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing.”