Aphroditeis?unmask

Aphrodite is the goddess of love, lust, beauty, pleasure, passion, procreation. We need a Disney princess story with a premise on par with Netflix hit reality TV series Too Hot to Handle, Single's Inferno, or Love is Blind.

The tale might start with a crime: 'having no love in their heart', a punishment: 'being turned into something unlovable', and resolve with redemption: 'loving another and earning their love in return'. To spice things up, we'll add a rival in love, and also set a time limit gimmick: 'a rose that will bloom until the 18th birthday'.

One Disney princess movie fits the bill, and don't overthink it.¹ Aphrodite is Belle from Disney's Beauty and the Beast.

Belle's name is the French word for beauty. Belle's symbols are a magic mirror and an enchanted rose, which are, respectively, Aphrodite's emblem of self-regard and Aphrodite's flower — the rose that in myth is stained red by her blood as she runs to a dying lover. She is the most systematically wooed woman in the canon and the only princess where men fighting over her led to the climax. And if that wasn't on the nose enough for you, she's the only Disney princess who actually says "I love you".²

The mythologically inclined may realize that Belle's story is Aphrodite's canonical love triangle. The Goddess of Love was married to Hephaestus, yet caught cheating with Ares, the god of war. The hideous beast represents Hephaestus. His workshop is famously full of automata: golden handmaidens who move and think and speak, objects he has given life to. And Gaston is Ares, whose response to a rival in love is to gather an army and march to war.³

"But Belle reads." She does… Far-off places, magic spells, and a disguised Prince Charming for the female protagonist to discover. That is not Foucault's Pendulum or the Brothers Kamarazov, that's romance fantasy. Belle's favorite books are Fifty Shades of Grey and Twilight — Aphrodite's calling card.

---

Extra-diegetic. In the Judgement of Paris, Aphrodite famously edged out Hera and Athena for the golden apple inscribed "to the fairest". Beauty and the Beast is the most critically acclaimed film in the Disney princess canon, and it made history as the first animated movie ever nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture⁴ — the only princess film ever nominated at all. The goddess of beauty takes the apple again.

Footnotes

1. Aphrodite's disguises are famously ineffective. In Book III of Homer's Iliad, Aphrodite disguises herself as an old wool-comber to fetch Helen of Troy, but her divine identity is immediately given away by her beautiful neck, perfect breasts, and flashing eyes. ↩

2. With the exception of Ariel, who says "I love you, Daddy" to King Triton and Rapunzel who says "I love you more" to Mother Gothel. For obvious reasons, they don't count. ↩

3. The extra mythologically inclined reader might realize there's an even better fit for Beauty and the Beasts's story: that of Psyche and Cupid. Aphrodite, being a jealous goddess, probably plagiarised elements from her rival's love story. ↩

4. See List of animated feature films nominated for Academy Awards. ↩