Aphroditeis?unmask

Aphrodite is the goddess of love, lust, beauty, pleasure, passion, procreation. So we want 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 story might start with a crime: 'having no love in their heart', a punishment of being turned into something unlovable, and a redemption arc of 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: '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. She's introduced as the object of desire by the whole town singing a song that's titled 'Belle'. She's the only Disney princess who actually says "I love you".² And if that wasn't on the nose enough for you, 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, it is a tale as old as time. Gaston and the Beast court her from the opening scene to the final credits, with surprises, gifts and dinner. The only princess where fighting over her led to the climax.

The savvy reader may realize that Belle's story evokes Aphrodite's canonical love triangle. The Goddess of Love was married to Hephaestus, although in the Odyssey, she is caught in the act of adultery with Ares, the god of war. The beast represents Hephaestus — the ugly one, the lame one, the one nobody wants to look at. His workshop is famously full of automata: golden handmaidens who move and think and speak, objects he has given life to. Belle gives herself up to the Beast in exchange for her father's freedom, just as Aphrodite was gifted to Hephaestus in exchange for Hera's freedom. And Gaston is Ares, whose response to a rival in love is to gather an army and march off to war.³

"But Belle reads." She does… Far-off places, magic spells, daring swordfights, and she won't discover that she's met prince charming until chapter 3. 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.

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Extra-diegetic. 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 one to earn the honour in the five-nominee era, and the only princess film ever nominated at all. Fitting, for the goddess of beauty. In the Judgement of Paris, Aphrodite famously edged out Hera and Athena for the golden apple inscribed "to the fairest" — and here too, Belle's is the one film the Academy plucked from the princess canon, over the likes of Hera's and Athena's Disney films. 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 super savvy reader might realize there's an even better fit for Beauty and the Beasts's story: that of Psyche and Cupid. Which is damning considering that Aphrodite was the jealous antagonist throughout that tale. Of course, I wouldn't put it past Aphrodite to steal elements from her rival's love story. ↩

4. Beauty and the Beast (1991) was the first animated feature nominated for Best Picture; the only other animated nominees are Up (2009) and Toy Story 3 (2010), both after the field expanded beyond five nominees. See List of animated feature films nominated for Academy Awards. ↩