Poor Unfortunate Soul: Reflections on Influences of Anne Bradstret on Disney's Frozen (2013), a Contemporary Dilaogue of the Body and the Soul
Presentation
Overview
Overview
Description
In 1678 Anne Bradstreet published “The Flesh and the Spirit,” a 108-line poem based upon the medieval concept of the dialogue between the body and the soul in which the soul castigates the body for its weakness and wretchedness. Over three hundred years later, another such dialogue appears, only this time in an animated form, but with a twist, Disney’s Frozen. In this version, a dialogic role-reversal occurs, and now the body (in the character of Anna) becomes the savior (or source of salvation) for the tortured soul, which is embodied in Queen Elsa. Anguished and languishing, Elsa must learn from her sister, the more grounded earthly embodiment, how to survive and to overcome her troubles through filial love. In the Disney version, the soul, not the body, becomes confused and in need of salvation from her own issues, such as her identity crisis and the several nuances, including one of sexual identity, involved with it. Anna’s warmth, patience, and determination for her sister as well as for the world around her with all of its physical pleasures, not only saves herself from an emotional pit of everlasting woe, but brings Elsa from an icy pit of personal isolation. Elsa’s ice palace, though it may be frigid, is reminiscent of that fiery pit of hell that Jonathan Edwards warned was a place of eternal disaster and that Robert Frost later in his poem “Fire and Ice” conflates each as offering their own destructive powers. Were it not for Anna’s intervention—the body this time warning the soul of such woe—Elsa would have been consumed by her inflaming passions of guilt and angst. Through Anna’s sisterly support, Elsa is able to overcome her personal damnation.
