The Little Mermaid Informative Speech

English Oral: Script

Intro:
The expectation of what is male and female is taught to us from a very young age. These ideals are learnt from our parents, books, movies and the broader society. Unfortunately, most of these representations have negative connotations, especially those of women. For example, the Disney princess film The Little Mermaid tells the tale of a young mermaid who is fascinated by human ‘artefacts’ and falls in love with a young prince after saving him from drowning. She trades her voice for a pair of legs and goes onto land in a search for true love. Although The Little Mermaid does have a variety of positive messages, its representation of women as people whose only happy ending is marriage and true love and only need

In The Little Mermaid, women are represented as dependent on men and willing to do anything just to achieve the security of marriage and love. Throughout the movie there are many moments were Ariel is valued for her looks and even told that her face and body is all she needs to make Eric fall in love with her. In the song Poor Unfortunate Souls, Ariel protests about giving up her voice and Ursula tells her “You’ll have your looks, your pretty face – And don’t underestimate the importance of body language”. This immediately tells the audience that a woman should have a ‘pretty face’ to achieve what she wants. But it doesn’t stop there, Ursula then continues with “Yet on land its much preferred for ladies not to say a word … It’s she who holds her tongue who gets a man.” This is a watered-down way of telling Ariel and young children that girls should be submissive, quiet and are only worth their looks. It is usually forgotten that Ariel is only 16, this is due to the hyper sexualisation of her body in the film. The way her body is shown also creates an impossible standard when she is given extremely large hips and a microscopic waist, she is also impossibly thin, sports a bold red lip and has a flowing mane of hair despite her life underwater. These kind of representations, especially those shown to young children, greatly affect what is socially acceptable in our world