Roxana Preda

The Angel in the Ecosystem Revisited: Disney’s Pocahontas and Postmodern Ethics

In its film Pocahontas, released in 1995, Disney provided an explicitly American narrative to add to its repertoire of universal moral tales. Though trying to be politically correct, the corporation was very severely criticized for not providing a historically accurate version of historical fact. Its critics demanded a realistic mode of representation, a more pronounced and firm attitude of protest against colonialism and racism. Since Disney stuck to the coordinates of the fairy tale in which it had produced before, the film cannot be regarded as an accurate statement of facts, but rather as an allegory of benign colonization. Pocahontas is represented as a symbol of American nature, as it was before the English took possession, rationalized, and instrumentalized it. The representations of her body, her emotions, and her code of values are a corrective to the epistemic and moral code of modernity as presented by the English sailors. Assessing the film ’s ideology with feminist and postmodernist theoretical tools, the analysis takes into account the genre requirements that are operative in configurating Disney ’s nationalist stance.

Over time, we have seen the feminine instinctive nature looted, driven back, and overbuilt. For long periods it has been mismanaged like the wildlife and the wild lands. For several thousand years, as soon and as often we turn our backs, it is relegated to the poorest land in the psyche. The spiritual lands of Wild Woman have, throughout history, been plundered or burnt, dens bulldozed, and natural cycles forced into unnatural rhythms to please others. (Est és 3)

Two large stones were brought in and placed before Powhatan, and Smith was dragged up to them and his head was placed upon them, that his brains might be beaten out with clubs. The fatal weapons were already raised, and the stern executioners looked for the signal, which should bid them descend upon the victim ’s defenseless head. But the protecting shield of divine Providence was over him, and the arm of violence was arrested. Pocahontas, the King ’s favorite daughter, – at that time a child of twelve or thirteen years of age, - finding that her piteous entreaties to save the life of Smith were unavailing, rushed forward, clasped his head in her arms, and laid her own upon it, determined either to save his life, or share his fate. Her generous and heroic conduct touched her father ’s iron heart, and the life of the captive Roxana Preda

was spared, to be employed in making hatchets for himself and bells and beads for his daughter. [...] Had we known nothing of her, but what is related of her in this incident, she would deserve the eternal gratitude of the inhabitants of this country; for the fate of the colony may be said to have hung upon the arms of Smith ’s executioners. (Jared Sparks, 1839 qtd. in Tilton xvi)

Pocahontas is a white man ’s story which is deeply embedded in America’s narrative about how it came to be itself. Her figure and legend were cast and remolded along the centuries, in stories, plays, and visual representations. Each time, the tale was retold in such a way as to address specific political issues of the day, whether these issues concerned a critique of social arrangements, class situations, or gender and racial conflicts. The film that the Disney corporation released in 1995 is only the latest of these recastings; like with virtually all other preceding versions, it is interesting for us to see in what respects it changed the story-line and also the ways these changes were designed to relate to contemporary political correctness in America and the Western world. Particularly the critique of ethnocentrism, the ecofeminist view on woman and nature, and the possibility of transcending the Cartesian epistemology and universalist ethics connected to Western capitalism constitute three possible areas of significance which are relevant to a subtler understanding of the film.

Pocahontas as a historical figure survives as snapshots and fragments in the narratives of three Englishmen: John Smith, Ralph Hamor, and John Rolfe. In his The Generall Historie of Virginia (1624), Captain Smith related how her mercy and generosity saved not only his own life, but also that of the colonists. The rescue of the captain, which was the starting point of her legend, took place in 1607.1 Five years later she was kidnapped by Captain Argall and held hostage in Jamestown. There she was converted to Christianity and married John Rolfe, with whom she had a son in 1615. A year later she crossed the Atlantic and was one of those who watched Ben Jonson ’s masque, A Vision of

1 Although Smith mentions Pocahontas in texts written earlier, like A True Relation (1608), A Map of Virginia (1612), and Proceedings of the English Colonie in Virginia (1612), he introduces the episode of the rescue only in his later work of 1624, seven years after her death. This led to speculation among scholars that the rescue is either fictional, or else has the significance of an adoption ritual (Robertson 572).

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