Compare And Contrast Merida And Marav Brave

In Disney’s animated movie Brave, a Scottish princess in a medieval, magical time fights to control her own destiny—much to the dismay of her mother. As her father and brothers get to play in the woods with the bows and arrows she so loves, Merida must get married, as is tradition for the princess of her clan. After a fight with her mother about competing for her own hand in the competition to determine her husband, she escapes to the forest (Brave 26:06). In the forest, she stumbles upon an old witch and strikes a deal to change her mother’s mind. Merida returns home and feeds the witch’s potion to her mother, unexpectedly turning the queen into a black bear—the arch nemesis of her family. Knowing her mother is now in danger of being killed, Merida helps her escape, and together they learn empathy, compromise and how to live with their differences in the quest to change the queen back to a human before the spell becomes permanent (Brave). …show more content…
While Merida believes she should be able to determine her future by competing for her own hand in their traditional tournament, her mother believes in fully upholding tradition (22:17). As Sharon Lennon felt so did Merida: “My mother, who had the power to control my social destiny with a few simple decisions…” (Lennon 213). She saw her mother as a symbol of oppression, as did Lennon (Lennon 219). Merida felt trapped under the weight of medieval Scottish gender norms just as so many of our readings illustrate women feel the same way today. They are norms similar to what Kincaid, Sittenfield and Curry-Johnson discuss in our readings—they aid male