Miss Independent
The women in Hercules are few in number. Besides Megara (our heroine and love interest), and the Muses (our narrators), there are no other women with dimension. The other women we directly learn the names of—Hercules’s mother figures Hera and Alcmene, and the Fates if you count their collective title as their names—have only short appearances, with scraps of lines. This story is, likely due to its intended audience of preteen boys, centered around the men; Zeus and Hades, Panic and Pain, Hercules and Philoctetes, even Pegasus, are consistently the major movers and shakers in terms of the plot. These women’s roles as narrators, heroines, and oracles, give them a false sense of strength of presence. While the most important women (Megara and the Muses) have lots of screentime, they rarely, if ever, move the plot—they only move within it.
The Muses cannot make any changes to what is happening, nor drive anything forward. They are there to recap what it is the men have gotten themselves into, via catchy song and dance. But they have no character dimension, little to no personal motives, and no ability to interact even in the same world as the other characters.
Megara is a slightly different story in this regard, but still lacks much plot power. For most of the film she is a slave to Hades. While she has personality and can make very slight transgressions in regard to his orders, most every major contribution she makes to the plot is under Hades’s careful puppeteering, who sets her upon Hercules to find out his weaknesses. The one exception to this rule is when she purposefully hurts herself in the Cyclops battle; even this, however, is for Hercules’s benefit, and due to the direness of the situation is also not totally of her free will.
Speaking of Megara, the sashaying, shapely soul we all know and love is quite the double-edged sword for women’s representation in media. As Blanshard and Shahabudin state, she is ultimately modeled off “…a type of feisty woman, the ‘tough gal’ that Disney increasingly chose to feature in its late 1990s films” (Blanshard & Shahabudin 2011, 212). She is sassy and independent, having a jaded past with men and a sharp tongue even in servitude (indicators of her aforementioned personality). There is an irony, though, to her characterization. At the beginning of the film, Meg labels herself best—“I’m a damsel, I’m in distress, I can handle it” (Hercules). She forces so much sarcasm and sass into that statement, implying her disgust at ever needing to be saved or being the archetypal “damsel in distress.” However, by the end of the film, she is just that. As the film progresses and we watch her fall deeper in love with Hercules, she becomes less sassy and jaded, substituting those traits by becoming more doe-eyed and submissive. Her voice even gradually changes in affect, becoming much higher, airier, and generally more wistful-sounding than it was at the start. She clings to Hercules’s words (and later his neck), and becomes entirely devoted to protecting him from the sidelines.
Now, all this is not to say that Megara has no right to fall in love. Of course she does, and as an audience member, if she did not it would certainly have been a lost plot opportunity. The issue is not the romance, but rather that she loses her individuality to it. When a woman falls in love, she will care about her partner and want to see them safe, as anyone would. She should and would not, however, lose her entire personality along the way. Meg becomes two-dimensional in the sense that she loses her fire and any personal motives she once had, including both her snarky one-liners and her mistrust toward men, in a matter of days—while still in servitude to a man, or being objectified by them, throughout almost all of said time. It just makes no sense—unless, of course, you consider Disney’s goal of portraying the nuclear family, requiring that women’s needs and desires be shown as secondary to those of the men in order to create a “happy” household dynamic. A feisty female does not make a happy nuclear relationship tick—but a damsel in distress absolutely will.
