An Identity Remix

Before pointing out its flaws, I would first like to say that I absolutely adore The Little Prince. The lessons and morals within the story touched me in ways as a 12th grader that was incomparable to everything else I learned in high school. However, there was always just one thing that always bothered me about the book. The way women and female characters were portrayed went against what I stood for and my identity as a female. The Little Prince employs the “Smurfette Principle”.

Before this project, I had no idea what the “Smurfette Principle” was. I knew that there was something about the way women were portrayed in television, media, and popular culture that really irked me but I did not have the words to define why. A quick google search and Wikipedia article later, I finally understood why I feel as a woman that my gender is my number one defining characteristic. To define the “Smurfette Principle” in a nutshell, it’s the way that media portrays women as a character dependent on both men and her gender. Being a woman is her only characteristic and she is often thrown into a piece of work as either a way to give women some representation or to introduce a love interest. The smurf part comes from smurfette, a female smurf who lives in a village where everyone has a talent and hers is “girl”.

The Little Prince is guilty of this annoying trope. The prince experiences many fantastic adventures, learning lessons, and meeting predominantly male characters. Meanwhile, his friend the rose (who uses female pronouns), is stuck on the planet, only waiting on the prince to provide her comfort, compliments, and care. She is manipulative, vain, and beautiful. How come she had to be female when all the other characters in the book are male?

For my project, I originally wanted to rewrite The Little Prince with swapped gender roles, but then I realized that it is around 80 pages long. Thus, I redrew the cover with a female presenting prince (now princess) and a bush rather than a rose. My rendition does bring up other problems about gender- what defines these characters as their identifiable gender and am I just feeding into the stereotypes? Just because a character has long hair does not mean they are female, and just because I changed the feminine rose to a bushy shrubbery does not mean it is male.

However, I would like to focus more on how much the story would change had the prince been a princess and the rose had been either genders- it would be much more relatable for me as a girl and would have been just as beautiful.

I know this principal will sneak into my classroom when I begin teaching. It is something I am passionate about and I would like to address it with my students. I also hope to find literature that avoids this principal so that I can help mold students conceptions of female roles before they become too influenced by other media. I will still involve pieces of work that does struggle with this problem, but I hope to address the issues of gender portrayals and help students recognize why they are problematic.