TOW #19 Princess Cartoon

Reading Goals:

• Identify the relationship between the picture and caption
• Check to see if use of color could be strategic
• Analyze the purpose from many different aspects

Writing Goals:

• Clearly identify purpose(s)
• Fully analyze what each device does for this purpose, and connect it back
• strong introduction

(Source)

In today’s society, girls have very different attitudes than they had just a mere fifty years ago about success. Women's ability to climb the socioeconomic ladder without the help of a male counterpart in America is an important cornerstone of life our country takes pride in. In this cartoon from The New Yorker's weekly cartoon section, illustrator Christopher Weyant's purpose is to first shed light on the fact that women in today’s society have very different views on success, but on the other hand, to make the reader question the severity of modern day feminism. This is evident in the juxtaposition between traditional and modern mindsets, and humor drawn from the little girl's comment.

The juxtaposition illustrated in this cartoon brings to light the modern difference in cultural views because the cartoon replaces what you would expect with something completely different. In this cartoon, a father is reading a little girl a bedtime story. If one were to just see the cartoon without the caption, one would think the little girl is asking the father when the princess will find her prince. Instead, the caption reads, “Skip to the part where the princess climbs to the top of the corporate ladder”. One would think the little girl would be looking forward to when the prince comes to save the princess, but this young girl, encapsulating feminism, sees success as a self-propelled thing. This sharp contrast brings to the forefront how society today has changed in its views of women’s roles because this  dialogue differs from the expected. This juxtaposition adds a certain shock value to the cartoon that humor then drives home.

This cartoon utilizes humor in order to somewhat undermine the ridiculousness of over-the-top feminism. In the cartoon, the girl wants to see the princess “climb to the top of the corporate ladder”. This statement is humorous because girls that young usually don’t even know what the “corporate ladder” is. Thus, the underlying point here is that feminism is creeping into even something as innocent as a bedtime story. This cartoon may be trying to tell us that sometimes we may be going too overboard on the women’s equality issues, and this may be tainting sacred aspects of our culture, such as the traditional bedtime story.

In conclusion, the juxtaposition in this cartoon allows the illustrator to  show the difference between modern society’s views and past views on women’s rights, and humor works to shed light on the fact that sometimes modern feminism can be too sensitive and over the top. However, the best thing about this cartoon is that the illustrator crafts it in such a way that many different messages can be taken away from it, depending on the reader’s persona. One could see this as a cartoon praising women’s newfound social mobility, or one warning of the danger of too much empowerment.