Miranda Muller
Professor Lewis
Reading Cinema, MW 2:30-3:45
13 December 2013
A Walk Through Fate and Semiotics
“Some say our destiny is tied to the land, as much a part of us as we are of it. Others say fate is woven like a cloth, so that one’s destiny intertwines with many others. It’s the one thing we search for, or fight to change. Some never find it, but there are those who are led” (Chapman). Those are the words of Merida, the heroine of one of Pixar’s latest films, Brave. The Disney production may be quite recent, but the overall moral of its tale is certainly nothing new. Instead, it merely reinforces two simple but powerful themes: it implies that pride and a reckless wish to change one’s fate may result in a recipe for potential disaster. This paper will explore through a semiotic study how its three most important symbols, the torn bond, the bear, and the standing stones render the tale of the courageous tomboy a cheerful but cautionary one. As the princess of the Scottish Kingdom of DunBroch, custom holds that she is to be married to a prince from one of the neighboring clans. Throughout approximately the first half of the film, her mother Queen Elinor tries to prepare her for her marriage and for the day that she herself is to become queen. Unfortunately for both mother and daughter, Merida has no desire to be married to any of the suitors in the film or to accept the responsibilities of the crown just yet, and thus creates a tension with her parents that is all too common among those her age, which is amplified by her position as a princess. After succession of brief scenes depicting Elinor attempting to teach Merida how to deliver a speech, the geography of the land, how to play music, and proper etiquette, she states to her that “above all, a princess strives for… well, perfection” (Chapman). Merida’s resistance to such grooming betrays her “anxieties at the prospect of growing up, of maturing into a sexual being, and of relinquishing some of her freedom for the bond of love” (Ducey).
Perhaps the epitome of what Elinor perceives as “perfection” lies in the tight, sky blue dress that Merida is forced to wear on the day her suitors compete for her hand in marriage. After Elinor laces her up in a corset and tames her wild red mane, Merida is shown squirming in her new dress and screeches “I can’t breathe!” (Chapman). The dress seems quite similar to what women experienced on a day-to-day basis from the medieval era all the way until the early twentieth century. However, this is another aspect in which Merida is much bolder than her nonfictional counterparts, most of whom suffered in silence until the feminist movement, when those very garments became a sign of female oppression. However, in the case of Brave, it is not so much the garments themselves or the wearing of them that is significant, but their tearing and destruction at the hands of the wearer; they merely serve as the first symbolic bonds to be torn. When all of the suitors have made their attempt at archery, Merida disappears from her wooden throne and into the crowd, from whence she reappears and competes for her own hand in marriage. As she tries to release her first arrow and realizes once more how constricting her attire is, she shrieks “Curse this dress!” (Chapman), and then rends her garments so she can move freely and show off her superior prowess at archery in full view of her appalled mother. As scholar Christopher Muir puts it, she “literally breaks out of the confines of the gown, and all that is associated with it” (Muir). However, at the same time, her actions also serve as an index to the destruction of the fruit of Elinor’s labor to produce a daughter fit for ruling DunBroch, as well as for the similar impending fate of her relationship with Merida, referred to by the witch in the woods as “the bond torn by pride” (Chapman).
That tearing of bonds commences in the fight that Elinor and Merida get into after her public display of rejection towards all three of the competing suitors. In a fit of rage, Merida draws her sword against the tapestry her mother wove, which is an icon of the family, cutting her mother’s image away from her own as she screams that she “would rather die than be like you!” (Chapman). While it is quite obvious that the now marred tapestry is what the witch in the cottage was referring to earlier as “the bond torn by pride”, the tearing is also another sign of rebellion on the part of Merida, much like the dress that she ruined during her archery display. However, unlike the dress, the tapestry merely represents the reckless destruction of the bonds that so deeply attach a mother to her child, and ultimately those that make the establishment of a family possible. It is also notable that when Merida later tries to sew the gash she had previously made in a desperate attempt to save her mother, the tapestry simply does not come together seamlessly through some form of magic, but instead results in a glaring line of awkward stitches (Chapman), suggesting that bonds torn by pride, though mendable, cannot completely return to their former glory once the damage is done.
In the particular moment where she slits the tapestry, Merida is also unwittingly playing the role of the selfish prince from the tale her mother tells her previously (Chapman), who destroys the kingdom handed down by his aging father due to his desire for total power. His tale is told in more detail in the related short known as The Legend of Mor’du. Like her, the prince was proud, stubborn, and dissatisfied with his lot in life. Instead of ruling his lot of the land fairly and wisely as his father had wished, the prince instead warred with his brothers over control of the entire kingdom. At one point, the short reveals him taking his axe breaking his image in a stone icon away from those of his brothers (Larsen), much like what Merida did to the tapestry in her outburst against her mother. Asking for the strength of ten men, he thus becomes the demon bear Mor’du, who had antagonized her father earlier when Merida was a small child by biting off his leg (Chapman).
The breaking of that stone image, which is in fact the icon of his own family, has a strikingly similar meaning to the slitting of the tapestry: like the tapestry, the prince thus breaks his bond with his three brothers and thus rejects his place among them. The two icons, the tapestry and the stone carving, work together to create the overall meaning of the broken bonds. It is also quite notable that when the destruction of the icons takes place, the images of the characters that eventually morph into ursine form are isolated from those of the family that they once belonged to. The isolation of the character’s images in the icons is therefore an index for the prince’s and Queen Elinor’s isolation from the known world of civilization once they have departed from their human forms.
Such tales of reckless actions induced by hubris “invariably alert us to the dangers linked with those who, in their strivings for power and rank, have violated social sanctions established to protect the welfare of others” (Trumbull 349). Thus, when Elinor had previously told her that story, she “uses such a breach of the natural order to dissuade Merida from aiming beyond the status quo, even when she does not know the full story behind the creature” (Muir). In this case, the tale of Mor’du serves a similar purpose to a number of other cautionary tales dealing with hubris, such as those of “the fallen angel Lucifer; the self-blinded outcast Oedipus” (Trumbull 342), and “the terrifyingly ambitious Dr. Frankenstein” (342). Since the tale of Mor’du reinforces the primal danger of hubris, Elinor’s tale may be enough to caution the audience about the dangers of rashly throwing away one’s bonds to those held dear, despite her failure to deter her daughter and the fact that she indeed is no expert on dangerous magical beasts.
Difficult and sometimes violent emotional struggles between a teenage girl and her mother are quite common, especially in Western society. However, another thing that sets Merida apart from her nonfictional peers is that she runs off into the woods, where she finds an old witch who gives her a spell that will allow her to alter her destiny. Her intentions at the time are to simply use magic to change her mother’s mind; however, the spell proves to have a more drastic effect than she initially expected: upon eating one bite of the cake, Elinor transforms into a giant black bear – just like Mor’du, save for perhaps a silkier and shinier coat. But why would a prince and a queen transform into bears? Perhaps the answers lie in how the bear has been historically viewed. In ancient times, the bear was revered in a similar way to how contemporary humanity would view the lion. Before the church Christianized northern and Western Europe, the bear was “not only the king of the beasts, but also the animal symbol of all kings” (Pastoureau 56). In Celtic society in particular, bears, along with boars and bulls, “were revered and admired for their qualities of strength, dominance, and unfettered potency” (Green 217). Given its association with such characteristics, the presence of “bonds uniting the bear and the warrior” (Pastoureau 46), embodied by the custom of carrying parts of its essence on one’s person such as teeth or claws, is not surprising at all. This information adds another dimension behind the prince’s transformation into Mor’du. Since the bear was seen as the “embodiment of strength and courage” (Pastoureau 56), the writers’ choice in turning the reckless prince into a bear when he asked for “the strength of ten men” (Chapman) is in fact quite fitting. Since Mor’du is the demon bear from Merida’s childhood who bit off her father’s leg, then it is quite understandable that King Fergus – and perhaps the vast majority of DunBroch – feels “a mix of awe and fury” (Muir) towards these great creatures.
King Fergus’ vow to avenge himself by killing Mor’du is also reminiscent of some of the masculine traditions held in ancient Europe, where “hunting a bear, confronting it, and killing it in single combat remained an act of bravery characteristic of a chief hero” (Pastoureau 57). If Mor’du is, according to Muir, “a malevolent (male) force that presents… an omnipresent, physical threat” (1), then Queen Elinor in turning into a bear has become “a symbol of what Merida fears most: a terrible grownup life as a mature woman and queen” (Ducey). Both of these great black bears play a significant role in the tale in both a concrete and a symbolic sense. The fight to get her mother back home alive and in human form is what drives the remainder of the plot, while Mor’du is the evil force that threatens them both as well as all four clans.
However, unlike Mor’du, Elinor still tries to maintain her queenly and motherly status, as is seen when she tries to clothe herself in one of a bed sheet when she is initially transformed, as well as in the scene where she attempts to prepare a “proper meal” in the forest (Chapman). In these rather comical moments, Elinor in bear form hardly fills the role of the intimidating beast that instills fear and awe in the human heart. Despite this, in the process of attaining her goal, Merida is forced to reconcile her relations her mother as she is “facing life in ursine form” (Muir) in order to save her family and her kingdom, which has been pushed to the verge of civil war due to her previous rejection of the suitors. As Merida does so, she is also confronting and reconciling with her fear of growing up and maturing into a woman, thus revealing the presence of a coming-of-age aspect in Brave despite the consequent confines of it being a children’s fairy tale. After Merida’s explosive argument with her mother, she defiantly rides off into the forest. After a while, her horse Angus suddenly halts and inadvertently throws her right into the middle of a circle of standing stones, where a trail of will-o’-the-wisps suddenly appears. The will-o’-the-wisps in the film are the ones who lead Merida to the settings where the most important events in the story take place, and in this case, they lead her to the witch’s cottage where she gets the spell in order to change her fate (Chapman). In this scene, the standing stones are somewhat intimidating against the dark and ominous sky. Perhaps this is due to the fact that “large stones and standing stones in particular were universally viewed as connections to the heavens, to ancestors, to the gods themselves” (Varner 1). The scene implies that Merida is about to cross the threshold between her ordinary life in the castle of DunBroch and the unknown world, where anything can happen. She follows the trail on her own accord and even urges her frightened stallion to go along with her, indicating that she is willing to seek the aid of the supernatural to attain her goals. In his work, Gary Varner notes how the standing stones have been viewed as “eternal” (6), and thus present “an image of a reality that survives the passing of time…the stone symbolized the essential being” (6). In the case of Brave, then, the standing stones have much in common with how fate itself is depicted. An individual’s destiny is usually connected to the one’s very essence, and in literature, a protagonist’s fate often the manifestation or product of something present in his or her character, if not his or her entire being. Likewise, the standing stones “give expression to man’s indomitable spirit” (Kindersely 34). Since standing stones in history have been linked to that which is beyond ordinary existence, it is quite arguable that the standing stones in the film serve as the gateway to the knowledge of and the opportunity to change Merida’s fate, or perhaps even its physical embodiment. In The Art of Brave, producer Katherine Sarafian states that it is “no coincidence that the finale of this film takes place at those stones. In every version of the movie we’ve ever done, that was the culminating, emotional, and narrative focal point” (Lerew 30). Indeed, the standing stones are where the final battle against Mor’du, his demise, and Elinor’s transformation back into human form take place. When Merida watches the fight between Mor’du and her mother at the standing stones (Chapman), she is also beholding the personification of the conflicting forces inside her. Her mother in bear form at this particular moment is a living sign of an adult life as queen, while Mor’du manifests the rejection of such obligations in favor of a more self-serving path. Merida thus gets that chance to witness the conflict that has been waging within her all along being played out before fate itself. Likewise, when Mor’du is ultimately crushed by a toppling boulder, Merida and the audience are thus reminded that a path recklessly forged by pride rarely lead to a positive end. Hence, lest she is to end up like him, she has no choice but to accept that she must face life as a mature woman. Since our heroine over the duration of her quest to save her mother has learned the price of such actions from Mor’du and to appreciate a mother’s love, she wants nothing more than to have her family be whole again once the fight is over and thus seems more than willing to take on these responsibilities. The fact Mor’du is killed by a standing stone and that Elinor’s transformation back into human form takes place before them once Merida has learned her lesson suggests that fate in the world of Brave, like in many pieces of literature, provide a sort of poetic justice. However, Elinor’s transformation does not take place until the sunlight hits the crudely sewn seam of the tapestry (Chapman), as if the stones themselves or the forces within them needed to confirm that Merida had indeed mended the bond torn by pride. Only when the seam is in full view does Elinor become human again, providing a fitting closure to the journey that she and her daughter had been through. Such an event suggests, like the story of Mor’du, that bond affected by pride and fate, represented respectively by the tapestry and the standing stones, are directly related to one another. The reason Princess Merida of DunBroch is a heroine in her own right lies neither in that fact that she is the first female protagonist in a Disney-Pixar film nor in her challenging of the patriarchy. In her tale, Merida battles and ultimately achieves victory over hubris in one of its most monstrous forms and gains a bit of wisdom along the way. The film gives the overall message that that one’s actions directly affect the destiny of an individual, and looking at the motif of the torn bond, the bear, and the standing stones can aid the viewer in understanding how the characters and the overarching story assist in reaching such a conclusion. As Queen Elinor and subsequently Merida state, “Legends are lessons. They ring with truth” (Chapman). Although it may be a little too early to consider Brave a legend, its story certainly provides its lesson in a similar manner to how a fairy tale or one of Aesop’s fables may go about providing theirs. The outcome in Brave implies, unlike the popular ancient belief that is addressed in Merida’s speech at the end, that the individual has at least some control over his or her fate. Perhaps this is most eloquently stated by Merida herself, when she says “There are those who say that fate is beyond our command, that our destiny is not our own. But I know better. Our fate lives within us. You only have to be brave enough to see it” (Chapman).

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