Dealing with Dragons

From the first pages of the novel, Cimorene feels different than most people in Linderwall. She intuitively pushes back against the restrictive status quo for princesses and eventually takes matters into her own hands, pursuing her own ambitions and finding a community that honors her for her choices. Even Cimorene’s appearance defies the status quo. Unlike her sisters’ “long, golden hair and sweet dispositions” (1), Cimorene’s appearance is characterized by black hair that “wouldn’t stop growing” (2). Her parents see her physical defiance of the status quo as a negative trait that will affect her marriageability; they don’t think a prince “would want to marry a girl who could look him in the eye instead of gazing up at him becomingly through her lashes” (2). Metaphorically, looking someone in the eye implies strength and equality, while gazing upward denotes meekness and passivity, and Cimorene’s challenges to the status quo often involve such subversions of typical gender roles. 

This theme continues in Cimorene’s princess lessons, for she proves to be “more interested in what the knights and dragons were supposed to say than in memorizing the places where she was supposed to scream” (25). This wry wording once again pokes fun at fairy tale tropes, and it is clear that the

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