Dear Crazy Fictional Bookworms, Keep On Being Awesome

I remember my first fictional role model.  I met her when I was five years old and newly transplanted from Palo Alto to a tiny town on the Central Coast of California.  My parents introduced us one evening when they popped in a VHS tape for the three of us to watch together.

Her name was Belle, and I wanted to grow up to be just like her.  Watching her stroll down the village street with her nose in a book was enthralling to a child not yet in kindergarten.  Belle was a brilliant, opinionated, starry-eyed dreamer who could read books faster than anyone she knew and wielded her fearsomely large vocabulary as a weapon against Cro Magnon throwbacks like Gaston with wit and verve.  She was startling.  She was refreshing.  She was my absolute unchallenged hero.

Belle was unlike any other Disney princess I'd previously encountered.  There was a distinct lack of  a "helpless female" aura lingering about her.  Unlike Aurora or Snow White, she didn't need rescuing from a wicked old crone by a handsome prince.  Unlike Ariel, she didn't sacrifice a key part of what made her unique or wonderful for the sake of a man she hardly knew.  Unlike Jasmine, she didn't blindly follow the mysterious male stranger around despite harboring doubts about his sincerity.  Bell was special.  Belle had spirit.  When her jerk of a captor/host/love interest made demands, she put her dainty foot down and said, "Like heck!  Try some manners next time, you overgrown mop!"

Or something along those lines.  It's been a while since I've seen the movie, and the lines have faded from mind (though with some prompting I have no doubt I could sing along to every song on the soundtrack), but there are three lessons I took away from Beauty and the Beast.  The first two were learned upon my first viewing, and were easily grasped by my childish mind.  The first was that if I ever had more money than I knew what to do with, I was building myself a library like the one that the Beast gave Belle (which, even back then, struck me as the most romantic gesture ever).  The second was that the reason Belle was so much more interesting than the other Disney princesses was that Belle was smart, and Belle was smart because she loved to read, so therefore I should read as well so that I might be smart and interesting, too.

The third reason is one that I wish I could have learned as a child, but it's an "older and wiser" retrospective sort of lesson.  The thing that really makes Belle better than all the other Disney princesses that came before her is that she is happy before she meets the Beast.  She.  Is.  Happy.  Single.  This is the most striking difference between Belle and her predecessors: where they all seem to need love or marriage or romance to be complete, Belle is already a complete and happy person when she's introduced to the audience.  This is my third lesson: be happy with who you are when you're by yourself.  If you can be happy single and you find someone who makes you happier as a part of a duo, good for you.

Belle was the impetus I needed to turn me from a dabbler in the shallow end of the library pool to a deep sea diver with a wide range of reading interests.  Every week without fail my mother would take me to one of the local library branches, and I would fly to the bookshelves, pulling off new releases, old classics, poetry collections, nonfiction books, books on handicrafts, science fiction and fantasy novels, young adult books, biographies, short story anthologies, even (though I hardly liked to admit it) the young reader books aimed at the first and second grade target audience such as myself.  I'd stagger up to the counter under the weight of all the books clutched in my arms, the pile stretching from my interlocked fingers all the way to my chin.  I'd often need to recruit my mother to carry a few for me if my burden was too cumbersome.

"Back so soon?" the librarian would invariably say, and my mother would laugh and point to the piles of books we'd dropped off on our way in.  The librarian would laugh as well, and when she asked for my library card I would hand it over as if passing off a blank key that the librarian was having cut to match the keys to Fort Knox.  Half of my books would go on my card; my mother would put the rest on hers.  She'd make small talk with the librarian while I fidgeted impatiently and waited for my books to be handed over.  "See you next week!" one of us would always cheerfully say.  Then I'd be buckled into the passenger seat of the van with my books piled around my feet, tempting fate and carsickness by cracking open the first book before we even pulled out of the parking lot.

It's hard to believe that a movie character could have done so much to influence how much books would come to define my life, but every little girl needs a fictional role model to inspire her.  I got lucky when I picked the "funny girl" of the Disney princess pantheon.  Belle satisfied my fictional bookworm inspiration until I was too old for Disney movies -- and by that time, I'd discovered a remarkable series of books by a woman named J.K. Rowling who wrote about a stubborn and opinionated bookworm named Hermione Granger....

But that gleeful character love can wait for another post.  After all, someone as utterly and amazingly cool as Hermione deserves her own essay.