The Social Sub-Text of the White Wedding: 'Disney's Cinderella Fairy-Tale Wedding: A Royal Book and Dress-Up Kit'

This paper utilizes a semiotic analysis to show how meaning is embedded within the Disney Princess collection storybook, Disney's Cinderella Fairy-Tale Wedding: A Royal Book - The Perfect Wedding and Dress-Up Kit (Marsoli, 2008).The meaning that is embedded within this Disney storybook will be shown through the identification of the signifiers, that which is seen and the signified that which is understood, linked by specific codes. Within the text, several codes are present. The detailed way in which Disney 'codes' the children's book and the dress-up kit in order to produce a consumer 'subject position' that seeks a 'fairytale white wedding' and believes in its value due to the deeply embedded ideological value that the codes establish will be shown. The codes will be brought to the surface. The significance will be examined from socialization in childhood that is symbolically embedded within the storybook text. The process of how this is realized in wedding ritual practice in adulthood will be examined; and how the wedding seems to promise a way to use marriage to be free of labor, of becoming a 'consumer elite'. Codes are ritual systems of connected meanings; organized by frameworks that are used by both producers and interpreters of the texts. The codes operate in certain domains that will be shown in the social and mythological sub-text of the storybook. This reading of the sub-text shows the repetitive and over determined patterns that comprise the constant themes forming the ideologies. Codes within the text include: wedding codes, commodity codes, bodily and behavioral gender codes; all under the topic of social status. By identifying the coded messages, one can comprehend what would be the preferred reading in key stereotypes and mythic association.