Dark Ride to the Source

If beauty and wonder can come from a place as contrived and synthetic and saccharine as Disneyland, is it any less beautiful? Is the delight somehow diminished? This is one of the many questions Leslie Jamieson wrestles with in this essay about her love of Disneyland, for Virginia Quarterly Review.

So many Disney films involve a crucial moment of transition or awakening—Sleeping Beauty and Snow White raised from their enchanted slumbers; Cinderella magic-wand-tapped into a luminous princess—and the promise at the core of Disneyland is one of alchemy as well, that you will feel not just transported but transformed. One of the accusations often hurled at Disneyland, that it invites us all into escapist fantasies, has always felt more useful as a question: Who does fantasy allow us to become? If we stop making Disneyland a scapegoat and allow it instead to become a teacher, a sunbaked and sugarcoated Virgil, it has something to teach us—about our own relationships to nostalgia and myth, about the parts of ourselves that want to dress up as princesses or follow dark rides into simulated danger; about the parts of us that want to die as pirates, lounge around with skeletons, and then get reborn, and die once more—and do it again, and again, and again.