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Prince and Princess (Shoujo Kakumei Utena)
Prince
Can be the animus for a woman. He is the potential of royalty. The online Dictionary of
Symbolism says, "The prince is associated with the king as the fertility of his people and
land. Winning the hand of the princess, in myth and legend, is to aspire to the superior or
higher state, a situation fraught with danger which can either kill the aspirant or raise him
to a higher and more noble state, as in psychic and spiritual aspirations and quests." This description fits the themes presented in the series.
The duelists hope by winning the Rose Bride they can gain their desires, and they battle through the duels (a symbol of their own inner
struggles) to do so.
Dios is Spanish for God, he is the embodiment of the ideal of the prince. Also, John Pollard pointed out that the word for prince, ouji, is also the word for the past.
So in some cases in the series, this is a bit of a pun.
Princess
Can be the anima for a man. She is the potential of royalty. The Rose Bride is the
princess archetype.
In some stories such as Rapunzel or The Six Swans the heroine is isolated. In the former, it is a social and physical isolation, and in the latter a more psychological isolation
as she can not speak for a period of time, and usually in such cases it means she does not communicate.
For Anthy, her role as the Rose Bride has led to both a kind of psychological isolation and a physical isolation resulting from the psychological isolation.
Because she is not encouraged to pursue her own interests and forge her own identity, she doesn't actively seek friends. And since she is not used to getting close to people
or having them seek a close relationship with her, she is not socially conscious or included in social circles. This physically isolates her from other students.
This also isolates her inwardly, as she is not used to being viewed as a friend, and her experiences as the Rose Bride leave her feeling different from others and unable
to make an intimate connection as she does not feel anyone would even understand what she has been through or care that she has been through it.
In popular tradition, the princess under a curse is released from the curse and her hand in marriage is the prize for saving the kingdom.
This idea of the princess as the ultimate attainment is also carried over to Anthy as well. She is the prize for the duelists when they win the duels,
and winning her means to gain what each desires most. Like the castle that floats above the dueling arena, Anthy holds the key to what each duelist seeks.
This is why each fights to win her, so that one day they can find what they are seeking. As in the above, it is assumed this is what the princess wants, and it is said always
to be the case that she does. This tradition is brought into question in the series. While, in fairy tales the princess may not decide she doesn't want to marry the prince,
and the heroine may not speak up from the tale and question why her purpose by the end is that she is the prize for the prince, this becomes a question posed with Anthy.
For that is what she is reduced to in the minds of some of the duelists, she is the princess, the Rose Bride, the means to attain all their desires and the happy,
uncomplicated ending they long for. The focus is the prince, the duelists, it does not matter what Anthy's feelings are or what her ambitions are,
the point is that she can give the duelists what they want. This idea can be extended to patriarchial attitudes where the focus is on the ambitions of the man and how he
must go out and achieve and seek, attributes not always associated with females historically in Western or Japanese society. An attitude and historical tradition that forgets
the ambition of the women in its society is one societal traditional thought reflected by this absence of concern for Anthy's feelings or dreams.
She is not given her own ambitions, instead she is looked on as she helps someone else attain theirs, and that is her purpose for existing.
In several fairy tales, the princess literally sleeps, waiting to be woken such as in Sleeping Beauty or The Glass Coffin. The sleeping maiden is again passive,
she waits for the prince or someone to wake her from her slumber, her curse. Usually, sleep in these fairy tales is equated with a kind of death, as in the princess sleeping
like death in a coffin, like in Snow White or The Glass Coffin.
In Anthy's case, this motif of the sleeping princess in the coffin is used as a figurative instead of a literal symbol. In the series, the coffin is a symbol for the individual
being inside the unconscious, in a regressed state, and not having reached self-hood. In the first part of the series, and at the end, in abstract symbolic scenes,
Anthy is shown sleeping in a coffin. These two scenes represent the mental state of Anthy, and her own journey to self-hood. When the audience is first shown Anthy,
she is curled up in a fetal position inside the coffin, in a deep sleep (it takes Utena several minutes to wake her), and clad in full Rose Bride attire.
This symbolizes that Anthy is completely mentally within this state of seeing herself as but the Rose Bride, and Anthy, the person has not come to consciousness.
At the very end of the series, the audience is shown Anthy again, but this time she is awake when Utena finds her and does not need to be woken, also she is naked,
symbolizing that Anthy now sees herself as a person and has fully awoke from her unconscious state. This shows that Anthy has made a personal change inside herself,
and after this scene she will be shown at the end of the episode to leave the Academy to start a life for herself of her own choosing.