Peg from Lady and the Tramp

[initial grumble]Okay, I give up. I've just spent the last 3/4 hour looking for Disney-based forums on which to ask my question. However, the vast majority of results that came up on Google were devoted entirely to Disney World and its satellites, feverishly promoting anything Disney has for sale, with surprisingly little space allowed for fans just to chat about the films, characters etc. without the pressure of a hard sell. I tried to register with one of them only to find the CAPTCHA question expected me to know the first Disney theme park in California, which I've no idea about. A quick secondary Google search suggested this might be Anaheim, but that turned out to be wrong. So I gave up. Past that, I managed to find a huge Disney page full of terms and conditions that said a forum did indeed exist, but that I MUST OBEY ZE RULES! I registered and logged in but it transpired that no forum is obvious there, at all. But I could buy some Disney stuff if I wanted to. :glare: [/initial grumble]

But I didn't want to. I just wanted to put a question to a bunch of Disney fans. But since that ain't possible on their home turf, I'm just going to put it here and see what answers I get. The question is this: do you think Peg from Lady and the Tramp was supposed to be liked by the viewer? I ask this because I'm genuinely not sure either way.

When the movie was made back in the 1950's, the concept of the ideal woman was quite different to our general concept of model womanhood today. Lady pretty much lived up to that 50's ideal: she was demure, sheltered, elegant, pretty, meek, dependant on her owners/a man... you get the picture.

Peg, on the other hand, was brash, rough n' ready, spoke up to the boys, professed an attraction to a man-about-town who wasn't settled down (the Tramp), and (arguably) didn't have Lady's grace. I thought she was pretty, but then I often preferred minor characters such as Peg anyway, and found her confidence intriguing. So maybe others see her a different way, I don't know.

Peg defended Lady when she was laughed at by the dogs in the pound, and we saw Lady relax a little in response to Peg's assistance. However, it seemed to me that any brownie points Peg picked up by defending Lady, she abruptly lost (in Lady's eyes) by being attracted to the Tramp. I wonder if this was seen by the Disney group as a bad thing for Peg to do, even though she was unaware of Lady's attraction to him - or, perhaps, of her more naive sensibilities.

Then we saw no more of Peg, which might suggest she was rehomed, or that she was put down. Call me dark, but I feel that, as Disney didn't show us any more of her, the latter was the case. Disney loves its happy endings, so I suspect that either Peg's good fortune wasn't important and was therefore disregarded, or that her fate didn't matter because she was too low-class. This was, after all, the unofficial tagline of Lady and the Tramp: girl falls in love with boy, even though he's from the wrong side of the tracks. It's even spelled out at one point in the film.

Peg is shown to have a heart, but I feel that, in the end, she's thrown away in favour of Lady and her cosy arrangement with Tramp by the end of the film. As helpful as Peg was, did Disney intend for her to be disliked? Please discuss.