The following summary of “Beauty and the Beast” is based on Madame Leprince de Beaumont’s rendering of the story published in 1757, which draws on an earlier French version of the motif by Madame de Villeneuve. It is the version in which the tale is now best known.*122
Different from most renderings of “Beauty and the Beast,” in Madame Leprince de Beaumont’s story a rich merchant has not only the usual three daughters but in addition three sons, although they play hardly any role in the tale. All the girls are very good-looking, particularly the youngest, who has become known as “The little Beauty,” which name makes her sisters very jealous. These sisters are vain and selfish, quite the opposite from Beauty, who is modest, charming, and sweet to everybody. Suddenly their father loses all his money, and the family is reduced to a mean existence which the sisters take very badly, but Beauty’s character shines even more in these difficult circumstances.
The father then has to go on a trip, and asks his daughters what he should bring them. Since their hope is that on this trip the father will regain some of his wealth, the two sisters ask him to bring them expensive garments, while Beauty asks for nothing. Only when pressed by her father, Beauty asks him to bring her a rose. The hopes for regaining his wealth turn out to be empty, and the father has to return home as poor as he left. He gets lost in a large forest and nearly despairs; then he suddenly comes to a palace where he finds food and shelter, but nobody home. The next morning, about to depart, the father sees some beautiful roses and, remembering Beauty’s request, gathers some for her. As he does so, a frightful Beast appears and berates him for stealing roses after it had received him so well in its castle. As a punishment, the Beast says, the father will have to die. The father pleads for his life, telling that he took the roses for his daughter. The Beast agrees to let him go if one of his daughters will take the father’s place and suffer the fate the Beast had planned for him. But if none of the daughters will do so, the merchant must return within three months to die. On leaving, the Beast gives the father a chest filled with gold. The merchant has no intention of sacrificing one of his daughters, but accepts the three months’ respite to see them again and bring them the gold.
On coming home, he gives Beauty the roses, but cannot help telling her what has happened. The brothers offer to find the Beast and slay it, but their father will not permit this, because they would only perish. Beauty insists on taking her father’s place. Whatever he says to make her change her mind makes no impression on her; she will go with him anyway. The gold he brought back has permitted the two sisters to make fashionable marriages. After the three months the father, accompanied against his will by Beauty, sets out for the palace of the Beast. The Beast asks Beauty whether she has come of her own free will, and when she says “Yes,” it bids the father leave, which he finally does with a heavy heart. Beauty is treated royally in the Beast’s palace; all her wishes are met as if by magic. Each night, during supper, the Beast visits with her. Over time, Beauty comes to look forward to this, as it breaks her loneliness. The only thing which perturbs her is that at the end of their visits together the Beast regularly asks her to become its wife; when she ever so gently refuses, the Beast departs in great distress. Three months pass this way, and when she again refuses to become its wife, the Beast asks that at least she will promise to never leave it. She promises this, but asks to be permitted to visit her father since, from viewing in a mirror the events in other parts of the world, she knows he is pining away for her. The Beast gives her a week’s time to do so, but warns her that it will die if she fails to return.
Next morning she finds herself home with her father, who is overjoyed. Her brothers are away serving in the army. Her sisters, who are unhappy in their marriages, plan out of jealousy to detain Beauty beyond the week, thinking that then the monster will come and destroy her. They succeed in persuading Beauty to remain another week; but during the tenth night she dreams of the Beast, and it reproaches her in a dying voice. She wishes herself back with it, and is immediately transported there. Beauty finds the Beast nearly dying of a broken heart because she did not keep her promise. During her stay at home Beauty realized how deeply she had become attached to the Beast; seeing it so helpless, she realizes her love for it and says that she can no longer live without it and wants to marry it. At this, the Beast turns into a prince; they are joined by her happy father and the rest of her family. The evil sisters are turned into statues and have to remain that way until they own up to their faults.
In “Beauty and the Beast” the Beast’s form is left to our imagination. In a group of fairy tales found in many European countries, the beast, in imitation of “Cupid and Psyche,” is given the body of a snake. Otherwise the events of these stories are quite similar to those just mentioned, with one exception. When the male regains his human form, he tells why he had been reduced to a snakelike existence: it was his punishment for having seduced an orphan. He, who used a helpless victim to satisfy his sexual lust, could be redeemed only by an unselfish love willing to sacrifice itself for the beloved. The prince had been turned into a snake because, as a phallic animal, it is a symbol for sexual lust which seeks satisfaction without benefit of a human relation, and also because it uses its victim solely for its own purposes, as did the snake in paradise. By giving in to its seduction, we lose our state of innocence.
In “Beauty and the Beast,” the fateful events are brought about by a father’s having stolen a rose to bring to his best-loved youngest daughter. His doing so symbolizes both his love for her and also an anticipation of her losing her maidenhood, as the broken flower—particularly the broken rose—is a symbol for the loss of virginity. This may seem to both father and daughter as if she would have to suffer some “beastly” experience. But the story tells that their anxieties are unfounded. What was feared to be a beastly experience turns out to be one of deep humanity and love.
Considering “Bluebeard” in conjunction with “Beauty and the Beast,” one might say that the former presents those primitive, aggressive, and selfishly destructive aspects of sex which must be overcome if love is to bloom; while the latter tale depicts what true love is all about. Bluebeard’s behavior is in accordance with his ominous appearance; the Beast, despite its looks, is as beautiful a person as Beauty. This story, contrary to what the child’s fears may be, assures the listener that, although females and males look very different, they are a perfect match when they are the right partners so far as their personalities are concerned, and if they are tied together by love. While “Bluebeard” conforms to the child’s worst fears about sex, “Beauty and the Beast” offers the child the strength to realize that his fears are the creations of his anxious sexual fantasies; and that while sex may at first seem beastlike, in reality love between woman and man is the most satisfying of all emotions, and the only one which makes for permanent happiness.
At various places in this book it has been mentioned that fairy tales help the child to understand the nature of his oedipal difficulties and offer hope that he will master them. “Cinderella” is a supreme statement of the devastating nature of a parent’s unresolved and destructively acted-out oedipal jealousy of a child. No other well-known fairy tale makes it as obvious as “Beauty and the Beast” that a child’s oedipal attachment to a parent is natural, desirable, and has the most positive consequences for all, if during the process of maturation it is transferred and transformed as it becomes detached from the parent and concentrated on the lover. Our oedipal attachments, far from being only the source of our greatest emotional difficulties (which they can be when they do not undergo proper development during our growing up), are the soil out of which permanent happiness grows if we experience the right evolution and resolution of these feelings.
This story suggests Beauty’s oedipal attachment to her father not only by her asking him for a rose, but also by our being told in detail how her sisters went out enjoying themselves at parties and having lovers while Beauty always stayed home and told
those who courted her that she was too young to marry and wanted “to stay with her father a few years longer.” Since Beauty joins the Beast only out of love for her father, she wishes to have an asexual relation with it.
The Beast’s palace in which all of Beauty’s wishes are immediately fulfilled, a motif already discussed in “Cupid and Psyche,” is a narcissistic fantasy typically engaged in by children. It is a rare child who has not at some time wished for an existence where nothing is demanded of him and all of his desires are met as soon as he expresses them. The fairy story tells that such a life, far from being satisfying, soon becomes empty and boring—so much so that Beauty comes to look forward to the evening visits of the Beast, which at first she dreaded.
If nothing happened to interrupt such a narcissistic dream life, there would be no story; narcissism, the fairy tale teaches, despite its seeming attractiveness, is not a life of satisfactions, but no life at all. Beauty comes to life when she learns that her father needs her. In some versions of the tale he has fallen seriously ill; in others he pines away for her, or in some other way is in great distress. This knowledge shatters Beauty’s narcissistic non-existence; she begins to act and then she—and the story—come to life again.
Thrown into a conflict between her love for her father and the Beast’s needs, Beauty deserts the beast to attend her father. But then she realizes how much she loves the Beast—a symbol of the loosening of ties to her father and transference of her love to the Beast. Only after Beauty decides to leave her father’s house to be reunited with the Beast—that is, after she has resolved her oedipal ties to her father—does sex, which before was repugnant, become beautiful.
This foreshadows by centuries the Freudian view that sex must be experienced by the child as disgusting as long as his sexual longings are attached to his parent, because only through such a negative attitude toward sex can the incest taboo, and with it the stability of the human family, remain secure. But once detached from the parent and directed to a partner of more suitable age, in normal development, sexual longings no longer seem beastly—to the contrary, they are experienced as beautiful.
“Beauty and the Beast,” in illustrating the positive aspects of a child’s oedipal attachment while showing what must happen to it as he grows up, well deserves the praise lona and Peter Opie bestow on it in their survey of The Classic Fairy Tales. They call it “the most symbolic of the fairy tales after Cinderella, and the most satisfying.”
“Beauty and the Beast” begins with an immature view which posits man to have a dual existence as animal and as mind—symbolized by Beauty. In the process of maturation, these artificially isolated aspects of our humanity must become unified; that alone permits us to attain complete human fulfillment. In “Beauty and the Beast” there are no longer any sexual secrets which must remain unknown, the discovery of which necessitates a long and difficult voyage of self-discovery before the happy ending can be gained. On the contrary, in “Beauty and the Beast” there are no hidden secrets, and it is highly desirable that the Beast’s true nature be revealed. Finding out what the Beast is really like or, to put it more correctly, what a kind and loving person he really is, leads right to the happy ending. The story’s essence is not just the growth of Beauty’s love for the Beast, or even her transferring her love for her father to the Beast, but her own growth in the process. From believing that she must choose between her love for her father and her love for the Beast, Beauty moves to the happy discovery that seeing these two loves in opposition is an immature view of things. By transferring her original oedipal love for her father to her future husband, Beauty gives her father the kind of affection most beneficial to him. This restores his failing health and provides him with a happy life in proximity to his beloved daughter. It also restores the Beast to his humanity, and then a life of marital bliss for him and Beauty becomes possible.
The marriage of Beauty to the former Beast is a symbolic expression of the healing of the pernicious break between the animal and the higher aspects of man—a separation which is described as a sickness, since, when separated from Beauty and what she symbolizes, first her father and then the Beast nearly die. It is also the end point of an evolution from a self-centered, immature (phallic-aggressive-destructive) sexuality to one that finds its fulfillment in a human relation of deep devotion: the Beast is about to die because of the separation from Beauty, who is both the beloved female and Psyche, our soul. This is an evolution from a primitive selfish-aggressive sexuality to one which finds its fulfillment as part of a loving relation freely engaged in. That is why the Beast accepts Beauty’s substitution for her father only after she assures it that she voluntarily takes his place, and why it asks her repeatedly to marry it, but accepts without recrimination her rejection and makes no move toward her before she spontaneously declares her love for it.
Translating the poetic language of the fairy tale into the pedestrian language of psychoanalysis, the marriage of Beauty and the Beast is the humanization and socialization of the id by the superego. How apt, then, that in “Cupid and Psyche” the offspring of this union is Pleasure or Joy, an ego that provides us with the satisfactions we need for a good life. The fairy tale, unlike the myth, doesn’t need to spell out the benefits of the union of the two protagonists. It uses a more impressive image: a world where the good live in happiness, and the evil ones—the sisters—are not beyond redemption.
Each fairy tale is a magic mirror which reflects some aspects of our inner world, and of the steps required by our evolution from immaturity to maturity. For those who immerse themselves in what the fairy tale has to communicate, it becomes a deep, quiet pool which at first seems to reflect only our own image; but behind it we soon discover the inner turmoils of our soul—its depth, and ways to gain peace within ourselves and with the world, which is the reward of our struggles.
The selection of stories to be considered was arbitrary, although guided to some degree by the popularity of the tales. As each story reflects some segment of the inner evolution of man, the second part of the book began with tales in which the child struggles for his independence: reluctantly and only when forced by his parents to do so against his will, as in “Hansel and Gretel,” or more spontaneously, as in “Jack and the Beanstalk.” Little Red Cap in the wolf’s belly, and Sleeping Beauty, who in her castle experimented with the distaff, have prematurely exposed themselves to experiences for which they are not yet ready; they learn they must wait until they have matured, and how to do this. In “Snow White” and “Cinderella” the child can become himself only as the parent is defeated. If the book had ended with either of these two stories, it would have seemed that there is no happy solution to the generational conflict which, as these fairy tales show, is as old as man. But they also tell that where this conflict exists, it is due only to the self-centeredness of the parent and his lack of sensitivity to the child’s legitimate needs. As a parent myself, I preferred to end with a fairy tale which tells that a parent’s love for his child is also as old as man, as is the child’s love for his parent. It is out of this tender affection that there grows a different love which, once the child is grown, will bind him to his beloved. Whatever may be true in reality, the child who listens to fairy tales comes to imagine and believe that out of love for him his parent is willing to risk his life to bring him the present he most desires. In his turn, such a child believes that he is worthy of such devotion, because he would be willing to sacrifice his life out of love for his parent. Thus the child will grow up to bring peace and happiness even to those who are so grievously afflicted that they seem like beasts. In doing so, a person will gain happiness for himself and his life’s partner and, with it, happiness also for his parents. He will be at peace with himself and the world.
This is one of the manifold truths revealed by fairy tales, which can guide our lives; it is a truth as valid today as it was once upon a time.
*That in these fairy tales nearly as often the animal groom is rescued through the l
ove of the female as the animal bride is disenchanted through the devotion of the male offers another example that the same fairy-tale motif applies equally to females and to males. In languages where the structure permits it, the names of the central characters are ambiguous, so that the hearer is at liberty to picture them as of either of the two sexes.
In Perrault’s stories the names of the main figures are such that they can be viewed as masculine or feminine. For example, the title of “Bluebeard” is “La Barbe Bleue”; here the name of a clearly masculine figure is so constructed that it takes the feminine article. The French name of Cinderella, Cendrillon, has a masculine ending; the feminine form would have to be something like La Cendrouse. Little Red Riding Hood is called Le Petit Chaperon Rouge because in French chaperon is not only a masculine piece of wearing apparel, but because of it the girl’s name requires the masculine article. Sleeping Beauty, La Belle au bois dormant, takes the feminine article, but dormant is a form which applies equally to male and female persons. (Soriano, op. cit.)
In German many of the main characters are of neuter sex, as is the child himself (Das Kind). Thus it is Das Schneewittchen (Snow White), Das Dornröschen (Sleeping Beauty), Das Rotkäppchen (Little Red Riding Hood), Das Aschenputtel (Cinderella).
*The many stories of the animal-groom type from preliterate cultures suggest that living in intimacy with nature fails to change the view that sex is something animal-like which only love can transform into a human relation. Nor does it alter the fact that more often than not the male is unconsciously experienced as the more animal-like partner because of his more aggressive role in sex. It also does not change the preconscious realization that although the female role in intercourse is more passive-receptive, she, too, must activate herself in sex, must do something quite difficult, even uncouth—such as licking a crocodile’s face—if love is to enrich a mere sexual bond.
The Uses of Enchantment Page 42