From the Beast to the Blonde
Page 39
Eventually there comes a time when we must learn what we have not known before – or, to put it psychoanalytically, to undo the repression of sex. What we had experienced as dangerous, loathsome, something to be shunned, must change its appearance so that it is experienced as truly beautiful.51
Belle had to learn to be a loving wife in the eighteenth century; in the late twentieth, she has to learn to be game in bed. But the Bettelheimian argument takes the exuberance and the energy from female erotic voices, and effects one last transformation of the Beast, by turning him into a mistaken illusion in unawakened female eyes. In this, the psychoanalyst works his way back, in more solemn vein, to the Hellenistic romance, in which Psyche was at fault for fearing her lover was an ogre and not trusting him in bed.
III
The cuddliness of the teddy bear, the appeal of domesticated sexuality, also informs the present trend towards celebrating the male. In Tim Burton’s film Edward Scissorhands (1990), the outcast hero does harm, entirely inadvertently: like Frankenstein’s monster, he has been made by a mad scientist but left half finished, with cutlery for hands. As a metonymy of maleness and its fumbling connection to the world of others, the scissorhands capture eloquently the idea of the redeemed male beast in current circulation. By the 1990s, the perception of the social outcast, the exile from humankind in the form of a beast, had undergone such a sea-change that any return to full human shape might have degraded rather than redeemed the hero, limited his nobility rather than restored it.
In the same year, the Disney film animation, Beauty and the Beast, one of the biggest box-office draws of all time, ran the risk of dramatic collapse when the Beast changed into the prince. No child in my experience preferred the sparkling candy-coloured human who emerged from the enchanted monster; the Beast had won them. Linda Woolverton and the team who collaborated on the film had clearly steeped themselves in the tale’s history, on and off screen; prolonged and intense production meetings, turning over every last detail of representation and narrative, can almost be heard over the insouciant soundtrack. This fairytale film is more vividly aware of contemporary sexual politics than any made before; it consciously picked out a strand in the tale’s history and deliberately developed it for an audience of mothers who grew up with Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinern, who had daughters who listened to Madonna and Sinead O’Connor. Linda Woolverton’s screenplay put forward a heroine of spirit who finds romance on her own terms. Beneath this prima facie storyline, the interpretation contained many subtexts, both knotty and challenging, about changing concepts of paternal authority and rights, about permitted expressions of male desire, and prevailing notions in the quarrel about nature/nurture. Above all, the film placed before the 1990s audience Hollywood’s cunning domestication of feminism itself.
Like an American buffalo, or a cartoon Picasso Minotaur, the Disney Beast, created by the animator Glen Keane, learns with Belle how to be a new man.52 (Beauty and the Beast, directed by Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, 1991, © Disney.)
Knowing as the film is, it could not avoid the trap that modern retellings set: the Beast steals the show. While the Disney version ostensibly tells the story of the feisty, strong-willed heroine, and carries the audience along on the wave of her dash, her impatient ambitions, her bravery, her self-awareness, and her integrity, the principal burden of the film’s message concerns maleness, its various faces and masks, and, in the spirit of romance, it offers hope of regeneration from within the unregenerate male. The graphic intensity given to the two protagonists betrays the weight of interest: Beauty is saucer-eyed, dainty, slender, and wears a variation on the pseudo-medieval dresses of both Cinderella and Snow White, which, as in Cinderella, turn into ancien régime crinolines-cum-New Look débutante gowns for the scene of awakening love when she dances with the Beast. Her passage from repugnance to attraction also follows a movement from village hall to castle gate, in the conventional upwardly mobile style of the twentieth-century fairy tale. The animators have introduced certain emancipated touches: she is dark-haired, a book worm and walks with a swing. The script even contains a fashionable bow in the direction of self-reflexiveness, for Belle likes reading fairy tales more than any other kind of book, and consequently recognizes, when she finds herself in the Beast’s castle, the type of story she is caught in.
But next to the Beast, this Belle is a lacklustre creature. He held the animators’ full attention: the pneumatic signature style of Disney animation suited the Beast’s character as male desire incarnate. He embodies the Eros figure as phallic toy. The Beast swells, he towers, he inflates, he tumesces. Everything about him is big, and apt to grow bigger: his castle looms, its furnishings dwarfed by its Valhalla-like dimensions. His voice thunders, his anger roars to fill the cavernous spaces of his kingdom. We are shown him enraged, crowding the screen, edge to edge, like a face in a comic strip; when he holds Belle he looks as if he could snap her between his teeth like a chicken wing. His body too appears to be constantly burgeoning; poised on narrow hooves and skimpy legs, the Disney Beast sometimes lollops like a big cat, but more often stands erect, rising to an engorged torso, with an enormous, craggy, bull-like head compacted into massive shoulders, maned and shaggy all over, bristling with fangs and horns and claws that almost seem belittled by the creature’s overall bulk.
The Beast’s sexual equipment was always part of his charm – hidden or otherwise (it is of course scattered by synecdoche all over his body in the Disney cartoon). When Titania fell in love with Bottom the weaver, the associations of the ass were not lost on the audience. But the comic – and its concomitant, the pathetic – have almost entirely slipped away from this contemporary representation of virility.
Whereas Bottom, even in his name, was a figure of fun, and the Golden Ass, his classical progenitor, a ruefully absurd icon of (male) humanity, the contemporary vision of the Beast tends to the tragic. The new Disney Beast’s nearest ancestor is the Minotaur, the hybrid offspring of Pasiphae and the bull, and an ancient nightmare of perverted lust, and it is significant that Picasso adopted the Minotaur as his alter ego, as the embodiment of his priapism, in the vigour of youth as well as the impotence of old age. But the real animal which the Disney Beast most resembles is the American buffalo, and this tightens the Beast’s connections to current perceptions of natural good – for the American buffalo, like the grizzly, represents the lost innocence of the plains before man came to plunder. So the celluloid Beast’s beastliness thrusts in two contradictory directions; though he is condemned for his ‘animal’ rages, he also epitomizes the primordial virtues of the wild (left).
The Beast’s longstanding identity with masculine appetite nevertheless works for him rather than against him, and interacts with prevailing ideas of healthy male sexuality. The enterprise of the earlier fairytale writers, to try to define their own desires by making up stories about beasts who either denied them or fulfilled them, has been rather lost to sight. The vindication of the Beast has become the chief objective; the true lovableness of the good Beast the main theme. The Disney cartoon has double-knotted the lesson in contemporary ecological and sexual politics, by introducing a second beast, another suitor for Belle’s love, the human hunk Gaston. Gaston is a killer – of animals – and remains one; he is a lyncher, who preys on social outcasts (suspected lunatics and marginals), he wants to breed (he promises Belle six or seven children), and he is capable of deep treachery in pursuit of his own interests. The film wastes no sympathy on Gaston – though his conceit inspires some of its cleverest and funniest lyrics.
The story without frills: ‘Beauty and the Beast’ from a nursery retelling, c. 1880.
The penalty for Gaston’s brutishness is death: he falls off a high crag from the Beast’s castle. In the film, he takes the part of the real beast, the Calvinist unredeemed damned beast: socially deviant in his supremacist assumptions, unsound on ecology in both directions, abusing the natural (the forest) and culture (the library). What is above all significant abo
ut this caricature is that he is a man in a man’s shape, Clark Kent as played by Christopher Reeve. The Disney version is pitiless towards Gaston; self-styled heart throbs who fancy themselves Supermen are now the renegades, and wild men in touch with nature and the beast within the exemplars.
He is moreover one of the rustics whom the sophisticated Belle despises in her opening song (‘I want much more than they’ve got planned’), an anthem for the Me-generation; this Disney, like its predecessors, does not question the assumption that the Beast’s princeliness must be material and financial.53 His credit card, with his social status, is no doubt bigger than Gaston’s, too.
In Edward Scissorhands, the heroine also acts quickly, with gallantry and courage, to save this outcast from a mob; but he is fatally hampered by his hybrid form, halfway between the automaton and the creaturely; his weapon hands encumber him with man-made technology and cut him off from the desirable aspects of the human, which derive from what is perceived as natural, as animal. The further the cinematic outcast lies from the machine, the more likely his redemption; the Beast as cyborg, as in the Terminator movies, represents the apocalyptic culmination of human ingenuity and its diabolical perversion. Whereas, to a medieval spectator, the Devil was represented as close to the animal order in his hooved hairiness, and a bloodless and fleshless angel in gleaming armour approximated the divine artefact, the register of value has been turned topsy-turvy since the eighteenth century and the wild man has come into his own as an ideal. The evolution of the Beast in fairy tale and his portraits in film illustrate this profound shift in cultural values as well as sexual expectations.
The most significant plot change to the traditional story in the Disney film concerns the role of Beauty’s father, and it continues the film’s trend towards granting Beauty freedom of movement and responsibility for the rescue of the Beast and for his restoration to fundamental inner goodness. The traditional fairy tale often includes the tragic motif that, in return for his life, the father promises the Beast the first thing to greet him when he returns home; as in the story of Jephthah in the Bible (Jg. 11: 12), his daughter, his youngest and most dear, rushes to the gate to meet him, and the father has to sacrifice her. In the eighteenth-century French fairy story, which focussed on the evils of matrimonial customs, the father hands over Belle to the Beast in exactly the same kind of legal and financial transaction as an arranged marriage, and she learns to accept it. Bruno Bettelheim takes a governessy line on the matter: Beauty, learning to relinquish her Oedipal attachment to her father, should be grateful to her father for giving her away and making the discovery of sexuality possible.
Linda Woolverton’s script sensibly sets such patriarchal analysis aside, and instead provides subplots to explain away the father’s part in Beauty’s predicament, as well as supplying Beauty herself with all the wilfulness and determination to make her mistress of her own fate. The Disney studio, sensitive to the rise of children’s rights, has replaced the father with the daughter as the enterprising authority figure in the family. The struggle with patriarchal plans underlies, as we shall see, the plots of many other familiar tales.
In popular versions, ‘Beauty and the Beast’ offers a lesson in female yielding and its satisfactions. The Beast stirs desire, Beauty responds from some deep inner need which he awakens. (There are echoes here of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ too.) The Beast, formerly the stigmatizing envelope of the fallen male, has become a badge of the salvation he offers; Beauty used to grapple with the material and emotional difficulties of matrimony for young women; now she tends to personify female erotic pleasures in matching and mastering a man who is dark and hairy, rough and wild, and, in the psychotherapist Robert Bly’s phrase, in touch with the Inner Warrior in himself.54
In her encounter with the Beast, the female protagonist meets her match, in more ways than one. If she defeats him, or even kills him, if she outwits him, banishes or forsakes him, or accepts him and loves him, she arrives at some knowledge she did not possess; his existence and the challenge he offers is necessary before she can grasp it. The ancient tale of ‘Cupid and Psyche’ told of their love; apart from the child Pleasure whom Psyche bore, their other descendants – the tales in the Beauty and the Beast group – number among the most eloquent testaments to women’s struggles, against arranged marriage, and towards a definition of the place of sexuality in love. The enchantments and disenchantments of the Beast have been a rich resource in stories women have made up, among themselves, to help, to teach, to warn.
CHAPTER 19
The Runaway Girls: Donkeyskin I
After her father’s proposal of marriage, the daughter takes flight in disguise. Catherine Deneuve as Peau d’Ane in The Magic Dpnkey, directed by Jacques Demy, 1971.
The pagan father …
Began to think about his daughter night and day.
His fears were so great
That he decided to have a tower built,
A tower more beautiful than any ever seen.
Gautier de Coinci1
THE LAW FORBIDDING sex between mother and son, father and daughter, brother and sister, holds universally in human society; it is sometimes extended to include cousins and god-siblings within its interdiction, but it always remains a founding binary opposition on which the structural foundations of society are laid.2 Because storytellers finger the heathen and the apostate, separate the saved from the damned, the well-behaved from the badly behaved, the transgressor from the insider, the tales that a ‘Sibyl-nurse’ traditionally passes on pinpoint differences between good and evil in matters of faith and doctrine and custom. In setting riddles which clarify such matters, the Queen of Sheba, for example, not only foreshadows the figure of the storyteller herself, but also embodies the function of the tale itself, as the arbiter of family relations and social order, conveying and instructing the audience, especially the young audience, in what is licit and illicit, what will earn praise and reward, and what will forfeit it. It was to fulfil this function that so many of her riddles circulating in fifteenth-century Europe focussed on the rules of exogamy and the incest taboo.3 Myths and folklore wrestle with defining and conveying its importance: the mother-son prohibition underlies the story of Oedipus, a founding myth both in its Sophoclean, tragic form and in its potent Freudian afterlife. Incest between father and daughter has not dominated Western mythology or mythological analysis to the same degree; but it makes a strong showing in fairy tale.
Giambattista Basile included in the Pentamerone the first modern variation on one of the most familiar fairy tales in Europe. His story is called ‘L’Orsa’ (The She-Bear): ‘There was once a King of Roccaspra,’ it begins, ‘who had for his wife the very mother of beauty, but he lost her early, for in the gallop of life she fell from the horse of health and broke her life …’4
The couple have a daughter, called Preziosa, Precious. On her deathbed, her mother demands on the pain of horrible curses that her husband should never marry again, unless he finds ‘another woman as beautiful as I have been’.
He swears; she dies; he rails with grief and weeps rivers of tears. But, as Basile says – and in Naples cynicism was an essential of survival – ‘the ache of the widower is like the ache in the funny-bone, sharp, but brief’. So he soon begins looking around him for a new wife to replace his beloved, and give him an heir – a son. He holds a contest, has candidates summoned from the four quarters; but none will do. Then the thought strikes him, ‘Why should I seek [high and low] when Preziosa, my daughter, is made in the same form as her mother? I have this lovely face by me at home, and yet I go to the ends of the earth to find another like it?’
He puts the matter to the girl, but she reproaches him bitterly. He explodes: ‘Make up your mind to tie the marriage knot this very night; for otherwise your ear will be the biggest bit left of you!’ When Preziosa hears this, she goes to her room in desperation and an old woman, a servant who ‘used to bring her mercury’ for her toilette, appears and comforts her. She also gives Prez
iosa practical advice, handing her a little stick and telling her to put it in her mouth when her father ‘wants to play the part of a stallion, though there’s more of the ass in him’. She promises her, ‘You will then immediately become a bear, and can run away …’
The wedding feast takes place that night; the bride is summoned to her father’s bed. There she does as the old woman had told her, and escapes from her terrified father in the shape of a bear. As she wanders in the forest in this disguise, a prince out hunting spots her, and captures her. One day, when passing the den in the palace gardens where the bear has been confined, he sees a young woman combing her golden hair. Preziosa the she-bear has taken the stick out of her mouth and become a girl again, thinking no one was looking. He falls in love with the mysterious stranger and, finally, after many vicissitudes, discovers that she and the bear are one and the same, and marries her. The prince’s mother, on hearing Preziosa’s story, extols her as a good, virtuous girl. Basile concludes, optimistically, ‘Thus Preziosa was the sounding rod to the balance of human judgement, which declares that “To those who do good, good always comes.”’
Some of the elements in this happy and reassuring story are very recognizable: the disguised princess whose virtue and beauty are at last acknowledged and properly rewarded by union with a prince, after an older woman has helped her escape her troubles, relates Basile’s ‘L’Orsa’ to the Cinderella cycle of folk tales.5 But the story differs in obvious ways from the classic fairy tale, the version told by Charles Perrault. There, of course, Cinderella is not wronged by her father, but by her stepmother and her daughters, Cinderella’s stepsisters. The more familiar story enfolds within it, not like a worm in the bud, but like the hollow in the core of an agate pebble, the motif of incestuous desire.