There is an upside to what feels to us at times like thinly disguised treacle and misleading advice. Earlier folk versions of the story did not engage in the kind of messaging found in Madame de Beaumont’s story. But they did indulge in tableaus of sexual assault and grotesque violence. That there are multiple alternatives to the social norms presented in “Beauty and the Beast” becomes evident not only in recent recastings of the story by Angela Carter and others but also in earlier versions that found their way into print. Consider the reckless possibilities inherent in tales about girls who marry pigs, hedgehogs, snakes, frogs, or donkeys and the ways in which folk raconteurs no doubt elaborated on courtship rituals and grew expansive about the wedding night. When the transformation from beast to man does not take place until the morning after—or many mornings later, as in Straparola’s “Pig King” in the Neapolitan Pleasant Nights—it is not difficult to extract humor from the bedroom scenes:
When the time had come to retire for the night, the bride went to bed and awaited her unseemly spouse. As soon as he climbed into bed, she raised the cover and told him to come lie next to her and put his head upon the pillow.…
In the morning, the pig got up and ranged abroad to pasture, as was his wont. Not much later the queen entered the bride’s chamber, expecting to find that she had met with the same fate as her sisters. But then she saw her lying in the bed, muddy as it was, looking entirely pleased and contented. And she thanked the Lord that her son had at last found a spouse that suited him.
Imagine how the grotesqueries of the Russian “Snotty goat” (“snot ran down his nose, slobber ran down his mouth”)7 and the Italian “Mouse with the Long Tail” (“a tail a mile long that smelled to high heaven”)8 might have enlivened long evenings devoted to household chores. That the jokes could take a crude, vulgar turn at the expense of the fabled beauties in the tales rarely curbed the impulse to improvise, embellish, and entertain. Here is a scene from “Hans My Hedgehog,” a tale collected by the Brothers Grimm for the entertainment of children: Hans collects a princess as a reward and returns home with her. On the road, he pulls off her “beautiful clothes” and sticks her with his quills until she is “covered in blood.” “That’s what you get for trying to trick me,” he tells her, “Go back home. I no longer want you.”
These animal-groom stories offered more than just the opportunity for pointed wisecracks, spirited banter, and bawdy humor. The heroine of “The Snotty Goat,” for example, is no self-effacing Beauty. She is described as “not a bit squeamish,” willing to tolerate the vulgar habits of her betrothed yet also defiantly slapping the cheeks of anyone who tries to belittle her. Defiance is, in fact, a characteristic trait of many of the folkloric heroines who find themselves pestered by beasts. In the Grimms’ “The Three Little Birds,” the heroine and her two brothers encounter a large black dog that turns into a “handsome prince” after being struck in the face. The fairy-tale heroine who reacts with aversion, loathing, or anger to the beastly exterior of her prospective spouse seems no less likely to effect a magical transformation than her tenderly affectionate or compassionate counterpart.
The Grimms’ “Frog King, or Iron Heinrich” (see here), although classified by folklorists as a tale type separate from “Beauty and the Beast,” bears a distinct family resemblance to it. Like Beauty, the princess in the Grimms’ tale encounters an animal suitor, but, despite her father’s admonition (“You shouldn’t scorn someone who helped you when you were in trouble” [see here]), she balks at the idea of letting the frog into her bed. Flying into a rage, she hurls the erotically ambitious frog against the wall: “Now you’ll get your rest, you disgusting frog!” (see here).
Some variant forms of the Grimms’ tale feature a princess who admits the frog to her chambers despite his revolting appearance, but most give us a princess who is perfectly capable of committing acts rivaling the cold-blooded violence of dashing a creature against a wall. Scottish and Gaelic versions of “The Frog King” show the princess beheading her suitor. A Polish variant replaces the frog with a snake and recounts in lavish detail the princess’s act of tearing the creature in two. A more tame Lithuanian text requires the burning of the snake’s skin before the prince is freed from his reptilian state. Acts of passion as much as acts of compassion have the power to disenchant. Although the princess in “The Frog King” is self-absorbed, ungrateful, and cruel, in the end she does as well for herself as all of the modest, obedient, and charitable Beauties that follow in the wake of Madame de Beaumont’s story.
Tales about animal brides and animal grooms stand as models for plots rich in opportunities for expressing anxieties about marriage. Over the years, however, Beast has usurped the leading role. As Marina Warner points out, “the attractions of the wild, and of the wild brother in twentieth-century culture, cannot be overestimated; as the century advanced, in the cascade of deliberate revisions of the tale, Beauty stands in need of the Beast, rather than vice versa, and the Beast’s beastliness is good, even adorable.”9 While eighteenth- and nineteenth-century versions of the tale celebrated the civilizing power of feminine virtue and its triumph over crude animal instincts, our own culture hails Beast’s heroic defiance of civilization, with all its discontents, from the economic to the ecological.
The happy ending to Angela Carter’s “Tiger’s Bride” (see here) reverses the traditional terms of “Beauty and the Beast.” Fulfilling a contract requiring her to strip before a tiger masquerading as a man, the heroine approaches her oppressor as if offering “the key to a peaceable kingdom in which his appetite need not be my extinction” (see here). Haunted by the “fear of devourment” (see here), she nonetheless has the temerity to approach Beast, and, in a flash of impressive courage, submits to a bargain that subjects her to something “harsh” and “abrasive”:
He dragged himself closer and closer to me, until I felt the harsh velvet of his head against my hand, then a tongue, abrasive as sandpaper. “He will lick the skin off me!”
And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shining hairs. My earrings turned back to water and trickled down my shoulders; I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur. (see here)
Beast delivers Beauty from the abject condition of being human as the artificiality of culture, symbolized by the earrings, yields to nature and returns to its primordial state.
Jon Scieszka plays fast and loose with the ground rules of folk narratives in his recasting of “The Frog King” for children, The Frog Prince, Continued. His story, which begins after the transformation into a prince, reveals “the shocking truth about life ‘happily ever after.’ ”10 “The princess and the prince live in such bitter marital discord that the prince flees, searching for a witch who can turn him back into a frog.” Yet in the end, as in the conclusion to “The Tiger’s Bride,” an authentic happy end is found in a return to nature for the two partners: “The Prince kissed the Princess. They both turned into frogs. And they hopped off happily ever after.”11 Scieszka has done more than give a clever new twist to an old tale. He has effected a profound ideological shift, transforming the tale from one that celebrates the superiority of culture over nature to one that concedes nature’s triumph over culture. Human beings, as it turns out, are the real beasts.
The profound shift in cultural values registered in Carter’s “Tiger’s Bride” and Scieszka’s Frog Prince, Continued also finds expression in the Disney Studio version of Beauty and the Beast. The true villain in this cinematic tale is Gaston (Beast’s rival for Belle), a man who endorses the rigid, self-destructive logic of Western civilization and sanctions ecological depredation. Disney’s Beast, virile yet sensitive, remains attuned to nature and open to the notion of regeneration by cultivating his feminine side. The Disney version in this particular case gives us a Beast-centered narrative devoted almost exclusively to the development of the male figure in the story. Warner finds in Belle nothing but a cover f
or telling the story of Beast: “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.”12
The Hollywood dream factory has also rebelled against the literary tradition of compassionate Beauties and abject Beasts. It seems almost ironic that Disney’s 1991 film is in the vanguard of that rebellion, turning Beast into a charismatic creature so winning in his animal state that Beauty seems mildly disappointed with the Fabio-lookalike who stands before her after the transformation. Dreamworks’ computer-animated Shrek (2001) takes matters a step further when the heroine finds her Beast so attractive that she turns herself into a matching green monster. To be sure I am omitting discussion of a host of other cinematic rescriptings, from Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête (1946) to Mike Nicholson’s Wolf (1994) and Daniel Barnz’s Beastly (2011). But a look at what Disney and Dreamworks are up to goes far toward clarifying the uses of enchantment and how Beast has reclaimed his animal magnetism even as Beauty remains an allegorical figure that compassionately embraces otherness.
Although Disney’s Beauty and the Beast marks a dramatic intervention in how the story has been framed, the lyrics to the most prominent song in the film emphasize the truth of the old refrain “Plus ça change, plus c’est le même chose.” Belle and Beast display their ballroom skills to the tune of Angela Lansbury singing “Tale as old as time / True as it can be.” The song itself is “as old as rhyme” and all is “ever just the same” and “ever just as sure / as the sun will rise.” And yet the kaleidoscope has been given a decisive critical turn, one that reconfigures the relationship between heroine and beast, with a young woman who stands up to Beast, even if his overpowering visual dominance shrinks her own importance.
Animal brides and animal grooms function as mediators between nature and culture. They are “impossible” hybrid creatures that help us negotiate that divide, to construct our own realities and identities through the dialectical interplay between the animal and human kingdom. Stories featuring these creatures, often as charismatic as they are monstrous, take up matters both primal and mythical as well as domestic and down to earth. As humans, we have distanced ourselves from nature, set ourselves apart as a separate breed, and yet we are perpetually drawn to the wild side, searching for an understanding of what we share with beasts even as we try to discover what makes us human.
* * *
1. Barbara Fass Leavy, In Search of the Swan Maiden: A Narrative on Folklore and Gender (New York: New York UP, 1994), p. 2.
2. Lee Edwards, “The Labors of Psyche: Toward a Theory of Female Heroism,” Critical Inquiry 6 (1979): 37.
3. Angela Carter, “About the Stories,” in Sleeping Beauty and Other Favourite Fairy Tales, ed. Angela Carter (Boston: Otter, 1991), p. 128.
4. “East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon,” in The Blue Fairy Book, ed. Andrew Lang (Harmondsworth: Penguin, Puffin, 1987), p. 2.
5. Giambattista Basile, “Serpent,” in The Pentamerone, trans. Benedetto Croce, ed. N. M. Penzer (New York: Bodley Head, 1932), I:163.
6. Angela Carter, “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon,” in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1993), p. 45.
7. Alexander Afanasev, “The Snotty Goat,” in Russian Fairy Tales, trans. Norbert Guterman (New York: Pantheon, 1945), p. 201.
8. “The Mouse with the Long Tail,” in Italian Folktales, trans. George Martin, comp. Italo Calvino (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 653.
9. Marina Warner, “Go Be a Beast: Beauty and the Beast II,” in From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994), p. 307.
10. Jon Scieszka, The Frog Prince, Continued (New York: Viking, 1991).
11. Ibid.
12. Warner, “Go Be a Beast,” p. 314.
JEANNE-MARIE LEPRINCE DE BEAUMONT
Beauty and the Beast†
Once upon a time there was a very wealthy merchant who lived with his six children, three boys and three girls. Since he was a man of intelligence and good sense, he spared no expense in educating his children and hiring all kinds of tutors for them. His daughters were all very beautiful, but the youngest was admired by everyone. When she was little, people used to refer to her as “the beautiful child.” The name “Beauty” stuck, and, as a result, her two sisters were always very jealous. The youngest daughter was not only more beautiful than her sisters, she was also better behaved. The two older sisters were vain and proud because the family had money. They tried to act like ladies of the court and paid no attention at all to girls from merchant families. They chose to spend time only with people of rank. Every day they went to balls, to the theater, to the park, and they made fun of their younger sister, who spent most of her time reading good books.
Since the girls were known to be very wealthy, many prominent merchants were interested in marrying them. But the two older sisters always insisted that they would never marry unless they found a duke or, at the very least, a count. Beauty (as I noted, this was the name of the youngest daughter) very politely thanked all those who proposed to her, but she told them that she was still too young for marriage and that she planned to keep her father company for some years to come.
Out of the blue, the merchant lost his fortune, and he had nothing left but a small country house quite far from town. With tears in his eyes, he told his children that they would have to live in that house from now on and that, by working there like peasants, they could manage to make ends meet. The two elder daughters said that they did not want to leave town and that they had many admirers who would be more than happy to marry them, even though they were no longer wealthy. But the fine young ladies were wrong. Their admirers had lost all interest in them now that they were poor. And since they were disliked because of their pride, people said: “Those two girls don’t deserve our sympathy. It’s quite satisfying to see pride take a fall. Let them play the ladies while tending their sheep.”
At the same time, people were saying: “As for Beauty, we are very upset by her misfortune. She’s such a good girl! She speaks so kindly to the poor. She is so sweet and sincere.”
There were a number of gentlemen who would have been happy to marry Beauty, even though she didn’t have a penny. She told them that she could not bring herself to abandon her poor father in his distress and that she would go with him to the country in order to comfort him and help him with his work. Poor Beauty had been upset at first by the loss of the family fortune, but she said to herself: “No matter how much I cry, my tears won’t bring our fortune back. I must try to be happy without it.”
When they arrived at the country house, the merchant and his three sons began working the land. Beauty got up every day at four in the morning and started cleaning the house and preparing breakfast for the family. It was hard for her at first, because she was not used to working like a servant. At the end of two months, however, she became stronger, and the hard work made her very healthy. After finishing her housework, she read or sang while spinning. Her two sisters, on the other hand, were bored to tears. They got up at ten in the morning, took walks all day long, and talked endlessly about the beautiful clothes they used to wear.
“Look at our sister,” they said to each other. “She is so stupid and such a simpleton that she is perfectly satisfied with her miserable lot.”
The good merchant did not agree with his daughters. He knew that Beauty could stand out in company in a way that her sisters could not. He admired the virtue of his daughter, above all her patience. The sisters not only made her do all the housework, they also insulted her whenever they could.
The family had lived an entire year in se
clusion when the merchant received a letter informing him that a ship containing his merchandise had just arrived safely in its home port. The news made the two elder sisters giddy with excitement, for they thought they would finally be able to leave the countryside where they were so bored. When they saw that their father was ready to leave, they begged him to bring them dresses, furs, laces, and all kinds of baubles. Beauty did not ask for anything, because she thought that all the money from the merchandise would not be enough to buy everything her sisters wanted.
“Don’t you want me to buy anything for you?” asked her father.
“You are so kind to think of me,” Beauty answered. “Can you bring me a rose, for there are none here?”
It was not that Beauty was anxious to have a rose, but she did not want to set an example that would make her sisters look bad. Her sisters would have said that she was asking for nothing in order to make herself look good.
The good man left home, but when he arrived at the port he found that there was a lawsuit over his merchandise. After much trouble, he set off for home as impoverished as he had been on his departure. He had only thirty miles left to go and was already overjoyed at the prospect of seeing his children again when he had to cross a dense forest and got lost. There was a fierce snowstorm, and the wind was so strong that it knocked him off his horse twice. When night fell, he was sure that he was going to die of hunger or of the cold or that he would be eaten by the wolves that he could hear howling all around. All of a sudden he saw a bright light at the end of a long avenue of trees. The bright light seemed very far away. He walked in its direction and realized that it was coming from an immense castle that was completely lit up. The merchant thanked God for sending help, and he hurried toward the castle. He was surprised that no one was in the courtyard. His horse went inside a large, open stable, where he found some hay and oats. The poor animal, near death from hunger, began eating voraciously. The merchant tied the horse up in the stable and walked toward the house, where not a soul was in sight. Once he entered the great hall, however, he found a warm fire and a table laden with food, with just a single place setting. Since the rain and snow had soaked him to the bone, he went over to the fire to get dry. He thought to himself: “The master of the house, or his servants, will not be offended by the liberties I am taking. No doubt someone will be back soon.”
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