ABSTRACT
Once upon a time, so goes a variant of the old fairy tale, there was a wealthy merchant who, by a combination of bad management and ill fortune lost all his possessions. He fell into the hands of a Beast, who offered to rescue him from his impoverished state on condition that he would give his youngest daughter, Beauty, to be the Beast’s wife. Beauty loved her father and agreed to marry the Beast. At the time appointed, she moved to the Beast’s house, only to find that although she was given lavish food and accommodation and all her wants are satisfied, she was never permitted to see the Beast, who came to her only in the darkest hours of the night. At last she decided to go back home. She dreamed, however, that the Beast was pining for her; so she rushed back and kissed him, brushing away the great tears that were rolling down his cheeks. And behold, before her stood a handsome prince, released by her tenderness from the frightful beastliness in which he had been trapped …1
Now, those with feminist consciousness will be quick to point out that, as the story stands, it reinforces all the old gender stereotypes: the beauty and compassion of the virgin daughter, the improvident father who is willing to treat his daughter as an object of exchange, the violent ugliness of the beast/ prince from which only a woman’s love will permit him to escape. But feminism has taught us more than how to recognize stereotypes. It has also encouraged us to use our imagination to look at things from another point of view, to retell old tales from another perspective: the story of Ariadne’s web, say, or of Penelope’s weaving, from Greek mythology, or the biblical stories from the point of view of Eve or Hagar or Bathsheba. How if we were to retell the fairy tale of Beauty and the Beast? It might go something like this. Once upon a time there was a spoiled brat of a prince who was very con-
fused – so confused that he hardly knew it himself. He was strong and handsome and deep down he wanted to be good; but in his social world he had learned that to be a real he-man prince he had to growl and swagger and use his big muscles to assert his power and be generally beastly. Especially, he had to compete with other men for beautiful women. So when the improvident merchant fell into his hands one weekend between his many wars, he jumped at the chance of taking his beautiful daughter, whom the cowardly old fool
was willing to sacrifice to save his own skin. The beast’s first impulse was to kill her and gobble her up, even though he knew that her brothers might come and fight him in revenge: he loved big fights where he could prove that he was bigger than all of them. But when he saw the girl and noticed how very beautiful she was, he was disturbed and her beauty made him even more confused. Up to now he had always had what he wanted; but he could not have his bride and eat her too. Instead of telling her what was the matter, he hid his real self from her and became more and more morose. At last he sat down and began to cry. Beauty could see, of course, that he was being a great baby, but she came over to him, kissed him, and appealed to his deep-down goodness: ‘Oh, do grow up! Can’t you see that there are better ways of being a man than strutting around competing with other men and generally being beastly?’ And very gradually the good in him responded to her beauty and he became a truly handsome prince. He still growls a lot, and sometimes struts about, but he has become much less likely to eat people. Best of all, he doesn’t need to be constantly fighting to prove that he is a man. (But as for Beauty’s father, what can be done about a man who is willing to
exchange his daughter for the sake of saving his own skin?) The retelling obviously does not escape all the stereotypes. The gender
characteristics of Beauty are still conventional: the pure and lovely female effects the salvation of a brute of a man. Also significant, though less often noticed, is that the tale (both in its original form and in its retelling) is, like many western stories, rather hard on beasts: why should animals be made the repository for what are, after all, human faults? Most importantly of all, the moral of the story should come with a health warning: women held in captivity by brutal men should not feel it their duty to try to transform them by love and kisses, when they have every right to escape. It is all too easy for the fairy tale to be used as yet one more story that implicitly condones male violence against women, who should bear it patiently as they try to win over their mixed-up men. Nevertheless, the fairy tales and old stories of any culture are sediments of
that culture’s attitudes and values, often at a barely conscious level. They can be examined in many different ways, turned over in the mind to reveal ways of thinking that we might otherwise not have recognized. Bruno Bettleheim, for instance, has offered an analysis of some of the best-known fairy tales of western culture from a psychoanalytical perspective, the story of Beauty and the Beast among them (Bettleheim 1989: 303-10). In religion, too, myths and stories are used to convey multi-faceted ideas. Biblical writers piled story upon story to give an account of the beginning of the world, the early life of Israel, or a portrait of Jesus whom they named as Christ. Centuries of biblical scholars have solemnly debated the historicity of this or that account, but in the popular imagination it is not the historical accuracy so much as the pictorial representation that has formed the symbolic universe of western consciousness.
