The perennially beloved tale of Beauty and the Beast has been told in dozens of different ways throughout the years. From its origins in far off days as a myth of a god and a mortal, to its presence on the Broadway stage of today, Beauty and the Beast has touched the hearts of men and women for centuries. Because of the tale’s origins in those far off days and it’s molding in the 19th century, the story has continuously been changed according to the times. In Beauty and the Beast the reader can get a sense of how a previous era viewed the “other” in society and how a faithful woman could tame the wildness that surrounded her.
One of the first Beauty and the Beast stories comes from Norway, and is known as East of the Sun and West of the Moon. In this story (a version of the even older Cupid and Psyche) the youngest daughter of a peasant is given to a bear in exchange for the wealth that the man needs to provide for his family. The bear is revealed to be a handsome prince, placed under this spell by a troll-hag, to be broken only if the woman he loves will not see him for a year. The girl follows the foolish advice of her mother and looks before the appointed time, thus losing her prince. But instead of mourning her loss, the girl sets out for the palace that lies “east of the sun and west of the moon” to rescue him from marrying an ugly troll princess. Because of her determination, she wins back her husband from the evil trolls (Moe).
The Heroine of East of the Sun is among the most tenacious fairy tale heroines. The plight of the girl in East of the Sun and its sister tale The Black Bull of Norroway is summed up by Marcia L. Lieberman this way: “The girls travel to the ends of the earth seeking them, but they cannot make themselves seen or recognized by their men until the last moment.” These determined girls are willing to work for their “happily ever afters”, and eventually make their way to them through their own cunning.
The story The Black Bull of Norroway is very similar to East of the Sun. In this story, a young girl, the youngest of three sisters sets out to seek her fortune. While her other sisters get fine men as husbands, she is shoved on the back of a black bull. She and the bull travel along for some time, until the bull must fight the “old one” to be free of his enchantment. He tells her not to move until he comes back, else he will not be able to find her. The girl moves before the bull comes back and she ends up searching for him and working for a blacksmith for seven years to earn a pair of shoes so she can climb up a glass hill to where he is. In the end, after enduring hardship and trickery, the girl and her now human knight are reunited and are married and “are living still” (Jacobs).
Many folklorists see these tales as harkening back to an earlier time, when belief that a human could transform into an animal was widespread. J.A. Macculloch summarizes:
“The idea of enchantment, itself primitive, has been made use of to give an earlier story more interest, especially at a time when beast-marriage pure and simple had become a revolting conception. But before that stage was reached many stories existed in which the hero could transform himself. He was one of a class of animals who are human in their native element.”
Because of shamanic beliefs like having the ability to shapeshift was so widespread, it could be believed that a seemingly ordinary animal could be a handsome suitor in disguise.
In Leprince de Beaumont’s Beauty and the Beast it is again the youngest of sisters, known as Beauty, who is given to a beast. This beast is a courteous fellow, and treats Beauty with the utmost kindness and gentility, asking only to dine with her once a day and at this meal he asks for her hand, and every time Beauty says no, but treasures him as a friend. One day, Beauty asks to be allowed to go home, the beast lets her go, but tells her if she stays longer than a week it will be the death of him. Beauty does go home but almost forgets her promise, and returns just in time to save the beast. The beast is transformed into a handsome prince and marries Beauty and they live in happiness ever afterward.
Because of the wide usage of motifs in each version of Beauty and the Beast, and the different cultural trappings, they have been gently molded throughout the years to emphasize different themes of the story. In the Victorian age, for example, it was meant to teach girls how to become ladies, but in the tale revised by Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Beauty is an industrious girl who, when her family is dispossessed, takes it upon herself to make home improvements. Beauty takes up a hammer and makes her adjustments herself, rather than advise safely from the floor (Talairach-Vielmas). This sort of inventiveness and industry were expected of a Victorian lady, but this Beauty’s independence is what makes her different and what has always made her unique among fairy tale heroines.
The Beast in Victorian days was simply a metaphor for the type of man a girl could hope to marry – virtuous and wealthy. It would be expected of a girl to submit to her father’s choice of husband, but it would be up to her to make sure the marriage was a happy one, through her industry and good manners (Talairach-Vielmas). This seems like a very old fashioned concept today, but it was the way girls were educated in the Victorian age.
As for the most famous scribe of Beauty and the Beast, Madame Jeanne-Marie Leprince De Beaumont was a lady ahead of her time. After an unhappy marriage, Mme. Beaumont was governess to a succession of upper-class French and English young ladies. She wrote essays and stories for them and for several magazines for ladies. In these writings, her heroines take the lead, performing tasks when the men in their lives are powerless to help them, a predicament that her version of Beauty finds herself in. This early feminist-style thought won her both friends and enemies in the literary world, but her writings were popular among the girls she sought to educate (Schaller).
In the realm of other literary forms, the theme of an unattractive man in love with a beautiful woman is a constant, but most of the time it does not end as well as it does in the fairy tale. Beaumont’s fellow French author Edmond Rostand wrote about such a pair in his play Cyrano de Bergerac. The plot is familiar to many – a man with an enormous nose tries to win the heart of a beautiful woman – but few people realize the explicit connection with Beauty and the Beast. In act five, Cyrano is dying in the arms of Roxanne, the beautiful woman he loves and she begs him to stay with her, as she realizes that it is Cyrano that she loved for so long. Cyrano tells her “In the fairy tale, when Beauty said ‘I love you’ to the prince, his ugliness melted away like snow in the warmth of the sun, but as you can see, those words have no such magic effect on me” (Rostand, 220).
Rostand was very deliberate about his reference, and so people who read his work today recognize the parallels. Elizabeth G. Mascia, a seventh grade English teacher writing in English Journal, explained how she did a unit for her students all about the connection between Cyrano and Beauty and the Beast. She read them Leprince de Beaumont’s version of the story as well as several other versions before reading Cyrano and the students came to the conclusion that perhaps the prevalence of the Beauty and the Beast story can be linked to the fact that all humans have the same needs and feelings (Mascia). The desire to love and be loved yet feeling unworthy of love because of some real or imagined fault is rooted deeply in human beings and this is ultimately where the appeal of this story lies.
The spirit of Beauty and the Beast did not stop with Cyrano, but lived on in a pulp novel by a man named Gaston Leroux. Leroux’s novel, The Phantom of the Opera, was the story of a hideously deformed composer with a heavenly voice and the beautiful chorus girl who he trains and grooms to become the prima donna of the Paris Opera. While the novel was unsuccessful in its original run, it found new life on the Broadway stage. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical based on the novel became a smash hit on Broadway, popular and beloved wherever it is performed. In the musical, Christine – the Beauty – is being tutored by the Phantom – the Beast – who loves her, but in an obsessive fashion where he will murder or harm anyone who stands in his way to having Christine as his wife or having her triumph on the stage. Playing the part of the handsome prince is Raoul, the man who loves Christine and wants to rescue her from the Phantom’s clutches.
Much of the commentary about Phantom and its relationship to its folkloric archetypes comes from the realm of psychology. Kathryn E. Wildgen in Symposium explains;
“At the end of the play, Erik/Shadow does not die as he does in the novel; he is transformed, defanged, redeemed, and integrated into the whole. Like Death, he has lost his sting. His redemption is at the hands of Christine… He will no longer interfere precisely because he has been unmasked and perceived in all his horror and ugliness and nonetheless embraced. Beauty has tamed the Beast, who no longer has the power to frighten.”
These archetypes make the Phantom a creature that is understood, and the audience comes to understand that there is a little of each of the characters in each of them.
The principal above applies to all the versions of Beauty and the Beast, each version presents the audience with the “other”, a shadow that must be faced before the true beauty can be seen. In the stories, the audience comes to realize that the Beast is a reflection of the part of themselves that they would like to keep hidden, their hidden flaws and foibles that make them feel unworthy of love, or even their larger flaws such as a temper or madness that must be faced before they can enter society. Beauty represents the gentling influences of society, smoothing out and confronting the flaws in the audience and unifying all of the aspects of the character so they can rejoin the greater world. These ideas speak to the audience in different ways, to comfort in the case of the Victorian girls the fairy tale was written for, to entertain in the case of Cyrano in its comi-tragic tone, and to teach in the case of The Phantom of the Opera. The spirit of the tale at its most basic is the lesson of not judging someone by the way they look, but rather judging them by their actions, which is a lesson that every member of the audience can learn from.
Beauty and the Beast is a fairy tale for all time. The universal lessons of acceptance and being able to see past the surface are ones that every generation needs. All the different ways that it is presented, from primitive tale to morality story to play to musical, present slightly different views on a similar theme, but in each they give the audience the feeling that seeing and reading should help them see the world differently. Not so shallow, not judging by their looks, but instead with actions, and loving despite flaws. Beauty and the Beast is not just a beautiful story, it is a cultural picture, one that is meant to be shared with every generation.
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