Megan Kearney on BATB

I love Megan Kearney's impressively concise summary of the history of the relationship development between Beauty and the Beast over time! Read her whole reply here, summary below:

 "So, in trying to sum up, traditionally Beauty and the Beast has been a story about a young woman’s journey to accepting an unconventional male partner. In the twentieth century, it become a popular metaphor for the awakening of female sexuality and power. Now, more and more, we see it as a metaphor for the channeling of negative masculinity into positive masculinity. The story evolves. We pull new meaning from it, stretch it this way and that, examine it in the mirror, and take it apart to see how it ticks. It changes to suit our cultural needs, and it will continue to change."

Art by David Sala

Lives of the Writers of BATB Stories

"Beauty and the Beast" emerged from a long line of Animal Bridegroom tales in France around the 1700s. Some sources credit Madame de Beaumont as the author of the tale, but her version is heavily influenced by other stories that preceded her. In a tale that revolves around marriage ideals, it's a story that can be very personal, and the lives of the authors influenced their versions of the classic fairy tale.

1696-1698- Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy's The Ram

At the young age of 15, d'Aulnoy was married off to a man notorious for a reputation as a gambler and extramarital lover. She took some lovers on the side herself, but it was a very unhappy marriage. d'Aulnoy attempted, later in life, to have her husband hung for high treason, but the attempt failed; her husband retaliated by charging herself and her lover. She fled to Paris where she became a successful writer.

d'Aulnoy wrote several fairy tales, but her Animal Bridegroom tale, "The Ram," ends tragically, with the Beast figure/Ram dying of heartache just outside of the castle gates, where his wife was attending his sister's wedding. d'Aulnoy wrote other stories with happier endings, but it's interesting that her attempt at killing her actual husband found outlet in this story. She certainly wasn't naive about what could happen in marriage when she penned her version of this romantic line of fairy tales.

1712-1714-Jean-Paul Bignon's Princess Zeineb and King Leopard


Jean-Paul Bignon was a priest and a scholar. Perhaps not surprisingly, the emphasis in his Animal Bridegroom tale seemed to be on sexual restraint; King Leopard spends every night in bed with Princess Zeineb but does not touch her, while the villains attempt to have one night stands (but are hypnotized by Princess Zeineb into doing monotonous tasks through the night instead-although the other "morals" in this tale seem a little more arbitrary, that scene is very humorous).

Jack Zipes estimates that it was very likely Villeneuve knew this story. Interestingly, in her version, there's an episode that was removed later by Beaumont, in which after Beauty accepts the Beast's proposal, there's basically a repeat of the initial bedroom scene from Princess Zeineb-the Beast comes in to bed, lies down, but makes no move.


1740-Madame de Villeneuve's "Beauty and the Beast"

It's difficult to find much information on Villeneuve, even the very excellent books exploring the tradition of Beauty and the Beast by Betsy Hearne and Jerry Griswold gloss over her life and version of the tale and instead focus on Beaumont, which is a shame in my opinion.  Villeneuve certainly borrowed from tales like the ones above, but she clearly created the story we know of today as Beauty and the Beast, so knowing more about her would seem to shed more light on the tale.

Villeneuve was married at 21 but requested a separation after only 6 months, because her husband was squandering all of their wealth. Just a few years later, at the age of 26, she was widowed. She lost her fortune and had to work for a living. She lived with a boyfriend for the rest of her life and worked as a writer, a lifestyle virtually unheard of for the time.

Her version of the story set up the essential details we associate with the BATB tradition, with lengthy descriptions of what went on in the castle and detailed backstories included for the Beast and Beauty that tie together all the details. One emphasis of the tale was on marrying for kindness and not looks, wit, or class. Having experienced two significant relationships, Villeneuve had more perspective on what helped relationships work better in the long run-character and equality.




1756- Madame LePrince de Beaumont's "Beauty and the Beast"

Beaumont, like Beauty in her tale, was very well educated. She (like the women above) also entered into an arranged marriage with a womanizing man, and the marriage was annulled after 2 years. Beaumont moved to England and became a governess, also writing more than 70 books. At the age of 51 she returned to France and remarried, this time resulting in a happy marriage.

Beaumont simplified Villeneuve's longer story to create the beloved classic (without giving any credit to Villeneuve, incidentally). Her version (as well as Villeneuve's) empowered the female to have choice in marriage, yet did not go to the extreme of most French salon writers whose characters were swept up in passion and love at first sight (more on this in my post Beaumont on Arranged Marriages).

And of course, there are countless other tale tellers and audiences, whose life details we will never really know. How interesting, though, that in the French fairy tale salon period, perhaps the most influential versions of BATB were written by those on the outside of happy marriages (for most of their lives). Their stories contributed to the then-new idea of marrying for love and not just for social standing, and helped to make one of the most female empowered fairy tales that remains well known today.

Sources:
Jerry Griswold, "The Meanings of Beauty and the Beast: a Handbook"
Jack Zipes, "Beauties, Beasts, and Enchantments: Classic French Fairy Tales"
Wikipedia article on Villeneuve

Illustrations by Edmund Dulac

Megan Kearney on Relationship Development in BATB

Check out this fascinating post by Megan Kearney on BATBComic on the history of Beauty and the Beast, specifically focusing on character development.

Here are a couple excerpts:

"Most older variants of the story are interested in Beauty getting what she deserves —wealth, station and an appropriate mate. This makes sense, as it’s a story about a woman told by women —first at great length in Villeneuve’s novella, and then in a much shorter bowdlerized form by Beaumont. The primary concern of the story is Beauty being respectfully courted by a remarkable patient and good hearted, but ugly, individual. This is, heartbreakingly, a deeply romantic fantasy when we consider that its authors were women who had been foisted into loveless political marriages with less than kindhearted men — it’s the story of hoping the man with whom you are forced co-habitate will turn out to be a kind prince, in spite of first seeming to be an unknowable monster..."

And the conclusion:
"So, in trying to sum up, traditionally Beauty and the Beast has been a story about a young woman’s journey to accepting an unconventional male partner. In the twentieth century, it become a popular metaphor for the awakening of female sexuality and power. Now, more and more, we see it as a metaphor for the channeling of negative masculinity into positive masculinity. The story evolves. We pull new meaning from it, stretch it this way and that, examine it in the mirror, and take it apart to see how it ticks. It changes to suit our cultural needs, and it will continue to change."

Illustrations by Pavel Tatarnikov

Also...today Tales of Faerie turns six! A sincere thank you to all of you who have helped me on my journey to learning more about fairy tales!

cake image

Article, BBC News: Fairy Tale Origins Thousands of Years Old

My friend sent me a link to this article from BBC News, Fairy Tale Origins Thousands of Years Old, Researchers Say. An Excerpt:

"Dr Tehrani, who worked with folklorist Sara Graca Da Silva, from the New University of Lisbon, said: "We find it pretty remarkable these stories have survived without being written.

"They have been told since before even English, French and Italian existed. They were probably told in an extinct Indo-European language."

In the 19th Century, authors the Brothers Grimm believed many of the fairy tales they popularised, including Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel and Snow White, were rooted in a shared cultural history dating back to the birth of the Indo-European language family.

Later thinkers challenged that view, saying some stories were much younger and had been passed into oral tradition, having first been written down by writers from the 16th and 17th Centuries.

Dr Jamie Tehrani said: "We can come firmly down on the side of Wilhelm Grimm.

"Some of these stories go back much further than the earliest literary record and indeed further back than Classical mythology - some versions of these stories appear in Latin and Greek texts - but our findings suggest they are much older than that."

This article doesn't provide too many details beyond this (they reference a different article from Science News which basically says the same). They've used language analysis to do their studies, as opposed to the usual method of finding a tale referenced in writing. In a way it's no surprise to us that fairy tales existed, in some form, thousands of years ago. For example, we already know that "Beauty and the Beast" can be linked to "Cupid and Psyche" from the second century, and that that was probably based on oral tales. But according to the article, BATB is probably 3,000-4,000 years old. Yet the stories change so much over time, even "Cupid and Psyche" is significantly different than BATB. I wish the articles had more examples showing how they can be confident that these stories are "far older than the first literary evidence for them." Still, very interesting, and contradicts the literary source theory that Ruth Bottigheimer has put forth.

Illustrations by Walter Crane

UPDATE: Surlalune has posted on the CNN article which provides the link for the full study. I'm definitely not an expert in phylogenetic analysis and I probably wouldn't understand any of it anyway but I'll pretend it's because I haven't had enough coffee yet. If anyone wants to look it over and attempt to explain pertinent findings in layman's terms, please do! (I also don't feel too badly because Don Melvin, in the CNN article, humorously points out how wordy the study is)

UPDATE:  Zalka Csenge Virag also discussed the article on Multicolored Diary (and has far more intelligent, in depth things to say about the study than I!)

*Also, I've added a tag for fairy tale origins. It contains posts about the debate over ancient oral sources for fairy tales verses relatively recent literary sources, but also those theories about historical precedents for fairy tales, if you're interested!

Petrus and Catherine Gonsalvus: Historical Beauty and the Beast?

I've heard of people trying to find true historical precedents for fairy tale characters such as Bluebeard and Snow White, but despite all my readings on Beauty and the Beast, I had never heard of a supposedly historical Beast, until recently an anonymous commenter led me to this video on the smithsonianchannel. It tells of the story of Petrus Gonsalvus, a man with hypertrichosis, or Ambras syndrome-a body completely covered in hair.

You can read the basics of his life on Wikipedia. The video on smithsonian is about 46 minutes long, and details the life of Gonsalves, as well as some of the modern people who have the same rare condition, and some of the science behind it. The description claims: "It's a condition known as "hypertrichosis" or "Ambras Syndrome," but in the 1500s it would transform one man into a national sensation and iconic fairy-tale character. His name: Petrus Gonsalvus, more commonly known today as the hairy hero of Beauty and the Beast. Discover the facts behind the fable as we follow Petrus's remarkable life with a very rare and hairy genetic condition. Then learn about this medical phenomenon, which continues to fascinate and perplex scientists to this day."

It's quite a sad tale of how humans treat those who are different, especially in the 16th century. But the claim that Petrus Gonsalvus is not just coincidentally similar to the Beast, but the inspiration for the classic fairy tale, had me suspicious. No history of BATB I've ever read has cited this man as being part of the tale's history. Was this just another sensationalized show, exaggerating to get more views? The story is always linked back to the myth of "Cupid and Psyche". There is a long string of folklore between that and the Animal Bridegroom tales written in the French Salon period. I'm not sure if you can prove either way if those tales most similar to BATB were around before Gonsalvus, it's so hard to date the oral tales, but I think given how widespread Animal Bridegroom tales are all over the world, folklorists would say they were being told before Gonsalvus. The documentary hardly mentions the fairy tale at all until this at the end-"And even if there had been tales of Beauty and her love for the Beast before them, their lives must have influenced one of the most famous love stories in world literature."

It's an interesting theory. Given that the couple was well known at European courts, it's not impossible to assume that they would have been known to Basile, who included several Animal Bridegroom tales in his collection in the late 1600s, or later Villeneuve and her French contemporaries (D'Aulnoy's "The Ram" and Bignon's "Princess Zieneb and the Leopard" are very similar tales that predated Villeneuve's).

Petrus Gonsalvus was given a wife-a wife selected for her beauty, not told what her husband looked like, and ordered to marry by the Queen. Yet, the couple got along, and may have grown to fall in love-in the illustration above, the resting of Catherine's hand on her husband's shoulder is a sign of affection. They had seven children together-some of them with hypertrichosis (the only ones the public cared about). The family attempted to live a normal life, but were exploited by a public that did not see those with differences as entirely human-tragically, the children who inherited their father's condition were all given away as gifts to other European royalty.

Who else thinks that the story of Catherine Gonsalvus is just begging to be made into a novel by Kate Forsyth?

The Evolution of the Beast

Our perceptions of the beastly will not only affect how we read the story of "Beauty and the Beast", but other fairy tales such as "Little Red Riding Hood" and numerous others that feature animals.

Dog fight illustration-1870

To audiences hundreds of years ago, animals such as a wolf in the forest or a Beast demanding your daughter would have been truly frightening. When much of the land people lived in still contained wild animals, attacks would have been a regular risk. We tend to only see wild animals contained in zoos or translated into cute, fluffy toys for children-even the teddy bear is a relatively recent invention, thanks to Teddy Roosevelt.

Replica of the original Teddy Bear

Older folk versions of Animal Bridegroom tales feature husbands that were clearly ugly and undesirable. They were not man/beast hybrids that were essentially more hairy and masculine men; they were straight up animals who could also talk and desire brides. The Beast has been everything from pig to frog to snake. This unusual husband was never meant to be attractive.

Eleanor Vere Boyle, 1875

In Villeneuve's 1740 story that sparked the "Beauty and the Beast" tradition as we know it, although she was possibly the first to make the Beast a hybrid creature; he was, if anything, a more horrifying combination of animals-a trunk like an elephant and a scaly covering that clanked when he moved.

Anne Anderson, 1935

Anonymous, for the Charles Lamb poem-1887

Beaumont's 1756 story, a shorter version of Villeneuve's, was directed towards young girls as part of their moral education. In hers, the Beast is never given a specific description. For years, illustrators had full range of imagination when creating the Beast, but he was still, in general, animalistic, and completely undesirable husband material.

W. Heath Robinson, 1921

Charles Robinson, 1911

It may seem disturbing to indicate bestiality, or imagine such a union. There are a couple explanations for why authors suggested such a marriage. I think some of the tellers of earlier tales may have been trying to communicate the horrors of arranged marriage-young girls being forced to marry older men, sometimes abusive or domineering, but with no other option. By the time Beaumont wrote her version, the moral was more along the lines of how an obedient wife could transform a beastly husband into a gentleman. But Villeneuve is clear about her message: the importance of marrying not for looks, money, or wit, but how kindness and character are the most important qualities to look for in a husband.  The moral is enforced even more in some versions (such as Eleanor Vere Boyle's 1875 story) by contrasting Beauty's happiness to her sisters, who married for looks and wealth and regretted their decisions when their husbands ceased to treat them well. This moral is still often attached to the story today, the idea of looking beneath the surface: "do not judge by appearances, for beauty is found within."

Edmund Dulac-1910

H.J. Ford, 1889

But the image of the Beast has changed drastically since the days of Villeneuve and Beaumont. Two main things have happened: he has become tamed, and sexualized.

The more man took control of animals, the less fearsome wild animals became. They were now exciting, something to see in a circus or zoo or take home as a pet. Some images of the Beast became downright cute and cloying.

Clyde Beatty, lion tamer, 1932

My own plush Disney Beast doll

Jessie Wilcox Smith, 1911

A.L. Bowley, 1920

Margaret Evans Price, 1921

Over time, the Beast has also become more and more attractive. First he became more human, and now some versions of the "beast" aren't the least bit Beastly. You can think of the Phantom of the Opera as a modern version of BATB, and the Twilight series, to the men from the film "Beastly" and the CW show in which the men just have tattoos or, as one commentator said, "one tiny scar on his pretty pretty cheek."

Phantom of the Opera Film-2004 (Musical-1986, book-1909)

First Twilight book published 2005

Beastly-2011

The CW's Beauty and the Beast-2012-present

Once Upon a Time-Rumpelstiltskin/Beast-2011-present

These are the mainstream versions of BATB that most people are still familiar with. There are some more foward thinking authors who have taken the next step, which is to embrace the Beast's animal nature-he might not transform, he is considered atttractive the way he is; sometimes the Beauty character turns into an animal as well-in the writings of Angela Carter, Tanith Lee, Francesca Lia Block, and Robin McKinley. With these stories, his animalistic nature is thought to represent his sexual nature, which we no longer suppress the way they did in Victorian times. 

Disney's Beast-1991

Yet these examples, while they might represent some of the most modern takes on BATB, are ones that are generally read only by people who actively search out versions of BATB and other fairy tales, not by the general population. For the masses, the Beast is still a Disney buffalo-like creature, or a series of storybook illustrations. We don't find him fearsome anymore, in fact, there's this idea that it's Beauty's role to find him attractive-yet there are virtually no examples in which men are rewarded for loving a less-than-attractive woman ("Shrek" is a parody; other examples, like Gail Carson Levine's "Fairest," will probably never be read by boys anyway-other older fairy tales, such as "Green Snake" or variants of "Frog Princess", are virtually unknown). Many women are intrigued by the idea of loving the brooding, misunderstood genius, but we've lost that element of horror associated with marriage to a Beast.

Villeneuve and Marriage Ideals

It's kind of amazing to me how internet resources for fairy tales have exploded in the past few years. When I first found out that there was a longer, more intricate version of "Beauty and the Beast" that predated Beaumont's classic, I could only find vague references to the plot online, and even then they usually contradicted each other, which I later found out was because different translations of Villeneuve's French text can lead to significant changes in how the story is interpreted (and some online sources are flat out wrong, no matter which translation you use-see here and here). A big part of the reason I founded this blog was to search for answers in that mysterious and elusive text, and to hope I would find other people who were also curious and/or had answers for me.

In the last 10 years or so, Surlalune has expanded the history section of her Beauty and the Beast page to include more on this monumentally important version of the tale, and now accurate English translations are much more easily accessible through her Beauty and the Beast Tales From Around the World. Quill and Qwerty recently gave her own summary of the intricate backstories for the main characters-a very helpful resource if you want to know what happens without committing to the full story, which, depending on the edition, can be over 100 pages. I had done my own summaries for Beauty and the Beast's complicated backstories a few years ago, but I'm getting to the point where I'll read old posts from my own archives as if it's new information (isn't it amazing how much the human brain can forget over time?).

Still, there is so much to explore within the text that still remains unknown to the majority of people. When dealing with Beauty and the Beast, we've assigned it many themes, such as loving despite appearances, exploring our animal natures, etc., without consulting what is arguably the "original" text (Villeneuve based her 1740 tale off of earlier Animal Bridegroom tales, but it was definitely the biggest single influence on Beaumont's later shorter version and all consequent versions).

As I reviewed the text, including the backstories that many summaries omit altogether as being boring and unimportant, a repeated theme kept jumping out at me: that of marriage outside of one's social class. The cultural context sheds light on this, but even today, the more general message of loving without discrimination has much application for modern audiences.

Terri Windling provides excellent context: "The story she came up with was uniquely her own, however, and addressed issues of concern to women of her day. Chief among these was a critique of a marriage system in which women had few legal rights — no right to chose their own husband, no right to refuse the marriage bed, no right to control their own property, and no right of divorce. Often the brides were fourteen or fifteen years old, given to men who were decades older. Unsatisfactory wives risked being locked up in mental institutions or distant convents. Women fairy tale writers of the 17th & 18th centuries were often sharply critical of such practices, promoting the ideas of love, fidelity, and civilité between the sexes. Their tales reflected the realities they lived with, and their dreams of a better way of life. Their Animal Bridegroom stories, in particularly, embodied the real–life fears of women who could be promised to total strangers in marriage, and who did not know if they'd find a beast or a lover in their marriage bed."

Yet the story itself seems, to me, to be as much about critiquing the idea of only marrying within the same social class as female independence (Beauty is incredibly independent, bravely defying the will of her father to go to the Beast, later turning down the Beast's repeated requests for sex, indicating that it is she who has the power to determine the nature of their relations).

The most obvious example is Beauty and the Beast themselves. Initially, although the Beast has magical powers and untold riches at his disposal, his shocking appearance contrasted with Beauty's attractive qualities give her the upper hand (in Villeneuve he has an elephant-like trunk, is enormous, and has scales that rattle as he moves-details that weren't included in any other versions and that no illustrator has seemed to want to tackle). Yet at the breaking of the spell, we find that the Beast is, of course, really a handsome Prince.

The tables are turned and we now find that the Prince, being royalty, is actually considered high above the social status of a merchant's daughter. In fact, the Prince's mother is very emphatic that she does not approve of Beauty to marry her son, simply because she isn't royal. Beauty proves again and again her inner worth, but the Queen cannot relent-"I am more than grateful to her for all she has done. But all the same...I cannot refrain from pointing out to you how unnatural would be the mixture of the blood which runs in my son's veins-the noblest in the world-with that from which this young girl has sprung."

Beauty graciously accepts this rebuff of the Queen, but turns down all counter offers (marriage to any other  noble). The good Fairy (read the backstory for a refresher on all the extra characters) emphasizes to the Queen that Beauty's worth comes from her character rather than her rank: "Think you that princesses, who are such only by the caprice of fortune, are any more worthy of the high rank in which their destiny has placed them than this young person? For my part, I think it wrong to hold her responsible for her origin, for which her virtuous conduct is an ample compensation."

The Queen even admits "Beauty is incomparable, her merit is infinite; nothing can surpass it." Yet, even after the Prince confesses he would rather go back to his Beastly form than be separate from Beauty, the Queen is uncomfortable with such a union. She is only happy when she discovers that, all along, Beauty has actually been the daughter of a King and a fairy, without being aware of it.

To add complexity and, I suspect, humor, to the whole debate of marrying only within one's social class, Villeneuve adds another layer to the social ladder: that of fairies, who consider themselves "as far above kings as kings are above their subjects," and their laws forbid them to engage in marriage with creatures below themselves. To add to the idea that worth is not found in social standing, most of the characters are found at one point or another to be secretly in a different class.

The Beast himself was cursed because he would not enter into marriage with an evil Fairy; by her rank, she would be above him, but because of her character, he does not desire her. When we delve into Beauty's backstory, we learn that her father was a King who fell in love with a shepherdess. Despite her poor situation, he recognizes beauty and inner worth. The shepherdess/Queen is lauded for  her "noble character and her purity of mind."

Yet once again there is an upset in the social status, for the King had no idea this whole time that his beloved wife was actually a Fairy who had gone beneath her station to marry a mere human, again because she recognized his character was worthy and she fell in love with him. When the fairy council found this out she was imprisoned, and the King had assumed her dead, until the good Fairy brought about a happy family reunion.

In that time, most fairy tale authors' response to arranged marriages was to have their characters marry for love (mostly at first sight) and attractiveness. The whole "love at first sight" is one of the most criticized features of fairy tales, and yet we can't pass the writers off as completely shallow-you should be physically attracted to your spouse on some level. It's so hard, when being oppressed under one extreme, not to default to the other (forced love verses ideal, free love).

Which is why Villeneuve's solution is so remarkable; she is able to look beyond her time to the more wise choice, to marry not for social status or for physical attraction alone, but to marry someone you can respect and trust-the best long-term solution. Yet if we completely ignore the whole second half of her story we miss an obvious message she was trying to make, for when we look at the full story, it is clearly a comment on classism among other things-we tend to get hung up on the sexual aspect and ignore the rest as unimportant. In fact I think I've only read about interpreting BATB as a socio-historic tale from Jerry Griswold, but he only looks at Beaumont's version, and concludes that she is endorsing a "backwards-looking endorsement of the nobility," which I hardly see as valid when you consider her full source.

*Illustrations by Eleanor Vere Boyle

Villeneuve's Epilogue to Beauty and the Beast, part I

I am extremely excited to share this post with you! If you recall, back in March my fiancé and I did a little researching in the Library of Congress to read the French text of Madame de Villeneuve's Beauty and the Beast. There was something else I had discovered but was waiting for someone who is more fluent in French to be able to translate it for me. In the back of the book was an Epilogue section, which included what appeared to be letters between Beauty and the Beast, after the events of the story had already taken place. I don't recall ever reading about these existing, but no other author was credited, so I'm  assuming they were written by Madame de Villeneuve herself. As always, if anyone happens to know otherwise, let me know in the comments!

So first of all, I want to thank Richard Jacobs, the father of a friend of mine, who lived in the Ivory Coast for part of his life and accepted the task of translating the letters. Note that he is not a French scholar or historian, he did it out of the goodness of his heart. He mentioned it was more difficult than anticipated because the language was very difficult than the vocabulary he had used when speaking French-it is, after all, a 300 year old somewhat abstract love note. So without further ado, the first letter, "A Letter from Beauty to the Beast."

My original plan was to share the text in its entirety here, but it occurred to me that that would probably be breaking copyright, so I'll be sharing portions that I found the most interesting.

After a random and kind of confusing introduction about Beauty wanting to retire to a land with fish ponds, she turns to contemplating the nature of the Beast himself. First she remembers what it was like when he came to her as a Beast:

 "You would come with the night, when the hour was never yet at the remaking of the day, but rather at the regret of its light.  The beasts, as dreams and fog, belong first of all to obscurity, to the experience of that which undresses and undresses itself again.  Well in advance of my seeing you, the memory of these recitals that came from elsewhere of the story of the marriage of the blood of the monster with the most beautiful of the beauties brought me to fear.  I thought of you as being born of murder and a curse when actually you had only conquered your horrendous face as a reflection of your beauty in the mirror of your mother.  For a long time, you remained for me one by whom mourning came.  One who gave also to the sun a taste of wormwood." (all emphasis mine)

You'll notice Villeneuve doesn't shy away from hinting at what Beauty and the Beast do in secret, and those commenting on her version usually note that it is more sexual.

Beauty goes on, and it appears that by the time of the writing of these letters, their story has already become legendary, and she refers to it as a fable-

"You had no other name than that of Beast.  It is the same for me who always carries only that of Beauty.  Is it only, as certain ones pretend it to be, that there are no genealogies?  No one precedes us in the legends, except it be in the days so ancient that I am not able to remember.  Children found in other memories, we would have unheaped some sense under the fullness and the untying of our names.  Or do you belong to the denseness of night en of secrets as I belong, me, of the morning and of white linen that I spread out in the yard?  The names of men are more uncertain than those of things.  To call yourself Beast, was to clothe yourself of everything that beasts are after the Fall and thus it was easy for you to make yourself the heinous, the most monstrous, the terror of death; and to call me Beauty, I brought all the women to like me, the fondness of their womb and their patient endurance, but also their beauty that, at times, to disguise the guile.  Despite you and despite me, the fable wanted to make us models.  It wanted that, when we would have ceased to live, because a person cannot live for ever, some one would remember you, my Beast, and another would remember me, your Beauty.  Thus, the lovers, who will come after us, will forget that I was a young girl who loved the roses and who mistakenly judged the forest with the musty odor of bear; they will forget also that you were the unknown one, handsome as one paints Love, who appeared to me in a dream along the canal and, at the same time, this sad prince, a victim of the indecent passion of an old hag.  We will thus remain Beauty and Beast, in accordance with what we ourselves wished, the fable that lasts forever."

A couple parts of this letter seem almost creepily prophetic, and makes me wonder if it was really the invention of Villeneuve herself. Beauty talks of future generations forgetting their stories, and while the fairy tale itself is alive and well in common knowledge, the details of Villeneuve's version are, indeed, almost forgotten. Very few people know of the Unknown Beauty speaks of-which is when the Beast would appear as his true, Princely self, to Beauty in her dreams.  (Some people might recall this from the children's book version by Marianna and Mercer Mayer, which includes this plot element). Also, the modern reader might remember the old hag of the Disney version, but in fact Beauty is referencing the evil fairy who cursed the Beast (read more about the Beast's backstory in my archives).

"When you were the beast, you ask questions and you never respond.  You were sown tied up into silence, and ordered a people statues and of maliciousness, who are only the semblance of men.  From parrots also, (come) many colored echoes of our words.  Were you not, at this strange season, similar to this lord who causes the body of this young wife to be taken under stony the on-looking of uncountable monsters?  Someone caused me to know that he went to the point of giving to his dreadful watchmen traces of seduction that his sadness loaned to the prisoner.  But, you, you have only to fear that my reflections in the deserted mirrors of your living rooms: left in the evening shadows that sleep brings on and that wakening obliterates, I was girded through absence and offered my arm only with a bracelet."

I think that the above bold section is referencing what many BATB scholars think was the "message" of the fairy tale from this period: to expose the cruelty of arranged marriages, especially when the husbands in question were older, perhaps uglier, and not necessarily trustworthy, yet being promised very young wives by their fathers. I'll admit I find many parts of this letter very confusing.

"Because, before becoming weak, you were, to be sure, incredible.  Or, to speak otherwise, your face could only be considered insignificant so long as it carried the promise of being other things.  I imagined you, at times, as a stranger to yourself, et to be so unreasonable and illusive, I wanted to unclothe you.  Since I knew that you, by love, had removed your savage clothing, to change yourself into a man I rendered dead." 

Again, references to sex, even when he was still a Beast.

"But nonetheless, I knew that you knew, from the terrible knowledge of the plants, you who were, perhaps, a rose before being a monster.  You never ignored that you were neither a beast lost among men, nor a man lost among beasts.  Not being one or the other, you were one and the other and you belonged to the list of revolved eras where humans had the necessity to live among all that lived under the sun, victims of the original desire of the gods.  From other fables, more knowledgeable than ours, they would say, perhaps, that man is not far from the beast or that one and the other are taking turns and in our eyes are surfacing through the waves of the immense sea where we were fish.  They will say this surprising thing that the destiny of  man and the destiny of the beast was tied together because the hunter and the prey change places often and that I also was myself a beast before being a woman.  Our obscure mouth, it seems, bristle up teeth to devour your happiness and it is possible that one day someone will write the history of the woman changed into a fox.  I assure you today that it has entered my mind to wish you to be animal more than person, though the inaccurate is more unprecedented than the accidental."

This is the other passage that strikes me as being suspiciously modern. What does she mean by saying she was a beast before becoming a woman? And the last two sentences accurately portray the current trend in BATB retellings, which is to celebrate the animal in the Beast, even sometimes turning Beauty herself into a Beast.

" You taught me how to un-mix what seemed to be that which disguised all things.  I knew that the image deceives, and our senses and our hearts.  You taught me also to never consult my eyes. "    

"You left me as soon as I refused to share my bed, I who never understood that you were the path to myself.  Surprised by your docility, I believed you to be a stranger to conquering.  Consequently, you left me to the world of images.  Being absent from your human body, you presented yourself to the will of pictures and dreams so that I reap scattered images.  Prisoner of your palace and its lazy courtyard of an inorganic sleep, I ruled, unknown to me, your life, because I retained the pieces scattered in one place or another on the mirror that only my love could piece together in a meaningful way.  Never did I lose awareness that you were, in reality, my prisoner.  Was it to have ascertained it that I finished by finding some pleasure being in your presence?  And this pain, that takes hold of me when I see you as dead in the den that lightened my monkeys.  Did I dream that or is it again a trick of the fable that wanted, according to its principles, that I abandon you before taking you as husband?  I ignore this thought.  The confusion of the dream is sweeter than that of reality.  My tears on your inanimate body teach me that love is a toy that the child never possesses before he loses it."

So many interesting things to consider and ponder, I won't talk about these sections here, just highlight what I found most interesting.

The letter ends:



"Thus, your ring no longer has use to me.  It suffices me to find you in the inner being of myself.

 

I will sleep with you again tonight.  Something tells me that the hours will be more extravagant than all those that we have known.  Do we not need to, in effect, go down together the steps of time? 

 

That the night be good to us, Beast!"

 

Isn't this fascinating?!?

Part II, Beast's reply to Beauty, coming soon!

Illustrations by Eleanor Vere Boyle