Beauty and the Beast

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Beauty and the Beast is a traditional fairy tale (type 425C -- search for a lost husband -- in the Aarne-Thompson classification). The first published version of the fairy tale was a meandering rendition by Madame Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, published in La jeune américaine, et les contes marins in 1740. The best-known written version was an abridgement of M. Villeneuve's work published in 1756 by Mme Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, in Magasin des enfants, ou dialogues entre une sage gouvernante et plusieurs de ses élèves; an English translation appeared in 1757.^[1]

Variants of the tale are known across Europe.^[2]

Contents 1 Plot summary 1.1 Villeneuve's version 2 Commentary 3 Significance 4 Variants 5 Adaptations 5.1 Movie versions 5.2 Stage Versions 5.3 Television 5.4 Fiction Versions 6 Beauty and the Beast in popular culture 7 See also 8 References 9 External links

[edit] Plot summary

A rich merchant lived in the city, with his daughters, one of whom was Beauty, but he lost his wealth, and he and his daughters (whose suitors no longer wanted to marry them) had to live in the country. One day, he heard that a ship of his had returned. He went back to the city. His other daughters asked for jewelry and dresses, but Beauty wanted only a rose.

Beauty's father, lost in a forest and caught in a storm, finds shelter in the Beast's palace. As he leaves, he plucks a rose to bring back to Beauty, offending his unseen host, who denouncing him as a thief, tells him he must now die. The father begs to be allowed to see his daughters again: the Beast says that if one of the man's daughters will return to suffer in his place, he may live. Beauty journeys to the Beast's castle convinced she will be killed, but instead she is made mistress of the enchanted palace, and the Beast asks her to be his wife. She says she can be his friend, and will stay with him forever, but not as his wife, asking only to return to her home for a week to say farewell to her father. Her sisters entice her to stay beyond the allotted week, and she returns belatedly to the castle, finding the Beast lying near death from distress at her failure to return. She begs him to live, so that he may be her husband, and by this act the Beast is transformed into a handsome prince. After Beauty returns to the palace, her family comes to live with her.

[edit] Villeneuve's version

Villeneuve's tale includes several elements that Beaumont's omits. Chiefly, the backstory of both Beauty and the Beast is given. The Beast was a prince who lost his father at a young age, and whose mother had to wage war to defend his kingdom. The queen left him in care of an evil fairy, who tried to seduce him when he was adult. When he refused, she changed him into the beast. Beauty's story reveals that she is not really a merchant's daughter but the offspring of a king and a fairy; the same fairy who tried to seduce the prince also tried to murder Beauty to marry her father, and Beauty was put in the place of the dead merchant's daughter to protect her.^[3] She also gave the castle elaborate magic, which obscured the more vital pieces of it.^[4] Villeneuve greatly pared down the cast of characters and simplified the tale to an almost archetypal simplicity.^[5]

[edit] Commentary

The urban opening is unusual in fairy tales, as is the social class of the characters, neither royal nor peasants. It may reflect the social changes occurring at the time of its first writing.^[6]

[edit] Significance

Beauty and the Beast is often interpreted as a young woman's coming-of-age story. Content with a pure love for her father, she finds sexuality bestial, and so a man who feels sexual desire for her is a beast. Only when she is capable of regarding the desire of sexual relationship as human is she capable of achieving happiness.^[7]

Another interpretation is that the Beast is actually bestial, but the woman's love is capable of transforming him into a handsome prince.^[8]

The tale has also been interpreted as a commentary on arranged marriages; the first known versions stem from upper-class ancien regime France, where such marriages were the norm. An arranged marriage, particularly to a much older man, could easily seem like marriage to a beast to a young daughter; the fairy tale argued that such marriages could be happy, and their "bestial" husbands could indeed prove to be good men, if the bride could look beneath the surface -- or be transformed into good men from beast by their wives.^[9]

[edit] Variants

Beauty And the Beast is Aarne-Thompson type 425C.^[10] Other tales of this type include The Small-tooth Dog, The Singing, Springing Lark, and Madame d'Aulnoy's Le Mouton (The Ram).^[11]

Closely related to them are tales of Aarne-Thompson type 425A.^[12] These include The Sprig of Rosemary, Cupid and Psyche, East of the Sun and West of the Moon, The Black Bull of Norroway, The Daughter of the Skies, The Enchanted Pig, and White-Bear-King-Valemon.^[13]

[edit] Adaptations

The tale has been notably adapted for both stage and screen several times.

[edit] Movie versions

A French version of La Belle et la Bête was made in 1946, directed by Jean Cocteau, starring Jean Marais as the Beast and Josette Day as Beauty. In this version Beauty is named Belle, the French word for "Beauty". This version adds a subplot involving Belle's suitor Avenant, who schemes along with Belle's brother and sisters to journey to Beast's castle to kill him and capture his riches while the sisters work to delay Belle's return to the castle. When Avenant enters the magic pavilion which is the source of Beast's power, he is struck by an arrow fired by a guardian statue, which transforms Avenant into Beast and reverses the original Beast's curse. It could be speculated that the Gaston character from the Disney version was inspired by Avenant.

A Soviet animated feature film The Scarlet Flower, using a rotoscoping technology, was filmed in 1952 after Sergei Aksakov's version. The story was set in Middle-Age slavic background, and characters speak Old Russian language in the vein of traditional tales.

In 1991 Disney produced an animated film of Beauty and the Beast with screenplay by Linda Woolverton, music by Alan Menken, and lyrics by Howard Ashman. It won Academy Awards for Best Song and Best Original Score and is the only animated feature to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. Like the 1946 version, the Disney version also names Beauty "Belle". (It is told that Disney had made notes on an idea for the movie many decades before it was actually made within which he mentioned that he wanted the female character, Belle, to be based on a childhood sweetheart of his, Laura Jackson, whom he wanted to immortalise in one of his animated pictures.) Also, in this version, the servants have been transformed into personified objects and much of the story has been changed. Belle's father is given a name, Maurice, and Belle is his only daughter. A handsome and popular, but crude and arrogant, man named Gaston wants to marry Belle; however, she does not want to marry him due to his boorishness. Gaston and his friends threaten Maurice and the Beast, but eventually Gaston is killed during a final confrontation with the Beast. This version also brought a strong redemptive quality to the story, as the perfect Belle loves the Beast enough to see past his outer ugliness. Although heavily altered, like many of their films, Beauty and the Beast is now considered one of the Walt Disney Company's classic animated films.

Golden Films released an adaptation of the story directly to video that was distributed by GoodTimes Entertainment. GoodTimes' Beauty and the Beast relied on moderate animation techniques but stuck primarily to the original tale.

The King Kong films are based loosely on the folktale. In the original film, the character of Carl Denham, who sets out in search of the monster with actress Ann Darrow, believes the creature and Ann appearing in a film together will be reminiscent of the folktale. When the creature is brought to New York City and dies after reuniting with Ann (unwilling and willing, respectively) in both the 1933 and 2005 versions, Denham famously remarks that "Beauty" killed "the Beast."

Other famous stories featuring grotesques who fall in love with beautiful women, usually with tragic consequences, include The Phantom of the Opera and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

[edit] Stage Versions

The Disney film was adapted for the stage by Linda Woolverton and Alan Menken, who had worked on the film. Howard Ashman, the original lyricist, had died, and additional lyrics were written by Tim Rice. Seven new songs, "No Matter What", "Me", "Home", "How Long Must This Go On?", "Maison des Lunes","Human Again", and "If I Can't Love Her" were added to those appearing in the original film score in the stage version. "Human Again", a song written for the movie but eventually cut from the final release, was added back in for the DVD release of the movie, as well as the stage production. Later, another song, "A Change In Me", was added for Belle. There is a great deal of emphasis on pyrotechnics, costuming and special effects to produce the imagery of the enchanted castle that was produced by Disney Theatrical. This version of Beauty and the Beast is often examined in gender studies because of the underlying female and male roles it presents to young audiences.

Also, in 2003, the RSC put a version on stage that was closer to the original novel than the Disney version. It was so popular that the RSC repeated it in 2004 with additions and slight variations to their original script.

Beauty and the Beast is often performed as a pantomime in the UK - there are many versions by many different authors. Often the character of a witch is introduced who turns the Prince into the Beast because he refuses to marry her - and a good fairy (usually called the Rose Fairy) who intervenes to help the plot reach a happy conclusion. Also in the pantomime versions the Prince often meets and falls in love with Beauty prior to his transformation (making the story more Cinderella-like). The traditional pantomime Dame figure (man dressed outrageously as a woman) can be either Beauty's mother or (again Cinderella-like) two of her sisters.

The musical version of "Beauty and the Beast" will close in August 2007. With Disney set to release its musical version of "The Little Mermaid" in November 2007, they believe that having two Disney heroines on Broadway at the same time will divide audiences between the two shows. "The Little Mermaid" will be put up in the theatre that "Beauty and the Beast" is currently running in.

[edit] Television

Beauty and the Beast (series), which owed as much to detective shows and fantasy fiction as to the fairy tale, originally broadcast from 1987 to 1989. This was centered around the relationship between Catherine, an attorney who lived in New York City, played by Linda Hamilton, and Vincent, a gentle but lion-faced "beast", played by Ron Perlman, who dwells in the tunnels beneath the city. Wendy Pini created two issues of a comic-book adaptation of the TV series. The series was canceled when ratings fell after Hamilton decided to leave the show at the end of the second season.

George C. Scott turned in a memorable made-for-TV rendition in 1976, in which, early in the presentation, his Belle Beaumont Trish Van Devere spots him devouring some of the local wildlife in the style of a lion, only later to comport himself in his dialogs with her (still as the Beast) with the nobility and charm of a knight. Scott was nominated for an Emmy for his performance.

[edit] Fiction Versions

Beauty and the Beast has been the subject of many novels, most notably in Beauty by Robin McKinley, the Newbery Award-winning author. McKinley's second voyage into the tale of Beauty and the Beast resulted in Rose Daughter.

Tanith Lee's collection Red As Blood, or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer included a science-fiction retelling, from the point of view of a female Beast in love with a male human.

Donna Jo Napoli wrote a YA novel, Beast, centered around the Beast's point-of-view and his life before he met Beauty.

Nancy Holder wrote an entry in the Once Upon a Time series called Spirited, which is a loose retelling of the story with a young Englishwoman named Isabella Stevenson who falls in love with her captor, Wusamequin, a brooding Mohican medicine man during the French and Indian War.

Beauty and the Beast are characters in the Fables comic book. They are resident in the New York City branch of Fabletown, and are rather poor at the beginning of the series. After the election of Prince Charming as mayor of Fabletown, they are promoted to, respectively, assistant to the mayor and sheriff, vice "Bigby Wolf" (Big Bad Wolf) and Snow White, the previous holders of these offices, who do not wish to work with Prince Charming due to prior difficulties with him.

The story was adapted by Mercedes Lackey into her Elemental Masters novel The Fire Rose, setting the story in early 20th-century San Francisco.

Shigeru Miyamoto cited the story as an inspiration for the Nintendo game Donkey Kong.

In 1967, a made-for television movie called Ugly and the Model was made. It was a parody of the tale and is very loosely based on it.

The Beast and later Beauty make a small appearance in the webcomic No Rest for the Wicked.

Megan Hussey's "Behold the Beauty," featured in Midnight Showcase's "Deities of Desire" erotic digest, is a feminist spin on the "Beauty and the Beast" tale. Hero Prince Beausoleil is a classically handsome young man who falls desperately in love with the healer Agnatha, an unconventional, often ridiculed woman who lives in the woods of Ravenshead; a mythical European province where Beau's family rules and many younger, more conventionally attractive women vie for his affections.

Two separate adaptations of the tale appear in Angela Carter's short story collection The Bloody Chamber, which reinterprets several different fairy tales.

The story also served as a plot for the 10th issue of Serena Valentino's comic book Nightmares & Fairy Tales, in which a young woman, Rose is turned into a monster and banished to live in an abandoned castle in order to put an end to her relationship with Belle.

[edit] Beauty and the Beast in popular culture

• Beauty and the Beast is a critical plot theme of the Jem TV series episode Beauty and the Rock Promoter.
• Beauty and the Beast is the plot of the music video and supposedly of the song: I will do anything for love (but I won't do that) by Meat Loaf.
• Stevie Nicks wrote the song "Beauty and the Beast" from her 1983 Album Wild Heart after viewing the Jean Cocteau film.
• The Beast is Monster in My Pocket #43.
• Beauty and the Beast is the name of a song by The Ark (Swedish band).
• The Finnish heavy metal group Nightwish has a song entitled "Beauty and the Beast".
• Marvel Comics published a four issue mini series titled Beauty & The Beast starring the X-Men's Beast and the Dazzler.
• The characters of Belle and 'the Beast' feature as part of the Squaresoft game, Kingdom Hearts, with Belle being one of the captured princesses that must be rescued, with the Beast being a summonable companion.
• Influenced the movie The Beautician and the Beast.
• Many Gothic Metal and Black Metal bands (such as Sirenia, Penumbra and Via Mistica) simultaneously employ the use of male death grunt vocals and melodious female vocals in their songs, and the ensuing combined vocal style of such music is known popularly as Beauty/Beast Vocals.

[edit] See also

• Damsel in distress
• Noble savage
• The Feather of Finist the Falcon
• Shrek
• The Phantom of the Opera
• Dracula
• Zarbon
• King Kong
• Edward Scissorhands
• Macbeth

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• SurLaLune Fairy Tale Pages: The Annotated Beauty and the Beast
• "Beauty and the Beast: folktales of Aarne-Thompson type 425C
• Cinderella Bibliography - includes an exhaustive list of B&tB productions in books, TV and recordings
• 20 "MercerMayer" illustrations
• Theatre Cedar Rapids Beauty and the Beast Production Photo Gallery - Great photographic overview of the whole show scene, including costumes and sets.