Beauty and the Beast and Prejudice

 Look, it's not surprising that someone decided to make the Beast's curse a punishment for wickedness. If anything, it's a surprise that it took them 200 years to do it. We do, after all, see a precedent for characters being transformed as punishment; the new thing here was combining "enchanted bridegroom" with "rightful punishment."

This makes perfect sense as a direction to take the story in. What confuses me is that pretty much everyone in the last 70 years has continued to take the story in that exact same direction. After two entire centuries of Beauty and the Beast as a well-known and well-loved story, the entire point of it changed practically overnight, and no one ever looked back.

My theory is that there are two main reasons for this.

1. Our society equates beauty with goodness, and ugliness with wickedness, a pervasive and incorrect viewpoint that makes it hard for us to accept that someone as hideous, as monstrous, as the Beast did literally nothing wrong.

2. Our society struggles to grasp the concept of men as victims of violence, particularly violence perpetrated by women, particularly sexual violence. Men are tough and strong. Large, hairy, ugly men, especially. Men carry out violence. Men do not have violence inflicted upon them.

It's much easier for us to view the Beast as a villain in need of reform than as a prisoner in need of rescue, because that fits in better with our prejudices and preconceived notions. Shirley Temple said, "But what if the Beast was a little bit bad," and we grabbed it, and ran with it, because it makes more sense to us.

But it's not what happened. Granted, none of it happened; this is a fairy tale. But it's a fairy tale that holds a major place in our society, a fairy tale than everyone knows, that's been spread and shared in a thousand ways. And that our cultural awareness of the story has completely shifted, in a relatively brief period of time, says, I think, unfortunate things about us. We want the big ugly dude to be the bad guy. As soon as someone suggested he could be, we embraced it wholeheartedly and never looked back.

And, like, he doesn’t stay a bad guy. It’s a redemption story now. But the original Beast didn’t need to be redeemed! He needed to be rescued. Beauty needed to overcome her own prejudices so she was able to rescue him. We need to overcome ours so we can restore his reputation and his intended role in the story.

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