So I've been thinking about why the Beast reacted so strongly to The Taking of the Rose. Like, sure, it's rude to steal from your host, especially when you were an unexpected, uninvited guest treated with great hospitality. But most people wouldn't consider picking a flower stealing.
But on the other hand, this is a fairy tale. And it's not as if there's not a precedent for Dire Consequences of Picking Plants.
(BTW, in a rare win for Disney, they managed to produce one of the few BATB stories that actually explained the Beast being overprotective of his rose. And then never actually had the dad get anywhere near the rose, so.)
Before getting into a whole thing with precedents and history and symbolism, I decided to Check the Source Material.
(At this point you may be wondering: Jenny, how come you keep finding new details you didn't remember in the source material? Are you just not paying attention? The answer is that this story is, like most French stories of this era, dense and a little Roccoco. While I enjoy the plot immensely, the prose is challenging. So I don't reread it in its entirety terribly often, and when I do, I skim a little. There's these big long backstories for minor characters, there's a fairy war, Beauty's mom was secretly a fairy and she was swapped at birth: it's a lot. So, yes, I'm not paying as much attention as I could be. If I'm reading for fun I'm skimming, and if I'm reading with purpose I'm reading the relevant chunk of the text only.)
Two important things from The Source Material:
Firstly, the father doesn’t just take the rose. The rose is not just a gift for Beauty, it’s the symbol of his overreach. After being welcomed into this enchanted palace with no clear owner, he “began to fancy…that some good spirit had made this mansion a present to him.” He has decided that this is his palace now, he’s started making plans for what to do with the treasures he’s seen, for moving his family in, and while the rose is the only thing he actually takes, he picks it while planning to take everything else in sight. Also, the Beast stops him after one, but he was about to pick “enough to make half-a-dozen bouquets.” Which is a lot of roses to be picking from someone else’s bush.
Secondly. This actually has nothing to do with the Beast. It’s actually all about fairies.
There are two fairies in this story: the wicked fairy who cursed the Beast, and a good fairy who has been checking up on him since.
One day the good fairy comes to him, and says basically, “Hey, this guy is on his way here right now, and he has a really nice daughter, and he’s probably going to try to pick a rose for her. When he does, you need to absolutely freak out, threaten to kill him, and demand his daughter’s life in exchange for his.”
She thinks this is the best way to get a potential wife to the Beast. And the reason she thinks this is because of a clause of the curse, which states that he will “remain in this state until a young and beautiful girl shall, of her own accord, come to seek thee, though fully persuaded thou wilt devour her.”
So it is literally a requirement of the curse that the girl who eventually agrees to marry him must initially expect him to eat her.
The Beast has to threaten her. He has to frighten her. If he doesn’t, he’ll never have a chance at regaining his humanity.
So it’s not about the rose. It was never about the rose. The only reason roses appear in the story is that Beauty happened to express an interest. The Beast overreacts to the rose because he has to overreact to something in order to frighten her and fulfill the terms of the curse.
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