“Give Me Back My Beast” Part II: Give Me Back My Representation

 

A lot of people are disappointed when the Beast changes back. And, okay, a fair amount of that disappointment is because they think the Beast is hot. But it’s not typically why I’m disappointed, and I think a lot of other people are in the same boat.

Beauty is beautiful and kind and perfect. The prince is beautiful and perfect. The Beast is relatable. He’s strange and different and lonely. He’s an outsider, and in my experience just about everyone feels like an outsider, no matter how far inside they are.

Everyone who feels different—which is everyone who exists—can see themselves in the Beast. And a lot of them can’t see themselves anymore in the prince.

If it’s not handled well, watching the Beast become a prince can feel a lot like watching a character magically recover from a disability in the final pages. Like it’s saying the only way you can be happy is to get rid of something that real people can’t or don’t want to get rid of.

I don’t want a happy ending that takes away the part of me that doesn’t fit. I want a happy ending for all of me. I want someone to love me with all of my issues. And I don’t want to see love chase those issues away, because it doesn’t in real life. Sometimes seeing a cure in fiction is wish fulfillment, but other times it feels like a rejection.

I’ve written a lot of retellings of both Beauty and the Beast specifically and other enchanted bridegroom stories. Sometimes I’ve changed him back, and sometimes I haven’t. But I’ve never changed him back at the end of the story. I think if someone suddenly becomes beautiful and perfect and different, we need to spend enough time with him to be sure that he’s still him—that he’s still ours.

Order my Beauty and the Beast retelling, To Be Loved, at waxheartpress.com!

Beauty and the Beast: Dream Prince

 

(In preparation for the release of my Beauty and the Beast retelling, To Be Loved, I will be re-sharing old Beauty and the Beast posts. So if this post seems familiar to you, you've probably read it before.)

I’m going to take some time today to talk about one of my (many) favorite aspects of the original Beauty and the Beast, which I’ve somehow managed to go all these years without covering.

The Superman love triangle.

Is there some sort of official name for this phenomenon that I haven’t bothered to look up? Probably.

But you know what I’m talking about. Lois likes Clark, but she’s really hung up on Superman. So this poor guy is in competition with himself for her affections.

In “The Beauty and the Beast,” the beauty is living with a beast who proposes to her every night, and every night she says no. But she’s growing increasingly fond of him, and one of the main things preventing her from saying yes is her Dream Guy.

Now. A brief explanation of the beast’s situation here. Part of his curse is that he seems as dumb as the beast he looks like. So he’s sort of trapped inside his own head, and it’s not possible for the beauty to really get to know him.

But he’s visiting her in her dreams, as a prince - as his real self. And she’s fallen in love with the dream prince, who she hasn’t connected with the beast.

So she’s refusing to marry him because she’s in love with the person he’ll become as soon as she says yes.

Basically, it’s a mess.

And ultimately she does agree to marry the beast, when it seems he’ll die if she doesn’t. At which point we have two options.

1.     She agreed to marry him because she does care for him deeply, even if she’s not in love with him, and has decided that she’d rather keep him alive than keep waiting on a man who might be only a figment of her imagination. In which case everything is gonna be great when he changes; she saved the beast she’s fond of, and now gets to marry the man she loves.

2.     The beast’s near death has made her realize that it’s him she truly loves, not a man who may only be a figment of her imagination. And as soon as she realizes she loves the beast more than the man, the beast ceases to exist forever and is replaced by the man. Which is a major bummer, and much awkwardness is bound to ensue.

It’s a worse situation than Superman’s; once he comes clean to Lois, it’s all good, because Clark and Superman are the same person in different clothes. But while the beast may be fundamentally the same person he always was, the terms of his curse prevent him from acting like himself while he’s a beast. Which means that the two people the beauty is torn between are, in a way, simultaneously the same person and two different people.

And it’s just - honestly I’m not sure I see this working out well. If you’ve fallen for this big, kinda ugly guy who’s a little slow, a little dumb, are you going to be happy with a whip-smart hottie? And if the girl you like was always nice to you when you were slow and ugly, but is suddenly all over you when the spell breaks, if she agreed to marry you, but is clearly delighted when this causes you to become a radically different person from the one she agreed to marry, how are you going to feel about that?

Overall, it’s this “seem like a beast” clause that continues to be problematic. Because if you love someone, it shouldn’t really matter what he looks like, right? But if the spell changes how you act, that’s...it’s just difficult. That fairy who cursed him knew what she was doing; he is thoroughly screwed over.

 

Order my Beauty and the Beast retelling, To Be Loved, from waxheartpress.com!

Give Me Back My Beast

 

Everyone prefers the Beast, right? That’s been the case for at least 80 years, since the Cocteau film. There are two major angles we can approach the Beast preference from, and we’re going to start with the more obvious approach: the Beast is more attractive, the Beast is more exciting, the Beast is more familiar. We just like him better.

I’ve seen a few people on the internet mention that it’s kind of crappy to want the Beast back rather than be happy for him that he’s finally released from a terrible curse. And yeah, it is kind of bad if Beauty herself is saying “I liked you better before. I liked you been when you were trapped and suffering.”

But again, the Beast is familiar. How would you feel if you woke up one morning and your spouse had been body swapped with a total stranger?

I think it’s perfectly natural and expected to find the change off-putting and uncomfortable at first. It’s probably a little uncomfortable for the Beast, too, after all the time he’s spent adjusting to his new body.

Of course the real difficulty here is that the curse was restricting the Beast’s behavior as well as adjusting his appearance, which means that from Beauty’s perspective, he maybe hasn’t been body swapped so much as swapped out entirely for a different guy.

However. There is, in the original book, one character who actually asks for the Beast back:

“Generous Fairy!” exclaimed the Prince, clasping his hands in supplication, “for mercy’s sake, do not allow Beauty to depart! Make me, rather, again the Monster that I was, for then I shall be her husband. She pledged her word to the Beast, and I prefer that happiness to all those she has restored me to, if I must purchase them so dearly!”

Background here is that his mother the queen does not approve of him being with a woman who isn’t a princess. Beauty immediately goes, “Oh, yeah, I’m not worthy to marry a prince, I’ll just go home now.” (Which for the record does seem to be a genuine feeling of unworthiness and not an excuse to bail because her Beast is no longer a Beast.)

The prince didn’t seem to like being a Beast. But he certainly likes being with Beauty more than he likes not being a Beast. I just think it’s funny that someone does ask for the Beast back in the original text, and that someone is the Beast himself.

Next week we’ll look at the other reason we might want our Beast back.

 

Order my Beauty and the Beast retelling, To Be Loved, from waxheartpress.com!

The Mother of the Beast

 

(In preparation for the release of my Beauty and the Beast retelling, To Be Loved, I will be re-sharing old Beauty and the Beast posts. So if this post seems familiar to you, you've probably read it before.)

I just want to take a moment today to go over yet another horrifying, heartbreaking element of the Beast’s suffering in the original Beauty and the Beast. I recently read the translation in the Gutenberg book I’ve linked here, to confirm it was legit before sharing, and I noticed a detail that I’d missed on my previous readings.

The Beast’s mother—his bio mother, not his creepy foster mom who wanted to marry him—was present when he was cursed. The fairy was attempting to ask her for her son’s hand in marriage, and she and her son both said no.

A quote from the fairy, to the queen: “I warn you that if you acknowledge to anyone that this monster is your son, he shall never recover his natural shape.”

Can you even imagine? You trusted this woman to take care of your son while you were at war. You love your child so much, and you’ve been separated from him for years, doing your duty as queen, protecting your subjects. You miss him. You miss him so much. And this is the woman you trusted to raise him.

She makes this outrageous suggestion, and you realize that you should never have trusted her, that she’s been grooming your son for who knows how long, and the only good thing about this situation is that at least she’s not very good at grooming, because your son clearly doesn’t like the idea any more than you do.

So you say no, because what else could you possibly say, and then she turns your baby into a monster, and then she forces you to sever ties with him if there’s to be any hope of the spell ever breaking.

I often go years at a time between rereading things like this, and this detail had completely slipped my memory, and I have spent all this time thinking, “What is wrong with this poor Beast’s mother? We know she’s alive, because she shows up at the end; why wasn’t she here earlier? Why wasn’t she here the whole time?”

Well, it turns out there’s nothing wrong with her, and she wasn’t here because the fairy was very thorough with the curse.

All this time with an evil fairy, separated from his mother, and the Beast gets her back so briefly before the fairy separates them again, and he’s all alone, all alone for so long.

And the way the fairy phrases things, it sounds like her primary concern isn't depriving the Beast of companionship from the mother figure who hasn’t just propositioned and then cursed him, so much as she’s worried the spell will break too easily if people know there’s a spell, which of course they would if the queen was like, “Hey, everyone, this is my kid, he’s a monster now.”

But the fact that the fairy is just thinking about the logistics of the spell, and not about the Beast’s emotional state—it’s almost worse, somehow? Like, deliberately causing more emotional distress to a person, when your whole goal in life right now is to cause him emotional distress, that’s one thing. But you have raised this guy from childhood, and you don’t even think about how hard this is going to be? Like, hurting someone on purpose is terrible—and she is very much also doing that—but so is spending several years with someone and not even thinking about how this is going to hurt. If she’d thought about the separation from his mom hurting him, she would totally also have done it for that reason. But she didn’t think about it.

So now our guy has been propositioned by the woman who raised him. He’s been very briefly reunited with his mother. (And also very briefly fought in a war, that’s a thing that happened, too.) He’s been turned into a monster, he’s been trapped inside his own mind by the curse clause “I command thee to appear as stupid as thou art horrible.” And now he's been separated from his mom.

I was thinking, well, if we get to the point, several years down the line, where it’s becoming clear that the spell isn't going to break, maybe we could just accept the consequences of breaking the fairy’s rules. Like, the Beast could go home, and the queen could tell everyone what happened. And then the spell wouldn’t break, but he could be home, and everyone would know who he really was, and could treat him accordingly.

But then there’s the ‘stupid as thou art horrible’ clause. If the queen acknowledges him and renders the curse unbreakable, he will forever be trapped inside his own head, unable to properly express himself because he has to appear significantly less intelligent than he is. This isn't just physical. Which means we can’t afford to give up on the remote possibility of the spell someday breaking.

Also, as far as I can tell he’s the only kid, the queen’s only heir. Even if the people will accept being ruled by a monster, he won’t be able to utilize his skillset to rule effectively until the spell, with that stupid clause, is broken. So even if they didn’t have to be separated for the Beast’s sake, they would have to be separated for the kingdom’s sake.

This just makes me so sad. She didn’t want to abandon her son. Abandoning him was the only thing she could do, if she wanted him to have any chance of breaking his spell. If she’d kept him close, if she let people figure it out, he’d never be free. So she set him up in the property that reminded her of her deceased husband, the estate she wanted to retire to when she was finally done with her war, and she left him. Because she had to.

 

Order my Beauty and the Beast retelling, To Be Loved, from waxheartpress.com!

To Be Loved: Author's Note

 

Everyone knows the story of Beauty and the Beast, more or less. But the original novel, by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, has been all but forgotten. This was published in 1740, long before copyright law as we know it existed. Sixteen years later, Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont published a tidied-up and much-abridged version which quickly surpassed the original in popularity, and was the definitive version of Beauty and the Beast for some two hundred years. 

In the mid twentieth century, something changed. It's hard to say exactly how this happened; my best guess, after hours of research, is that it began with the Beauty and the Beast episode of Shirley Temple's Storybook Theater in 1958. As that episode is lost media, we can't be certain, but the tie-in picture book supports this theory.

Regardless of the reason, for the last seventy five years or so, children have grown up with a Beast who earned his curse. A Beast who had it coming. A Beast who was selfish, cruel, lazy, bad-tempered, and generally transformed so that his outsides would match his insides.

That is a very new addition to a very old story.

Villeneuve didn't write her novel in a vacuum. It was inspired by existing stories. We can track this tale type—the Enchanted Bridegroom—all across the world, and all throughout history. A rightfully-punished Beast is new not just to Beauty and the Beast, but to the wider Enchanted Bridegroom category to which it belongs. This element, which has become so vital to our general, cultural understanding of the story, simply didn't exist even a hundred years ago.

So today, I want to introduce you to a different kind of Beast, modelled off of Villeneuve's original. A Beast being punished not for being a bad person, but for turning down the sexual advances of the woman who raised him. An innocent victim of a terrible, vindictive curse. A young man who had every fundamental element of himself stripped away, who was separated from his family and left in isolation, all for the horrible crime of daring to say no.

Beauty and the Beast has been my favorite story for thirty years. And when we talk about Beauty and the Beast, it's important to me that you know exactly what we're talking about. Beauty and the Beast, for me, isn’t about redemption; it's about recovery. 

Every time I talk about Beauty and the Beast, I’m saying: “I am broken and afraid. Will you love me anyway?” When I think about the Beast, frightened and sad and alone, no longer human, I think about how, when my depression was at its peak, I didn't feel like a person at all. I think about sitting under my bed writing poetry, half convinced that I was a robot or a changeling or an alien, because I couldn't possibly be human, could I? Humanity didn't feel like this, did it? 

It wasn't about how I looked; it was about how I hurt.

So this isn't the story of Beauty's love making the Beast a better person. This is the story of Beauty's love allowing the Beast to be a person at all, of helping someone who has been hurt and lost for a very long time to find his way home.

 

Order my Beauty and the Beast retelling, To Be Loved, from waxheartpress.com!