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!