Stories of
transformation, whether the subject be a husband, wife, sibling, child, or
friend, must begin with the cause of transformation. The beasts of Beauty and
the Beast tales are cursed, but this often goes beyond the act of a spell being
cast—beasts are cursed with the love of those who cannot truly love them.
Scholars such as Bruno Bettelheim will talk at great
length of the Oedipal nature of, for example, the love of Beauty for her
father. But what stands out far more upon closer reading is the opposite
problem. Mothers and fathers, as well as a horde of other inappropriate
figures, fall in love with their children with alarming frequency. Punished for
failing to return romantic feelings in utterly bizarre situations, children are
punished by transformation, a spiteful and childish reaction along the lines of
“If I can’t have them, no one can.”
In
the variant which our modern “Beauty and the Beast,” is most clearly descended
from, a French novel by Madame Villeneuve titled La Belle et la Bete, the Beast’s back story is very clearly
developed, and one particularly striking change has occurred over the years.
Most recent tellings of the story show the Beast as cursed due to his
mistreatment of some innocent. In Villeneuve’s version, as in many early
variants of the story type, the situation is quite the opposite. The young
prince is watched over for many years, in the midst of war, by an elderly
fairy. Their relationship is always close, but shifts dramatically over time;
telling his story later, when the spell is broken, the prince says, “Whereas
she had previously permitted me to call her ‘mama,’ she now forbade me…She
wanted me to love her not as a mother, but as a mistress” (Villeneuve 200). The
prince has come to love her as a mother, his own being absent, and she has
always treated him as a son, a child—certainly not a lover. He is punished for
rejecting her advances, and for his mother’s description of the proposed match
as “absurd” (201).
The
fairy turns him into a monster, commanding that he seem as stupid as he is
hideous, and remain in such condition until a beautiful girl develops “such
tender love for [him] that she’ll agree to marry [him]” (203). In uttering this
curse, she clearly exhibits her unsuitability as a lover; not only is she a
maternal figure in his life, but she is unable to imagine that anyone would
love him were he not intelligent and attractive, showing that her love for him
runs no deeper than this.
In
“East O’ the Sun, West O’ the Moon,” a popular Norwegian variant of the Greek
“Cupid and Psyche,” the prince finds himself in a similar position with a
stepsister. Having failed to fulfill the escape clause on his curse, he must
finish what he started before his detour as a polar bear. Noticing his
reluctance to marry the sister in question, his troll stepmother has cursed
him. As a white bear, he was to live with a woman for one year, a bear by day
and a man, in bed with her, every night. If he could make it this long without
her seeing his face, he would be free. But if the woman failed to meet these
terms, of which she was never informed, the prince was marry his stepmother’s
daughter, a troll princess with a nose three ells long (Asbjornsen).
Even
in “Cupid and Psyche” itself, one can see the same element. True, there is no
other bride on hand, and no actual transformation occurs—it is merely a
relationship that lives only in the dark. Bettelheim claims that Cupid’s
relationship with his mother, before Psyche enters the scene, is sexual, but
the text does not spell this out as clearly as he implies (293). Regardless,
his relationship with his mother in undoubtedly overturned by his relationship
with Psyche, and he is forced to hide himself and the relationship from her
anger. The transforming love that these stories are centered on is consistently
preceded by a love that is possessive, obsessive, and often utterly
inappropriate and immoral.
A particularly interesting case is that of Aarne-Thompson
Type 510B, or “Donkey Skin.” Aarne-Thompson groups this story with the Cinderella
types, and though that is sometimes accurate, it can also fit perfectly here.
This is due to regional issues; 510B is a broad category, and the stories based
in Northern Europe, where Aarne and Thompson worked, bear much more resemblance
to Cinderella stories than those told elsewhere (Goldberg). In the case of the
titular Donkey Skin, there is no literal curse. She is cursed only by her
father’s romantic pursuit. Desperate to avoid an incestuous marriage, the
princess tries first to set impossible conditions for her father, but when he
meets them all, she is forced to flee, taking on a grotesque disguise in order
to protect herself.
In the French version recorded by Charles Perrault, the
princess, based on instructions from her fairy godmother, asks her father to
kill and skin an enchanted donkey that excretes gold coins. When he
unexpectedly does so, the princess runs away wearing the skin of the donkey,
which will protect her from recognition for most of the story. In the version
told by the brothers Grimm, one of her conditions is “a mantle made of a
thousand skins of rough fur sewn together, and every animal in the kingdom must
give a piece of his skin toward it” (76). When she runs away, of course, the
princess uses this as her disguise.
Another French variant, this one by Henriette-Julie de
Murat, is called “Bearskin.” This story is slightly different from those above,
in that it does involve the princess actually changing into bear to escape unwanted marriage, rather than
just donning a disguise. In her analysis of this tale, scholar Marina Warner
notes that for female beasts “shape-shifting also shifts the conditions of
confinement…[she] acquires more freedom of movement than as a young woman, and
more freedom of choice” (283). While it is noteworthy that most female
characters choose their own transformation, ultimately they have no more real
freedom than their male counterparts. They, too, were forced into this position
against their will in the aftermath of false and wicked love.
