[Note 2: Yes, for anyone wondering, I will eventually post something besides term papers.]
Progressing and Regressing: Beauty and the Beast in the 21st Century Media
After growing up watching the 1990s Walt Disney Pictures version of Beauty and the Beast, with its spunky heroine and multi-faceted man-turned-monster, the version by Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont which appears in The Classic Fairy Tales may seem like something of a letdown. Indeed, the heroine of Beaumont’s eighteenth-century tale is as gentle and passive as her 1990s counterpart is fiery and spirited, a true testament of the different eras--after all, in the 1700s, it was not exactly considered proper for young women to engage in adventures and read books,which the Disney film seems to enjoy mocking with Gaston’s insistence that a woman shouldn’t be “getting ideas” from books. However, that is the difference between the 1990s and the 1750s; it is quite a different story when the analysis of a film made in 2008 reveals gender-related stereotypes and conventions that would not have seemed out-of-place in Beaumont’s written version of the original oral tale.
The films analyzed for this paper were, in order of release, Jim Henson’s Labyrinth (1986), Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991), and the film adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight (2008). While Beauty and the Beast is obviously the most direct adaptation of the original tale, the others were selected for their similarities in plot and theme, mainly the concept of a young woman falling in love with, or being romantically pursued by, a non-human or fantastical creature. Each of the three films was made within the past 30 years, however there is quite a time jump between Beauty and the Beast and Twilight (17 years to be precise). Each film was made with a youthful audience (children or teens) in mind, with Twilight and Labyrinth presented more as coming-of-age films while Beauty and the Beast was presented as predominantly a child’s film. Most importantly, the films as a group revealed a surprising trend: as the years progressed, the heroines regressed in terms of strength of character, feminist tendencies, and general independence.
To understand the context of the films, it is important to first understand the original tale of “Beauty and the Beast,” as captured by Madame Beaumont. What is most telling about Beaumont’s story is the characterization of both Beauty and her Beast: Beauty is gentle and extremely passive, preferring to simply allow things to play out as they will rather than take proactive action, while the Beast is a modest, gentle being who insists on courting Belle rather than forcing her to marry him. Within a few months of her arrival, it is apparent that he truly loves her; when she says her separation from her family is too painful to bear, he replies “I would rather die myself than cause you pain.” (Beaumont, Beauty and the Beast, 39) Beauty, however, only realizes that she loves her Beast at the moment of his death. Before this, it is a mixture of guilt (for staying home longer than she promised the Beast she would) and practical thinking (“I would be more happy with him than my sisters are with their husbands...I may not be in love with him, but I feel respect, friendship, and gratitude toward him”). (Beaumont, Beauty and the Beast, 40)
The story is fairly obvious in its moral instruction, promoting the preference of virtue over looks and status. No time is wasted in telling us just how charming and virtuous Beauty is in comparison to her prideful, arrogant older sisters: “[Beauty] was not only more beautiful than her sister, she was also better behaved...Every day they went to balls, to the theater, to the park, and they made fun of their younger sister, who spent most of her time reading good books.” (Beaumont, Beauty and the Beast, 32) Beauty is also more patient and kind, thanking her suitors but rejecting their proposals because she feels too young for marriage, while her older sisters hold out for men of higher rank. At the end Beauty and her husband are rewarded for their virtue, him by returning to human form and her by becoming a queen, but her two sisters are punished for their “malice and envy” by getting turned into statues. (Beaumont, Beauty and the Beast, 42) The moral is clear: if you are good and virtuous and value a good heart over looks and intelligence, you will be rewarded; if not, you will be punished.
However, the theme of virtue is merely the tip of the iceberg, according to Maria Tatar and Bruno Bettelheim, both of whom believe the tale to be a reassuring allegory to a young newlywed’s wedding night. Bettelheim believes the tale soothes fears concerning the loss of virginity: “While sex may at first seem beastlike, in reality love between woman and man is the most satisfying of all emotions, and the only one that leads to permanent happiness.” (Bettelheim, 306) Tatar describes “Beauty and the Beast” and its multicultural variants as an allegory of arranged marriages, saying that “these tales mirror social practices of an earlier age.” (Tatar, 27) She goes on to say that “Many an arranged marriage must have seemed like marriage to a beast, and the telling of stories like ‘Beauty and the Beast’ may have furnished woman with...therapeutic advice, comfort, and consolation,” (Tatar, 27) reinforcing Bettelheim’s theory that “Beauty and the Beast” is really intended to calm engaged young woman concerned about losing their virginity.
With all of this in mind, let’s take a look at Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, made in 1991 and the most direct adaptation of the tale researched for this paper. In his essay “Mass Marketing ‘Beauty,’” Marc DiPaolo calls Belle (the Disney incarnation of Beauty) a feminist heroine and praises her for being “far more intelligent than anyone else in town.” (DiPaolo, Mass Marketing Beauty, 170) In the film, Belle is not your average princess. Like Beaumont’s incarnation of Beauty, Belle spends much of her time reading, falls in love with the beast despite his looks, and loves her father to the point of sacrificing herself for him--but there, the similarities virtually end. This Belle has a feisty side and a wide feminist streak. In her film, she rejects her arrogant suitor not because she loves her father, but because she does not love the man who proposed, she craves adventures far beyond the safe boundaries of her strictly traditional French town, and when she and the Beast disagree, she isn’t afraid to (loudly) let him know that she doesn’t approve of what he has to say. Not that she has little reason to push back: the Beast of the Disney film, instead of representing the gentle, if stupid and unattractive, beast of Beaumont’s tale, is truly a loud-mouthed, selfish, bad-tempered monster who only realizes he loves Belle when she is nearly killed by a pack of wolves.
DiPaolo compares Belle favorably to the young women of modern media, noting that while she may not be a feminist icon compared to, say, the heroine of a Margaret Atwood novel, she “stands head and shoulders above the nightmarish role models available for young women today,” (DiPaolo, Mass Marketing Beauty, 172) and Allison Craven says she is “barely recognizable as the traditional fairy-tale Beauty.” (Craven, 130) However, as DiPaolo notes, her story does indeed end with a traditional marriage and the implication of her “happily-ever-after” with her newly-transformed lover, which reinforces that women do need men in order to be happy. So while Belle does prove herself a strong woman, she also falls into stereotypical gender roles in her need for marriage. In terms of feminism, it’s not exactly a full step back, but it can be read as “taking away from” the character’s independence.
Contrast that with a film made five years prior, Jim Hensen’s muppet-filled semi-musical Labyrinth (1986). The plot is simple, but the “Beauty and the Beast” elements are clear: When young Sarah, unaware that the Goblin King has fallen in love with her, wishes that the goblins would steal her baby brother, her wish is immediately granted, and she must go get him back by solving the king’s labyrinth in 13 hours or less. Sarah is at her wit’s end when the Goblin King (played by, of all people, David Bowie) throws challenge after challenge at her, but she is even more stunned when he professes love for her at the end of his maze. The film makes several references to the tale type of “Beauty and the Beast” throughout the story: non-human creature (in this case, a goblin) pursuing a human girl, a young girl willingly going into a dangerous situation (the labyrinth) to save a family member (in this case, her brother) from an unknown creature (the Goblin King), who may or may not turn out to be benevolent. But there, once again, the similarities end. Unlike her fairy-tale counterpart, Sarah is not passive in the least. Through the whole film, she is a proactive force and eventually learns not only to love her younger brother, but to trust her own strength.
As Elycia Arendt puts it in her essay on Labyrinth, “If ever there was a fairy tale heroine battling against a patriarchy, this is it.” (Arendt, 42) Right from the beginning of the film, Sarah is shown to want a career--she wants to be an actress. She is expected by her father and stepmother to “take the role of a domestic woman” (Arendt, 41) and is pressured by her stepmother to start dating. (Labyrinth) Like Beauty, she rejects the idea of courtship because she isn’t ready yet, and she rejects the idea of herself as a child’s caretaker by wishing her brother away. Later on, inside the labyrinth, she confronts obstacles at every turn, the majority of them male, and conquers or evades them all, and even befriends some of them. Finally, she rejects the idea of herself as Jareth’s wife when he asks her to be his queen. “Fear me, love me, do as I say and I will be your slave,” he promises--but Sarah’s having none of it, and replies quietly but confidently, “You have no power over me.” (Labyrinth) Sarah is the only one of the four heroines examined in this paper who actually, completely rejects the idea of marriage to her non-human suitor. The others, even the feisty Belle of the Disney film, eventually submit to their non-human lovers. Keep in mind, this film was made in the teen-film era of the 1980s, where women were mostly love interests or sexual objects. Sarah is neither: she is a feminist incarnate, who rejects stereotypical roles of mother/caretaker and wife/lover and demands something bigger for herself.
But take a leap into the year 2008, when the film Twilight was released, and look at the female lead of that film, Bella Swan. Again, she is a human who captures the romantic attentions of a non-human creature--in this case, a vampire, Edward Cullen, who frequently refers to himself as a monster. (Twilight) Interestingly, Bella portrays more characteristics of the original Beauty than either of the heroines in the other two films: she is introverted, naive, passive, selfless, and above all, ultra-feminine. In the novels on which the film was based, she faints at the sight of blood; in the film, she watches helplessly while Edward fearlessly saves her from an out-of-control truck and from a group of cartoon-villain sexual predators. Moreover, she is conventionally beautiful and, though it is never outright stated in the film, it is implied that she is inexperienced with men. While the other film heroines, Belle and Sarah, are also beautiful and virginal, they don’t possess those qualities in addition to all of the other virtues that both Beauty and Bella display in their respective stories.
Fleur Diamond calls Bella’s behavior “what adolescent girls are pressured to perform on a social level: to assume a sexually conventional exterior while a fugitive text of female sexual agency is suggested between the lines.” (Diamond, 47) What this means is that she is the paragon of femininity in our culture: beautiful and sexually desirable, but also sexually inexperienced. Young women are expected to “camouflage their desire for sexual activity or risk being ostracized” (Diamond, 44), a throwback to the era of the original “Beauty and the Beast” tale, when young women were not just encouraged or suggested, but required to be virginal on their wedding nights. In addition, Bella is portrayed as a caretaker (the very thing that Labyrinth’s Sarah fought so hard against becoming) by looking after her divorced bachelor father and scatterbrained newlywed mother. She also is willing to do whatever it takes to serve others: she moves away so her mother can be with her new husband, endures awkwardness for the sake of entertaining her father’s best friend’s son Jacob, and is even willing to give up her life for that of her mother and Edward. (Twilight) Her interactions with Edward, while romantically charged, are mostly chaste; they share a grand total of three kisses on-screen and when he spends the night at her house, all he does is watch her sleep. But the biggest indication of Bella’s femininity is her helplessness: like Beauty, she is utterly passive, allowing Edward to take a fully dominant role in their relationship. She can even be seen as more passive than Beauty, in that Beauty initially resists the Beast’s advances, while Bella immediately succumbs to Edward’s.
It is most interesting that Bella, the anti-feminist, is the heroine of the most recent film, while Sarah, the strongest feminist, is the heroine of the oldest. When comparing all three--Bella, Belle, and Sarah--to Madame Beaumont’s Beauty, it is clear who embodies the majority of the original values associated with the fairy tale. Sarah of the 1980s rejects her gender’s stereotypes and places her friends and her dreams of a career above all else. Belle only marries her suitor once she has firmly established her own identity. But Bella--Bella, the lead character in a film made during an era where women are fighting and screaming for independence--the lead character of a film that grossed almost $200 million at the domestic box office and is the subject of discussion of millions of women worldwide--falls in love, submits herself, and that’s the end of it. One more thing to think about: In 1756, the year “Beauty and the Beast” was published, women were still thought of as property. In 2008, the year Twilight was released, Hillary Clinton became the first woman to run for President of the United States...and yet the heroines of both stories show matching values, above all the value of a woman learning her place under a man.
Bibliography
Arendt, Elycia. Braveheart and Broomsticks: Essays on Movies, Myths and Magic. Infinity Pub, 2002.
Beaumont, Jean-Marie Leprince. "Beauty and the Beast." In The Classic Fairy Tales. Ed. Maria Tatar. New York: Norton, 1999: 31-42.
Bettelhelm, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. London: Penguin Books, 1991. pg-pg. Print.
Craven, Allison. "Beauty and the Belles Discourses of Feminism and Femininity in Disneyland." European Journal of Women's Studies 9.2 (2002): 123-142.
Diamond, Fleur. "Beauty And The Beautiful Beast." Australian Feminist Studies 26.67 (2011): 41. MasterFILE Premier. Web. 25 Apr. 2013.
DiPaolo, Marc. "Mass–Marketing Beauty ‘: How a Feminist Heroine Became an Insipid Disney Princess ‘." Beyond Adaptation: Essays on Radical Transformations of Original Works (2010): 168-180.
Twilight. Dir. Cathrine Hardwicke. Summit Entertainment, 2008. Film.
Labyrinth. Dir. Jim Henson. TriStar pictures, 1986. Film.
Tatar, Maria. The Classic Fairy Tales. 1st ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999. Print.
Beauty and the Beast. Dirs. Garry Trousdale and Kirk Wise. Walt Disney Pictures, 1991. Film.
