Beauty and the Beast

Familial relationships are an important focal point of Madame de Beaumont’s Beauty and the Beast and the story takes place in that context.  There is no mother or mother figure initially in the story and (the mother’s absence not being explained) and this allows for the youngest daughter to take center-stage in her father’s affections, although not exclusively, as he demonstrates a concern for the education and well-being of his other two daughters and three sons.  “Beauty” is the youngest daughter and the only person named in the narrative until a non-descript monster named “Beast” in introduced.  Beauty’s wealthy merchant father loses his fortune “out of the blue” and is forced to move his family to a humble country house where he and his sons work the land and Beauty, refusing “a number of gentlemen who would have been happy” to marry her devotes herself to domestic life, again assuming the role of the absent wife and mother.  This situation mirrored a common reality in 18^th and 19^th century family life with many a wife dying in childbirth, often leaving the children to take on many adult responsibilities.  When the merchant receives a letter informing him that a ship containing his merchandise has arrived safely in its home port, a clue to the reason for his sudden loss, he sets out to reclaim his wealth and status only to discover there is a lawsuit over his merchandise.  Caught in a fierce snowstorm as he travels home, and on the verge of death in the dark of night, the dejected merchant suddenly sees a bright light that leads him to an immense castle and thanks God for His intervention.  Magically, he finds hay for his horse in the stable and a table laden with food with just one place setting, but strangely, there is no other person in sight.  After a night of rest and a prepared breakfast in the morning, he remembers Beauty’s request to bring her a rose on his return home and he plucks a rose from a nearby magnificent arbor.  It is then that Beast appears and loving his roses “more than anything in the world” demands that the merchant pay with his life for the offense.  When the merchant explains the reason he plucked the rose, the Beast offers forgiveness only if one of his daughters dies in his place, echoing a theme of substitutionary, sacrificial death that 18^th century readers were surely familiar with.  Now fate seems to be working against the merchant father and even as he returns home with a large chest of treasure Beast has given him, he mourns that plucking the rose will cost an innocent life.

Beauty asked for a rose, a symbol of heraldry and a flower of great beauty but one also bearing thorns.  Both she and Beast consider a rose of great value and this is the first evidence of a kinship between the two and is also the literary device that brings them together.  Beauty’s self-sacrificing insistence to go back to the Beast’s castle in her father’s place displays a virtuous inner character which, in her case, corresponds to a beautiful outer appearance.  This theme of the “abstract quality of virtue” and “the transformative power of love” are lessons Madame de Beaumont considered essential for children to learn.  Beast is kind to Beauty despite being a “horrible figure” and this lifts Beauty’s spirits as she “puts herself in God’s hands.”  When Beast grants her wish to return home to visit her family, she discovers that “it is neither good looks nor great wit that makes a woman happy with her husband but character, virtue, and kindness, and Beast has all those qualities.”  She returns to Beast to say she’ll marry him and this pronouncement breaks the magic spell that has hidden a young handsome prince in the body of the beast.  Now his outer appearance and inner virtue mirrors Beauty’s and all incongruity between them is resolved; nonetheless, a “grand fairy” (a mother figure at last) warns Beauty not to let becoming a noble queen destroy her many virtues.  The grand fairy reunites the family and makes one final moral point by turning Beauty’s two jealous sisters (whom de Beaumont ironically calls “nasty creatures”) into statues at the door of her palace to witness her happiness and experience a corrective to their malice and envy. 

Madam de Beaumont wrote this moral tale at the dawn of the Enlightenment, a time when there was a belief that individuals could bring about solutions to the problems of society.  Barry discusses this in the “Postmodernism” chapter of the Beginning Theory reading.  He cites the differing views of three postmodernist thinkers; Jurgen Habermas, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Jean Baudrillard, marking their writings as a major moment in the postmodernist movement.  Habermas states that the modern era began with the Enlightenment movement in the mid-seventeenth to mid-eighteenth centuries when that movement broke with a strict adherence to long-held religious precepts and attempted to replace them with a secular faith in reason.  Surprisingly, Habermas manages to maintain his faith in reason despite a “catalog” of twentieth century disasters and he criticizes Derrida and Foucault for attacking the ideals of reason, clarity, truth, and progress. 

In response, Lyotard criticizes Habermas’s plea for postmodernists to “put an end to experimentation” and argues that postmodernists must deconstruct the basic aims of the Enlightenment.  Instead of accepting “metanarratives” that attempt to explain and reassure man there exists a “unitary end of history,” Lyotard claims that the best modern man can hope for is a series of contingent, temporary “mininarratives” valid only for specific groups in particular circumstances.

Baudrillard writes about the “loss of the real” or the loss of distinction between reality and illusion, image and substance, which brought to mind the theme of outer and inner representations of beauty and virtue depicted in Beauty and the Beast. He states that in the past (once upon a time?) a sign was believed to be a surface indication of an underlying reality but that postmodernism questions this belief and proposes that a sign can disguise the reality beneath or that a sign may bear no relation to any reality, citing Disneyland as an example of a simulation, not a representation, of an idealized America that never was.

I thought it interesting that Barry ends his chapter with an example of a postmodernist critique by Jeffrey Nealon, co-author of The Theory Toolbox text we are reading in class.  In his essay “Samuel Beckett and the Postmodern …,” Nealon explores the idea of “language games” where he defines “truth” as narrowly applicable, like rules that govern a game and are only valid within the context of that game, a view similar to the “mininarratives” advocated by Lyotard.  Nealon criticizes two characters in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, who wish for a “Grand Narrative” that will give significance to the seemingly meaningless trials they endure, their lives “riven with nostalgia for the lost wholeness of the past” (a wholeness represented in Beauty and the Beast.)  In Nealon’s view, these characters never “breakthrough” to the greater postmodernist realization that they will have to settle for a “mininarrative” on which to base their understanding of the particular circumstances and trials of their lives.

Little Red Riding Hood

Little Red Riding Hood


In reading the four versions of Little Red Riding Hood, it's interesting to note the differences between them. The two more traditional versions are those of Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. Both these versions present Little Red as a pretty village girl, adored by her mother and grandmother, and the red cap or hood made for her by her grandmother easily identifies her. In both versions she is an innocent charged with taking cakes to her ill grandmother and to do so, she must travel through the woods where a wily Wolf lurks. When she encounters the Wolf he pretends to be her friend but the reader knows he intends to trick her so that he can make a meal of both her and her grandmother.

Never having read the Perrault version, I was surprised to read that Little Red takes off her clothes and climbs into bed with the Wolf - she surely must have recognized him at close range! Also, the finality of both Grandmother's and Little Red's deaths is somewhat shocking, a triumph of evil over innocence. Perrault's heavy-handed "Moral" at the end of the story appears to be targeting young ladies rather than little girls, warning them of the dangers of being deceived by men who, like the wolf, may seem "tame, pleasant, and gentle" but are to be guarded against at all costs.

The Grimms' tale, however, provides the reader with the proverbial "happy ending" by bringing resolution to the narrative. Although the Wolf succeeds in eating both Grandmother and Little Red, he has apparently swallowed them whole (a bit of magic to be sure.) When the huntsman hears the Wolf snoring in Grandmother's bed, he realizes the Wolf has eaten Grandmother and cuts her out of the sleeping wolf's belly because "she could still be saved." Out come an intact Grandmother and Little Red, and the huntsman, Grandmother, and Little Red all profit from the near-fatal experience. Not wanting to leave the reader without an alternative rendition of how Little Red and Grandmother could have avoided the nasty situation all together, the Grimms also present a short tale demonstrating how Grandmother and Little Red could have out-maneuvered the Wolf without the huntsman's help if they had been less trusting. They turn the tables on the Wolf and lure him to his death by exploiting his hunger and drowning him in a trough of broth!

In contrast, “The Story of Grandmother” published by Paul Delarue and “The Little Girl and the Wolf” by James Thurber are not morality tales. There is no personalization of any of the characters - no names, no illumination of motivation or emotion displayed, and the Little Girl is no innocent, but clever enough to extricate herself from the Wolf's clutches, in one version by pretending to have to "go" outside and escaping back to her home in safety and in Thurber’s version by pulling an automatic revolver out of her basket of food for Grandmother and shooting the Wolf dead. No magic or moral needed here.

When I finished last week's reading in Beginning Theory by Barry, I did the activity he listed about why I decided to study English on page 8. I wrote that one of the reasons I decided to study English was because of learning experiences I had in high school when reading books like Melville's Billy Budd, Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, and Shakespeare's Macbeth. These works provided me with new ways of thinking about the human condition and man's relationship to others and to God, the natural and supernatural planes, and man's place in the universe, and also allowed for exploration of these issues in thought-provoking class discussions.

In this week's readings from the books on Theory, I discovered that my view of the function and value of literature is one that was prevalent prior to the 19th century but is no longer in vogue with modern literary theorists. From Barry's chapter on "Liberal Humanism," I'm apparently in Aristotle's camp because I have a "reader-centered" approach to literature, and believe that individual character is revealed through actions that lead to decisions readers can identify with. I think this is why fairy tales like Little Red Riding Hood remain popular through generations of children, because tragedy or near-tragedy create "pity and fear," sympathy for and empathy with the plight of the protagonist, and are cathartic in nature, helping us as children and adults to deal with our own fears. I also believe a story should have some point or significance, making the effort to read it "worth it," as Culler discusses in Literary Theory. Both Culler and Barry highlight the movement of British critics in the 19th century to view the function of literature as a vehicle to replace a declining national belief in religion, with literature providing a special place of moral scenarios which would unify society by giving the "middle class and aristocrats alternative values” and giving “the lower class a stake in the culture." Culler cites the novels of Jane Eyre and Uncle Tom's Cabin as examples of vehicles of ideology that were also instruments for that ideology's undoing; however, Culler then goes on to state that modern criticism rejects this as a legitimate function of literature.

I thought the chapter on “Author/ity” in the Theory Toolbox was interesting in its discussion of why certain works of literature are considered worthy of study and how the word "author" is both a verb and a noun. "To become an author is to be invested with author/ity, to be taken seriously and respected for your accomplishments." While I agree that the author is not always in control of the meaning of his or her text and that there can be multiple meanings for readers because each reader is a unique individual who is capable of discerning meaning apart from the author, I disagree that the author therefore has no control over his or her meaning, as Foucault claims. I believe an author's meaning depends on the credibility that the community of readers gives to his or her works and that the text, apart from the author, cannot produce its own meaning. I find myself more in agreement with Matthew Arnold's view that if readers will read the best works by the great masters (Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton) it will encourage "a direct relationship between the individual reader and the literary greats" and help readers establish a basis for judging new writing, a view that Barry calls a "protestant aesthetic."

Mary's Theory:

Mary's Theory: