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 18th and 19th 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 18th 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.
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