The Escapist

ridyr-roulette:
pandoyawrites:
me-ya-ri:
strangegods:
missveryvery:
What You Don’t Know About Beauty and the Beast:
Some backstory: due to this little discussion, I was considering writing a continuation/expansion of Beauty and the Beast. I read up on it and found out everything I thought I knew about it was wrong.
-It was created by one, singular, female author in 1740: Madame Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve
-It is not a retelling of a pervasive folklore like Perrault’s Cinderella, for example. It was influenced by folklore but is an original story and is very “post” the fairy tales you might be familiar with. The story is also influenced by women who gathered together and told each other revisions of fairy tales in Parisian salons.
-It’s over 100 pages long
-Though written simply and in a straightforward manner, the characters have personalities and are much more complex in their emotions than a normal folkloric tale. They behave in a diverse and fairly realistic manner to their situations. The Beast’s mother in particular is a complex woman, protective of her son and a capable military leader but not progressive in her attitude towards marrying below your station.
-Women are overwhelmingly the masters of the plot and outnumber the men in number and priority.
Female players include:
Belle/Beauty
A nice Fairy
A jerk Fairy (called Mother of the Seasons)
The Queen of the Fairies
A Fairy-who-is-a-Queen (these are different)
A Queen/the Beast’s mother
Belle’s shallow (though fairly realistically so) sisters who are treated as a collective
-It contains considerable world-building. Fairy language, Fairy law, Fairy influence over monarchies, Fairy hierarchy, Fairy magic are all things she depicts. (eat your heart out, Tolkien fans).
-The curse is broken halfway through the book. The rest is devoted to comments on class, monarchy, marrying for love vs. status, appropriate conditions for love, and marrying below your station among other things.
-The Beast is cursed to punish his mother.
-The book’s plot turns out to be entirely due to the machinations of The Mother of the Seasons and the long-game trap/revenge story orchestrated by the Nice Fairy to defeat The Mother of the Seasons Fairy.
-The book takes place in a specific time period rather than in a nebulous “before-time”, somewhere, as I figure, between 1669 to the early 1700s. It might even be contemporaneous to when it was published. It references the age piracy, revolutions, the merchant class, the presence of slavery, Belle watching comedies, operas, and plays the Fair of St. Germain, and a Janissary battle.
-The Beast’s Queen mother led troops into battle for several years, put down a revolt and defeated an encroaching enemy monarch.
And this is only a partial list.
If you’d like to read the original version by Madame de Villeneuve, it’s collected in a book by J. R. Blanche.
It’s available for free:
Archive.org (they don’t mention her name in the author list but it’s there)
Google Books
I’ve uploaded a PDF of the Beauty and the Beast part on Google Drive.
huh
Oooooooooo!
I need this.
SWEET.

Not entirely accurate though. The Beauty and the Beast is a story drawn from a subset of fairy tales, all with different variations on a central theme, dealing with young women, “beastly” men and some kind of agreed to captivity. They come from cultures across Europe including Russia, and were used often as allegories for marriage in a time when it was most often a financial arrangement.

The heroine, a young woman, becomes a part of a transaction between her father (the head of one household) and the beast (also a man, to be the head of a household) often to save his own skin, sometimes after he has done something for apparent financial gain or while seeking something for his daughter. The heroine then goes to live with the beast, who at first seems like a terrible monster who is not obliged to treat her well, etc. just as girls’ arranged husbands often did. Over time, however, if she is kind and clever and hardworking, he sees her value as an individual and comes to love and respect her, at which point the beast releases her (In this way showing that he is not in fact beastly at all, in fact in many versions of the story his attitude is never negative, only his appearance) with the request that she return„ usually in a given amount of time. The heroine usually chooses to stay with her family too long, or is tricked into staying by jealous (unmarried or in an unhappy marriage) siblings and returns to the beast in time to find that her apparent abandonment is causing him to die from a broken heart. Either at this point or slightly earlier she usually realizes how much she doe not want to lose him, and that despite his appearance or lack of stunning attributes (infamous wit, for example,) that he is a good man who makes her happy and that she loves him enough (this is the kind of love that makes a marriage survivable, not an epic romance so much) that she wants to stay with him of her own free will. This changes him inevitably into a handsome youth (IE a sexually approachable partner) with considerable sums of money, and they live happily ever after.

The moral of the story was to teach girls that although their marriages would probably not be their idea and that men would seem like hairy smelly beasts (literally, chest hair and an era when bathing was not as frequent) but that by being kind and determined they could bring these men around, and that in time, they would also come to see them as hansom, as a physical partner, as opposed to how they saw them as young girl before maturity. They were stories about marriage and sexual maturity presented as fairy tales to acclimatize girls (mostly) to what they could expect later in life, and were widespread long before this book was published.
Daymn Ridyr laying it down