The Meanings of "Beauty and The Beast:" A Handbook (review)

Jerry Griswold opens his study of "Beauty and the Beast" with a quote from Italo Calvino's Why Read the Classics: "What counts for us in a work of literature is the possibility of being able to continue to unpeel it like a never-ending artichoke, discovering more and more new dimensions in reading." After years of studying and teaching the tale, Griswold presents his explorations of this multi-faceted text and offers the reader a variety of versions, thoughtful commentaries, and models of text analysis.

Madame LePrince de Beaumont's version of "Beauty and the Beast" is taken as a "touchstone;" after retelling the tale in his own words, Griswold analyzes the key characters of the story. He offers a biographical reading by relating Beauty's hesitation facing her fearful suitor with the contemporary practice of arranged marriages from which Beaumont herself suffered. To demonstrate psychological interpretations he discusses Jungian applications of the concepts of anima and animus and Bruno Bettelheim's Freudian reading. Griswold challenges the tendency of psychological critics to look at the story principally in terms of Beauty and her "problem" with relationships, arguing that Beast also undergoes transition and may symbolize an equal need for male maturation. He also challenges the strictly heterosexual reading of male/female relationships only that ignore the same-sex relationships in the tale. The approach of historical criticism to the tale is represented by Jack Zipes' analysis of class struggle enacted between the aristocratic Beast and the nouveau riche merchant family. Griswold briefly traces the development in feminist readings from the first generation that rejected the story as promoting the image of a self-sacrificial daughter submitted to patriarchal desires to more recent readings that celebrate Beauty's willingness to celebrate her own sexuality. As he traces versions of folk and fairy tales that include the animal groom, Griswold recalls the morphological approach of Vladimir Propp by delineating five "acts," or core elements, of the stories. In the recurrence of stories involving a marriage to an Other, Griswold sees attempts to address exogamy, or marrying outside the normative group structure.

Perhaps the most delightful part of the handbook is the collection of illustrations and the analysis that accompanies them. Griswold suggests that the story can be seen as a "reverse Rorschach test" (9), revealing how artists conceive beauty and bestiality. Griswold offers twenty-four images from nineteenth-century versions such as Ford's Blue Fairy Book (1889) to contemporary versions by Mercer Mayer (1978). In his analysis, Griswold presents a sensitive reading of the visual language of the selected illustrations, alerting the reader to details such as claw-footed furniture, motifs in the clothing of the characters, and how the posing of the figures and the characters' eye contact (or aversion) help to tell a story firmly grounded in issues of "seeing." While each of the illustrated versions might appear to be intended for children, Griswold contrasts some portraying Beauty as childlike (Gordon Brown, 1919; Jessie Wilcox, 1911; and Margaret Evans Price, 1921) with others, such as those by Walter Crane ( 1875), that include erotic symbolism only accessible to adults. This chapter could have led to a discussion of the dual audience of the tale, not only in art but throughout centuries of variation. Regrettably, Griswold contents himself with noting whatever readership seems to be addressed with each version, without wrestling with the issue of borders between child and adult literature that so often arises in the study of folk and fairy tales. Yet the chapter is undoubtedly a success in that it leaves the reader wishing to track down these and other versions in order to pursue the history of illustration of this or other fairy tales.

Griswold does not limit his study to written texts; his discussion includes references to televised versions, such as the Beauty and the Beast TV series. An entire chapter is devoted to two film versions: Cocteau's classic from 1946 and Disney's 1991 animated film. This chapter...