Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies

4. In the Eye of the Beholder: "Where Is Beast?"

IN THEEYE OF THE BEHOLDER "WHERE IS BEAST?" 4 ONE OF THE MOST POPULAR TALES OF MAGIC, "Beauty and the Beast" is known as sub-type C of "The Search for the Lost Husband" (AT425) to folklorists, who have counted approximately fifteen hundred versions. This tale's history and diffusion exemplify the vital interaction of folk and literary texts.1 The most widely known "Beauty and the Beast," by Madame Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont, appeared in Le Magasin des Enfants in 1756. In it, Belle remains with Bete to save her father, who angered the powerful beast by stealing a rose, the gift his favorite daughter Belle had requested. Bete treats her like a queen, she grows fond of him, but she refuses his nightly marriage proposal. Bete allows Belle to visit her sick father only after she promises to stay no longer than a week. Her envious sisters conspire to keep her longer, however, and she returns to find Bete on the verge of death. Begging him not to die, she promises to marry him. Bete turns into a prince, and the fairy who advised Belle in a dream rewards her virtue, reunites her with her father, and punishes her sisters.2 While this specific plot of "Beauty and the Beast" developed fairly recently in France, by grouping it together with the much older "Cupid and Psyche" (AT425A) and "East of the Sun, West of the Moon" (AT425B) sub-types, Aarne and Thompson's classification helps modern Western readers to understand far better the tale's symbolism and affect. In "Cupid and Psyche"—the most famous version is Apuleius's second-century A.D. literary rendition in The Golden Ass—the heroine is sent to an invisible bridegroom, In the Eye of the Beholder 73 and her sisters convince her he must be a monstrous serpent. Breaking her promise to her husband, Psyche holds an oil lamp over his sleeping form: though she falls in love with the divinely handsome youth she sees, a drop of oil awakens him, and he leaves in anger. After taking revenge on her devious sisters, Psyche submits to the four impossible tasks her jealous mother-in-law sets for her. Magic helpers arid Cupid himself assistPsyche, but only when Jupiter intervenes is Venus appeased. Cupid and Psyche's marriage is, thus, celebrated by the gods and the couple conceive their child, Pleasure. In "East of the Sun, West of the Moon," the heroine marries an animal or an invisible bridegroom—in the Italian folk version "King Crin" and in Straparola's sixteenth-century literary tale "RePorco," a pig.s Once again, she cannot resist looking at his true features; once again the handsome youth leaves, falling into an enchanted forgetfulness. She sets out on a long and difficult journey to find him, picking up along the waythree magic objects—oftentimes nuts—which she eventually uses to buy three nights with her husband from his new wife or betrothed (see Sautman ). The first two nights, he lies in a drugged stupor. On the third night he recognizes her, and they are reunited. The most significant links between "Cupid and Psyche" and "Beauty arid the Beast" are the mysterious nature of the husband, whose invisibility or bestial appearance is the supernatural effect of divinity or enchantment; the broken tabus, which in all cases concern knowledge of the other or of one's self; a virgin's sexual initiation in both a psycho-familial context, involving sisters, fathers , and mothers-in-law, and a more broadly social one, involving mortals and immortals in the case of "Cupid and Psyche," and merchants and gentry in "Beauty and the Beast"; and the valorization of beauty over pride and vanity. Most obviously, the two tales dramatize the reconciling of physical and spiritual beauty in each member of a heterosexual couple, which leads to a physical and psychological transformation—Psyche turns into an immortal, the Beast into a Prince; Cupid grows out of being an enfant terrible, and Beauty is no longer daddy's girl—and an overall balanced union of eros and soul. "Beauty and the Beast" also shares both the heroine's self-sacrificing yet active nature and the dramatic urgency of the bridegroom's disenchantment with the "King Crin" sub-type: Beauty finds a close-to-dead Beast; the forgotten wife 74 Chapter 4 arouses her husband's memory on the third and...