The Dark Side of Beauty and the Beast: The Origins of the Literary Fairy Tale for Children

THE DARK SIDE OF BEAUTY AND THE BEAST: THE ORIGINS OF THE LITERARY FAIRY TALE FOR CHILDREN Jack Zipes Whenever we discuss the classic fairy tales, we tend to neglect their origins and social function in the western civilizing process as if they had no bearing on how children were and are expected to internalize their values from the time of Charles Perrault up through the present. Recent studies, however, especially those by Andrea Dworkin, Kay Stone, Madonna Kolbenschlag, and Jane Yolen have disclosed the potentially harmful effects of many socalled harmless classic fairy tales such as "Cinderella," "Sleeping Beauty," "The Frog Prince," "Snow White," and "King Thrushbeard," which lead children to stereotype sex roles and social behavior. Despite the significant revelations of these critical essays, none of them have focused on the classic fairy tales at their point of origin to explain the contradictory purpose of these discursive narratives which were intended to civilize children by inhibiting their development. Since this could be a vast undertaking, I want to limit my present paper to an analysis of the origins of the "beauty and the beast cycle" as a case study. My focus will be on the French writers of the 17th and 18th_ centuries who participated in the prevailing and pervasive fairy-tale vogue (c.1690c . 1790) which generated aesthetic and ideological standards for the literary fairy tale as it became accepted as children's literature in the West. In France the cultivation, of fairy tales for children of breeding was largely initiated by Perrault, who took a special and active interest in the education of his own children, and this genre also attracted such refined writers as Marie-Jeanne Lheritier, Marie-Catherine D'Aulnoy, Gabrielle-Suzanne Villenueve, and Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont, who used elegance and fashion to moralize. That is, there were two major tendencies among the countless French fairy-tale writers: either they took the genre seriously and endeavored to incorporate ideas , norms , and values in the narrative structure which they considered worthy of emulation either for the child or adult reader; or they parodied the genre because they considered it trivial and associated magic and the miraculous with the superstitions of the lower classes who were not to be taken seriously anyway. Both groups of writers demonstrated remarkable finesse and literally transformed the common folk tale, which they heard from nurses, governesses, servants, and peasants, into "high art." To be sure, one could speak of a third group of authors who did, in fact, trivialize the fairy-tale genre by grossly imitating the more skilled writers just to become a social or what we would call today a commercial success. Yet, whatever the purpose of writing a fairy tale was, all the authors employed their tales to engage in an ongoing cultural discourse about the mores and manners of the civilizing process in the 17th and 18th centuries . In analyzing the origination of the "beauty and the beast cycle" as it became a classic fairy tale for children, the important factor to consider is the manner in which the French writers adapted the stringent socio-religious values which became solidified after the crises of the Reformation Period and exemplified them with models drawn from court society, bourgeois circles, and doctrinaire writings on manners. Each author distinguished himself or herself by the tasteful and original contribution one made to the discussion civilité. Here the "beauty and the beast tales" are highly significant because they enable us to see the close connections between psychogenetic and sociogenetic factors of civilization as they were embodied by symbolic configurations within the development of the fairy-tale genre itself. My center of attention will be placed on the depiction of role and model formation for rearing children shaped by the fairy-tale discourse as it gave rise to the most widely known version of "Beauty and the Beast." The most prominent tales of this cycle are: Mile. Catherine Bernard's "Ricky of the Tuft" in her novel Ines de Cordoue (1696), Charles Perrault' s "Ricky of the Tuft" in Histoires ou Contes du temps passe (1697), Madame D'Aulnoy's "The Ram" and "The Green Serpent" in Contes des...