give me back my beast
romantic parables, part I
This is the first of a two-part newsletter about two fairy tale adaptation films that I have been thinking about in the context of romance novels since I first saw them and two romances novels that borrow images from fairy tales. Christine Monson’s Stormfire and Loretta Chase’s Lord of Scoundrels. This part is mostly about the fairy tales and the films! The next issue will be about the romance novels. Fair warning: one of the fairy tales, Donkey Skin, involves a threatened incestuous relationship that is never acted upon.
As far as genre cross-pollination and interaction goes, fairy tales and romance novels are obviously linked by their happily-ever-after mandates, even if the term of art means something slightly different between the two genres. But romance, particularly historical romance, also storms accusations/gains affection from being set in a “fantasy” escape world, and many, many novels are literal retellings of fairy tales and even more titles borrow elements, if not wholesale plots. Another shared function is the ease with which romance novels and fairy tales can be described by their ingredients in meaningful ways.
I don’t mean exclusively the “tropes” of Canva Instagram graphic book recommendations, a method of talking about books that I don’t find particularly interesting or helpful because it lists out ingredients without telling me how they are used or what is done to them. Like okay, eggs, flour, salt, milk, sugar, how are we being combined and prepared? In The Fairy Tale: A Magic Mirror of Imagination Steven Swann Jones defines a fairy tale “by the sum of its versions. From coinciding events or episodes in texts that apparently tell the same basic story, a plot outline for that tale is deduced."1 The pieces of these genres become more meaningful when they are repeated, iteratively, across works.2
The most comprehensive and well-known attempt at doing this for fairy tales is the Aarne-Thompson-Uther index, which classes each type of tale with an ATU number.3 Using this method, we can define both the individual tale types and the genre and concept of a “fairy tale”. A fairy tale, like the broader category, folktale, concerns itself with the “quests and questions” of ordinary people: where and how will I make a home and who will I marry? This human question is different than a myth, concerning world origin and deities, or a saga, concerning a culture's founding hero.
But a distinguishing factor of a fairy tale is these day to day struggles are expressed in ways that must be understood as metaphorical because they do not represent things that actually exist. As Swann Jones writes, the “poetic and exaggerated symbolism of fantasy” is used to “represent the deep-seated feelings of ordinary individuals in facing typical challenges of life.”4 I think that exaggerated symbolism for the everyday concerns of the reader is also a core tenet of historical romance, partly from its generic foundation in bodice rippers and from the inherent distance between characters and audience, wholesale.
In histrom, we have many a plot arc that could have actually happened and quite a few that seem pretty remote, but either way, by design, a reader’s experience of human sympathy with the characters will be filtered. The filter of the past may be less opaque than that of a land far away, populated by fairy godmothers and evil witches, but it is a filter on top of fiction nonetheless. Still, one deviation between fairy tales and romance novels is how comfortable I am calling them intentionally instructional or didactic. My hesitancy comes primarily from the expressed sentiment that “this romance depicts a relationship that I deem to be unhealthy and it is a worse romance novel for it.”
Romance novels need not be instruction manuals on good or aspirational relationships to be romance novels, but the central concerns of “how to do I communicate my feelings to another person and also understand their emotional communications to me (romantic or otherwise)” are as fundamental to human experience as any defining genre plot. When romance novels borrow from the structures of fairy tales, a genre that is explicitly didactic, how to do those “lessons” manifest? I’m going to look at two cinematic adaptations of two French fairy tales and two romance novels that explicitly reference Beauty and the Beast (though not quite literal adaptations), and explore how this didacticism manifests with the source materials are filtered either through cinema or the romance novel structure.
cataloging
Both of the fairy tales I’m looking at today were popularized in their most common form in French literature. Beauty and the Beast, which connects to the Roman myth of Cupid and Psyche, was first published as a full-length novel by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve in 1740, with many plot details that would be unfamiliar to most modern readers. Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont would abridge the story into the fairy tale of children that most audiences know today.5
The Aarne-Thompson-Uther system catalogs Beauty and the Beast as ATU 425, the “The Search for the Lost Husband” type. Subtypes include the Animal as Bridegroom (ATU 425A), involving a heroine marrying an animal of some kind, where the animal is then revealed to be a prince; Son of the Witch (ATU 425B), where a heroine has to perform tasks for her husband’s family, specifically her mother-in-law; and Beauty and the Beast storyline (ATU 425C). The motifs cross-referenced for this story include the beauty requesting a present from a journey by her father, her staying too long after the return to her home, to the detriment of her beast, and an enchantment being undone by a kiss.
The lesson of Beaumont’s fairy tale is included at the end, after the Beast has transformed, a fairy comes and transforms Beauty’s greedy sisters into statues. She says to Beauty: “Come and receive the reward of your judicious choice; you have preferred virtue before either wit or beauty, and deserve to find a person in whom all these qualifications are united. You are going to be a great queen. I hope the throne will not lessen your virtue, or make you forget yourself.”
The fairy also condemns Beauty’s cruel and vain sisters: "I know your hearts, and all the malice they contain. Become two statues, but, under this transformation, still retain your reason. You shall stand before your sister's palace gate, and be it your punishment to behold her happiness; and it will not be in your power to return to your former state, until you own your faults, but I am very much afraid that you will always remain statues. Pride, anger, gluttony, and idleness are sometimes conquered, but the conversion of a malicious and envious mind is a kind of miracle."
Beauty is rewarded for looking past the Beast’s beastliness, while her sisters, who were already in loveless marriages because they married a handsome, but vain man and a witty, but cruel man, are additionally punished for their plan that involved goading the Beast into devouring Beauty, out of their jealousy for her fine things.
Donkeyskin by Charles Perrault6 was published in 1695. Perrault possibly combined some early French novels with a theme of threatened incest from Italian folktales. In the ATU system, Donkeyskin (or the French, Peau d’Ane) is linked with the “Cinderella” type story, 510A, notable for the stepdaughter aspect of the story. Both stories have a fairy godmother, a transformative dress, and an accessory that proves identity. But Donkey Skin is 510B and one of its defining features is a king, who promises his dying first wife that he will only marry someone more beautiful and wiser than she.
The queen believes that this extracted promise would keep the king from ever remarrying, but then after a period of grief, the courtiers urge the king to remarry. The king comes to believe that marrying his daughter is the only option that honors the promise to his wife. The noble daughter is conflicted over her duty to her father and knows that their marriage would be wrong. Her fairy godmother advises that she ask for increasingly difficult-to-create gowns as a condition for her acceptance, hoping this way that the father will fail at the task and the daughter will not have to disobey her father. Using his great resources, the king keeps producing the complex dresses (the color of the sky, the color of the moon, the color of the sun). The princess’s final request is a gown made of donkey skin (pean d’ane in French).
The donkey is the source of the king’s riches. Every morning, the donkey defecates gold coins. The princess thinks the king would never kill his source of wealth, but the next morning her father produces the donkey skin and the princess uses it to flee the kingdom as a hideous chimera now known as Donkeyskin. She finds work as a servant in another kingdom, where everyone thinks of her as the pitiable creature. But a prince falls in love with her after spying her out of her costume in her home, wearing her earlier beautiful dresses. Just like Cinderella, there is a test of an accessory fitting only the heroine, though she drops a ring baked into a cake for the prince instead of accidentally leaving behind a glass slipper. The heroine marries her prince once he realizes the ring fits only her finger. Her father comes to the wedding, sees the errors of his ways, and begs the couple’s forgiveness.
Perrault tells us “[i]t is not hard to see that the moral of this tale is that it is better to undergo the greatest hardships rather than to fail in one's duty, that virtue may sometimes seem ill-fated but will always triumph in the end.” In her analysis of the 510B tale type, Christine Goldberg contrasts Donkey Skin heroines with Cinderellas— arguing that Donkey Skin is activity to Cinderella’s passivity. Donkey Skin’s godmother’s plan of increasingly beautiful dresses basically fails and she must set out on her own, compared to Cinderella’s dresses to lead directly to her interaction with the prince. Perrault hints that Donkey Skin purposefully drops the ring in the cake for the prince to find, as opposed to Cinderella’s forgotten slipper. Her period of labor as a servant is a self-exile for protection, rather than abuse suffered.
And there are parallels to passivity getting first the queen and the princess into trouble—they both ask the king to perform seemingly impossible tasks to control his actions, but only when the princess sets off on her own does her intolerable situation improve.
Both Beauty and the Beast and Donkeyskin have the classic absent mother of a fairy tale and involve a devoted daughter rending herself from being the potential domestic replacement of her mother, either emotionally like Belle, or sexually like Donkeyskin. Both processes are the trials and tribulations that make up the story, but both heroines are rewarded with committing to the process and remaining their virtuous selves, though they must first either live with or become a beast to free themselves from the role of child-made-mistress in one home to become rightful mistress of another.
adapting
La Belle et La Bête (1946, dir. Jean Cocteau) begins with a title sequence where Cocteau writes the names of his actors on a chalkboard and they are subsequently erased. The sequence continues, occasionally with actual chalk writing and sometimes with just a white handwriting text superimposed on the black chalkboard, which will also be “erased” by Cocteau with a rag. The fault lines between reality and fancy are already rumbling. The chalkboard also links the framing of the film with a schoolroom, where lessons are taught.
After the credits, we hear a voice call “Rolling! Action!” and we see the production slate for the film, but then Cocteau calls “Cut!” and we get more handwritten text on the screen, reading in French:
“Children believe what we tell them. They have complete faith in us. They believe that a rose plucked from a garden can bring drama to a family. They believe that the hands of a human beast will smoke when he kills a victim, and that this beast will be shamed when confronted by a young girl. They believe in a thousand other simple things. I ask of you a little of this childlike simplicity, and to bring us luck let me speak four truly magic words, childhood’s Open Sesame: ‘Once upon a time…’”
Now that we’ve established the conceit of watching a film, telling a fantasy story, and referencing the didacticism inherent in telling a child a story, the plot proper may begin. There is a family in France, with a father, three daughters and one son. The son has a hanger-on friend, Avenant. Three of the children are selfish, vain, and indulgent, while Belle, played by radiant Josette Day, is virtuous and honoring. Avenant is sexually interested in Belle, but she rebuffs him.
Jean Marais, with his ur-Disney Prince jawline, plays both Avenant and the Beast (the role is really a triple role if you include his transformation into Prince Charming). Avenant, close friends with Belle’s brother and the proto-Gaston character, is an invention of Cocteau not appearing in the fairy tale’s original story.
The father is preparing for a journey that he thinks will enrich the family. The two avaricious sisters request a monkey and a parrot, but Good and Sweet Belle requests only a rose. On the journey, the father’s new fortune is actually seized to pay his debts, so on his return, he has no money for lodging, leading him to an enchanted castle. He is first treated hospitably by the anthropomorphic castle, but when he steals a rose from the garden for Belle, the castle’s master appears: a great Beast threatening death. The Beast suggests an exchange as a mercy: if one of the daughters volunteers to go in her father’s place to be killed, the Beast will spare the father. Otherwise, the father must swear to return to himself to die.
The father intends to return himself after seeing his family one last time, but Belle secrets away nobly to take her father’s place. Belle explores the enchanted castle and when she finally sees the Beast, she faints from fright. The Beast carries her to her bedroom. There’s a threat of sexual violence in the image of a large masculine creature carrying the unconscious woman up the stairs. But instead of Belle being undressed, an additive transformation happens—her country garb is magically transformed into a ball gown as the Beast carries her. When Belle awakes, the Beast acts afraid of her, asking her never to look him in the eyes, even when they dine together every night.
Beast makes it clear that Belle is in equal command of the castle and he would like to marry her. Belle grows more comfortable with the Beast, even chiding him when he indulges in self-talk and behavior that emphasizes his Beast side. He seems content to lay prostrate and self-flagellate over his lack of control, but he feels shame when Belle demands that he stop this destructive behavior. When Belle asks to go home to see her ill father, the Beast is convinced to let her go if she promises to return within a week.
But the Beast also gives Belle the golden key to a pavilion no one, including him, may enter, according to the magic that gives the Beast his riches and power. If Belle neglects to return within the week, the Beast will die and the riches will be hers. He does this to demonstrate his trust in her, a leap of faith only capable from his human side. While she is home, her father recovers, seeing that she is safe and happy, but her jealous siblings plot to steal from the Beast when see Belle in a beautiful dress and gowns. Belle still attests that she does not love the Beast and is manipulated into returning to her subservient role in the family. When she realizes they have taken the key, she transports herself back to the castle, yelling ma bête, ma bête!, knowing that he will be near death.
Avenant and Belle’s brother plan to kill the Beast by stealing the source of his power, the riches of the pavilion. The men do this by scaling a wall into the Beast’s secret pavilion.7 As Avenant is hanging down from a skylight, about to drop into the garden, he is struck with an arrow from an enchanted statue of Diana, which turns him into a Beast, though he does not appear to survive the fall. At the same moment, the near-death Beast is transformed into the prince in the arms of his Beauty. As the Beast, Marais’ face is covered in fur, so the double role only becomes patently obvious as the Beast transforms back into his princely self.
Reactions to the transformation in the audience are also the stuff of reception legend. Greta Garbo apparently yelled “Give me back my beast!” as she watched the transformation. The adaptive choice to have Marais in a triple role means that when the Beast transforms into Prince Charming, Beauty reacts to him with recognition. Cocteau makes this connection in her reaction in his production diary for the film: “This Prince Charming looks extraordinarily like Avenant, and the likeness worries Beauty. She seems to miss the kind Beast a little, and to be a little afraid of this unexpected Avenant. But the end of a fairy story is the end of a fairy story.”
Marais’ performances, particularly as the Beast, where he is wearing that mask still emoting so beautifully and painfully, really do hold the whole film together. But it also raises new questions that do not exist in the original fairy tale, where only one doubling happens between the Beast and the Prince--how are Avenant and Prince Charming linked or the same, and how does Belle reconcile her flash of recognition of her enemy in the eyes of her transformed love? How does it change our lesson from Beaumont’s tale when the delivered beauty with the Beast’s virtue recalls a sexual threat?
In Donkey Skin (1970, dir. Jacques Demy), Catherine Deneuve plays both the princess and the queen. Jean Marais appears again as the king. The dual role here is also important to the structure of the story. The king’s promise to his wife, to only marry someone as beautiful as she, is literally enacted with Deneuve in both roles. After all, if you cast Catherine Deneuve as a character, who could you possibly cast as her equally beautiful and charming foil?8 There are also many other direct references to La Belle et La Bete, so any viewer of both could see Jean Marais’ reappearance as its own type of doubling, the beloved beast now made beastly king.
Like all of Cocteau’s practical magic, Demy imbibes his adaptation with Technicolor glory. The respective kingdoms are brightly blue and red and the gowns that the king has made for his daughter are particularly stunning.
The main change in the plot is the character of the fairy godmother, who appears in the original story. But in Demy’s adaptation, she is now a sexual rival for Donkey Skin. She is motivated less by maternal goodness than interest in the King herself. The gorgeous Delphine Seyrig plays her in a costume that is a far cry from the dowdy Disney fairies of Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella, more in line with a light version of Maleficient. Importantly for Donkey Skin, her fairy godmother’s plan does not really work, unlike Cinderella, so Demy stretches the failed plan into a joke—the godmother does set things right, but by selfishly sending Donkey Skin away, so she can spend time with the King.
The film stays otherwise true to the plot of the original story, though really what Demy is adding is self-aware winking at the fact that we are in a fairy tale at all—starting with the references to Cocteau’s film and continuing with the musical songs of the film (including one sung by the women of the Red Kingdom about shaving down their fingers so they might fit into Donkey Skin’s ring and that they might marry the prince), and the final arrival of the King and the Fairy Godmother at Donkey Skin and the Prince’s wedding that happens in a way that I won’t spoil, but confirms that Demy is asking us to laugh.
La Belle et La Bête is heart-wrenching and Donkey Skin is campy and cheeky, but both use fairy tales about rejecting home and maintaining one’s self in that process as frames for queer art. Both Cocteau and Demy were bisexual. Cocteau and Marais were lovers during the production of La Belle et La Bête and Marais was in many of Cocteau’s films as his muse. In this context, the sinister rot of the traditional home life in the first half of each of the heroine’s stories can read as something not only they need to grow out of, but something they must reject wholesale. And the looming violent heterosexuality of first Avenant and then the King (both played by Marais) is the source of the danger to the heroine. Triumphant sexuality involves accepting the othered and subjugated identities, either the Beast or Donkeyskin, and is equitable and joyful in these films.
But neither film fully rejects the framing as a didactic story or the lesson from its source material. Both have a visual frame around the story, like Cocteau’s classroom, and Demy using the opening and closing of a large leather book that would be familiar to any Disney fairy tale adaptation viewer. Demy even ends with the last line of Perrault’s original story: “The story of Donkey Skin may be hard to believe, but so long as there are children, mothers, and grandmothers in this world, it will be remembered by all.”
The new angle of the lesson, added by the visuals of the film and slight changes made to the story, have an additive effect on the lesson teaching. These films show a lesson of performing duty through hardship and rejecting a restrictive-to-your-identity home. La Belle et La Bête, with the disappointment felt by the viewer and Belle at the transformed Beast who now looks like the threatening, heterosexual Avenant laughs a little at the neatness demanded by a happily-ever-after. As Cocteau says “But the end of a fairy story is the end of a fairy story.” The straight, human couple has to be together at the end, but the director can leave the viewer wishing for their beast back.
Next issue, I’ll look at two romance novels that are not straight Beauty and the Beast adaptations but do reference the story directly. Neither Lord of Scoundrels nor Stormfire is or needs to aim to show an aspirational relationship, but what is each novel’s relationship with its didactic source?
recommendations
My actual favorite Catherine Deneuve film is Belle de Jour (1967, dir. Luis Buñuel). Not quite a romance novel, but certainly about sex and romance. This movie was a TCM Essential in 2014 and I watched it one night while I was at a nannying job. I put it as a watershed moment when I started loving movies on my own and just because my parents loved movies.
Lots of people my age were Ella Enchanted heads and I did love Gail Carson Levine’s Cinderella adaptation, but my favorite of hers was always The Two Princesses of Bamarre, which I reread a few years ago. It still hits! Recommend revisiting whichever fairy tale adaptation you imprinted on as a pre-teen.
It’s October and you should watch a ghostmance. My favorite is The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, from 1946, like La Belle et la Bête, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. There’s just nothing more atmospheric and cozy than this tiny film set on the coast of England about a romance between a widow and the ghost of a sea captain.
Steven Swann Jones, The Fairy Tale, 4 (2002).
This was my angle for the Dukes!
The Aarne-Thompson-Uther index is a bibliography of types of fairy tales. They are grouped into seven broad categories: Animal Tales, Tales of Magic, Religious Tales, Realistic Tales, Tales of the Stupid Ogre (Giant, Devil), Anecdotes and Jokes, and Formula Tales. There are thousands of these entries in total. Within the numbered entries (sometimes subdivided with letters after that), the “wonder tale” is titled and given a summary. Tales are then tagged with motif references, cross-referenced to common other tales that might be in communication. Lists of the tale from multiple cultures are listed and scholarship on the tale might be included as well in the annotations.
Swann Jones, 11.
The Beaumont story is the basis of both La Belle et la Bête (dir. Jean Cocteau, 1946) that I am discussing today and the 1991 Disney production, though the Disney production borrows some original elements introduced in the 1946 film as well.
Perrault is most famous for writing wrote the Cinderella story the Western world is most familiar with, changing her fur slippers to glass based on a misconception about the words verre (glass) and vair (squirrel fur).
Even though they have stolen the key from Belle?? They choose not to use it out of fear that the key will set off a “diabolical device.”
(The only possible answer other than Demy’s dual role solution is Françoise Dorléac, her sister who died in 1967, three years before Donkey Skin was released)
i just watched cocteaus beauty and the beast last night so this was perfect timing!
Re: Catherine Deneuve films, if you watch A Slightly Pregnant Man, I strongly recommend finding the Italian ending on YouTube, the French ending is the one streaming on Criterion Channel.