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Feb. 23rd, 2008 05:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
joiedecombatI have a confession to make: I love the Beauty and the Beast story.
I really do. I have a weakness for the Wounded Hero. The guy who's fundamentally decent but emotionally and/or socially retarded. The Jerk With A Heart Of Gold. The guy who starts out Mad, Bad, and Dangerous To Know and ends up happily-ever-after with the girl, or at least a good bit more sympathetic and easier to get along with than when he started.
This embarasses me quite a bit because, let's be honest, the moral of this particular fable is kind of broken. And this is true not only of "Beauty and the Beast" but of the various other fairy tales, fables, and myths like it: the lesson presented at the beginning for everyone to learn is "don't judge other people by appearances," but when the characters prove that they have learned this lesson by falling in love with (or at least agreeing to marry), they are rewarded with a fabulously attractive (and generally also quite wealthy) partner. Appearances shouldn't matter... but for the ending to be happy, they really kind of do, apparently. The Cupid and Psyche myth does it a bit better, but it's got its own issues.
And, this aside, the "bad boy redeemed by the love of a good woman" story works out much more frequently in fiction than it does in reality, and helps keep a lot of people in unhealthy relationships because they're convinced that they can change their partner for the better. This fails on two counts, the first being the problem inherent in entering into a relationship based on who you want the other person to become as opposed to who they are, and the second being the assumption that one person can change another (as opposed to being there to support someone who is making a sincere effort to change his or her self).
But I still love the story.
Which puts me in a quandary, because on the one hand I'd like to do a version of it myself - I had a lot of fun with a Sleeping Beauty retelling that I wrote once upon a time - but on the other hand, well, see above. Better writers than I have tried to "fix" the myth: Robin McKinley's Rose Daughter, in which Beauty has to choose whether to return the Beast to his human form or not; Cocteau's film version touches on it a bit, in a bizarre, backwards kind of way, by having the Beast's newly-regained human visage be the spitting image of the movie's villain, prompting Beauty to eye him rather dubiously. They never quite work for me, and I don't have any brilliant ideas of my own for how to un-break the essentially broken aesop of the fable.
Meta at me, folks. What are your thoughts onyaoi the Beauty and the Beast myth and others like it?
I really do. I have a weakness for the Wounded Hero. The guy who's fundamentally decent but emotionally and/or socially retarded. The Jerk With A Heart Of Gold. The guy who starts out Mad, Bad, and Dangerous To Know and ends up happily-ever-after with the girl, or at least a good bit more sympathetic and easier to get along with than when he started.
This embarasses me quite a bit because, let's be honest, the moral of this particular fable is kind of broken. And this is true not only of "Beauty and the Beast" but of the various other fairy tales, fables, and myths like it: the lesson presented at the beginning for everyone to learn is "don't judge other people by appearances," but when the characters prove that they have learned this lesson by falling in love with (or at least agreeing to marry), they are rewarded with a fabulously attractive (and generally also quite wealthy) partner. Appearances shouldn't matter... but for the ending to be happy, they really kind of do, apparently. The Cupid and Psyche myth does it a bit better, but it's got its own issues.
And, this aside, the "bad boy redeemed by the love of a good woman" story works out much more frequently in fiction than it does in reality, and helps keep a lot of people in unhealthy relationships because they're convinced that they can change their partner for the better. This fails on two counts, the first being the problem inherent in entering into a relationship based on who you want the other person to become as opposed to who they are, and the second being the assumption that one person can change another (as opposed to being there to support someone who is making a sincere effort to change his or her self).
But I still love the story.
Which puts me in a quandary, because on the one hand I'd like to do a version of it myself - I had a lot of fun with a Sleeping Beauty retelling that I wrote once upon a time - but on the other hand, well, see above. Better writers than I have tried to "fix" the myth: Robin McKinley's Rose Daughter, in which Beauty has to choose whether to return the Beast to his human form or not; Cocteau's film version touches on it a bit, in a bizarre, backwards kind of way, by having the Beast's newly-regained human visage be the spitting image of the movie's villain, prompting Beauty to eye him rather dubiously. They never quite work for me, and I don't have any brilliant ideas of my own for how to un-break the essentially broken aesop of the fable.
Meta at me, folks. What are your thoughts on
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Date: 2008-02-24 01:16 am (UTC)And I tend to take this one on slightly different terms:
If you focus on the parts of someone that you hold most dear and find most endearing, the other parts may eventually wind up not mattering so much.
It is not that the Beast becomes fabulously attractive, but that you become so accustomed to the fur and the fangs that you really wonder how other people got along without them. (I have fond memories of a friend's absolutely appalled look during a discussion in college when I looked up at him blankly and said "But who'd want to date Mel Gibson? He'd be boring!")
Then again, I'm one of the lucky ones. The whole thing did work for me RL -- largely because I didn't expect my husband to change... and largely because he was primarily motivated to change himself.
It's fascinating, occasionally, watching the reformed bad-boy types in the moments when they drop the surliness and talk about the things they do sheerly for the sake of making their partners happy. If their partners ask for something, it tends to get done grudgingly. If the guys just know that their partners really love a particular event, or time, or thing --
-- well, not infrequently, they quietly stage a production.
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Date: 2008-02-24 02:14 am (UTC)It is not that the Beast becomes fabulously attractive, but that you become so accustomed to the fur and the fangs that you really wonder how other people got along without them.
What's really funny is when a version of the myth includes the nonsensical but all-too-common reversion of the Beast to a human form, it backfires because - as you say - the audience has gotten to like the Beast enough that they have in fact stopped minding his appearance, and do find his new look boring. Both Cocteau's and Disney's version did that one; their Beasts were really quite handsome once you got used to them.
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Date: 2008-02-24 02:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-24 04:35 am (UTC)Hell, no one would talk to ME if they wanted only beautiful people. I ain't what anyone would come close to calling beautiful. ;)
Really, I couldn't even describe most the people I know except in the most general of terms. I can't remember appearances well. When I meet people I know them by only how they move, and what they 'feel' like when they stand close. Can't describe it better then that. Doesn't matter to me what you look like so long as you don't make my skin crawl by setting off what ever it is sense I go by. Appearances don't mean much to be.
..And I'm rambling, sorry. *sheepish*
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Date: 2008-02-25 11:03 pm (UTC)What works for me is when love comes later, after the Beauty character has already seen the good qualities and that the bad stuff is more exaggerated than it seems. I like the setup where they have to work or live together for another reason, there's some yelling and some Slap Slap Kiss, and the Beast character starts changing without Beauty really being in love with him/*trying* to change him other than enough to have a reasonable working deal.
Then it seems more "Hey, when you get to know this person, he's not so bad," and less Power of Love.