OLD AS TIME: CIRCULATION OF GENDER CONCEPTIONS IN BEAUTY AND THE BEAST TALES PDF Free Download
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OLD AS TIME: CIRCULATION OF GENDER CONCEPTIONS IN
BEAUTY AND THE BEAST TALES
_______________
A Thesis
Presented to the
Faculty of
San Diego State University
_______________
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts
in
Rhetoric and Writing Studies
_______________
by
Clara Cushing
Summer 2020
iii
Copyright © 2020
by
Clara Cushing
All Rights Reserved
iv
DEDICATION
To my parents, who instilled in me a fascination for stories, cultures, education, and
asking questions, and whose own love story far outshines tales as “old as time.”
v
The intensity, force, and circulatory range of a rhetoric are always expanding through the
mutations and new exposures attached to that given rhetoric, much like a virus. - Jenny Rice
vi
ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS
Old as Time: Circulation of Gender Conceptions in Beauty and the
Beast Tales
by
Clara Cushing
Master of Arts in Rhetoric and Writing Studies
San Diego State University, 2020
One of the first forms of rhetoric we encounter as children is the fairy tale, which
inducts us into society by conferring social roles, especially gendered ones. This thesis traces
a fairy tale’s portrayal of gender using circulation studies—specifically, Jenny Rice’s
framework of affective ecologies—and feminist criticism—Sonja Foss’s disruptive strategies
and Gesa Kirsch and Jacqueline Royster’s critical imagination. In doing so, I extend
circulation studies to demonstrate how it can be used not only for digital rhetoric but also for
tales that have been circulated via print and film.
“Old as time,” Beauty and the Beast tales lend themselves to such a study, with the
animal bridegroom motif providing a particularly fascinating take on gender. This thesis
examines three versions of the tale, occurring in three distinct time periods and cultures:
Lucius Apuleius’s second-century CE Roman Cupid and Psyche (embedded within The
Golden Ass), Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s eighteenth-century French La Belle et la
Bête, and Disney’s 2017 live-action film Beauty and the Beast. To capture the viral spread of
the tale, this thesis provides an overview of the cultural gender context and analyzes the
temporal, historical, and lived contexts of each tale, tacking in and out to illuminate the
bleeding of contexts and the complexity of rhetorical movement.
Investigating how gender expectations are conveyed rhetorically through the “male
animal” and “female bride” in each tale, the thesis argues that the heroine and the Beast
conform to their contemporary gender conventions in terms of physical appearance and
performative roles in education and marriage. Circulating literature and films during each
tale’s historical period indicate how the tale shifted to reflect changes in societal perspectives
on curiosity and love in marriage. While the lived context of each tale points to a change in
audience, the purpose of edification and instilling gender conformity remains consistent
throughout the tale’s circulation. Ultimately, this thesis offers an example of how a
circulation studies analysis of the viral spread of a tale enhances our understanding of how
rhetoric and the ideologies it presents—such as gender—morph as rhetoric circulates across
time and culture.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................. vi
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ..................................................................................................... ix
CHAPTERS
1 INTRODUCTION .........................................................................................................1
Literature Review of Animal Bridegroom Motif .....................................................6
Rhetorical Use of Motifs ....................................................................................7
The Animal Bridegroom Motif ..........................................................................9
Function of Animals in Rhetoric......................................................................14
2 METHODOLOGY ......................................................................................................20
Circulation Theory .................................................................................................20
Circulation Theory: Ecological Frameworks ...................................................26
Gender Theory .......................................................................................................31
Gender Theory: Feminist Criticism .................................................................33
3 APULEIUS’S CUPID AND PSYCHE ........................................................................37
Summary of Cupid and Psyche ..............................................................................38
Cultural Context for Gender: Second-Century CE Rome ......................................41
Tacking In ..............................................................................................................46
Temporal Analysis ...........................................................................................46
Tacking Out ...........................................................................................................50
Historical Context ............................................................................................50
Lived Context...................................................................................................53
Conclusion .............................................................................................................54
4 LEPRINCE DE BEAUMONT’S LA BELLE ET LA BÊTE.........................................56
Summary of La Belle et la Bête .............................................................................59
Cultural Context for Gender: Mid-Eighteenth Century France .............................61
viii
Tacking In ..............................................................................................................68
Temporal Analysis ...........................................................................................68
Tacking Out ...........................................................................................................73
Historical Context ............................................................................................73
Lived Context...................................................................................................77
Key Differences ...............................................................................................79
Conclusion .............................................................................................................80
5 DISNEY’S LIVE-ACTION BEAUTY AND THE BEAST ...........................................82
Summary of Disney’s 2017 Beauty and the Beast .................................................85
Cultural Context for Gender: Contemporary “Disney Feminism” ........................88
Tacking In ..............................................................................................................97
Temporal Analysis ...........................................................................................97
Tacking Out .........................................................................................................107
Historical Context ..........................................................................................107
Lived Context.................................................................................................110
Key Differences .............................................................................................114
Conclusion ...........................................................................................................115
6 CONCLUSION ..........................................................................................................117
WORKS CITED ....................................................................................................................122
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
As I was writing this thesis on the viral nature of rhetoric, a physical virus swept
across the globe and disrupted all aspects of life—including the university space—in an
unprecedented manner. Not only do I wish to acknowledge COVID-19’s contribution to
carving out writing time and to lending more urgent relevancy to my discussion of rhetoric as
a virus (small silver linings to a devastating pandemic), but, more importantly, I want to
acknowledge the dedication and support of my thesis committee despite the coronavirus
chaos. My chair, Suzanne Bordelon, challenged my thinking on my method and ideas
throughout the writing process while also offering endless encouragement. My second and
third readers, Glen McClish and Elizabeth Pollard, similarly provided encouragement and
offered their expertise in strengthening my arguments and ideas.
I also would like to thank the entire Rhetoric and Writing Studies department faculty,
my cohort, and the San Diego State University Writing Center for pushing me to grow as a
rhetorician, a scholar, and a teacher.
1
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
One of the earliest ways that rhetoric shapes our society is through the stories that we
tell children. Fairy tales reflect and perpetuate values and identities, demonstrating to
children what behaviors and identities they should assume as they grow and to parents what
behaviors and identities they should cultivate in their children.1 One specific cultural
construction that is deeply embedded in the rhetoric of fairy tales is that of gender norms and
expectations. As parents expose their children to fairy tales that explain to them the purported
ideal of separate, binary roles of men and women, the cultural construct of gender becomes
increasingly entrenched in society. Authors of fairy tales specifically craft them keeping in
mind this goal of imparting society’s values to their target audience: the next generation.
While the rhetorical value of fairy tales is rather straightforward with regard to its
influence on children, what makes fairy tales particularly interesting is how they circulate
both among cultures and over time. Repetitions of the same story line can be found in
different parts of the globe—some of which are a result of simple parallel development,
attributed to the universality of the human condition, and others of which can be traced back
more clearly to a single original source. Analyzing specific versions of the same fairy tale
that can be traced back to a specific source offers a unique opportunity to apply circulation
studies to understand how the gender values that these tales perpetuate have varied over time
and place.
1 Studies demonstrating this include Lori Baker-Sperry (2007), Julia Golden and Jennifer Jacoby (2018), and
Karen Wohlwend (2012). Other researchers who have made such claims about fairy tales and children’s
literature include Jane Agee (1993), Lenore Weitzman et al. (1972), and Jack Zipes (1983, 1995).
2
Scholars have researched fairy tales extensively in various disciplines, including
literature, folklore, cultural studies, sociology, and psychology, and the portrayal of gender in
fairy tales has claimed a good amount of focus in these studies.2 However, little attention has
been paid to fairy tales within the field of Rhetoric and Composition. Major academic
journals within the field, including Advances in the History of Rhetoric, Rhetorica, Rhetoric
Review, and Rhetoric Society Quarterly have few, if any, studies on fairy tales.3 There is
similarly a lack of book publications on fairy tales within the field, with one of the few
publications being Lawrence Coupe’s Kenneth Burke on Myth: An Introduction. Coupe’s
book is an in-depth study of the cross-disciplinary rhetorician’s ideas on myths, which he
wrote on throughout his other works but did not himself devote an entire project to. This
thesis aims to address this gap within the field of Rhetoric and Composition by analyzing a
specific fairytale, thus drawing rhetorical attention to the genre of fairy tales.
This study furthermore extends the emerging study of circulation, a field that is
relatively new and has focused largely on digital texts, since digital circulation is the most
prominent method of circulation today. This thesis thus expands circulation studies by
tracing the circulation of a specific tale from its early beginnings to its modern-day
interpretation, growing the field of circulation by demonstrating what can be gained by
taking a larger overview approach. Ultimately, this study provides a deeper understanding of
how gender constructs are circulated within and between societies over time and place via
fairy tales.
2 For more on the study of gender in fairy tales within these fields, see: Justyna Deszcz’s “Salman Rushdie’s
Attempt at a Feminist Fairy tale Reconfiguration in Shame” (2004) in Folklore; Benjamin Justice’s “Maleficent
Reborn: Disney’s Fairy tale View of Gender Reaches Puberty” (2014) in Social Education; Victoria Somoff’s
“On the Metahistorical Roots of the Fairy tale” (2002) in Western Folklore; Nanae Takenaka’s “The
Realization of Absolute Beauty: an Interpretation of the Fairy Tale Snow White” (2016) in Journal of
Analytical Psychology; Igor V. Vachkov’s “Fairytale Therapy Today: Determining its Boundaries and Content”
(2016) in Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences; and Dymtriieva Valeriia’s “Gender Alterations in English
and French Modernist ‘Bluebeard’ Fairy Tale” (2016) in English Language and Literature Studies.
3 The few articles in these journals dedicated to myths include Jay Dolmage’s “Metis, Metis, Mestiza, Medusa:
Rhetorical Bodies across Rhetorical Traditions” (2009) and Richard Johnson-Sheehan and Paul Lynch’s
“Rhetoric of Myth, Magic, and Conversion: A Prolegomena to Ancient Irish Rhetoric” (2007).
3
The tale of Beauty and the Beast is one that particularly lends itself to circulation
studies, since it is, as it claims, “old as time.” The popular tale of the animal bridegroom can
be traced back to its classical origins in the myth of Cupid and Psyche, although the
connection is not immediately visible. The link between Cupid and Psyche and Beauty and
the Beast tales is widely accepted by scholars of literature and cultural studies, although it
“does not demonstrate an unbroken chain of transmission from Roman antiquity to the
present” (10), as Ruth Bottigheimer notes. Lucius Apuleius’s novel was first translated and
reprinted in 1469, leaving a large gap where his stories were not widely known. Nonetheless,
the history of publication indicates that Beauty and the Beast tales only rose in countries with
a publishing history of Apuleius’s Cupid and Psyche, embedded within his novel The Golden
Ass. Since the novel heavily emphasized magic, the Inquisition destroyed all versions of the
text other than the 1469 Editio Princeps published by the Bishop of Aleria, resulting in an
unusual situation that limits this particular tale to one specific version (Bottigheimer 9).
Apuleius’s Cupid and Psyche was thus the origin for subsequent Beauty and the Beast tales
in these areas, and, as it is much different than the tale it transformed into, it is particularly
eye-opening to study changes to the tale over time and among cultures.
For the purposes of this thesis, I examine Apuleius’s second-century CE version of
Cupid and Psyche, published within his novel The Golden Ass, circulated in second-century
Rome, as well as Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s 1756 story La Belle et la Bête, and
Disney’s 1991 animation and 2017 live-action film in the U.S. These three versions are
tightly connected. As the first known version of the tale, Apuleius’s Cupid and Psyche
provides an important starting point in demonstrating the origin of the gender roles
associated with the tale. I then examine the more widely known version of the tale that arose
in areas where Cupid and Psyche was published: Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s 1756
story La Belle et la Bête. Leprince de Beaumont’s story is actually an abridged version of
Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve’s 1740 novel. Since most historians view Leprince
de Beaumont’s version as the “authoritative source for all those that followed in English”
4
(Craven 126), I focus on her retelling and provide only a brief overview of de Villeneuve’s
novel. The final version of the tale that I analyze is Disney’s live-action film Beauty and the
Beast. Disney used Leprince de Beaumont’s La Belle et la Bête as the basis for the 1991
animated Beauty and the Beast, which was then adapted for the live-action film in 2017.4 For
the scope of this thesis, I will focus more heavily on the live-action version, since this reflects
the most contemporary version of the tale and reflects more recent gender constructions than
those portrayed in the 90s. When useful, I will highlight differences in gender portrayal
between the animated and live versions. By situating each version in its temporal and cultural
setting, I will demonstrate how circulation theory can improve our understanding of how
texts and their values are circulated. In addition to being linked to each other and thus being
an appropriate subject for circulation studies, these tales are particularly fascinating for
studying gender, since they focus on a woman’s performed role in marriage, familial
devotion, and love.
As the tale of Cupid and Psyche was circulated over time and place via retellings of
the animal bridegroom, the values rhetorically reflected in these stories added to and altered
the original version of the story. In this way, the treatment of gender in these tales that model
romantic relationships changes throughout the process of circulation. To understand better
the ways that fairy tales perpetuate and alter these perceptions as they circulate across time
and culture, I pose the following research questions:
• How are gender expectations conveyed rhetorically through the “male animal”
and “female bride” characters in each culture’s (second-century CE Rome,
eighteenth-century France, contemporary U.S.) version of the fairy tale? What are
the differences and similarities?
• Examining the rhetorical situation of fairy tales (specifically, this animal
bridegroom trope), how does circulation theory enhance our understanding of
how gender expectations do or do not change in these stories over time?
4 There were other versions of the story between the 1991 animation and 2017 live action, including the 1987
and 2012 television series. For the purposes of studying circulation, however, it is most useful to consider these
two versions because they are the most closely connected. In addition to being the most recent version of the
tale, the 2017 film is a close reproduction of the 1991 animation.
5
To address my research questions, I begin with a general literature review of the
animal bridegroom motif, specifically focusing on its occurrence in Western cultures, since
the three versions of the tale that I analyze are in this region. Following this review, I
establish a foundation for the theoretical framework of circulation studies, limiting the broad
field to specifically use affective ecologies as discussed by Jenny Rice.5 Put briefly,
circulation studies complicates the rhetorical situation, demonstrating that the contexts that
affect rhetoric are overlapping and interconnected rather than discrete. Drawing on Rice’s
“framework of affective ecologies that recontextualizes rhetorics in their temporal, historical,
and lived fluxes” (9), I demonstrate her metaphor of rhetorics moving as a virus and contexts
“bleeding” into one another. To effectively consider issues of gender in the tale, I also
provide a brief overview of gender studies. I define gender using Judith Butler’s discussion
of “a stylized repetition of acts” (519), focusing specifically on physical portrayal and
performance. I limit my use of gender theory to feminist criticism as demonstrated by Sonja
Foss’s strategies of disruption as well as Gesa E. Kirsch and Jacqueline J. Royster’s use of
tacking in and tacking out in their discussion of critical imagination.
I apply these frameworks to the existing scholarship on the three key texts, entering
the conversation by supporting, extending, and challenging previous findings and bringing to
light the rhetorical presentation of gender performance in these tales. Each of the three key
texts is analyzed in its own chapter, organized according to the theoretical frameworks I have
selected. I begin with a discussion providing cultural context for the treatment of gender
during the time period in which the piece was initially published and circulated. I then
provide a temporal analysis and historical and lived contexts to contextualize the text
according to Rice’s framework of affective ecologies (9). Analyzing the texts in such rigid
boxes would undermine my purpose in demonstrating the complexity of a fluid framework
such as affective ecologies, so I use Kirsch and Royster to convey the temporal analysis as a
5 Jenny Rice is listed in the Works Cited by her maiden name, Jenny Edbauer, under which she published her
article “Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to Rhetorical Ecologies.”
6
strategy of tacking in and the historical and lived contexts as strategies of tacking out to
provide a global view of the text. The chapters on La Belle et la Bête and Beauty and the
Beast include a final section on key differences to further highlight how the circulation of
these texts reflected changes in gender conventions—specifically regarding major themes of
curiosity, marriage and love’s role in it, and the heroine’s passivity versus activeness. These
categories are used as a tool to capture the bleeding of contexts in a productive manner while
still demonstrating that the tale being tracked is a living, moving, viral rhetoric.
I argue that all three texts show the female character (Psyche/Beauty/Belle) and the
Beast as conforming to their contemporary gender conventions in terms of physical
appearance and performative roles in education and marriage. The historical contexts
concentrate on other literature circulating at the time to provide further understanding on how
society’s gendered understanding of curiosity and the role of passion or love in marriage has
shifted over time. The lived contexts demonstrate that, although the purpose of each tale’s
circulation and audience has changed over time, one purpose has remained more or less
similar: to edify its audience and reinforce accepted gender conventions. This study offers a
glimpse of how rhetoric—in this case, in the form of a fairytale—takes on a viral life of its
own as it circulates, picking up various aspects of various contexts that all bleed into one
another and form just one of the many stories that rhetorically inform our society’s
conception of gender.
LITERATURE REVIEW OF ANIMAL BRIDEGROOM MOTIF
Fairy tales have long depicted the marriage of humans to animals in many cultures,
including Indo-European, Native American, Asian, and African (Anderson 35). As the
worlds of humans and animals always tend to be close together in these tales, the animal
bridegroom motif is something that we are accustomed to in fairy tales; it is no more
shocking to us in the context of a fairy tale than animals’ capability of speech in Aesop’s
Fables. The bizarre and taboo aspect of such marriages is of course readily apparent when
one moves beyond the realm of fictitious fairy tales and considers the horror of such tales in
reality. This calls into question the purpose of exposing children to the image of an animal
bridegroom—not disturbing to a child, who is drawn to delightful talking animals, but
uncomfortable for an adult, who is both drawn to and repulsed by the deeper implications of
7
a human’s marriage to a character that is “othered” from the human by being given an animal
status.
To analyze the animal bridegroom motif’s significance in Beauty and the Beast tales,
it is necessary to consider how motifs function rhetorically in culture by creating meaning
specific to a cultural context as well as to trace the history and meaning of the animal
bridegroom motif—specifically, as relates to this thesis, the motif of the animal groom who
is actually an enchanted prince. In considering how the motif is significant to the gendered
roles of love within society, it is furthermore useful to extend the discussion to include how
animals themselves work rhetorically in society in terms of persuasion and gender
conceptions.
Rhetorical Use of Motifs
Central to this study is the concept of motif. In their book Archetypes and Motifs in
Folklore and Literature, Jane Garry and Hasan El-Shamy define motif as “a small narrative
unit recurrent in folk literature” (xv). They draw on American folklorist Stith Thompson’s
definition: “A mother as such is not a motif. A cruel mother becomes one because she is at
least thought to be unusual” (xv). The mother “as such” is not a motif, according to Garry
and El-Shamy, because it is “a basic experience of human existence” that can be thought of
as an archetype. The cruel mother, or, in the case of Beauty and the Beast tales, the absent
mother, is thus a motif, as are other commonly occurring aspects of a tale, including the cap
of invisibility, the magic carpet and magic air journey that Thompson refers to in the tale of a
hero. Garry and El-Shamy further clarify their understanding of the difference between the
two: “While a motif is a unit of interest in a tale or some other genre such as a proverb, joke,
ballad, or riddle, an archetype is a pattern of primary significance with deep psychic
resonance that also occurs in various literary genres” (xv). In the case of the animal
bridegroom motif, the marriage between human and animal is a motif—a unit of interest in a
tale—that occurs in various literary genres, but it is not a pattern of “primary significance” in
that it is not quite as universal as the archetype of “mother” or “hero.”
The term motif is not commonly used within the field of rhetoric since it is studied
mainly within the fields of literature and folklore studies. In rhetoric, stylistic elements such
as a figure of speech (“a form of speech differing from the common and ordinary mode of
8
expression”) or a trope (“the conversion of a word from its proper signification to another, in
order to give it force”) focus more on how a word or phrase functions rather than how a
figure such as the cruel mother is repeated throughout the rhetorical tradition of multiple
cultures (Bain 1147). Despite the fact that motifs are not often researched in the field of
rhetoric, motifs nonetheless work rhetorically in folklore and fairy tales as they hold
meanings specific to cultural contexts. Although the same motif may be repeated in tales
across cultures, the motif may have a significantly different meaning. While the motif of a
dragon in European tales generally is seen as a beast that takes human lives and acts as a
guardian of dark places, in Asian tales the dragon motif portrays a creature that brings good
luck and assists humans; similarly, the snake motif is seen as evil in Judeo-Christian cultures,
whereas in Buddhist, Jaina, and Hindu traditions snakes play large roles in tales and are even
given shrines in individual houses (Garry and El-Shamy xvii). By constructing different
meanings in different societies, motifs serve the purpose of communicating culturally
specific ideas. Its rhetorical function thus necessitates that the motif’s meaning and
presentation change over time to reflect the values of the society that uses and views it. In
some cases, it can even be seen as the ground for change; authors such as Angela Carter, who
will be discussed more in the next section, make changes to commonly circulated motifs to
introduce different viewpoints into society.
Garry and El-Shamy observe the limitations of cross-cultural studies of motifs.
Specifically, they point out the limitations of slightly simplified current classification systems
of motifs, such as Thompson’s 1932-1936 motif-index. Thompson includes a section on
talking animals, for example, but does not account for how all African stories involve
animals that speak, which makes this category “virtually meaningless for African stories”
(xviii). Garry and El-Shamy furthermore assert that universalities were misidentified by
nineteenth-century folklorists because their methods were arbitrary, and they were not
sensitive to problems that arise in cross-cultural comparisons. Despite these limitations to
understanding how motifs function rhetorically in cultures, Garry and El-Shamy
acknowledge that current scholars have more research to draw on to more accurately
consider such possibilities. Garry and El-Shamy cite Alan Dundes, who notes that studying
the distribution of myths shows that no myth is fully universal, but at the same time no myth
is found in only a single culture (xviii). While motifs do provide an opportunity to examine a
9
culture’s value system and how that is expressed rhetorically, it is important to be aware of
these limitations. For this reason, this project tracks a motif across cultures that originate in
the same region: western Europe.6
The Animal Bridegroom Motif
The animal bridegroom motif comes in many varieties in both animal type and plot
line. Animals in the tales include birds, which are generally female, “dogs, goats, bears,
horses, bulls, fish, crocodiles, and snakes” (Silver 93). Carole Silver, a fairy tale scholar
whose articles on the animal bridegroom motif have appeared in Archetypes and Motifs in
Folklore and Literature: A Handbook and Folktales and Fairytales: Traditions and Texts
from around the World, 2nd Edition, indicates that commentators argue about the difference
between tales of human-animal marriages and those that center on human-animal lovers:
Tales of marriage between humans and animals are often Märchen, focus on
transformation, and have happy endings, in which the animal metamorphoses into
a princess or prince. . . . Animal paramour tales, on the other hand, are sometimes
etiological or moralistic and often end with the slaying of the animal lover or the
desertion of the human partner. (93)
Two tales that Thompson discusses highlight these differing plot lines. In an Eskimo story, a
girl has a lover who is a dog that visits her as a man at night. When she gives birth to dog
children, her tribe “feels itself disgraced and deserts her,” until she shares the food for her
children with the tribe when it is starving (356). She also eventually disenchants her dog
children by destroying their animal skins. Although this is a tale of an animal lover rather
than a marriage, Thompson notes that the tale focuses less on the sexual aspect of the
relationship and instead treats the relationship as a marriage, paralleling the tale of Cupid and
Psyche. Thus, the tale ends in a transformation. Conversely, the Plains tribe tells a story of
6 The term “culture” is used in many ways in different disciplines. For this study, I draw on the Dictionary of
Media and Communication definition of culture as “the sum of those characteristics that identify and
differentiate human societies—a complex interweave of many factors.” I reference these specific factors that
create culture: “language, history, traditions . . . arts, social, economic and political norms, and [a] system of
values” (“Culture”). I also acknowledge that there are cultures within cultures; my work focuses specifically on
how these tales reflect and interact with the dominant culture in which they were published and circulated.
10
the Rolling Head, which focuses on the sexual nature of the relationship between a woman
and animal. In the tale, a man punishes his wife when he learns she was committing adultery
with a snake; in some tales, he feeds the snake to his wife, and in others, he cuts off her head.
Her head then rolls after him and his family, and they struggle to escape. The focus of the
tale is on the woman’s sexual misconduct and on the punishment that follows adultery. Other
tales of animal lovers concern gods rather than humans, depicting Zeus’s approach to various
women in Greek mythology, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses include various odd amorous
pairings, such as Pygmalion loving a statue and a nymph having relations with a human.
Ovid includes animal transformations that were punishments for individuals who spurned
physical advances, such as Callisto, who is turned into a bear after being raped by a god of
humans and animals, and Picus, who is turned into a woodpecker (Fantham, Ovid’s
Metamorphoses 158, 12).
Animal marriage tales also follow two different types: the female animal bride and
the male animal groom. The female animal bride is generally a diminutive animal, such as a
frog, dog, mouse, or tortoise (Anderson 36). Silver highlights themes of fear and distrust with
female brides, noting that even gentle animal brides carry with them a connection to
animalistic nature that indicates women are in need of control; some of these tales may
“reflect men’s fantasies of captured and domesticated power . . . [or] male anxiety about
desertion or abandonment by women” (95). Amanda Anderson adds that these tales result
from the “cultural anxiety that women are, in truth, part animal” (35), and thus the animal
bride is usually the husband’s victim or captive; her monstrous nature is uncovered, and she
is often destroyed or left behind. Tales in which the animal bride assists the husband suggest
that there is a beneficial relationship between men and women and between humans and
nature (Anderson 36). One particularly fascinating trend in these stories is how their bodily
descriptions contrast with animal grooms; whereas animal grooms usually are shown to be
beautiful princes disguised as beasts, “female animals, though masked in human beauty, are
frequently exposed as monsters,” and few stories “utilize the idea that a husband must love
and accept a ‘beastly’ or animal wife” (Silver 94-95). The gendered double-standards
between female animal bride and male animal groom appearances further point to the
societal significance of this motif.
11
The category that Beauty and the Beast tales fall under, of course, is that of the
animal groom. Thompson labels tales of Enchanted Husband (Lover) Disenchanted, in which
the husband or lover who has been enchanted as an animal is returned to his human form, as
Type 425 (98). While the tale has been recorded in various parts of the world and includes
Lithuanian, Magyar, Indian, and Kaffir versions, it is particularly popular in western Europe;
several countries in this area have more than fifty versions of the tale (“Beauty and the
Beast” 129; Thompson 99). Such tales begin with a girl married to a “monster husband,”
although the plot line has many variations in its beginning regarding how the monster
became such and how the girl entered the marriage. Often, the monster is actually an
enchanted prince in the form of an unpleasant animal, such as a crocodile, serpent, or bear
(“Animal paramour” 61). In many tales, he is a man at night but an animal or monster during
the day (Thompson 98). The girl finds herself in the marriage because her father has
promised his daughter to the monster in marriage, either to buy his own freedom from the
monster or to get a present that his youngest daughter requested. In the majority of the tales,
the girl joins the monster husband willingly. Thompson articulates,
. . . at this point . . . the manifold versions of the tale begin to converge. In spite of
the fact that the girl has been really forced into this marriage and that the husband
is thought of in the earlier part of the story as a monster or a disagreeable animal,
the heroine is not only complacent about the marriage but almost immediately
comes to love her unusual mate (98).
In most tales, the couple lives in luxury, and the focus of the plot then becomes about the girl
finding a way to disenchant her husband, which she does with a kiss or tears, burning an
animal skin, or, less frequently, by cutting off his head (98).7
In The Search for the Lost Husband tales, Type 425, the girl loses her husband
because she disobeys his instructions, often by “learn[ing] and reveal[ing] the secret of his
unusual form” (98). For example, in several tales the husband forbids her from looking at
7 Other popular animal groom tales include: in Germany—the bear, the Dwarf, the House in the Wood, Hans
My Hedgehog the Frog King, and the Two Girls; in Italy—the Wolf; in Scandinavia—serpent tales (Thompson
101-102).
12
him at certain times, and, when the girl disobeys, the husband flees (Silver 94). On her search
to find him, she sometimes wears iron shoes that have to be worn out before she finishes her
search, receives magic objects from an elderly woman, gets directions from the wind or stars,
or climbs glass mountains. She then must win over her husband from the woman he is about
to marry, making him remember her since he has forgotten. Thompson notes that she usually
does this by acting as a maid and using three jewels to buy her three nights with her husband.
In all tales, the story concludes “with the reunion of the couple and a happy marriage” (98).
As these tales have been told over time, the emphasis and meaning have seemingly
shifted as well. Silver observes that older versions of this “Enchanted Husband (Lover)
Disenchanted” “stress the civilizing value of women’s virtue, the triumph of female
gentleness over brute desire” (94). Both Silver and Anderson signal Angela Carter’s Bloody
Chamber (1979), a collection of adult fairytales concerning unions between humans and
animals, as an example of the more recent trend in versions of the tale to emphasize the
beast’s virtues and values. One story within the collection, “The Tiger’s Bride,” concludes
with the woman turning into a tiger so the man does not have to hide his magnificent animal
nature in the form of a human. In such versions, “the passion, wildness, and defiance of the
beast, his rebellion against the evils of civilization, are now perceived as good” (Silver 94).
The versions of this age-old motif vary widely over culture and time, as can be expected—
and the interpretations vary endlessly in much the same way.
The animal bride and animal groom motifs have differing significances, as can be
expected, and there has been no shortage of approaches to an interpretation. Thompson
summarizes previous scholarship of animal bride tales, noting that some have interpreted the
supernatural spouses as representing some “phenomenon of sky or cloud or seasonal
change,” as animals that are always “related to primitive totemistic ideas,” “embodiments of
ancient rites,” or as being best understood as “interpretation[s] of dreams” (97). Similarly, the
meaning of the “Enchanted Husband (Lover) Disenchanted” remains obscure despite the
many attempts to assign meaning to it. Thompson takes issue with Ernst Tegethoff, who
interprets the tale as centering on the disruption of a happy marriage due to a wife’s
disobedience. Thompson criticizes Tegethoff for focusing only on the “psychological
condition which might conceivably produce this story” and for ignoring all other plot aspects
13
and motifs that occur in the tale in his attempt to portray the story as “the result of a dream
experience” (99).
Also taking the psychoanalytic approach, other critics have focused solely on the
motif’s relation to sexuality. One such critic, Bruno Bettelheim, focuses on the beast as a
symbol for sexuality and how children at first find sex revolting. These tales, he argues,
“teach that for love, a radical change in previously held attitudes about sex is absolutely
necessary” (282). He uses a psychology perspective to analyze three aspects of tales
concerning the animal groom motif. The first aspect is that the groom was changed into an
animal for unknown reasons that are not fully explained. Bettelheim equates this
transformation to children’s changing understanding of sex, which, depending on cultural
and time period factors, may be limited to what they know about cooties and “gross” kissing.
The tale thus traces how children’s abhorrence of physical intimacy is eventually
transformed, via love or marriage, into an acceptance of it as something beautiful and
desirable—just as the beast is transformed into a prince when the girl learns to love him.
Albeit widespread, animal-lover relationships are maybe not the most realistic models for
young children to learn what a relationship should look like. The second aspect is that a
woman—a sorceress—is responsible for changing the man into a beast, and she is not
punished in any way. Bettelheim explains the sorceress turning the man into a beast as
mothers or nurses—“our earliest educators”—turning sex into taboo while we are children.
There is no mother figure in these stories, so the sorceress takes on this role of tabooing sex,
and since tabooing sex is “universal and…unavoidable in the child’s education…there is no
reason to punish the person who made sex appear animal-like” (284). Thus, the sorceress is
not punished for her deed. The final aspect of the motif that Bettelheim emphasizes is the
girl’s love for her father. The heroine is able to transform the beast to man only if she is able
to “transfer to him her earlier, infantile attachment to her father” (284). Her father must agree
to her joining the beast, even though he hesitates in many versions. She joins the beast “only
out of love for her father, but as her love matures, it changes its main object—although not
without difficulty” (284). According to Bettelheim, the meaning behind the animal groom
tale deals largely with maturing childhood views of sexuality.
A more nuanced and complicated understanding of the animal bridegroom tales goes
beyond just considering the tales’ connection to sexuality and explores how the animal
14
bridegroom represents cultural “othering,” especially as related to gender. Fairy-tale scholar
Jack Zipes explains that fairy tales “operate ideologically to indoctrinate children so that they
will conform to dominant social standards,” assuming a harmless façade while engraining in
children socially constructed ideas—and morphing over time to incorporate changing social
norms (“Breaking the Disney Spell” 34). The animal bridegroom motif’s function of
indoctrinating children into societal conceptions of gender is notable in early versions that
illustrate women’s virtues and in Tegethoff’s interpretation of the motif highlighting the
consequences of a wife’s disobedience (qtd. in Thompson).
In addition to taking into account how the tales reflect societal norms and pressures,
English scholar Laurence Talairach-Vielmas looks at how such tales also contain notes of
resistance to the very norms they portray. Her research focuses on how tales in the mid-
Victorian era represented aspects of society and certain ideologies while at the same time
debunking them. She analyzes three Victorian tales with animal bridegrooms: Anne
Thackeray Ritchie’s “Beauty and the Beast” (1867), Juliana Horatia Ewing’s “The Ogre
Courting” (1871), and Mary Louisa Molesworth’s “The Brown Bull of Norrowa” (1877). Her
article argues that “Victorian women writers rebelled against traditional gender roles even as
their tales seem to confirm the conservative civilizing process” (274). These perspectives on
how the animal bridegroom motif both reinforces and subverts social norms regarding gender
are valuable to keep in mind when analyzing the selected tales for this project.
Function of Animals in Rhetoric
In addition to considering how the animal bridegroom motif has functioned in
cultures, it is helpful to contemplate the role that animals themselves play in rhetoric.
Rhetorics centered on animals have changed greatly over time, as Jeremy Gordon, Katherine
Lind, and Saul Kurnicki summarize. Animals appeared in rhetoric for the purpose of
religious and moral teachings in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; for empirical and
taxonomy purposes in the thirteenth and fourteenth; for the genre of science books and
“narratives that conveyed lessons in profane or courtly styles” in the fifteenth; and for
accounts of the “New World” during the expeditions of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries (Gordon et al. 223-224). In her recent book Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw, Debra
Hawhee investigates how animals function in ancient theories of rhetoric. She notes that the
15
use of animals in theories such as Aristotle’s reinforces the hierarchy of humans over
nonhumans, but it also demonstrates a more complex relationship. Aristotle’s description of a
dog ceasing anger “toward those who humble themselves, for they do not bite those sitting
down,” she asserts, “shows humans and nonhumans mutually assessing dispositions and
altering their own in response” (2). There is a special relationship between humans and
nonhumans that Hawhee claims is related to energy and sensuousness. She highlights how, in
Western rhetoric, nonhuman animals function in terms of “their responsive movements and
energy, and their role as partners to humans in sensing and feeling” (2). Her book explores
“the curious and contradictory role animals play in language theories and language training,
and [how] that accounting brings forth a decidedly sensuous, lively, and kinetic history of
rhetoric and rhetorical education” (3).
George Kennedy and Diane Davis also comment on the connection between rhetoric,
animals, energy, and emotion. Tracing the evolution of rhetoric, Kennedy identifies rhetoric
as the energy within communication and argues that “rhetoric is manifest in all animal life
and existed long before the evolution of human beings” (4). He cites physical actions within
a pack of wolves as examples of rhetorical energy; the wolves transmit energy through
signs—giving a cry to indicate danger or prey and growling or pacing and circling to scare
off others with “signs of intent” (4). Other animals “receive the message and react in an
appropriate way,” indicating that the message had rhetorical value (4). Davis complicates
Kennedy’s definition of rhetoric as “mental and emotional energy” by stating that rhetoric
has more to do with “an affectability or persuadability” associated with “the exposedness of
corporeal existence” (89). While she agrees that animals have a fundamental rhetoricity in
that they possess this energy, she emphasizes the corporeal aspect that makes animals
“vulnerable, open to wounding and outrage as well as to various forms of affective
contagion—panic fear, for example” (90). This indicates that animals are capable of rhetoric
but remain incapable of true response, as they instead react on a bodily level. Kennedy also
emphasizes emotion in his discussion of animal rhetoric, noting that animals demonstrate
anger, love, loneliness, depression, and even altruism within their animal societies (11). He
goes further to even break down the emotional reaction of an animal in terms of ethos, pathos
and logos, suggesting that an animal offers a sign of credibility, uses more or less alarm in its
16
call to move his audience to be more or less alarmed, and indicates a reason for giving the
call, such as seeing a predator (15).
Hawhee links the energy and sensuousness that accompany animals to rhetorical
strategies of phantasia—the rhetorical creation of a vivid visual image—and pathos. She
describes how “animals (especially nonhuman ones) and their noisy, kinetic movement fill
the world with sensory material. That filling—simultaneously a performance and a
performative extension of rhetorical theory into sensory interaction—fills out the art of
rhetoric” (2). Given animals’ embodiment of this sensuous energy, they worked well in
Greek deliberative rhetoric and in the teaching of rhetoric in the progymnasmata. Hawhee
draws on Aristotle to demonstrate how phantasia results in a process of movement similar to
how judgment or feeling result from “direct sensation.” Phantasia is defined by third-century
CE rhetorician Cassius Longinus as “the situation in which enthusiasm and emotion make the
speaker see what he is saying and bring it visually before his audience” (356)—in other
words, the art of creating a visual with words is entwined with the experience of emotion,
experienced by both the rhetor and the audience. Hawhee explains that imagination slows or
blurs emotions one would have more immediately in experiencing the same situation in
reality; because of this, phantasia allows a sense of distance in which “the fictitious narrative
of fable can create a dreadful or encouraging picture, brimming with violence, pain, and
gore” (75). The energy and embodied sensuousness of the nonhuman animal thus contribute
to how beast fables, paralleling human situations, “retain their vividness” (77), making them
useful endings to deliberative speeches as “the likeness between the fable scenario and the
deliberative situation comes into view, [and] the difference between animal characters and
the situation of the auditors slips away” (75). Phantasia moves the audience away from the
situation in such a way that makes it more bearable or pleasurable to experience. The animals
are used as almost a vessel for pathos, serving as “the bodily witness” to certain feelings such
as pain and fear, and persuade the audience toward a certain view.
Notably, aspects of the rhetorical role of animals that Hawhee highlights include both
the “othering” of animals from humans and the likening of animals to humans. In classical
rhetoric, the nonhuman animals in fables share characteristics with children in that they are
alogos, lacking in what sets humankind apart from the rest of the world: language and
reason. Infans, the Latin word for infant, literally means one who cannot speak, and Latin
17
texts often used the same verbs for an infant’s crying as they used for “the bleating of sheep
or goats and the bellowing of wild beasts” (83). In order to educate children in rhetoric,
progymnasmata authors sparked children’s lively imaginations with beast fables, offering
models of eloquent talking animals to help the children practice their ability to use words and
arguments—the same beast fables that were used to appeal to pathos via phantasia, often in
terms of pain and fear (82).8 Hawhee cites Hermogenes, who in the second century CE
identified such fables as having the ability of helping children become less unruly by
“bring[ing] their minds into harmony [rhythmizein] for the better” (82). Hawhee explains that
the main meaning of harmony, or rhythm, is related to timing and order. Thus, she claims
that Hermogenes implies “that the minds (and even the souls) of children suffer from
disorder or arrhythmia and need to be ordered, harmonized” (82). Children and animals are
not only unruly and in need of taming and ordering; they are also in need of this education of
rhetoric because they are aloga, lacking in speech and reason. The treatment of animals in
beast fables consequently “others” animals and children from logical humankind.
At the same time, the treatment of animals in beast fables implies a likeness between
beast and human that is somewhat contradictory to this “othering.” Using textual evidence,
Hawhee cautiously posits an affinity between children and the animals in these tales.
Ausonius, a Latin poet and rhetorician in the fourth century, encouraged the emperor Probus
to educate his children with a book of fables, writing to the emperor that his children will
laugh and learn at the same time; similarly, Quintilian, a Roman rhetorician and educator in
the first century CE, notes that Aesop’s fables will promote laughter and should follow
nursery education (83). Children are able to move out of their alogos stage and become more
human-like as they learn from these models of other alogos animals that are, in fables,
capable of speech.
8 Progymnasmata were writing exercises used for teaching rhetoric to students in classical Greece and the
Roman Empire (Bizzell and Herzberg 33).
18
However, the acknowledged likeness between human and beast in rhetoric is not
limited to just children. As noted, fables were used as concluding arguments in deliberative
rhetoric for the effects of phantasia (Hawhee 76). The juxtaposition of human and beast
actions in such a context indicates a comparison between human and animal behavior. The
rhetorical relationship between humankind and beast is complex and contradictory; there is a
clear “othering” involved in terms of a hierarchy, but in other ways comparisons and
anthropomorphism indicate similarities that may be overlooked. Furthermore, Davis labels
Darwin’s discovery that the human race evolved from the ape as a strike to human pride that
has made people question how different we are from animals—especially as scholars like
Kennedy assert that animals are capable of a form of rhetoric too (Davis 88; Kennedy 4).
Their emotional responses and, albeit limited, rhetorical capacities demonstrate a closeness
between human and animal that can account for why animals can be used effectively in
human rhetoric.
Animals also perform gendered functions in rhetoric. From a biological standpoint,
animals’ sex is conveyed through physical build, maternal instincts, and even distinct roles.
Applying the way animals perform male and female roles to understand human gender,
however, is highly problematic and has contributed to harmful binary conceptions of human
gender in the past. However, Marlene Zuk addresses the question of whether biology,
culture, or the interaction between them can explain differences between men and women
(1). Stereotypes about human genders stem from how behaviors of certain animals, such as
the plains baboon, were interpreted in sexist and anthropomorphic ways and came to affect
the way monkeys were rhetorically presented in popular culture (3). Zuk asserts that using
such stereotypes makes us “pawns of our evolutionary heritage.” She highlights how the
evolutionary world of animals actually undermines such views, as female animals’
preference for certain male characteristics, and she proposes that in general the great amount
of variation in sexual selection among animals should help us understand the variation of
differences in humans (3). Just as the roles of sexes vary in different animals, so do those
roles vary in human populations; Zuk notes various different female-male roles in different
cultures (4). The key conclusion about how biological animal models affect human
understandings of gender is that “biological differences between men and women have no
uniform and universal implication for social roles and relations. Biology, for humans, takes
19
on meaning as it is interpreted in human culture and society” (5). For the purposes of this
research, it is not necessary to delve too deeply into the implications that biological studies
have on gender, but it is worth noting that gender roles vary across cultures, and animals
have long been part of the tradition of understanding how our gender roles function within
culture.
To explore the significance of Beauty and the Beast tales as animal bridegroom tales,
it is vital to recognize the roles of motifs in culture and to trace the way animal bride and
animal groom motifs have varied and transformed over time. In addition to considering how
interpretations of the tales can vary drastically, it is important to heed the differences in how
women are physically portrayed as animal brides and how men are portrayed as animal
grooms, as this sheds light on cultural differences in perceptions of gender. The fact that
humans are marrying animals in these tales further indicates the rhetorical and gendered role
that animals play in human culture in terms of othering and likeness, energy and emotion.
20
CHAPTER 2
METHODOLOGY
To track the transformation of the gender conceptions portrayed by the animal groom
and human bride in these three Beauty and the Beast tales, I will use a blend of
methodologies. Circulation theory and gender theory are both central to my project, but they
are also large fields of study that will need to be bracketed for the scope of this thesis. Within
circulation theory, my focus is thus limited to ecological frameworks—even more
specifically, to Jenny Rice’s framework of affective ecologies. I similarly limit my discussion
of the broad field of gender theory to feminist criticism, focusing on Sonja Foss’s strategies
of disruption, which provide insight on the role of gender in the tales, and on Gesa Kirsch
and Jacqueline Royster’s concept of critical imagination, which offers a helpful way to
organize my circulation theory method of analysis.
In this section, I first discuss circulation studies as an emergent threshold concept that
stems from a need for a more complex understanding of rhetorical situation, and I delve into
how circulation studies connect to Michael Warner’s concept of the “public,” or audience. I
then narrow my focus within circulation studies to consider how ecological frameworks,
specifically, function as an augmentation of other models, and I hone in on aspects of Rice’s
model that I will use. The final section of this chapter turns to gender studies, defining gender
for the purpose of this project and providing an overview of feminist criticism and how this
project will use strategies of disruption and critical imagination.
CIRCULATION THEORY
Circulation studies is a relatively new focus in the field of Rhetoric and Composition.
In her introduction to Circulation, Writing & Rhetoric, a collection of essays concerning the
topic of circulation, Laurie Gries conceptualizes circulation as “spatiotemporal flow as well
as a cultural-rhetorical process . . . that has always been important to studies of rhetoric and
21
writing” (3). In other words, in addition to rhetoric spreading across space and time, it also
undergoes a process of being translated within and across cultures; the meaning and
expression of rhetoric changes with every new audience it encounters, within and across
cultures. Although the term “circulation” is relatively new to Rhetoric and Composition,
Gries claims it has always been part of rhetoric and writing, implied throughout rhetorical
theory in terms such as endoxa (“commonly held opinions”), delivery (manipulation of the
“flow of discourse” through gesture or tone), and commonplaces (statements or knowledge
that are commonly held and “assume the spread of ideologies and discourse”) (3). She offers
examples of how circulation theory has been implied in rhetorical scholarship, citing Thomas
Rickert’s discussion of ancient rhetorical theory’s connection to the “circulation of ideas,
feelings, and mores,” as well as Stephen Heidt’s work with Maurice Charland and Raymie
McKerrow’s respective focuses on “how circulating texts constitute identity” and the process
of language’s normalization to maintain power relations (3).
Since it is only recently that rhetoric scholars have begun to ground their research in
the context of circulation studies, Gries identifies circulation theory as an “emergent
threshold concept.” Using Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth’s Wardle’s definition of
threshold concepts as vital to “continued learning and participation in an area or within a
community practice,” Gries highlights the transformative power that distinguishes threshold
concepts from core concepts (5). She draws on Jan Meyer and Ray Land, who discuss how
these new, threshold concepts incorporate other related ideas to result in a radically different
perspective on the subjects to which it is applied (Gries 7). Gries concludes her discussion of
emergent thresholds stating, “because circulation has been instrumental in tuning us into
rhetoric’s dynamic, affective, and global dimensions, as well as developing new rhetorical
models, methodologies, and theories, we believe circulation has also become an important
threshold concept for rhetoric and writing studies” (8). By identifying circulation as a
threshold concept in this field, Gries acknowledges how circulation has given scholars a new
viewpoint or tool with which to expand their understanding of how rhetoric moves and
changes globally, and how it impacts us in the less tangible affective realm as well.
These threshold concepts are not static, as Gries points out, and her aim “is not to
demand the uniform adoption of any singular definition for circulation” (6). The concept is
fluid and complex, permitting us to recognize what we already know while also having the
22
“ability to point toward and help develop other concepts that can deepen our understanding
of rhetoric and writing in motion” (6). With this definition in mind, this thesis responds to
Gries’s call for using this emerging threshold concept to extend our understanding of rhetoric
in motion. Circulation studies is currently being used in digital rhetorics, since the rhetorical
situation in these cases is especially complex and is being responded to, changed, and spread
incessantly.
However, what has not been considered within circulation studies is how this concept
can be used to trace stories that have traditionally been considered from a more “static”
standpoint. Rather than looking at a tale within the context of just one version in one culture,
circulation studies can provide the framework needed to understand how a tale functions in
motion. My thesis thus aims to use this threshold concept to point to new ways that it can be
applied. Because the topic of circulation is so vast and, by necessity, endlessly circulating, I
will limit my discussion of the theory to where it stems from—an increasingly recognized
need for a more complex view of rhetorical situation—and an aspect crucial to understanding
the theory—its relationship with the “public” (i.e. the audience with which the text interacts).
I ultimately turn to Rice’s ecological framework for the purposes of this thesis.
To better understand the transformative power that circulation theory presents, it is
helpful to consider the origins of the study of rhetorical situation. One of the first rhetoricians
to attempt to acknowledge and define the rhetorical situation, Lloyd Bitzer proposed a
somewhat simplified speaker-audience-message triangle. Rhetorical discourse, Bitzer argues,
cannot be separated from its rhetorical situation. Bitzer illustrates:
A tree does not obtain its character-as-tree from the soil, but rhetorical discourse .
. . does obtain its character-as-rhetorical from the situation which generates it.
Rhetorical works belong to the class of things which obtain their character from
the circumstances of the historic context in which they occur. A rhetorical work is
analogous to a moral action rather than to a tree. An act is moral because it is an
act performed in a situation of a certain kind; similarly, a work is rhetorical
because it is a response to a situation of a certain kind. (3)
Unlike a tree, which owes its existence to the soil it is rooted in but does not take on the
characteristics of the soil, rhetorical discourse both owes its existence to the historic context
in which it is rooted and takes on the characteristics of that context. Rhetorical discourse is
only rhetorical if it is responding to a certain situation, just as a moral act is a response to a
certain situation. One point that Bitzer further stresses is that “the situation controls the
23
rhetorical response in the same sense that the question controls the answer and the problem
controls the solution” (6). Using such metaphors to paint a picture of the causal relationship
between situation and rhetoric, Bitzer demonstrates that rhetorical situation is an area
deserving of greater consideration within the field.
Although Bitzer’s intention was admirable and his work laid the foundation for more
in-depth consideration of the rhetorical situation, his framework does not entirely account for
the complex and fluid nature of phenomena. He defines rhetorical situation as “a complex of
persons, events, objects, and relations presenting an actual or potential exigence which can be
completely or partially removed if discourse, introduced into the situation, can so constrain
human decision or action as to bring about the significant modification of the exigence” (6).
In a nutshell, there must be an exigence—“an imperfection marked by urgency,” or some
event or situation requiring a response—that can be changed by discourse’s influence over
human’s thoughts or actions. He names three constituents: the exigence noted above and two
elements of what make up that exigence—“the audience to be constrained in decision and
action, and the constraints which influence the rhetor and can be brought to bear upon the
audience” (6). These three aspects, Bitzer concludes, “comprise everything relevant in a
rhetorical situation” (8). However, although these are useful starting points to consider,
stating that three concepts, no matter how complex, make up all of the rhetorical situation is
simply too rigid of a theory to explain the intertwined, fluid relationship between rhetoric and
its rhetorical situation. Bitzer is largely criticized for this over-simplification, and many
rhetorical theorists have made attempts to extend and complicate his definition, ultimately
laying the path for circulation studies to enter the discussion. 9
One concept that is central to the theory of circulation is that of a “public.” Warner, in
his book Publics and Counterpublics, distinguishes between the concept of “the public” and
“a public.” He asserts, “the public is a kind of social totality. Its most common sense is that
of the people in general… [and it] is thought to include everyone within the field in question”
9 Rice names several of these theorists, including Barbara Biesecker (1989), Louise Weatherbee Phelps (1988),
Craig Smith and Scott Lybarger (1996), Richard Vatz (1973), and Michael Warner (2002).
24
(Warner 65). Warner elaborates that this includes all types of communities—nations, states,
cities, Christendom, and humanity as a whole. A public refers to a more temporal concept—
“a concrete audience, a crowd witnessing itself in visible space, as with a theatrical public.
Such a public also has a sense of totality, bounded by the event or by the shared physical
space” (66). A public can thus be the audience of a sports event or the audience of a speech.
Warner further distinguishes a kind of public “that comes into being only in relation to texts
and their circulation” (66). In this way, texts not only address “a public” or “the public”—
texts, in fact, create publics in the process of being distributed and interacted with.
Circulation comes into play more clearly in Warner’s work when he includes it in one
of his “rules” of how publics construct the social world; he posits, “A public is the space
created by the reflexive circulation of discourse” (90). Warner argues that a single text
cannot constitute a public; only multiple texts can do so. Sender/receiver and author/reader
models, which imply that a single text can create a public, are therefore “misleading.” A
public, he states, is “understood to be an ongoing space of encounter for discourse” (90).
Thus, a text itself does not form a public but rather “the concatenation of texts through time.
Only when a previously existing discourse can be supposed, and when a responding
discourse can be postulated, can a text address a public” (90). As texts circulate, they create a
public that includes various layers in terms of how the text is understood and discussed.
However, in order to circulate, the existence of a public is also necessary, which indicates
that the circulation of texts and the concept of a public are interrelated.
Capturing the relationship between rhetoric and the public is a somewhat elusive
aspiration of circulation studies. In her article “Unframing Models of Public Distribution:
From Rhetorical Situation to Rhetorical Ecologies,” Rice traces various theorists’ attempts to
complicate Bitzer’s simplified speaker-audience-message triangle.10 Craig Smith and Scott
Lybarger link “the articulation of exigence(s) to multiple agents and constraints” (Rice 7),
which adds another layer to rhetorical situation but does not move away from the idea that
10 Jenny Rice published this article under her maiden name, Edbauer. Although I refer to her by her new legal
name, she is referenced in the Works Cited as Edbauer.
25
the rhetorical situation is located in specific, discrete sites (such as agents and constraints).
Rice agrees with Barbara Biesecker’s and Louise Weatherbee Phelps’s critique of such
theories that look at rhetoric as elemental conglomerations, depending on discrete elements
to explain the text such as “audience, rhetor, exigence, constraints, and text.” She cites
Biesecker’s argument that such theories presuppose an audience of “already-formed, already-
discrete individuals,” thus excluding the ability to form new identities from the power of
rhetoric. Phelps she points to as “recontextualiz[ing] those elements in a wider sphere of
active, historical, and lived processes”—hence both attempt to “[build] a model around a
‘conglomeration’ of distinct elements in relation to one another” (74). However, Smith and
Lybarger’s work, Rice argues, reveals that exigence is not located within the model and
seems to be “instead an amalgamation of processes and encounters” (8). Concluding her
review of other extant models of conglomeration, Rice suggests that these models fail to
account for an important fact: “the elements of rhetorical situation simply bleed” (9). The
elements of rhetoric are not discrete but rather blend—or, to use Rice’s more life-like term,
“bleed”—into one another.
Setting up her theoretical framework in contrast to these other attempts, Rice takes
issue with the very term “rhetorical situation,” coming from the Latin root of situation—
“situs,” meaning “location.” Whereas previous frameworks of rhetorical situation portrayed
rhetorical situation as rhetorical action located around exigence, she builds on the work of
theorists who recognize that “the public existence of situs is complicated” (9). She cites
Steven Shaviro, who recognizes that the social is located in “a networked space of flows and
connections” rather than in specific, fixed sites. To address what characterizes these
networks, she draws attention to Shaviro’s concept of the consciousness never being outside
“ongoing structures of feeling that shape the social field,” as well as Nedra Reynolds’s
argument that geographies are embodied and that the social is located “at the level of the
body” (10). Reynolds asserts that sites can sometimes be felt more than seen; as an example,
she notes students’ ability to easily identify “bad” and “good” parts of town. While these
parts of town were given spatial markers (e.g., east of the freeway, downtown, southside of
town), they obtained their markers not from their locations but from the “embodied
experiences that circulate” such as “feelings of fear or comfort” (Rice 11). Thus, two aspects
of these networks are that they are embodied and affective—dealing with the circulation of
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feelings and moods that are connected to the material. Circulation’s connection to bodies and
affective sensation is especially relevant to this study of tales that highlight both bodily,
physical appearances within the animal bridegroom motif as well as the affective properties
of love.
Circulation Theory: Ecological Frameworks
To better reflect the fluid nature of rhetorical circulation, Rice joins other theorists
who have turned to ecological frameworks as an alternative or augmentation of other models.
The term “ecology,” coined in 1866 by zoologist Ernst Haeckel, is the study of “relationships
between organisms and their environment” (Pimm). David Eyman’s dissertation—“Digital
Rhetoric: Ecologies and Economies of Digital Circulation”—provides some background on
the way the term has been used within the field of rhetoric, summarizing the works of
Marilyn Cooper, Margaret Syverson, Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O’Day, Clay Spinuzzi and
Mark Zachry, and Stewart Blythe (33). To put the significance of ecologies shortly, they
describe “specific interactions between people, texts, and technologies,” and they are marked
by “rhetorical, technical, and social dimensions that influence the possible routes of (and
interactions made possible by) circulation” (11).
The field of ecology looks at both ecologies and ecosystems. Ecologies are the larger
interacting systems made up of discrete ecosystems, while ecosystems refer to systems of any
size that also contain organisms, environments, and interactions (Eyman 35). Eyman
distinguishes ecologies as the theoretical lens, whereas ecosystems refer to both the specific
system a work exists in when it is originally published and the “interconnected composition
and environment that can be mapped and articulated through its circulation” (35). This
project will use Eyman’s terminology regarding ecologies and ecosystems.
Ecologies thus offer a powerful lens for examining rhetorical circulation on both
smaller and larger scales. Eyman writes:
Ecologies represent specific, bounded locales where circulation takes place; and
although circulation occurs across and through multiple ecologies, the effects are
best observed within particular localized systems; thus, ecologies represent the
scale at which research on circulation may be most profitably undertaken. (10)
Ecologies allow local and globalized views; while they permit rhetoric to be observed in their
local ecologies, they also open up the potential for considering how rhetoric may expand
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beyond its local ecology. To explain how ecologies have been applied in different manners in
rhetoric, he draws on Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O’Day’s “information ecologies” and Clay
Spinuzzi and Mark Zachary’s “genre ecologies.” Using ecologies opens up possibilities to
frame both specific sites—such as a university department or a newspaper—and digital
spaces that do not have a specific site but are “bounded by genre and activity”—such as
Amazon or Wikipedia (11). Ecologies provide a helpful tool for understanding the circulation
of rhetoric within the local context of its original publication or distribution as well as within
the larger context of its circulation over time and culture, and they are therefore particularly
applicable to this study.
Rice situates her ecological framework as an augmentation of other popular
frameworks of rhetorical situation, with the aim of challenging the way we think about
“rhetorical publicness as a context of interaction.” She states: “Rather than primarily
speaking of rhetoric through the terministic lens of conglomerated elements, I look towards a
framework of affective ecologies that recontextualizes rhetorics in their temporal, historical,
and lived fluxes” (9). Bitzer’s speaker-audience-message triangle is thus expanded by a
nuanced understanding of how past and ongoing present affect rhetorics. Rice aims to
“theoriz[e] public rhetorics (and rhetoric’s publicness) as a circulating ecology of effects,
enactments, and events by shifting the lines of focus from rhetorical situation to rhetorical
ecologies” (9). She finds it more accurate to attribute the movement of rhetoric to something
alive—to an ecology, in which all aspects (effects, enactments, events) mutually influence
and depend upon each other.
Particularly valuable in these ecological models, according to Rice, is the emphasis
on distribution. She concludes her review of previous scholarship noting that “writing is
distributed across a range of processes and encounters,” noting the depth of complexity in the
situation of writing—the medium used by writers, the writers’ identity and comfort within
the space they are writing, the event of writing in audiences or communities with different
moods and energies (13). By considering such distribution, she argues, it is possible to grasp
a more comprehensive understanding of this range of distribution and encounters—of how
elements of the situation are “enacted and lived…put into use…and what change comes from
the in-processes-ness itself” (13). Rather than being located in a fixed situs, then, Rice argues
that rhetorical situation should be considered a verb. Such frameworks of distributions and
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encounters can thus be thought of in a “fluid framework of exchanges—a fluidity that bleeds
the elements of rhetorical situation” (19). Events and contacts with rhetoric bleed into one
another, offering a framework of understanding that is truer to reality but also, given its
vastness, immensely difficult to comprehend and discuss.
To more concretely demonstrate how such ecological models read rhetoric “both as a
process of distributed emergence and as an ongoing circulation process” (13), Rice highlights
two poignant metaphors. One useful metaphor is that of a weather system, as used by Ash
Amin and Nigel Thrift in their refutation of the concept of a city-as-container. Although
cities are bounded, physical sites where rhetoric circulates, Amin and Thrift claim that the
city is actually an “amalgam of processes” more so than a physical location. By looking at a
city in this way, it “becomes a kind of weather system, a rapidly varying distribution of
intensities” (qtd. in Rice 12). Just as a weather storm appears in different locations due to
conditions, and just as it spreads in various directions and in various intensities depending on
factors it encounters, so does rhetoric circulate in such a complex and organic manner.
Rice also draws attention to the metaphor of a virus. She cites Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari, who point to how evolutionary processes happen between species rather than
as a “hierarchical transmission of genetic information” (13). They draw on Remy Chauvin’s
discussion of the connection of a type C virus to both baboon DNA and the DNA of certain
domestic cats. Chauvin writes that this indicates an “aparallel evolution” between the two
animals; clearly they are not the same animal, but the animals have been connected by
“transfers of genetic material by viruses or through other procedures, fusions of cells
originating in different species. . . . Transversal communication between different lines
scramble[d] the genealogical trees” (qtd. in Rice 14). Rice connects this mode of “transversal
communication” and distribution to rhetoric. She writes:
. . . a rhetoric emerges already infected by the viral intensities that are circulating
in the social field. Moreover, this same rhetoric will go on to evolve in aparallel
ways: between two “species” that have absolutely nothing to do with each other.
What is shared between them is not the situation, but certain contagions and
energy. This does not mean the shared rhetoric reproduces copies or models of
“original” situations (any more than the shared C virus turns a cat into a baboon).
Instead, the same rhetoric might manage to infect and connect various processes,
events, and bodies. (Rice 14)
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Thus, the circulation of rhetoric can be visualized through biological phenomena such as the
spread of viruses and DNA. Rhetoric is “infected” by various processes, events, and contacts
occurring before it even comes into existence, and, as one strain begins to spread, it “infect[s]
and connect[s]” other “processes, events, and bodies.” Just like the weather system, similar
storms and viruses can appear separately, in different places or species. However, a single
strain of a virus—or a specific instance of rhetoric—can also spread far and wide, connecting
and infecting various ideas, processes, and people.
For this study, I will utilize Rice’s “framework of affective ecologies that
recontextualizes rhetorics in their temporal, historical, and lived fluxes” (9), and I will draw
on her metaphors as illustration. Rather than considering how Beauty and the Beast tales
emerged separately around the globe and evolved in parallel ways, as Rice discusses in the
weather system metaphor, I will instead be focusing on the virus metaphor in terms of how a
single virus strain spreads to “infect and connect various processes, events, and bodies.”11 To
demonstrate how I will be using this specific definition in this project, I will unpack each of
the key terms she uses. In terms of “affective,” Rice refers to the concept mentioned earlier
about how rhetorics are imbued with affect, as in the example of good and bad parts of town.
In my project, I will be paying special attention to how the affective, sensational elements
play a role in the gender portrayal of the animal groom and human bride.
Rice specifically clarifies what she means by historical and lived fluxes within her
article. She refers to how “the elements of a rhetorical situation can be re-read against the
historical fluxes in which they move” (8), describing the important and fluid relationship a
rhetorical situation has to historical context. Such a context takes into account the
contemporary culture and social norms as well as the historical influences that led to the
11 The current COVID-19 pandemic brings to mind an important aspect of the nature of viruses: herd immunity.
Like physical viruses, of course, rhetorical viruses can also falter due to herd immunity; when an audience has
been overexposed to the rhetoric, they may become immune to or unaffected by its power. A slogan, for
example, can become tired and ineffective over time. Beauty and the Beast has not developed such a herd
immunity because it is experienced by society at certain times in life—as a child encountering it for the first
time, as a parent introducing their children to it, or as an adult experiencing modern and new twists to the viral
rhetoric.
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contemporary situation. She also describes how rhetorical elements “are enacted and lived,
how they are put into use” (13), furthermore clarifying “lived” as the “in-process operations”
of rhetoric (17). Thus, the lived flux is how the rhetoric is being enacted, used, and
experienced throughout the process of its circulation.
Rice is a bit vaguer in her use of “temporal,” which she does not sufficiently describe.
She references the word in a quotation she draws on Phelps: “Natural and traditional
categories acquire greater depth and scope when we…temporalize them, interpret them as
metaphors, expand their range of variation…or treat them in historical-institutional terms”
(8). Responding to this statement, she writes: “Phelps’ critique seeks to recontextualize those
elements in a wider sphere of active, historical, and lived processes. That is, the elements of a
rhetorical situation can be re-read against the historical fluxes in which they move” (8). The
temporal flux she speaks of can be interpreted as having to do with being defined by time, as
how rhetoric is active in a specific, kairotic moment of time. I will treat temporality as the
text or film as-is—allowing for a consideration of the text or film as it stands preserved in
time, read and experienced (minus issues of translation) more or less as it had been read and
experienced when first published or released.
One concern for using such ecological frameworks is that they can be
overwhelmingly continuous to consider. Warner notes, however, that the temporality of
publics and of circulation creates punctual rhythms. He writes, “The temporality of
circulation is not continuous or indefinite; it is punctual” (95). Even as the process has
become more complicated as technology has developed, publishing cycles and televisual
media continue to follow “punctual rhythms of daily and weekly emission,” for evidence of
which Warner points to prime time and the news hour. He goes on to state that “a public can
only act in the temporality of the circulation that gives it existence” (96); circulation and the
public it addresses are thus tied to the context of time. Yet, Warner expresses some hesitation
concerning circulation frameworks, as he compares the punctual rhythms of print to the
nonpunctual rhythms of the Internet public sphere. He asserts that the Internet is altering the
public sphere in the way it implies changes to temporality: “Highly mediated and highly
capitalized forms of circulation are increasingly organized as continuous (“24/7 instant
access”) rather than punctual” (97). With web pages that are not archived, webpages that do
not note when they were posted or revised or how long they will continue to be available, it
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may be “very difficult to connect localized acts of reading to the modes of agency in the
social imaginary of modernity. It may even be necessary to abandon ‘circulation’ as an
analytic category” (98).
Although he does not advocate for fully abandoning the category, his concerns are
worth noting when considering circulation studies. For this study, however, punctual rhythms
fit rather well; all three authors or creators—Apuleius, Leprince de Beaumont, and Disney—
published their works in punctual times, whether through oral transmission, print, or video
format. Warner’s emphasis on punctual rhythms and temporality is especially useful because
it brings in focus the artifacts’ multiple publics—as the tales’ publishing and circulation can
be considered along more of a punctual rhythm than webpages and the specific temporalities.
It also helps to limit the complexity of the ongoing circulation process of this tale, as the
discussion can be bracketed to specific spaces and time periods to be more conducive to
circulation research.
GENDER THEORY
Although gender is still commonly characterized in binary terms in contemporary
popular culture, scholars have long recognized the complexity of gender identity and moved
away from binary definitions. There are many non-binary ways to conceptualize gender, but I
will be focusing largely on the enactment of gender through bodily acts and portrayals. As
noted in the introduction, the definition of gender that I will be using in this thesis is drawn
from Judith Butler’s article “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in
Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” According to Butler, the phenomenology theory of
“acts” considers how “social agents constitute social reality through language, gesture, and
all manner of symbolic social sign,” but it can be extended to consider how the social agent is
more of “an object rather than the subject of constitutive acts” (519). A social agent does not
just create reality using symbols; the very symbols and language that are used have the power
to shape reality for that social agent.
Drawing on this concept, Butler puts forth her definition of gender:
In this sense, gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which
various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time—an
identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts. Further, gender is instituted
through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the
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mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various
kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self. (519)
Butler ties conceptions of gender to the body—specifically to the repeated performance of
bodily acts. Butler furthermore notes that gender identity and conception are “constituted in
time” and “requires a conception of a constituted social temporality” (520). This
understanding of gender identity focuses on how time and society, or culture, affect gender
construction. By acknowledging how these elements weave together in a complex manner to
create the construction of gender, this conceptualization of gender aligns closely with the
emphasis of circulation studies.
Another key point Butler makes is how this definition serves to shed light on gender
transformation by the “breaking or subversive repetition of that style” of culturally accepted
repeated acts for a specific gender. While Butler specifically considers the “stylized
repetition of acts” of the body as what determines gender, I will extend her use of “acts” to
also consider how the portrayal of the body itself functions as an embodiment of the cultural
constructs of gender. In animal bridegroom stories, both bodily acts and bodily portrayals are
critical to understanding gender.
A concept that is important to note in any discussion of gender is the intersectionality
of gender, class, and race that complicates our understanding of gender. Coined by Kimberlé
Crenshaw in 1989, the term “intersectionality” describes “the notion that identity is formed
by interlocking and mutually reinforcing vectors of race, gender, class, and sexuality,” a
notion that Jennifer Nash points out has only recently become a buzzword despite having
existed in black feminist scholarship for decades (3). Nash’s article “re-thinking
intersectionality” provides a more in-depth complication of how the term is understood
today. Because the subject of this analysis is a western tale centering on a heteronormative
(albeit inter-species) couple, gender will be considered mostly in terms of heteronormative
constructions of gender as seen through the “stylized repetition” of bodily acts. In terms of
intersectionality, class dynamics play an important role in the relationship between the
couple. It is worth noting that the “othering” of the animal-like male may not only have
gender undertones but also racial undertones (McGrath 48). Given time constraints and the
lack of diversity among human characters in early versions of the tale, racial themes were not
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a major consideration of this thesis, but later discussions of race within these tales could add
more depth and modern-day relevancy to this study.
Using this foundation of the concept of gender from gender studies, it is possible to
then consider how gender functions in rhetoric more broadly. Traditionally, rhetoric has been
rooted in Western patriarchal values. Kirsch and Royster note specific historical patterns that
appear throughout rhetoric, including:
• a focus on men as rhetorical subjects.
• a focus geographically on the Europeanized/Western world.
• attention centered on power elites, by class, race, and gender.
• attention directed toward public domains…rather than in what we refer to
currently as counter-public arenas that draw from social and political networks
that have not been shaped or controlled by power elites. (641)
Placing Western traditions at the center of attention in rhetorical practices establishes their
primacy and thus creates “a tendency toward us-and-them expectations that are binary and
hierarchical” (642). This tradition in rhetoric has had the consequence of silencing and
disempowering other populations and world views. When examining past and present animal
bridegroom tales, it is important not only to consider how rhetoric has been used in
traditional ways to uphold these binary views, but also to consider how rhetoric can resist
such traditional views—as is the focus of feminist criticism.
Gender Theory: Feminist Criticism
Feminist rhetorical criticism has come into the picture in the past few decades to draw
attention to and challenge the ways that rhetoric upholds such values, in an attempt to subvert
the power dynamic. The criticism takes its name from feminism, the social and political
movement for equality between men and women, but there are many definitions of feminism
as well as many types. Drawing on feminists who focus not just on the oppression of women
but on liberation for all oppressed people, Sonja Foss discusses feminist criticism as coming
from the definition of feminism “as a challenge to hegemonies—to dominant or standard
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ways of seeing the world…” (143).12 Even though this method of criticism’s focus extends
beyond women’s oppression to focus more broadly on subverting hegemonies, the term
“feminist” is appropriately given, as its aim is the same as feminism’s: “to decolonize minds
or to disconnect from hegemonic ways of believing, acting, and being” (Foss 144).
Furthermore, feminist criticism celebrates how “the communicative practices of women are
often used as a heuristic device for studying how communication practices in general can be
used to disrupt hegemonies or standard perspectives and practices” (144). The method
focuses on different strategies women have used to create new ways of thinking about culture
and to challenge assumptions.
Two specific aspects of feminist rhetorical criticism that I will rely on in this thesis
are Foss’s strategies of disruption and Kirsch and Royster’s concept of critical imagination.
In her description of feminist criticism, Foss notes specific strategies of disruption:
generating multiple perspectives, cultivating ambiguity, enacting, and juxtaposing
incongruities. Hegemonic perspectives assert that there is only one perspective on a subject
that is “correct.” Generating multiple perspectives can be done by repeating “the same phrase
or word or image but with the context varied so that the meaning changes with each new
context,” in addition to “deliberately seeking out perspectives that are different from theirs”
(148). By placing a single word or image within the contexts requiring multiple perspectives,
and by including different perspectives, rhetors avoid the traditional, single hegemonic
perspective. To cultivate ambiguity, rhetors “[violate] conventional rules of rhetoric” (148),
avoiding straightforward messages and instead opening up interpretation to many meanings.
This can be done by repetition with variation—repeating a word or phrase but creating a
small difference in each repetition—or “prevent[ing] narrative closure,” leaving the
conclusion open for the audience to interpret.
The final two strategies also aim to provide a shift in perspective. Foss draws on bell
hooks to explain the strategy of enactment as a bodily action that “affirms and reinforces a
12 See methodology chapter for a short explanation of intersectionality; for the purposes of this thesis, I will
focus on heteronormative constructions of gender and will take into account class and race when useful.
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new interpretation of a situation and makes it part of the rhetor’s psyche or internal state”
(152). She cites hooks, noting that “our lived practice, every moment of the day” should in
some way aim to subvert the dominant culture (152). In Sonja Foss’s recent article published
with Karen Foss, she builds upon previous scholarship on visual enactment, which focuses
on material embodiment, performative nature, and appeal to emotion rather than logic. Foss
and Foss propose four specific dimensions to visual enactment. They identify visibility as the
state of attracting attention to something, which is “a crucial starting point for visual
enactment” since something cannot be challenged if it is not recognized as problematic (130).
Individuality involves “distinguishing and removing items from a class,” allowing for a new
perspective; syncreticity combines elements to “construct a new ideology”; and futurity
opens up the new ideology to a future of participation that involves the audience (Foss and
Foss 41). The final strategy, juxtaposing incongruities, “disrupts settled assumptions and
beliefs about the words and concepts by introducing new ideas into them” (134). These
strategies will be useful both in determining whether any of the Beauty and the Beast tales
utilize such strategies and in my own analysis of the tales through the lens of feminist
criticism.
Another valuable feminist rhetorical practice is the inquiry tool of critical
imagination. This tool is vital to the work of “historical rescue, recovery, and (re)inscription”
that the work of feminist critics center on, as their subjects (women rather than men,
domestic sphere rather than public sphere, and so on) have been largely unexamined in the
past. Kirsch and Royster argue for analytical stances within feminist criticism that exceed
this approach, offering critical imagination as a way to expand scholarship:
The idea is to account for what we “know” by gathering whatever evidence can be
gathered and ordering it in a configuration that is reasonable and justifiable in
accord with basic scholarly methodologies. The next step is to think between,
above, around, and beyond this evidence to speculate methodically about
probabilities: that is, what might likely be true based on what we have in hand.
(650)
By doing this, rhetoricians are able to see more clearly what has been achieved and consider
people, populations, practices, or genres that have yet to be examined. Since it can be
difficult to see what is missing, as opposed to what is present, critical imagination allows
rhetoricians to envision what is likely to be missing and to make an “educated guess” (650).
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Kirsch and Royster tie critical imagination to Clifford Geertz’s concept of tacking in
and tacking out. The metaphor of tacking in refers to using “long-standing analytical
tools…to focus closely on existing resources…and existing scholarship to assess what we
now understand and to speculate about what seems to be missing” (Kirsch and Royster 651).
For example, close readings of texts would be considered tacking in. They describe tacking
out using the metaphor of satellite imagery of earth, which zooms out far enough to show
paths of where rivers used to flow—paths that are now dry and thus cannot be seen by those
who are looking from a vantage point that is too close. Kirsch and Royster write:
To tack out, then, we stand in conscious awareness of what we have come to
know by more traditional means and from that base use critical imagination to
look back from a distance (from the present into the past, from one cultural
context toward another, from one sociopolitical location to another and so on) in
order to broaden our own viewpoints in anticipation of what might become more
visible from a longer or broader view, where the scene may not be in fine detail
but in broader strokes and deep impressions. (651)
To look beyond the dominant hegemony—to see what has been overlooked and rendered
invisible in one perspective—one must attempt to step outside of that vantage point.
Tacking in and tacking out provide a helpful method for applying feminist criticism,
and, most importantly for the purposes of this thesis, it provides a way of conducting
circulation studies without creating firm boxes. Treating the temporal, lived, and historical
aspects of each tale as conglomerated elements would of course undermine the fluid nature of
circulation studies that I am trying to capture. I will use tacking in and tacking out as a way
to consider how these aspects flow and overlap.
In the following chapters, I will first “tack in” to consider the temporal aspect of the
text, considering how it is “active” in a specific moment of time: the moment of the text as is.
I will then “tack out” to consider the historical and lived fluxes of the tale. To keep the effect
of circulation on gender conceptions at the center of my work, I will note how each
subsequent version keeps the same bodily portrayals of gender or changes them, and I will
conclude with a section discussing how conflicts between the versions seem to be or not to be
resolved.
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CHAPTER 3
APULEIUS’S CUPID AND PSYCHE
While the animal bridegroom appears in Beauty and the Beast tales all around the
world, this project aims to trace one specific strain of the viral tale—a strain that begins with
the tale of Cupid and Psyche. Stith Thompson clarifies that Cupid and Psyche is not the
origin of all such tales, as “it belongs to a widely-diffused tradition which has a considerable
variation from place to place” (97). Although it is not clear where the first Cupid and Psyche
story was told, there is evidence that the tale was popular in Europe, especially in the western
region where “several countries have already reported more than fifty versions” (99). Since
the most popular version of the tale in today’s world is the Disney version, it is appropriate to
trace how the tale circulated over time throughout Western culture—starting with the tale of
Cupid and Psyche.
As mentioned previously, the version of the tale I will explore in this project is the
version appearing at the midpoint of Lucius Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, written in second
century CE Rome. Familiar with folk tradition, Apuleius most likely heard the story of Cupid
and Psyche as an oral tale first and then embedded it within his novel (Thompson 281, 181).
The publishing history of Apuleius’s novel appears to be directly connected to the rise of
Beauty and the Beast tales, as these tales only exist in countries where the novel was recited,
during the early days of its oral performance, and published after the invention of the printing
press, although the chain of transmission is not direct. In the middle ages, the Inquisition
destroyed all versions of Apuleius’s novel on magic with the exception of the 1469 Editio
Princeps published by the Bishop of Aleria (Bottigheimer 9). Consequently, all copies that
we have access to today stem from this text, the first translated and reprinted version of the
novel. Apuleius’s Cupid and Psyche can thus be treated as the origin of the viral strain of the
Western Beauty and the Beast tales and the origin of the gender roles within these tales.
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In this chapter, I extend the scholarship of Susan Haskins’ relatively recent analysis
of Cupid and Psyche, which takes a gender approach as opposed to interpreting the tale
symbolically, as well as Josiah Osgood’s, which focuses on the role of Roman law in the tale.
I argue that Apuleius’s novel juxtaposes Psyche and Cupid’s expected gender roles and
actual behaviors, displaying both characters breaking from traditional Roman gender norms.
Although gender roles seem to be subverted because of their break from tradition, I assert
that these norms are actually restored by marriage at the end of the tale, reinforcing gender
conceptions of the time period. The way gender is depicted through the characters of Cupid
and Psyche is significant in that it indicates how gender conceptions were treated and
enforced in second-century CE Rome. Furthermore, this chapter creates a basis for the
portrayal of gender conventions in this particular viral strain of Beauty and the Beast stories,
thus undertaking a critical first step for this circulation study.
I first provide a summary of Apuleius’s Cupid and Psyche and also briefly note how
the tale fits into the larger work of The Golden Ass. I then offer a cultural context of gender
during second-century CE Rome, focusing on the gendered treatment of bodies and of roles
in marriage. Tacking in to conduct a temporal analysis, I note the ways in which Psyche and
Cupid conform to gendered norms with regard to their physical bodies. Drawing on Sonja
Foss’s strategy of juxtaposition, and I then describe how the incongruity between cultural
expectations of their roles and their actual actions expose them as disrupting gender
conceptions. Tacking out to consider the historical and lived aspects of gender in Cupid and
Psyche, I consider other circulating literature at the time to look at the meaning of curiosity
and the relationship between love and marriage in the tale. To understand the lived
experience of the tale, I examine how the text’s audience and purpose transformed over time
from an entertainment text to one used for scholarly analysis.
SUMMARY OF CUPID AND PSYCHE
The story begins by describing a king and queen with three beautiful daughters,
immediately drawing attention to the youngest daughter: “the loveliness of the youngest . . .
was so perfect that human speech was too poor to describe or even praise it satisfactorily”
(Apuleius 4.21). The youngest daughter, Psyche, is of such “unequalled beauty” (4.21) that
she is worshipped as Venus, which incurs the rage of the goddess herself. Venus orders her
39
son, Cupid, to cause the girl to “be seized with a burning passion for the lowest of mankind,
some creature cursed by Fortune in rank, in estate, in condition, someone so degraded that in
all the world he can find no wretchedness to equal his own” (4.31). Meanwhile, the king
becomes concerned as Psyche’s beauty keeps all suitors away, and he consults the oracle of
Apollo at Miletus, only to be told to expose his daughter on a mountain peak for a “funeral
wedlock,” as “no human son-in-law (hope not) is thine/ But something cruel and fierce and
serpentine” (4.33). Psyche sorrowfully but willingly subjects herself to being given away to a
monster in marriage, only to be saved and brought to a luxurious place of extravagant wealth
and tended to by invisible servants. She is visited at night by her “unknown husband,” who
“mounted the bed, made her his wife, and departed in haste before sunrise” (5.4). Her
husband continues to visit Psyche only in the darkness of night when she cannot see him, and
eventually his visits “became pleasurable to her by force of habit” (5.4).
Upset at being unable to console her sisters and parents with her unusual marriage,
Psyche implores her husband to allow them to visit; he gives in, saying that she “must never
be induced by the evil advice of her sisters to discover what her husband look[s] like” or they
will not be able to remain together (5.6). The sisters visit twice, and Psyche offers a different
made-up description of her unknown husband each time. Psyche becomes pregnant during
this time, and her husband informs her that her child will be divine unless she tries to see
what he looks like. On the third visit, the sisters, overcome with jealousy at their sister’s
beauty and good fortune, convince Psyche that her husband is “an immense serpent” and give
her a plan to kill the “wild beast” after he has fallen asleep, so she can have a desirable
marriage (5.17, 5.20). Psyche follows the plan they presented, but when she pulls out the
lamp, she sees that her husband is “the most soft and sweet of monsters, none other than
Cupid himself”—who, rather than follow out his mother’s instructions, fell in love with
Psyche himself (5.22). Psyche falls in love with him, but a drop of hot oil falls on the god’s
shoulder and wakes him up, causing him to flee.
Psyche realizes she has been betrayed by her sisters and tricks them into killing
themselves. For the rest of the story, Psyche wanders in search of Cupid, traveling far and
wide while also hiding from Venus. She attempts suicide many times but is prevented from
completing it. Finally, she turns herself in to Venus and completes a series of impossible
tasks that the goddess inflicts on her. For each task, she receives help, and, upon completing
40
the last task to travel to the Underworld and retrieve some of Proserpine’s beauty in a box to
bring back to Venus, she gives into “her reckless curiosity” and opens the box to steal some
of the beauty to please Cupid and is put into a deadly sleep (6.20). Cupid meanwhile finds
Psyche, saves her from the sleep, and asks for Jupiter’s help to overrule his mother and allow
him to be with Psyche. Jupiter orders a legitimate marriage between the two, and the tale
ends with Psyche and Cupid having a daughter named Pleasure.
In addition to summarizing the plotline of Cupid and Psyche, it is necessary to note
how this tale fits into the larger work of which it is a part: Apuleius’s The Golden Ass. The
narrator of the novel, Lucius, is obsessed with magic and hears that his friend’s wife is a
witch. He watches his friend’s wife turn herself into a bird with magic and asks his friend’s
slave to perform magic on him, but she turns him into an ass who is capable of his human
intellect but unable to communicate his understanding to others. Lucius the ass is stolen by
robbers, and a series of unfortunate and humorous adventures follows as the lustful ass
wanders far and wide—just like Psyche—to find Isis to transform him back into a man. The
tale concludes with Lucius receiving visions and dedicating himself to the goddess Isis, under
her local name, Campensis, and he is transformed back into a man. The story of Cupid and
Psyche appears directly in the middle of Lucius’s tale. Recaptured by the thieves, Lucius is
kept in a cave with a wealthy young woman named Charite, who has been kidnapped from
her fiancé by one of the thieves who wants to marry her. As Charite cries, an elderly woman
who is traveling with the thieves tells her the story of Cupid and Psyche to cheer her up and
give her hope.
There are many interpretations regarding how the tale of Cupid and Psyche fits into
this novel.13 The most notable interpretations involve the parallel between Lucius and
Psyche, specifically regarding themes of animal transformations, reckless curiosity, and
13 Some examples of scholarship on the meaning of the Cupid and Psyche tale within The Golden Ass are Britta
Ager’s “Necromancy, Divine Encounters, and Erotic Magic in Cupid and Psyche” (2019), E.J. Kenney’s
introduction to his translation of The Golden Ass (1998), and John J. Winkler’s Auctor & Actor: a
Narratological Reading of Apuleius' Golden Ass (1985).
41
divine redemption. For this chapter, I will limit the complexity of this layered tale by
focusing on just the telling of Cupid and Psyche, although I will reference the context of the
novel when useful for certain points.
CULTURAL CONTEXT FOR GENDER: SECOND-CENTURY
CE ROME
Of obvious importance to tales of Beauty and the Beast is the physical body, which is
marked rhetorically in any culture by gendered conceptions of the ideal. The ideal body, or
standard of beauty, in Roman times was heavily based on Greek perceptions, as conveyed by
Roman replicas of Greek art. An example of the ideal female body can be seen in Praxiteles’s
mid-fourth century BCE state of Aphrodite of Knidos, from which “her body type, and
particularly her head, became standards of beauty in later Hellenistic and Roman art”
(Stansbury-O’Donnell 37). A contemporary writer of Apuleius’s time, Lucian recommends
this statue be used for a statue of the emperor’s mistress, noting her hair, forehead, “neat line
of the eyebrows,” and “dewy quality of the eyes with their joyous radiance and welcoming
look” (37). In addition to demonstrating the culture’s value of symmetry as an attractive
quality, this quote creates “a visualization of the invisible,” as the description uses the
physical eyes to look beyond the body and into the character to highlight divine beauty
(Stansbury-O’Donnell 35). Similarly, standards for male beauty as represented in statues
were based on Greek values of symmetria—“commensurability or proportion”—as well as
strength, which implies qualities of youth and fitness (Stansbury-O’Donnell 35). In fact, male
Roman aristocrats were taught to achieve the ideal body through holding themselves in
specific ways, and Roman nurses shaped male babies’ heads and noses, as well as stretching
their penises’ foreskins, to achieve the ideal body (Koloski-Ostrow 98).
Beginning in Greek times and carrying into second-century CE Rome, modesty
played an important role in the attitude toward the ideal physique of both men and women.
Although the ideal body is illustrated in the nude, aspects of chastity and modesty are still
highlighted. Public nudity in Greece caused embarrassment and discomfort; it was not until
somewhere between 700 and 575 BCE that nudity became a practice in athletic competitions
for various probable reasons, such as allowing the public to admire beauty and strength of
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young fit men. Young men in Athens displayed themselves in the nude in competitions, as
“beauty and strength were commensurate and admired publicly” (Stansbury-O’Donnell 47),
highlighting the importance of youth and physical fitness in the ideal male. However, statues
of athletes showed nude figures looking away from the spectator, avoiding eye contact while
naked as a sign of modesty (39). Even in this setting where public nudity was permitted, the
buildings for such competitions reflected Greek reservations about nudity as they were
constructed to shield the athletes from outside viewers (Christesen and Kyle 227; Stansbury-
O’Donnell 47). Just as the male statues reflected modesty despite their nudity, the statue
Aphrodite of Knidos covers herself in a modest gesture to make her nudity socially
acceptable (Stansbury-O’Donnell 39).
While nudity was a common practice in second-century Rome, Ann Koloski-Ostrow
posits that elite Romans were also not comfortable with public nudity as they “associated it
with dishonor” (98), and Paul Christesen and Donald Kyle note Roman beliefs that nudity
involved in Greek sports represented homosexuality and effeminacy (607). He points out that
Roman authors do not comment on exposure of sexual organs in these places as the design of
Roman clothing would have made such exposure rare (98). Romans’ discomfort with public
nudity is further illustrated by the fact that Augustus banned women from attending Greek
athletic contests, in which athletes were nude, but allowed them to attend gladiator fights, in
which contestants had at least a loincloth covering themselves (536). For both male and
female bodies, modesty and propriety play a role in making the ideal, naked body publicly
acceptable.
In both early Christian and Hellenic teachings, women and men were expected to
practice “fidelity within marriage and chastity outside marriage,” as sexual desire—a low
form of love—is bad for the soul and is meant solely for producing legitimate heirs for the
continuation of society (Clark 29). Such teachings encouraged both women and men to
practice these virtues: “Women, they said, must obviously be chaste; men, being in all
respects the stronger sex, should not yield to desires they expect women to resist” (29).
However, there was often a double standard, as a woman was always an adulteress if she had
relations outside of her marriage, and a man was only an adulterer if he had relations with a
married woman. Cheryl Glenn notes that “for the past 2500 years in Western culture, the
ideal woman has been disciplined by cultural codes that require a closed mouth (silence), a
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closed body (chastity), and an enclosed life (domestic confinement)” (180). Thus, physical
chastity concerning the body is also tied to the performative roles women are supposed to
fulfill—a solely domestic existence in which their voice and sexuality are not seen by the
public.
There is an extensive amount of literature analyzing the bodily performances, or
enacted gender roles, of men and women in Roman culture.14 For the analysis of Cupid and
Psyche, I limit this discussion to gender roles as related to education and marriage, as these
are two major themes that recur throughout this tale’s circulation. Since women’s roles were
solely in the household, they were not typically educated.15 Young Roman men received an
education in rhetoric, and Joy Connolly discusses gendered issues that arose in their
education in her article “Virile Tongues: Rhetoric and Masculinity.” She links issues of
gender in rhetorical education to the worries of small agrarian towns turning into cities; as
rhetoric was what made civilization possible, it was necessary for Rome to instruct its male
citizens in rhetoric. Since professions such as acting were linked to effeminacy as opposed to
more masculine military professions, it was important for orators (who, like actors, were
putting on a performance) to project manliness into the audience to rouse respect from his
audience (90). To avoid becoming “effeminate” like the countries that Rome took rhetoric
from—namely Greece and other eastern cultures—the instruction focused on constructions of
manliness (such as logical argument, gesticulation, confidence, and a lack of empty
“ornateness”) in order to make the orator seem more masculine and thereby more powerful
(Connolly 85, 86). One Roman text that discusses oration delivery asserts that “a high-
14 A few sources on gender in classical Greece and Rome include K.J. Dover’s Greek Homosexuality (1989),
A.M. Keith’s Engendering Rome: Women in Latin Epic (2000); Bonnie MacLachlan’s Women in Ancient
Rome: a Sourcebook (2013); Kristina Milnor’s “Gender, domesticity, and the age of Augustus: inventing
private life” (2005); Ellen Oliensis’s “Sons and lovers: sexuality and gender in Virgil’s poetry” (1997).
15 It is important to note that the conceptions of gender discussed in this section apply to the elite, as the lower
class could not afford the luxury of women being able to not work outside of the household. Both slave women
and free women worked outside the home in industries concerning clothing, food, and caring for children, as
well as in religious cults (Fantham, Women in the Classical World 382).
44
pitched outburst damages the voice… [and] is more fit for womanish screeching than the
dignity of a citizen” (qtd. in Connolly 89).
Furthermore, Quintilian warns his students that to become “master[s] of eloquence”
their compositions must be “smooth and polished, and yet manly and vigorous,” avoiding
excessive ornamentation or reliance on the visual (374). The portrayal of emotion was also
linked to effeminacy; Aristotle, one of the earliest and most influential teachers of Rhetoric
in antiquity, notes that people suffer shame from “engaging in shameful actions, of which
being physically violated is one…for submission and lack of resistance comes from
effeminacy or cowardice” (134). Effeminacy is linked to both an action and an emotion; men
were effeminate for allowing themselves to be physically violated, and the emotion of
cowardice is connected to femininity. Young men’s rhetorical education thus reinforced
binaries of gender performance by teaching men to embody masculine values of logic and
confidence and to eschew feminine roles such as “womanish screeching” or showing
emotions like cowardice.
Marriage reinforced such binaries. Augustan legislation, passed in 18 BCE,
contributed to shaping the role of women in Roman marriages through the lex Julia de
maritandis ordinibus and the lex Julia de adulteriis, laws encouraging marriage and
punishing adultery (“Family,” Encyclopedia of Ancient Rome). While these laws were
created long before Apuleius’s time, they were enforced in the first century CE and “endured
in spirit until the fourth century,” indicating their relevance in the second century CE.
Apuleius demonstrates his own familiarity to these laws through his specific reference to the
lex Julia in his telling of Cupid and Psyche (6.22). These laws, arguably created as a
response to the low birth rate in Rome at the time, created several stipulations around
marriage, divorce, and procreation, revealing societal expectations of gender roles.
The Augustan legislation put a great amount of pressure on Romans to marry, which
was considered legitimate based on the contract, witnesses, or public ceremony in addition to
consent of all parties involved, including family (Osgood 428). Under the lex Julia de
maritandis ordinibus, unmarried, divorced, or widowed Roman citizens faced punishments if
they did not marry, including being cut off from their inheritances (“Family”). This
legislation furthermore prohibited senators and their children from marrying into a lower
class (Haskins 250). Part of the reasoning for this was to prevent marriages between a citizen
45
and his freed slave, which sometimes occurred and were generally looked down upon
(Osgood 427). Women were therefore expected not just to marry but also to marry into high
status—at the very minimum the wealth of the bride’s family should be equal to the wealth of
the groom’s family, as this was the joining of two families and the woman’s new status
would be dependent on her husband’s birth rank, wealth, and community respect (Haskins
250-251). As wives, women were expected to display obedience and demonstrate self-
control—despite the contradictory fact that Roman culture viewed women to be “inherently
lacking in self-control” (254). Reflecting societal concerns about women’s lack of control,
the lex Julia de adulteriis enforced severe punishment for adulteresses, including the loss of a
dowry or death (“Family”).
The legislation also pressured Romans to procreate, rewarding citizens who had
several children. It “encouraged the idea that women were to put the family first and those
who did not conform did not have the good of the state at heart” (253). A baby further
committed a woman to her conjugal rather than natal family, as the child belonged to the
man’s family. Haskins notes that a Roman woman was expected to “worry about her son and
encourage his advancement” in addition to “exert[ing] herself on her son’s behalf, placing his
interests even over those of her husband” (255). A woman’s role as a mother held higher
social value than as a wife due to her responsibility to bear and nourish the next generation of
Romans.
While higher class men were similarly pressured to marry and procreate, they held
other roles outside of the family unit. Their roles as husbands were consequently less defined
than women’s roles as wives, since women were limited to this main societal function. Men
were expected to respect their blood families more than women were, since women were
meant to leave their natal families and give their loyalty to their new husbands and conjugal
families. As the heads of their households, Roman men also held the responsibility of
controlling their wives, since women’s nature, as seen by the Romans, was in need of being
controlled (Haskins 259). With an understanding of the cultural context of the gendered
conceptions of the body and performed roles within a Roman marriage, it is possible to now
turn to the circulation of Cupid and Psyche as a process involving temporal, historical, and
lived contexts.
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TACKING IN
Temporal Analysis
I begin my analysis of gender constructions within the tale of Cupid and Psyche by
looking at the tale’s temporal context—that is, tacking in to take a close look at the text to
see how gender was treated in its temporal publication.16 In several ways, both Psyche and
Cupid fit the Roman ideals for gendered bodies and performed roles. In terms of physical
appearance, Psyche’s “loveliness… was so perfect that human speech was too poor to
describe or even praise it satisfactorily” (Apuleius 4.28). She is famous for being “such an
extraordinary sight” that people were “struck dumb with admiration for her unequalled
beauty” and worshipped her as the goddess of love, Venus, causing her ideal female body to
become the object of envy of a goddess (4.28-29). Venus’s portrayals change throughout the
ages, but as indicated by the discussion of statues of the goddess above, her body is generally
symmetrical, youthful, and modest, in addition to fitting contemporary standards of beauty
(“Venus”). While there are not many specific references to how Psyche’s body is beautiful,
this description is offered: “from a new fertilization by drops from heaven, not sea but earth
had grown another Venus in the flower of her virginity” (Apuleius 4.28). It is implied that
Psyche has the beautiful, symmetrical characteristics of the well-known statues of Venus, and
her virginity is highlighted as another ideal aspect of a young woman. The lack of more
specific physical descriptions emphasizes Psyche’s attitude towards her beauty. She is
extremely modest, as Roman women were expected to be. Rather than reveling in the fame
she has received for her ideal feminine body, Psyche “[hates] this beauty of hers which had
enchanted the whole world” because it keeps suitors away from her (4.32).
The physical descriptions of Cupid throughout the tale include Psyche’s two made-up
accounts to show off to her sisters, her sisters’ horrifying description of him as a monster,
16 Of course, this is not truly the text originally published by Apuleius; it has been translated and has gone
through various publications since. However, this text is the closest available translation, so in this section I
treat it as the temporal source itself.
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and the narrator’s description of the god’s actual appearance. All of these descriptions uphold
the expectations for men’s physical appearance in Roman culture. Trying to show her sisters
that she has married advantageously, Psyche describes her husband first as “a handsome
young man whose beard had only just begun to grow…[who] spent most of his time farming
or hunting in the mountains” (5.8) and as “a prosperous merchant from the neighbouring
province, a middle-aged man with a few white hairs here and there” (5.15). Both of these
contrast sharply with her sisters’ descriptions of their old and sick husbands; one is described
as “older than my father, bald as a pumpkin and puny as a child” and the other as “bent
double with rheumatism . . . [with] twisted, stone-hard fingers” and making his wife act as
“an overworked sick-nurse” (5.10). The ideal man is thus relatively young, healthy, and of
good status. When Psyche does finally see Cupid, he is “the sweetest of monsters” with “a
rich head of golden hair dripping with ambrosia, a milk-white neck, and rosy cheeks over
which there strayed coils of hair becomingly arranged . . . shining [with] extreme brilliance . .
. [and] the rest of the god’s body was smooth and shining” (5.22). The hair and skin quality
point to youth, and the smooth body also indicates youth and fitness.
Furthermore, the image of Cupid as a beast, as described to Psyche by her jealous and
conspiring sisters, draws attention to these conceptions of the ideal male body and role in
marriage. The sisters describe Psyche’s unknown husband as “a wild beast,” “a savage
monster,” and “an immense serpent, writhing its knotted coils, its bloody jaws dripping
deadly poison, its maw gaping deep”—naming its goal of marrying her to fatten her up
before he eats her (5.17).17 The affective qualities of fear associated with a beast parallels
Psyche’s fear of a non-socially acceptable marriage. Instead of acting as a protective head of
household, the beast has plans to kill his wife. The beast also has no social standing, making
Psyche lose status in the eyes of society as she did not marry into a class equal to her own. In
17 For Apuleius and his audience, this serpentine description would likely have called to mind the story of
Laocoon, who was devoured by serpents by the gods for warning the Trojans against bringing the Greek
wooden horse within the city walls (Thomas).
48
terms of gendered physical norms, the beast is utterly lacking—her husband is not even
human, making him an even worse match than her sisters’ bald and sickly husbands.
Despite these aspects of the story that conform to traditional Roman gender norms,
applying Foss’s strategy of juxtaposition signals that Psyche and Cupid’s actions in the story
break from social expectations for their gender roles. Foss’s strategy of juxtaposing opposites
“disrupts settled assumptions and beliefs about the words and concepts by introducing new
ideas into them” (154). In this case juxtaposition draws attention to certain actions as being
outside of the norm, but, unlike the feminist use of this strategy, Apuleius does not use it to
purposefully subvert or change gender roles. In terms of the gender roles conveyed through
men’s rhetorical education, neither Psyche nor Cupid fully conform. Psyche does give in to
emotion and betray her cowardice through her multiple attempts to commit suicide, but, she
“[takes] on a man’s courage” (Apuleius 5.22) to unveil her unknown husband and to continue
to search for him despite continuous obstacles. Cupid acts on emotion rather than passion,
disobeying his mother to marry her enemy due to his desire.
At first glance, it appears that Psyche does embody the gender performances for a
woman in that she laments that her beauty has made her fail to fulfill her social duty to be
married further demonstrate her desire to perform the gendered roles expected of her.
Haskins draws attention to cues in the tale that demonstrate Psyche’s conformity to these
ideals; she enters a marriage to a monster willingly, as her life does not have purpose in
Roman society without being married, and she worries most not about her unknown husband
more in terms of his societal standing rather than his appearance (257). To punish Psyche for
her beauty, Venus forces a fate upon Psyche that is the exact opposite of a socially acceptable
marriage for a woman, juxtaposing proper and improper roles for a woman and drawing
attention to the fact that Psyche is not in line with society’s expectations for her gender.
Venus orders Cupid to make Psyche have a passion for “the worst sort of man” but not
necessarily to marry him, making her “one of the lowest ranks of females, especially
according to Augustan legislation, namely those without chastity” (qtd. in Haskins 251).
Furthermore, Venus describes him “as lacking in station, wealth and health,” which would
lower Psyche’s standing as well. When Venus learns that Cupid took Psyche as his wife
instead of making her fall in love with a monster, Venus continues to degrade Psyche’s social
standing by claiming the marriage is illegitimate (Haskins 251). Osgood points out that she
49
refers to Psyche as a slave and a fugitive, while Cupid, as a god, is “of Senatorial stock”;
according to Augustan legislation, such a union is forbidden (431). In these ways, Psyche and
her roles within the story follow what is to be expected of the cultural conception of gender.
Even within her illegitimate marriage, Psyche breaks the expectations of a wife.
Haskins asserts that Psyche “chooses to put her own needs before her duty and her husband’s
welfare . . . show[ing] more care for her natal family than she does for her husband” when
she ignores her husband’s warnings that her sisters will destroy their marriage and still insists
on comforting them (253). Psyche does not exhibit the self-control characteristic of the ideal
wife, and she furthermore uses her sexual power over her husband to seduce him into letting
her sisters come to visit (254). Beyond disobeying as a wife, Psyche also breaks from the
expectations of the role of a mother. Cupid informs Psyche that she is pregnant and tells her
that their child will be divine if she controls herself and obeys him by not trying to discover
what he looks like. If she disobeys, her son will be mortal. Psyche’s self-interest still
overcomes the pull to enact the societal expectations of a mother to advance the interests of
her child; not only does she disobey, pulling out a lamp to catch a glimpse of her unknown
husband, but she also attempts suicide repeatedly throughout the rest of the story. Gillian
Clark notes that aborting a pregnancy or abandoning a child were illegal and immoral acts
that were acceptable in cases where the mother’s life was in danger, the fetus was dead, or in
cases of extreme poverty (46-47). By committing suicide while pregnant, Psyche effectively
attempted to abort and abandon her unborn child simultaneously. She thinks only of herself
rather than the child that she is expected to care for, again breaking the norms associated with
her gendered role.
Cupid, too, breaks with the roles associated with his gender. Although he portrays a
“display of mastery in taking his wife to task” when he rebukes her for failing to keep her
promise of not talking about him to her sisters during their first visit, Haskins suggests that
“his final response to her tears is also not expected gender behavior for the head of the
household” (254). Instead of forbidding her from what he does not want her to do, he gives
into her desires by permitting her to see her sisters and simply giving her warnings about the
consequences of disobeying him again. He, too, acts in a manner that is just as destructive to
family as Psyche’s actions were, as he did not obey his mother and instead married her
enemy, Psyche. Venus describes her son as “unrestrained” and “immature,” highlighting that
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he disrespected his natal family while entering into a non-legitimate marriage that had been
started in secrecy, without the knowledge or consent of the two families (Osgood 428).
Although Psyche and Cupid’s actions subvert the gender norms of the time through
juxtaposition, the tale’s conclusion does not seek to introduce new ideas into the unsettled
gender assumptions. Rather, the conclusion seems to reinforce the conceptions by offering a
legitimate marriage as a solution to the characters’ confused gender roles. Throughout the
tale, marriage is frequently described as a prison when referring to the sisters’ marriage to
old, sickly men or to Psyche’s marriage to a husband of unknown status or looks. At the end
of the story, Cupid goes to Jupiter for help—again disobeying and disrespecting his mother,
Venus. Deciding to support Cupid, Jupiter declares:
I have decided that the hot-blooded impulses of his first youth must somehow be
bridled . . . We must take away all opportunity for this and confine his youthful
excess in the bonds of marriage. He has chosen a girl and had her virginity: let
him have and hold her, and embracing Psyche for ever enjoy his beloved . . . I
shall arrange for it to be not unequal but legitimate and in accordance with the
civil law. (Apuleius 6.23)
He then gives Psyche a cup of ambrosia to make her immortal, making Psyche of equal status
to Cupid. Whereas illegitimate, undesirable marriages are described as prisons, marriage still
carries this connotation of bridling and confining with bonds. In this case, the bonds of a
legitimate marriage are shown to be restraining two individuals from acting outside of their
accepted gendered roles; in this now-legitimate marriage, Cupid must restrain his passion and
act as a proper head of household, and Psyche must obey her husband and put her child’s
wellbeing above her own.
TACKING OUT
Historical Context
Tacking out to consider the story beyond its temporal portrayal of gender roles, a
broader historical context further illuminates the significance of Cupid and Psyche and the
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tale’s relation to gender conceptions. To understand the significance of the tale at the time, it
is necessary to have an awareness of other texts that were “popular and accessible” in second
century Rome: Plato’s Symposium, Phaedrus, and Phaedo (Kenney xxv).18 In the
Symposium, one of the characters distinguishes “between two Aphrodites, Urania or
Heavenly, and Pandemos or Vulgar, and two Eroses to correspond, their respective provinces
being the love of souls and bodies” (Kenney xxv). The idea that Plato introduces in this text
is that there are higher and lower forms of love—love that is more heavenly, associated with
the soul, and love that is earthly, confined to the lust and passion of the body.
E.J. Kenney asserts that Apuleius himself was clearly aware of the duality of
heavenly and earthly love, as he mentions it in his Apology, and, in his tale of Cupid and
Psyche, “displays Venus and Cupid in these dual Platonic guises contending for the human
soul” (xxv). This tale portrays Venus in her lower form and Cupid in his higher form.
Psyche, too, embodies the lower form of lust as Venus commands Psyche’s body to be
“seized with a burning passion,” using the language of erotic love that describes lustful love
as a disease (Apuleius 4.31; Faraone 44). Kenney also points to key passages in the Phaedrus
and the Phaedo to illuminate the significance of earthly and heavenly love in the tale. The
Phaedrus describes how celestial love allows the soul to grow wings and glimpse the
heavens. In section 248c, the Phaedrus continues to warn what happens when celestial love
is not present: “When the soul is unable to follow God and fails to see, and through some
misfortune grows heavy, being filled with forgetfulness and wickedness, it loses its wings
and falls to earth” (Kenney xxvi). Kenney compares the soul’s failure to attain celestial love
to how Psyche is filled with passion—an earthly, bodily love—upon seeing Cupid, and how
her pursuit of him leads to her fall to earth (xxvi). Furthermore, Kenney notes that the
Phaedo declares that the soul needs to “purge itself of the defilements of bodily pleasure if it
18 T.H. Irwin discusses the circulation of Plato in-depth; evidence of Plato’s circulation includes the fact that
comedies in Athens parodied his work and that Plato gave permission to a member of the Academy to introduce
his work abroad in Sicily. While the exact circulation is unknown, his works became known in the field of
philosophy after Cicero (106-43 B.B.), who translated some of Plato’s works within his own (82-84).
52
is to attain to eternal life with the gods,” which is exactly what Psyche spends the rest of the
tale doing (xxvi).
Plutarch, the second-century parallel biographer and philosopher who was a rough
contemporary of Apuleius, is another author who contributes to an understanding of the
significance of Apuleius’s tale. Kenney references Plutarch’s treatise on curiosity in which
Plutarch “appeals to a standard philosophical distinction between proper objects of
investigation, such as natural science, and things that are attractive merely because they are
hidden” (xxvi). In addition to exhibiting the lower form of love—bodily passion—Psyche
also exhibits the lower form of curiosity; she disobeys her husband, sneaking a glimpse of his
hidden appearance, and she tries to take some of Proserpine’s forbidden beauty from the box.
The tale thus juxtaposes high and low forms of love and curiosity and exhibits the
higher and lower forms of love battling over the soul of Psyche. Since Psyche’s name
literally means “soul,” this appears to be more of a tale of these two types of love battling for
the human soul. The tale of Cupid and Psyche is not so much about one couple that
disregarded gender norms and succumbed to lower forms of love and curiosity, but it is more
so about the “quest of salvation through union with the divine” (Kenney xxv). This quest for
divine salvation of course ties neatly into the story arc of The Golden Ass as a whole; just as
Psyche’s soul is swayed by lower love and saved by her pursuit of the divine, so is Lucius
consumed by lower love and curiosity and ultimately finds salvation through his devotion to
the goddess Isis.
By understanding the historical context, it is easier to see the tale’s significance at the
time it was published. In terms of lower and higher love battling for the soul, gender does not
seem to matter as much as the human aspect. Humans will always experience baser forms of
love and curiosity, but through devotion to the gods, there is hope for overcoming the passion
of the body and achieving a celestial love of the soul. In addition to divine devotion, marriage
seems to be part of the tale’s solution to this war over the soul. In the Roman world, marriage
not only helps constrain lower forms of love or curiosity, in the cases of Cupid and Psyche,
but also follows the rules of legitimacy set forth by the gods. Still, as central to Roman
marriage as gender norms were, at least in the discussion of higher and lower love, gender
seems to not be at issue.
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Lived Context
The final aspect of circulation to take into account for this original version of the tale
is the lived context—that is, how the tale was enacted, used, or experienced as it was
published and distributed over the next several centuries. At the time, Apuleius’s tale of
Cupid and Psyche was not intended for children, as children would not have been the
intended audience of the humorously raunchy novel The Golden Ass. Older scholarship
identifies the novel’s audience as the general public and its purpose to entertain as a “broad
Milesian comedy, filled with bawdy thigh-slapping humor,” using the form of Latin that the
population conversed in and understood (Bottigheimer 7). However, more recent scholarship
problematizes this position. Osgood argues that the text’s language—Latin—presumes the
audience’s familiarity with previous Latin literature, since it would be difficult to understand
Apuleius’s text without such knowledge. Their intellectual level suggests that they were
likely to have been wealthy and citizens, making them “a highly privileged audience”
(Osgood 417). The tale showed gods reduced to earthly forms of love and characterized by
greed and hyperbolized passion. Within the context of The Golden Ass, the tale of Cupid and
Psyche is told by a woman to a younger woman, Charite, whose life is in the hands of men
who are interested in marrying her. It is not too much of a stretch to imagine that Charite is
representative of how an audience at the time would have a lived experience of the tale. In
some ways, it seems that the tale was meant to simply entertain and cheer her up. However,
Kenney also suggests that the presence of the Cupid and Psyche tale within the novel is
evidence that the novel was meant to edify its audience—in this case, a girl who may soon be
forced into a marriage—about celestial love and devotion to the gods. He additionally
acknowledges arguments against this that presume The Golden Ass may in fact be trying to
undermine devotion rather than to edify. Regardless of the meaning of the overall novel, the
tale of Cupid and Psyche does take on this edifying tone with regard to devotion to the gods,
high and low love, and gendered roles within marriage.
As the tale circulated over the next several hundred years, however, the lived
experience changed significantly. While it is debated whether it was intended for the general
public or for higher classes, its main purpose was to entertain through references to familiar
Roman practices that were part of their experience as citizens. Its later lived experience,
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however, was constricted to higher classes for solely intellectual studies. Bottigheimer states,
“when it was published in Italy in 1469, the fact of Apuleius’ Latin language restricted the
tale to a classically educated readership, which represented only a small proportion of the
entire population. One wonders if it made a difference to Renaissance comprehension of
‘Cupid and Psyche’ to read it in the language of the church fathers and of classical
scholarship” (7). The lived experience of Apuleius’s novel as it circulated varied vastly; it
may have shifted from low to high culture, and its purpose changed from entertainment to
scholarship. The tale of Cupid and Psyche, on the other hand, continued to influence
generations of “poets, dramatists, composers for opera and ballet, and artists,” including
Shakespeare, Keats, Morris, and Bridges (Kenney xxxv). The full novel was clearly no
longer used to edify the public about devotion or gendered roles, yet it remains as a reminder
of what those roles had been and how this age had conceptualized bodily and heavenly love.
The legacy of Cupid and Psyche lives on through its circulation in various contexts,
reshaping these ancient values according to the new culture that has reconceptualized the
tale.
CONCLUSION
Analyzing Cupid and Psyche through its temporal, historical, and lived contexts
uncovers the rich complexity of gender conventions in the original tale of the viral Beauty
and the Beast strain. Overall, the ways in which both Cupid and Psyche challenge the gender
conventions of second-century Rome demonstrate the necessity of marriage to reinforce
gender performances for wives, mothers, and husbands. Awareness of the historical context
points to the important message concerning higher and lower forms of love and curiosity,
thus moving away from discussions of gender and considering the more general experience
of humankind as a whole. Gender also does not appear to have had an effect in terms of the
tale’s initial lived context; it was embedded in a story as being told by an older woman to a
younger woman, but it was later experienced by mostly male scholars. It is worth noting as
well that issues of class arise in this text’s circulation both in the perceived permissibility of
the marriage at the beginning and end of the tale and in the way in which the text was lived;
intended for the entertainment of lower classes, it was eventually confined to the desks of
clergy and scholars. Within the text, issues of class and gender also overlap in a way that is
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not easy to separate. Apuleius’s Cupid and Psyche displays the tensions between earthly and
heavenly love while reinforcing and emphasizing gender performances through the social
institution of marriage.
A virus does not simply appear on its own but rather comes from previous genetic
elements or cellular organisms or coevolve with their host (Wessner). In the same way,
Cupid and Psyche, the origin tale of the viral strain, comes from the rhetorical tradition of
animal bridegroom tales that came before and coevolved with the tale. The subsequent tales
analyzed in this thesis are treated as the mutations of Cupid and Psyche, and the following
chapters demonstrate how this story morphed through its viral circulation, creating an even
more tangled web of layers of gender, class, and contexts to consider.
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CHAPTER 4
LEPRINCE DE BEAUMONT’S LA BELLE ET LA
BÊTE
About sixteen centuries after Lucius Apuleius’s Cupid and Psyche, the version that
more closely resembles the one we know today emerged in France. As noted in the previous
chapter, there is a clear connection between the publishing history of Cupid and Psyche and
Beauty and the Beast tales in western Europe. The second-century CE tale was not
republished until 1469 due to the Inquisition’s destruction of all versions of the text about
magic, and the first publication of the Cupid and Psyche tale in France was in 1648. The tale
was further spread throughout French culture by La Fontaine’s 1669 novel Les Amours de
Psyché et de Cupidon and the 1670 Psyché, a tragedie-ballet, written by Molíére, Quinalut,
and Corneille with music composed by Lulli (Talairach-Vielmas 292). The woman who
made a striking impact on the telling of this particular animal bridegroom story was the
French noblewoman and anonymous author Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve. Her
story of La Belle et la Bête, embedded within her 1740 novel The Young American Girl and
Tales at Sea (paralleling Apuleius’s embedding of Cupid and Psyche within The Golden
Ass), contains narrative elements that indicate Villeneuve’s familiarity with La Fontaine’s
version of Cupid and Psyche (Wolfgang 106).19
19 Throughout her translation of Villeneuve’s text, Aurora Wolfgang points to specific references to La
Fontaine’s novel, including the description of the lover who visits Beauty’s dreams as “as handsome as others
portray the god of Love” and a scene in which Beauty dresses in various fashions from around the world that
parallels La Fontaine’s description of Psyche dressing as an Amazon, a Greek woman, and a Persian woman to
please her husband (106, 117).
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Although Villeneuve was the creator of this tale that was highly inspired by Cupid
and Psyche, her tale is not the one we are most familiar with today. Her novel was well
received by Parisians at the time of its publication, but she did not receive credit or fame
because she published it anonymously (Wolfgang 13). Aurora Wolfgang acknowledges that
the main reason she is not well remembered for La Belle et la Bête is due to Jeanne-Marie
Leprince de Beaumont’s 1756 abridged version of Villeneuve’s novel, which shortened,
simplified, and censored the plot and content of Villeneuve’s tale. Leprince de Beaumont
published her abridgment after Villeneuve’s death and did not attribute any credit to the
original author—not an uncommon practice in the days before the French Revolution, when
literary copyrights were not established and royal permits to publish were granted to printers
rather than authors (14). As an experienced governess who educated young girls for over
thirty years, Leprince de Beaumont was an author of children’s tales and conduct books,
which taught girls how to properly behave in society. Leprince de Beaumont’s collection of
tales, Magasin des enfants, went through twenty-six editions before 1789, indicating that
“her version of the fairy tale reached a much greater readership than did Villeneuve’s”
(Wolfgang 14). Since this version had significantly more cultural impact, scholars such as
Hearne dismiss Villeneuve’s as merely “a gene-carrier from earlier stories, passing on a
genetic code responsible for a more important creation” (Wolfgang 29). This statement does
not acknowledge the fascinating strategies and implications of Villeneuve’s text, as I will
demonstrate in this chapter, but it does point to the fact that Leprince de Beaumont’s version
had a wider readership. Because of this, it ultimately became the most well-known version of
the tale and was used as the basis for the version that will be the main subject of the third
chapter: the version made popular in today’s age by the influence of Disney. In examining
how gender conventions evolved from the second century CE Roman Cupid and Psyche to
the mid-eighteenth-century French La Belle et la Bête, this chapter will focus mainly on
Leprince de Beaumont’s version but will also at times turn to aspects of Villeneuve’s original
tale that are useful to consider.
I assert that the characters Beauty and the Beast conform completely to eighteenth-
century French gender conventions by embodying the virtues and performing the roles
expected of them—with one interesting tension in the unexpected plot element of a woman
who acts as the savior of a man who passively waits to be saved. The only other
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nonconformities within this tale are restricted to Villeneuve’s novel, and I argue that
Villeneuve uses these nonconformities not to question established conventions of gender but
to gently critique society’s treatment of virtues and love. This full conformity, I demonstrate,
is due to the purpose of these texts: to teach and instill society’s gender expectations in young
girls. This analysis is significant in itself because it provides a close look at how gender was
taught to girls during this period and highlights some of the tensions and contradictions that
were inherent in both the gender conventions and the teaching of those conventions. As the
second step of this study on the circulation of the viral spread, it also increases the
complexity of circulation studies by giving an in-depth look at the differences in plot, gender,
and overall meaning of the two tales.
This chapter begins with a summary of Leprince de Beaumont’s La Belle et la Bête
and a brief overview of key aspects that she removed from Villeneuve’s original novel. The
following cultural context parallels my previous chapter, highlighting the gendered treatment
of bodies and of gendered roles, specifically with regard to education and marriage. Tacking
in, I provide a temporal analysis of Beauty and the Beast’s bodily and performative
conveyance of gender ideals, additionally noting the one aspect in which they do not conform
in the plot. I then consider how Villeneuve’s original novel contained a few elements that did
not conform to these gender expectations, and I demonstrate how these instances call into
question societal values of virtue and love—but they do not undermine the conventional
gender roles. Tacking out, I widen the scope beyond just historical thoughts on gender at the
time and also consider a broader societal view on love’s role in marriage, specifically
concentrating on how literary forms conveyed this and how Villeneuve’s use of such styles
parallels Sonja Foss’s strategies of generating multiple perspectives and cultivating
ambiguity. Examining the lived experience of both Leprince de Beaumont’s and Villeneuve’s
texts, I consider their purpose in edifying young girls about gender expectations and the
reception of these texts at the time of their publication. Finally, I conclude by tracing the key
differences between Cupid and Psyche and La Belle et la Bête in regard to curiosity, love and
marriage, and female heroine agency.
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SUMMARY OF LA BELLE ET LA BÊTE
Leprince de Beaumont’s tale describes a wealthy merchant and his six children, three
sons and three daughters, on whose education he “spared no cost.” The youngest daughter
was especially beautiful and admired and went by the name of Beauty, which made her
sisters jealous. Proud and conceited because of their wealth, their sisters had several suitors
but would not deem to marry anyone less than a Duke or an Earl, while Beauty politely
turned down her suitors out of duty to staying with her father. When the merchant loses his
fortune at the beginning of the tale, the family moves to the country; the suitors abandon the
sisters, who do not take well to having to live an impoverished life, and Beauty, wishing to
support her father, forces herself to adapt quickly and cheerily to a life of work while
continuing her educated activities such as reading, playing the harpsichord, singing, and
spinning.
After a year, the merchant receives news that a ship had arrived with the promise of a
return to wealth. While the sisters beg for new gowns and jewelry, Beauty asks simply for a
rose so that she will not appear to disapprove of her sisters’ behavior but will not put a
burden on her father. The merchant goes on his journey but does not come back into wealth
as expected. On his journey back, he gets lost in a forest and is afraid of dying from cold or
wolves until he comes across a palace, where the food and clothes he need appear before
him. When he leaves in the morning, he stops to take a rose for Beauty—and the Beast then
appears and reproaches him for being ungrateful for the hospitality, condemning him to
death. Upon learning that the merchant has daughters, the Beast changes the merchant’s
punishment and tells him to go back to his daughters and either have a daughter come
willingly in his place to stay with the Beast or return himself within three months to die.
Beauty insists on taking her father’s place, as she was the one who asked for the rose. During
her first night at the palace, Beauty is visited in her dreams by a lady who praises her for her
virtuous deed and tells her she will be rewarded. She lives in fear of the Beast eating her up
the first couple of nights. Instead, every night the Beast asks her if she will marry him, and,
after she says no, leaves. She spends her days amusing herself with the beautiful library and
harpsichord.
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Although she will not consent to marry him, she does promise to spend her life with
him—but she asks that he allow her to visit her father once more so she will not “fret to
death” (19). The Beast allows her to leave but warns her that, if she remains with her father,
“poor Beast will die with grief” (19). When Beauty visits her family, her sisters are jealous of
how happy she is and scheme to keep her with them for a week so that the Beast will be
angry and devour her. One night, Beauty dreams of Beast dying in the garden and
reproaching her for her ingratitude, and she suddenly realizes that, although she does not
“feel the tenderness of affection for him . . . [she has] the highest gratitude, esteem and
friendship” (23, 24). She decides she would be content to marry him, despite his ugly looks
and lack of intelligence, because he has more virtue than her sisters’ husbands. She returns
and finds him in the garden, stretched out as if dead, just as he had appeared in her dream.
She pours water on his head to awaken him and asks him to “live to be [her] husband,”
exclaiming “the grief I now feel convinces me, that I cannot live without you” (25). The
palace immediately sparkles with light, fireworks, and music, and the Beast immediately
transforms into “one of the loveliest Princes that eye ever beheld” (25). The Beast explains
that a wicked fairy had cursed him to be ugly and lacking in intelligence until a “beautiful
virgin would consent to marry [him]” (26). The lady from Beauty’s dream, along with
Beauty’s family, appear in the castle, and the lady tells her this is the reward for valuing
virtue over wit or beauty, and she will become a queen. Her sisters are punished by being
transformed into statues to witness their sister’s happiness; they can only return to their
human form if they can overcome their “pride, anger, gluttony, and idleness,” which the lady
mentions would take a miracle for them to accomplish because they are so malicious. Beauty
and the Beast marry and live many years together, and the tale concludes: “their happiness,
as it was founded on virtue, was complete” (27).
As is evident from this summary, Leprince de Beaumont’s version of the tale is
simple, straightforward, and centered on virtue. The tale she abridged, however, had a few
key differences in terms of plot. Villeneuve’s tale was much lengthier and accordingly more
detailed and complex. The tale is told from three perspectives: Beauty’s, which is the
perspective Leprince de Beaumont adopts, the Beast’s, and the Lady Fairy. At the end of
Beauty’s story, Beauty discovers that the Beast is the son of a fairy queen and that she herself
is also the daughter of another fairy queen. The fairies in Villeneuve’s novel thus play a
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much larger role; there is the old Fairy (who cast the spell on the Beast), the Amazon Queen
(Beast’s mother), the Fairy Queen (Beauty’s mother), and the Lady Fairy (Beauty’s fairy
aunt). Because there are more perspectives and more details, the story is less straightforward
and moralistic. Beauty is not as perfectly virtuous as she appears to be in Leprince de
Beaumont’s tale because she is torn between gratitude for the Beast and love for her
unknown lover who visits her dreams at night—who turns out to be the prince cursed to
appear as the Beast. Villeneuve makes more explicit references to the sexual themes of the
book, contrasting Beauty’s nightly dreams of a handsome man who courts her with the
Beast’s nightly question of whether she will “allow him to sleep with her” (109). Villeneuve
also describes their marriage night, a scene left out entirely by Leprince de Beaumont. As
stated earlier, this chapter will focus on Leprince de Beaumont’s publication of the tale, as it
was more widely read, but when useful I will make references to this original novel that she
abridged.
CULTURAL CONTEXT FOR GENDER: MID-EIGHTEENTH
CENTURY FRANCE
As in the previous chapter, physical bodies are central to this animal bridegroom tale,
and it is important to establish the ideal physical forms associated with the two genders in the
mid-eighteenth-century France. Similar to Roman ideals of feminine beauty, French
standards of physical attractiveness featured symmetrical proportions. Looking at what is
presented as the opposite of beauty can be more revealing however; by the end of the
eighteenth century, artists of the revolution started to depict the female grotesque to
demonize enemies of the French Republic, such as aristocrats and members of the royal
family, although women of lower classes were also depicted in the grotesque by counter-
revolutionary artists (Landes 113). These depictions physically portray what society viewed
as the worst physical and moral characteristics in a woman, and in this way, they indirectly
illuminate the ideal physical appearance of a woman. Joan Landes writes:
. . . the female grotesque called attention to women’s most immediate, physical
characteristics. Hence, the grotesque body was likely to be open and protruding
(available for sexual pleasure; focused on the mouth, nose, stomach, or sexual
organs), debased (monstrous and animal-like), subject to change (aged, pregnant,
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too large or too thin), and transgressive (of heterosexual object choices and
behaviors). (115)
He goes on to explain that such depictions were similar to “the long-standing iconographic
tradition of representing all evil” (114). These physical representations of women, equivalent
to depictions of evil and vices, thus indicate that the ideal female body would be the exact
opposite—a modest virgin characterized by youth and a healthy physique who conformed to
the virtues expected of her gender. Depictions of goddesses in the eighteenth century, for
example, “pointed to the spiritual, transcendent, and permanent aspects of human existence”
as well as “universal, nonsexual values” (114). In addition to physically embodying these
virtues, the ideal woman was expected to reflect her husband’s wealth and status, appearing
“ornamental, leisured, and expensive” on the public streets in Britain, whose culture at the
time was similar to that of the French (Talairach-Vielmas 280).
The ideal portrayal of the male body shifted during the eighteenth century in France.
While classical aspects such as symmetry continued to distinguish beauty in the appearances
of both women and men, men’s ideal bodies were particularly connected to intellect and
status. In terms of social status and authority, Ronit Milano posits that the “ambivalence”
present in the portrayal of masculinity was due to social concerns regarding male authority.
Portraits in the beginning of the eighteenth century conveyed authority through traditional
powerful appearances that included “stern expressions” and “rich and impressive wigs,” and
extravagant clothing. In the decades before the revolution, this gave way to less authoritative
images that promoted the “ideal of self-exposure” through more “natural” styles of
adornment, including simpler wigs and darker, less extravagant clothing (136-137). Portraits
also exhibit men as intellectuals through “sharply cut eyes and stern gaze” (Milano 32) or
“elegant and sophisticated” clothing such as a “smart, fashionable coat of a respected
gentleman” (148).
Another fascinating aspect of the ideal male body during this time period is how more
traditional depictions of masculinity gave way to include an androgynous ideal. In The
Portrait Bust and French Cultural Politics in the 18th century, Milano departs from
traditional scholarship that focuses on the classicizing motifs and instead focuses on how
these sculptures form a hybrid of classicizing motifs and styles as well as their representation
of French culture of that time period (2). Her book suggests that some French portrait busts
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in the 1760s offered “a manifestation of reformed masculinity: intimate, soft, sensitive and
therefore feminine in nature” (45). She cites Abigail Solomon-Godeau’s and Alex Potts’s
respective studies on the masculine nude and how the androgynous represents “an ideal
persona (and sexuality) deprived of gender affiliation” (44). This “gender-free concept of a
virtuous French citizen” thus permitted both men and women to identify with the portrait
bust and highlighted the importance of virtue. In the later part of the eighteenth century, the
androgynous male figure became popular in art.20 Landes writes:
. . . fascination with the sensual ephebe or the androgyne in neoclassical art
production coexisted with misogynistic and homophobic public discourses . . .
such feminized forms of male subjectivity—“non-phallic” or “castrated”—may
accompany and even work to shore up male power by incorporating the threat
posed by women to the patriarchal gender order. (139)
The gendered physical ideals in eighteenth-century France are largely a reflection of
the well-defined performative roles of gender resulting from notable social changes. One
highly influential shift in society at this time was the Enlightenment, which emphasized the
importance of education in creating progress. Furthermore, the shift to an industrial urban
economy with middle classes caused women to “step out of the sacrosanct private sphere of
the home” (Talairach-Vielmas 280). While lower-class women had always held public roles
in society, the gender conventions concerning middle and higher classes now shifted with
their new public visibility. The new order of the public and private world depended on clear-
cut gender roles, particularly in regard to family life and morals. Writing on the development
of nationalism alongside these values, Landes comments,
the family came to be associated with the values of intimacy and sentimentality,
and private morality was seen as a necessary condition for a healthy state and
society. Female virtue was absolutely pivotal to this new conception of public and
private life, and women as a whole were divided between those who did and those
who did not contribute to the nation’s moral well-being. (136)
20 While this appears to have occurred a while after the publications of Villeneuve and Leprince de Beaumont, it
is worth noting since such societal values may have existed some years prior to the recorded instances we have.
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Thus, it was a woman’s duty to society to play a moral role within her family unit,
embodying virtue through her actions as a wife and mother.
The focus on education sparked a debate about how to educate women and to what
extent women should be educated. Nadine Berenguier writes that Bishop de Lamothe-
Fénelon, whose De l’éducation des filles went through seven editions between 1719 and
1776, called attention to the fact that girls’ intellectual and moral education was being
neglected (“as if we supposed the sex to be in need of little or no instruction”) (1). He also
indicated that mothers were both to blame and were inherently incapable of teaching morality
and social behavior, as their teaching style was characterized by “an effeminate and timid
manner”) (Berenguier 1). While all materials written for girls generally contained some
moral instruction, a new genre was specifically created to guide women from the private
sphere to the public: conduct books.
Jane Donawerth writes that these books were written by men in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries to warn women “against speaking too much, being witty, or gaining too
much education” (43). Towards the end of the eighteenth century, women began to write
these books for other women to provide “social guidelines for conversation, letter writing,
and sometimes education in rhetoric or composition” (43). The rhetoric of conduct books was
meant to “initiat[e] the reader into a discourse community” (43). Donawerth asserts:
. . . conduct book rhetoric by women teaches both the stylistic conventions and
language etiquette that signals class status (for women who do not necessarily
have the same education as men of their class), and also the canonical knowledge
or ideology leading to shared assumptions for interpreting rhetorical behavior,
including, very importantly, gender roles. (44)
Conduct books in this way educated women on acceptable rhetoric for both speech and
behavior, forming and reinforcing a social construction of gender roles. Specifically,
behavioral guides describe the social practices that would be expected of young women when
they left the home and thus provide a clear depiction of gender conventions in eighteenth
century France (Berenguier 3). Part of the need for these books was due to the lack of moral
behavior and rampant scandalous activities of French courts and salons in the time period
before Leprince de Beaumont. Even other countries’ conduct books drew attention to this
issue in France; Donawerth points to a British woman, Hannah More’s, 1783 conduct poem,
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in which “she enforces appropriate gender roles by demonizing the unfeminine behavior of
the précieuses in French salon culture of the previous century” (45).
In portraying how girls should conduct themselves in the public sphere, conduct
books also upheld specific virtues that they should embody. These virtues were crucial to the
success of women, and thereby the family and society as a whole, due to society’s perception
of women’s nature. In the eyes of society, young women “were powerless and easily misled,
but their own behavior was not spared negative scrutiny, since it was characterized by a
deep-seated urge to please” (Berenguier 85). They were both susceptible to being preyed on
by men in the callous outside world and at fault for it, since they were naïve and had an
inherent desire to please. Because of this, it was important that women uphold certain virtues
to control their behavior in society (Landes 136). It was also essential that women be
educated on these virtues, since they could be easily misled. Virtues that women were
supposed to embody included patience—“the supreme feminine virtue” (Korneeva 249)—as
well as “feminine modesty, goodness, and self-sacrifice” (Wolfgang 42). Using the terms
“virtue” and “modesty” interchangeably, conduct book authors discouraged girls from
showing interest in seduction by adorning themselves (Berenguier 88). Ironically, they
praised virtue and modesty to such an extent that it almost appeared as an adornment for
seduction; the author Puisieux noted that modesty and virtue are “the most beautiful
attributes of our sex” and that, without modesty, “the most beautiful woman becomes an
object of contempt” (qtd. in Berenguier 89). Berenguier asserts that the values introduced in
these books emphasized the connection between “the display of desired behavior and the
conjugal prospects of girls,” as marriage was a social expectation of women (89). Physically
embodying modesty was not meant to keep girls from being seen but rather to attract positive
attention from society (88).
Furthermore, the extent to which girls should be educated was debated. To guard
against “indifference and sloth,” girls were encouraged to engage their minds in intellectual
pursuits rather than on adornments and frivolous activities, such as social calls or dressing
(Berenguier 90). Still, only a certain level of education was acceptable. Since most women
did not have much education, it was unacceptable “socially damaging to show off one’s
knowledge”; thus, it was better for women not to have too much education to have to conceal
(Berenguier 91). Female authors of conduct books were concerned about how education
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would affect girls’ social standing, whereas male authors were more concerned with the idea
that too much education might detract from women’s dedication to their domestic duties (93).
Physiologists additionally claimed that women had “weaker and more delicate fibers than
men, similar to those of children” (22). Rather than studying women’s brains, physiologists
declared women were largely incapable of reason due to the softness of their bodies and the
“enragement” of the uterus (Bostic 34). This impacted women’s education. It was not only
socially unsuitable for women to have to hide what knowledge they did have; it was also
necessary to limit that education due to their unequal capability of possessing reason.
In terms of marriage, conduct books reflected society’s disapproval of allowing
romantic love and passion to play a factor in choosing one’s own spouse. Some conduct book
authors, such as Leprince de Beaumont, insisted on the absolute authority of parents in
creating a match for love, while other authors acknowledged that parents could sometimes
create a mismatch (Berenguier 98). Berenguier observes that these books portrayed creating
marriage matches as hopeless while they still asserted that the only way a marriage could
flourish was through reason and virtue (98). Although women had little to no say in whom
they married, they still were expected to play a significant role in ensuring the success of
their marriage. To do this, wives were expected to demonstrate “‘complaisance’ [gentleness],
‘déférence’ [deference], and compliance with a husband’s requests” (104, 105).
Women’s roles as mothers were also forefront in the conduct books, since they
relentlessly criticized bad mothers for failing to attend to their daughters’ education.
However, Berenguier points out that these books failed to provide examples of what
parenting should look like. One of the few authors who did discuss mothering was Leprince
de Beaumont herself, who highlighted the importance of a woman being “a Christian, an
amiable wife, a tender mother, and an attentive housekeeper” (qtd. in Berenguier 69).
Leprince de Beaumont advocated for the importance of conversation between a mother and
her daughter in order to instill Christian values and ensure respectability for the good of
society (70). Many of the early conduct books showed devotion in mothers as an exception
rather than a rule and praised mothers who demonstrated such devotion by not being
separated from their children (69, 73).
Men, in contrast, were seen as having external roles in society. A few decades after
the publications of La Belle et la Bête, revolutionary Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de
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Mirabeau published his discussion on national education, in which he clearly lays out the
societal expectations that men, active and suited to the external world, should do work that
“demands considerable force, traveling great distances, courage, steadfastness, opinionated
discussions, regards him exclusively. It is he who should labor, negotiate, travel, fight, plead
his rights and those of his brothers, other humans, in the public assemblies” (qtd. in Landes
136). Thus, the ideals for man included his physical abilities, strong virtues such as courage,
and intellectual capabilities. During the Enlightenment, as education became increasingly
seen as the way for society to make progress, intellectual capabilities were so greatly valued
that they became a noticeable physical feature of the ideal man (Milano 187).
Since eighteenth-century French society rested upon the unit of the family, men were
encouraged to marry and become husbands in addition to carrying out their public roles.
Men’s “identity as a national subject” was defined in opposition to women’s. In addition to
having a clear, binary opposite in terms of the sexual division of labor, men’s identities were
closely linked to the possession of a wife: “one of the privileges of nationhood for every man
is the promise of possessing a female, whom he pledges in turn to protect and honor, under
the aegis of the nation” (Landes 137). Marriages between man and woman created the family
units that “came to be associated with the values of intimacy and sentimentality, and private
morality was seen as a necessary condition for a healthy state and society” (136). A husband
gave honor, love, and protection to his wife, and in turn he expected her to fulfill her roles
within the private sphere.
One aspect of eighteenth-century characterization of men that complicates these
gender conventions is men’s sexual aggressiveness. As mentioned previously, the conduct
books emphasized that a negative quality in men was their tendency to be sexually
aggressive; this was posed as a danger to young women and their virtue as they entered
society. Despite the denouncement of this behavior, men did not seem to be held accountable
alone for such a vice. While conduct books warned girls against the “sexual aggressiveness”
of men, they also indicated that girls shared the blame for such aggressiveness due to the way
they dressed or interacted with men (Berenguier 82). Furthermore, men did not appear to
have to accept the blame for misconduct on their side of the marriage, as “a husband’s
happiness and, by implication, his fidelity depended on a wife’s ability to maintain a modest
demeanor and simple dress” (87). Thus, it would appear that men were not held solely
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responsible for misconduct on their side of the marriage. This glimpse into the complex
physical portrayals and performative roles of gender of eighteenth-century France provides
the background for the temporal, historical, and lived contexts of La Belle et la Bête and how
the tale shifted from its circulation from second-century CE Rome.
TACKING IN
Temporal Analysis
As with my analysis of Cupid and Psyche, I will begin by tacking in to consider how
the temporal publication of La Belle et la Bête treated gender. Leprince de Beaumont’s
depiction of the characters of Beauty and the Beast fully complies with the gender
conceptions of the time. One notable aspect of Leprince de Beaumont’s version of the tale is
the lack of emphasis on physical descriptions of characters in order to draw attention to the
more important aspects of gender of the time period: embodied virtues. While physical
descriptions are scarce throughout her short tale, the depictions provided indicate that Beauty
is an example of the ideal feminine body. Her physical beauty is conveyed only at the
beginning of the tale; Leprince de Beaumont writes, “[the merchant’s] daughters were
extremely handsome, especially the youngest; when she was little, everybody admired her,
and called her The little Beauty; so that, as she grew up, she still went by the name of
Beauty” (1). While Leprince de Beaumont offers no explanation regarding what specific
characteristics make Beauty so handsome, she does hint at other physical characteristics that
portray Beauty as the opposite of the feminine grotesque. Instead of having a body that is
open and available for sexual pleasure or indicating change (in terms of pregnancy, aging, or
weakness), Beauty’s youth and virginity are both emphasized as she thanks her many suitors
while politely telling them that “she was too young yet to marry, but chose to stay with her
father a few years longer” (2). After two months of living in poverty, she also “grew stronger
and healthier than ever” (4). Her virginity is subtly affirmed at the end of the tale, when the
Beast explains how she broke the spell: “a wicked fairy had condemned me to remain under
that shape till a beautiful virgin should consent to marry me” (25). Unlike the female
grotesque, which is characterized by transgressive qualities that violate gendered
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conventions, Beauty fully conforms to the ideal female in these physical characteristics as
well as in embodied virtues and performed gender roles.
Applying Foss’s strategy of enactment, it is clear that Beauty complies with gender
roles through her enactment of ideal feminine virtues. Foss states, “in enactment, individuals
act out or embody an interpretation of a situation that is counter to the one normally
accepted—they embody the point they are making about the new reality they desire” (152).
Beauty’s embodiment is different from Foss’s in that she reinforces norms of behavior rather
than disrupting them. Leprince de Beaumont’s purpose was the opposite of Foss’s, as her use
of enactment was intended to display conformity. In the text, the townspeople describe
Beauty as “a charming, sweet-tempered creature, [who] spoke so kindly to poor people, and
was of such an affable, obliging disposition” (3). Her virtues are brought into focus by their
stark contrast to her sisters’ vices. Their father claims that “Beauty out-shone her sisters, in
her person as well as her mind, and [he] admired her humility, industry, and patience; for her
sisters not only left her all the work of the house to do, but insulted her every moment” (4).
Her sisters also are accused of pride, envy, jealousy, greed, and lack of modesty in dress (11).
While her sisters demand luxurious clothing and jewelry from their father, Beauty asks only
for a simple rose.
In terms of gender roles, Beauty also demonstrates conformity to the social norm.
Although we do not see her as a wife or mother in the story, she accepts the roles placed
upon her as a young woman. She cheerily takes on the domestic responsibilities of a woman
as she does all of the housework for her father, even while her sisters goad her. She is highly
obedient to her father, willingly entering a marriage that benefits him and that he has, in a
way, arranged. Demonstrating proper Christian values, when she feels like crying during her
first night in the Beast’s castle, she instead “recommended herself to God” (14). The Beast,
too, she treats with the docility and gratitude expected of a wife, refusing to marry him only
until she realizes that her value of his virtuousness has transformed their relationship from
friendship to something she cannot live without—which, by the understanding of marriage in
the Enlightenment, was as perfect a marriage as one could hope to have. She is also educated
to a suitable degree. Her father “spared no cost for [his children’s] education,” and as she
spends “the greatest part of her time in reading good books” and plays the harpsichord (1-2).
Still, she is educated within the proper limits of Enlightenment expectations for women, and
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she is careful not to show off her knowledge or virtue so as not to make her sisters look lesser
in comparison (5).
The Beast’s description similarly conforms to contemporary ideals of masculinity.
While physical descriptions of the Beast himself are almost nonexistent in Leprince de
Beaumont’s version, beyond having “a terrible voice” (9) and “very ugly” (17), Villeneuve’s
novel provides a vivid description. The Beast, of course, is meant to be opposite of the ideal
male body; thus Villeneuve depicts “a horrible beast” with a “furious look,” “a kind of trunk,
similar to an elephant’s,” a body of “enormous weight,” “horrible clinking of his scales,” and
“awful shrieks” (95, 103). The affective aspect of such a description harkens back to the
scaly serpent husband that Psyche’s sisters described to her. The image sparks fear by
invoking frightening, exotic animals and removing human characteristics. Leprince de
Beaumont chose to eschew any vivid description of the Beast, significantly lessening the
affective element of the animal groom. The Beast only comes to represent male beauty at the
end of the tale, where he is described as “one of the loveliest Princes that eye ever beheld”
(25)—another reference to Cupid. One aspect of the ideal masculine body was its portrayal
of wealth, at the beginning of the eighteenth century through clothing and later on by men’s
more modest attire and their wives’ more luxurious ornamentation. The Beast conforms with
this expectation too; neither in his animal nor human form is attention brought to his style of
dress or wig. Instead of indicating it through physical markers on his body, his wealth and
status are conveyed through the lavishness of his palace and through the gowns available to
Beauty (although she takes them for her sisters rather than for herself).
The Beast likewise represents the importance of men’s embodiment of intelligence
and virtue. One of the othering characteristics of the Beast is his lack of intelligence, which
he himself acknowledges to Beauty’s father: “My name is not My Lord, but Beast; I don’t
love compliments, not I; I like people should speak as they think” (9). He also tells Beauty,
“besides my ugliness, I have no sense; I know very well that I am a poor, silly, stupid
creature.” By differentiating himself from a Lord, a man of high status, the Beast contrasts
himself with the masculine ideal, indicating the centrality of intellect. Beauty, however,
draws attention to the virtue he embodies despite his ugliness: “I am pleased with your
kindness, and when I consider that, your deformity scarce appears . . . I prefer you, just as
you are, to those who, under a human form, hide a treacherous, corrupt, and ungrateful heart”
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(18). Although the Beast does not possess the intellect expected of his gender, he does
embody other virtues that Beauty names, such as his “sweetness of temper,” “complaisance,”
“good-natured[ness],” “kindness,” rationality and common sense (16-18, 23)—all essential to
his identity as a man.
The Beast furthermore conforms to gendered roles within marriages, although we do
not see him as a husband or father in the tale. Leprince de Beaumont contrasts the Beast’s
suitability with the suitability of Beauty’s sisters’ husbands. One husband was “extremely
handsome indeed, but so fond of his own person, that he was full of nothing but his own dear
self, and neglected his wife”; the other husband was “a man of wit, but he only made use of it
to plague and torment everybody, and his wife most of all” (21). The Beast thus reveals that
the most desirable characteristics of a husband are virtues—not physical appearances, and
not a showy, immodest type of intelligence. The Beast possesses neither looks nor
intelligence, yet he does not neglect his future wife, and he provides for and protects her in
his palace—all of the things expected of an ideal husband in the French Enlightenment.
The one way in which Leprince de Beaumont’s tale does not conform to gender roles
is through its juxtaposition of normal male and female roles in the plot of a fairytale,
particularly with regard to agency. Wolfgang notes that Beauty’s role of arousing the prince
from his sleep in Villeneuve’s novel was the equivalent of “a masculine ‘Sleeping Beauty’
awaiting the magical kiss of his princess” (36)—a scene that reappears in Leprince de
Beaumont’s tale, albeit the Beast has not yet been transformed into the prince. Inherent
within the tale’s plot is this reversal of traditional gender roles. This is especially so in
Villeneuve’s original tale, in which female fairies demonstrate agency through their control
over the majority of the plot. Wolfgang articulates, “the male characters are consistently
portrayed as weak, either waiting for the strong female characters to decide their fate or
proving ineffectual to change their own fate through their actions” (51). While Villeneuve’s
version emphasizes the passivity of men through strong female fairies and a prince whose
fate is in the hands of Beauty and his fairy mother, Leprince de Beaumont’s tale also carries
over this aspect despite her apparent resolve to stringently reinforce gender roles. The Beast
is unquestionably passive and lacking in agency, waiting for a virgin to break his spell. Even
Beauty’s father allows her to make the decisions that save him and his family. In this
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juxtaposition between an active female character who exercises agency and passive male
characters, Leprince de Beaumont’s tale breaks from its conformity to gender norms.
Although this is the only way that Leprince de Beaumont’s tale strays from
conformity to gender norms, Villeneuve’s original version of the story contains a few notable
instances where these norms are reversed or pushed back against—despite the fact that her
tale, too, ultimately reinforces the norms. One way in which this is done is by attributing
masculine virtues to women. As discussed earlier, Beauty embodies all of the virtues
appropriate for women—yet, Wolfgang asserts that Beauty actually “embodies a more
androgynous ideal than the masculine femme forte, for she unites feminine modesty,
goodness, and self-sacrifice with masculine courage, resolve, intellectual curiosity, and a will
to overcome adversity, even in the face of physical or sexual violence” (42). Wolfgang attests
that androgyny was used to represent positive attributes of both sexes after the 1650s and
continued into the eighteenth century. This creates an interesting connection to the new
values of masculinity in this century—specifically, the “reformed masculinity” or
androgynous portraits that drew attention away from gender and towards virtue. Wolfgang
asserts that Beauty, as “a child of the 18th century,” has business skills, as she advises her
father, while also enjoying all of the entertainment, cultural activities, and global fashion
interests of the “eighteenth-century cosmopolitan woman” (43). Rather than subverting
gender roles and criticizing the status quo, Villeneuve instead appears to be emphasizing the
ideals of virtue and drawing the gaze slightly away from gender.
Villeneuve’s novel also does not conform to norms surrounding marriages at the time.
As with the transferal of gender characteristics, she does not resist conformity in a way that
criticizes the gender roles so much as gently calls into question the validity of other values of
society. One social controversy that her novel confronts is the conflict between the practice
of arranged marriage and a marriage by choice, based on love and passion. In her novel,
Beauty feels passion for the suitor in her dreams and ultimately chooses the Beast as her
husband due to her gratitude. As it turns out, the suitor in her dreams and the Beast are one in
the same person, so she gets a marriage filled with passion and love. In this ending,
Villeneuve joined other French women novelists—not conduct book authors, of course—
who advocated for such free choice for women in finding love (Wolfgang 37).
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Another critique Villeneuve appears to have concerns the rules of status in marriage.
In her tale, the prince’s mother will not let him marry Beauty at first because she is the
daughter of a merchant and is therefore of a lower class. The Lady Fairy puts voice to the
concerns about a society that values class over virtue, as she states that “her virtues make up
for that inequity” (McGrath 169). Yet, Dearbhla McGrath asserts, “Villeneuve is not able to
fully overcome this issue,” as the Queen Fairy only allows Beauty to marry the prince when
Beauty’s true fairy lineage is revealed (170). She thus indicates how deeply ingrained social
status was at this time, and her subtle critique simply whispers against the double standards
and inequity. By changing two major aspects of typical marriage—its arrangement without
passion and its support of status over virtue—Villeneuve slightly pushes back against the
systems that constrained women and men while still fully reinforcing the respective roles of
the two genders.
TACKING OUT
Historical Context
I now turn to the historical context surrounding La Belle et la Bête, tacking out
beyond a temporal consideration of gender roles in the text to consider a larger picture of
how key historical aspects create a better understanding of the views of marriage and love
during this time period. Specifically, I look at how other literature and literary forms
conveyed this understanding of marriage, and I draw attention to how Villeneuve’s original
novel used these literary strategies in alignment with Foss’s strategies of generating multiple
perspectives and cultivating ambiguity. To reiterate the inherent fluidity of circulation
theory, the temporal, historical, and lived contexts of gender in this tale bleed into one
another, allowing for overlap between the constructs I am using to try to capture the viral
spread of gender conventions in the tale.
During the mid-eighteenth century, marriage in France was a commercial exchange in
which there was no place for love. Wolfgang writes that it was “primarily an economic or
political contract between families of similar social standing, in which families approved, if
not chose, the spouse of their child, [and] the feelings and desires of the young bride were
often beside the point” (29). Furthermore, the idea of love was quite different from modern
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conceptions of passion or Roman ideals of heavenly love because it was more deeply based
in gratitude and esteem. This is illustrated in Dr. Gregory’s A Father’s Legacy to His
Daughters; although it was written based on eighteenth-century British society, the book is
relevant to French culture because the two were similar and closely connected during this
period. Dr. Gregory notes that some women mistakenly refer to gratitude as love and marry
men without esteem or affection involved, which condemns them to a life without love. He
explains to his daughters that “love is not to begin on your part, but is entirely to be the
consequence of [a gentleman’s] attachment to you” (80-81) and describes the appropriate
process:
When you perceive [a gentleman’s attachment to you], it excites your gratitude;
this gratitude rises into a preference, and this preference perhaps at last advances
to some degree of attachment . . . If attachment was not excited in your sex in this
manner, there is not one of a million of you that could ever marry with any degree
of love. (82-83)
Thus, a man will marry because he has chosen whom he loves or esteems more than other
women, and a woman “of equal taste and delicacy marries him because she esteems him, and
because he gives her that preference” (83). He also warns women against showing love and
claims that it is women’s responsibility to be more reserved, as the consequences of
expressing it is “satiety and disgust” (88). These ideas about marriage and love illuminate
Leprince de Beaumont’s tale; Beauty follows her father’s wishes, paying no mind to her own
feelings to live with the Beast, and she chooses to marry him for the correct reasons: not
because she “feel[s] the tenderness of affection for him” but because she has “the highest
gratitude, esteem and friendship” (23, 24). She, too, never admits to feeling love when she
agrees to marry him. In this way, marriage was purely economical, and it had a place not for
love as we know it today but for gratitude and esteem.
The only place where a more passionate version of love and marriage aligned,
Wolfgang asserts, was within fiction. The seventeenth century literary movement called
préciosité “had promoted a modern view of marriage based on feeling . . . and denounced the
common practices of marital oppression” (30). This movement had spoken out about sexual
violence, distinguishing between seduction and coercion and demonstrating certain behaviors
of men as necessary for winning a woman’s affection, such as respect, tenderness, and
generosity (31). In this way, they created in fiction a place for women’s affective needs,
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drawing attention to their reality in a world where such needs were nonexistent. Joining the
literary stage of female writers after this movement had taken place, Villeneuve drew on this
movement by reintroducing passion to marriage and contrasting the Beast with the suitor in
Beauty’s dreams. Her tale emphasizes tenderness through the Beast’s “non-violent
seduction” (Wolfgang 32). Suellen Diaconoff explains that Villeneuve “breaks new ground”
by depicting the “erotic birth” of a woman, as other female fairy-tale writers of this time
period did not speak out directly about desire or sexuality (qtd. in Wolfgang 34). While
Leprince de Beaumont does acknowledge tenderness and promotes positive, nonviolent
behaviors in men, she does not carry over the same concern for women’s affective needs,
instead emphasizing the commercial aspect of marriage in society.
In addition to the ideas surrounding marriage in society and in literary movements,
the actual literary forms that were circulating had an impact on these two versions of the tale
and invite a consideration of Foss’s strategies of generating multiple perspectives and
cultivating ambiguity. Examining types of fairy-tales, Elizabeth Harries identifies two
models (Wolfgang 26). The first is a “compact” model, which we are most familiar with
today thanks to the Grimm brothers’ adoption of the model in the nineteenth century. French
male authors such as Perrault used this form, which Wolfgang describes as “simple,
moralistic, folk narratives” that contained clear moral lessons (26). This is the form that
Leprince de Beaumont’s abridged version fit. This contributed to her version’s longer-lasting
success, and the “compact” model was preferred by scholars in the nineteenth century over
the other form of fairy tale: the model written by women, which was “often convoluted,
complex, and full of sly psychological observations” (Wolfgang 26). This model influenced
Villeneuve and provided the original form for the tale. Other notable aspects of women’s
fairy tales include their significantly longer length and their inclusion of multiple
perspectives. Villeneuve’s novel includes three versions of the same story, from the
perspectives of Beauty, the Beast, and the Lady Fairy. According to Foss, “one way in which
a rhetor may disrupt a hegemonic ideology is by presenting multiple perspectives on a
subject . . . [to make] clear that the perspective being presented as dominant and natural is not
the only one available” (147). In telling and retelling the story through these different lenses,
Villeneuve emphasizes different aspects of the story and is able to introduce complexity and
nuance in various societal values. She gives a voice to both female and male protagonists, as
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well as to a female character with a greater amount of power—the Lady Fairy—who fixes
the improper use of magic by the wicked fairy in much the same way as the goddess Isis
restores Lucius to his human form in The Golden Ass to undo the witch’s illicit magic. In
giving voices to these three characters, Villeneuve touches on a technique identified by
feminist scholars today, demonstrating that there is always more than one perspective to a
story by giving a voice to different and less powerful people.
Using the grotesque, a literary technique that appeared in this point of history,
Villeneuve’s novel displays Foss’s strategy of cultivating ambiguity, in which “rhetors
deliberately construct messages that are unclear, inexact, equivocal, and open to more than
one interpretation” (148). Virginia Swain calls attention to Villeneuve’s use of the grotesque
aesthetic, a style that was popular in the Regency period and beginning of Louis XV’s reign
but was being rejected in favor of modern values. The grotesque style emphasizes the
sensual, so much so that reason is left behind and the style was referred to as “sogni dei
pittori,” or painters’ dreams (200). It also “defied the classical order by doing away with any
authoritative point of view that might have organized randomness into a meaningful whole”
(200). Swain explains that the aesthetic was used by upper classes to subvert the values of the
monarchy and setting forth their own. Analyzing the grotesque portrayed in the palace and in
Beauty’s dreams, Swain brings to light the tension between the grotesque aesthetic of the tale
and the messages about the “fundamental mistrust of beautiful surfaces and their potentially
deleterious effects” and the emphasis of virtues within (201). Swain points to the ambiguity
between the grotesque style of writing and the message conveyed by Beauty’s nightly suitor
coming to life: “the merger of the apparent and the real gives the lie to the good Lady’s
teaching about the visual” (202). Beauty obeyed the orders given to her and avoided the
pleasures of the visual, and upon doing so she is rewarded with the visual sensuousness she
desired. Swain argues that the ambiguity lies in the suitor of Beauty’s dreams, who
exemplifies the pleasures and sensuousness of the visual yet also represents “illegitimacy and
emptiness” (202). Ultimately this ambiguity seems to question the grotesque and the values
held by society.
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Lived Context
In considering the lived context of this tale, it is worth looking at both Leprince de
Beaumont’s version and Villeneuve’s original novel in terms of the purpose for their
intended audiences and their reception at the time of their publication. As an author of
conduct books and an educator with thirty years of experience as a governess, Leprince de
Beaumont was primarily focused on an audience of young girls. She directly addressed the
responsibility of educating children by creating an educational journal to provide girls,
specifically, with appropriate reading materials (Korneeva 233). Tatiana Korneeva provides a
translation of Leprince de Beaumont’s justification for using fairytales as the vehicle of
education: “it is as an entertainment that I present this story to the children. They should not
suspect that I want to teach them. This concern authorizes me to cut out all that can annoy
them” (233). This accounts for Leprince de Beaumont’s decision to omit certain plot
elements and details from Villeneuve’s novel, such as the more sexual elements suggested by
the suitor who visits Beauty’s dreams and the Beast’s request that she come to bed with him
rather than marry him. In addition to these censored details, Leprince de Beaumont cuts out
any distracting or confusing elements of the plot, significantly paring down the tale to convey
to her audience a clear moral lesson.
The moral lessons that she conveys are focused on teaching virtue and preparing
young girls for success in their arranged marriages. Korneeva notes that the tales in Leprince
de Beaumont’s Magis feature plots that “hinge on conduct rather than on adventurous
circumstances” and focus on the “expected conduct of courtship, marriage, and family
relationships.” Leprince de Beaumont also admits to “the disadvantages of arranged
marriages” and “the misfortunes that can happen from the lack of indulgence for the whims
of a husband,” acknowledging the bleakness of women’s situation and stressing that girls can
only improve their arranged marriage by controlling their individual conduct (234). The
focus on conduct creates a clear moral lesson for young girls, instilling the virtues discussed
previously in this chapter: patience, gratitude, modesty, goodness, and self-sacrifice.
Christian religious virtues are also emphasized, as Leprince de Beaumont states that Beauty
“recommended herself to God” while under great hardship (14). The tale promotes all of
these female virtues for the main purpose of preparing these girls for their arranged marriages
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to old men, with the Beast signifying how young girls probably felt both about the older men
they were being forced to marry for their families’ economic gain and about the sexual
relations that would be expected of them as wives (Bottigheimer 8; Talairach-Vielmas 272;
Silver 94).
At the time of its publication, Leprince de Beaumont’s tale appears to have been
generally well-received. La Belle et la Bête was very popular, as demonstrated by the twenty-
six editions that Magasin des enfants, the collection of tales in which it was published, went
through between 1756 and 1789 (Wolfgang 14). Critics seemed to have responded favorably
as well. In his periodical L’Année littéraire, Fréron praised Le Magasin des enfants as well as
her other Magasins for the way she portrayed the situation of young girls and for focusing on
instilling in those girls “reason, Religion, and sound Morals” (Berenguier 143). He praised
the extent of topics and situations that her tales treated and for finding a balance between
educating and entertaining the youth. However, he does offer criticism, stating that the
simplicity of her style was “sometimes lacking in nobility” (145). Berenguier notes that,
while Fréron acknowledges that a simplistic style was better than one that took on “faux wit,
affected tone, [and] ornament always foreign to truth,” his review still indicates an overall
discomfort with the lack of style that she presented.
Villeneuve also intended her story for an audience of young girls who would soon be
married, but her tale was circulated and discussed among the adult literary circles of her time.
Interestingly, Villeneuve’s tale of La Belle et la Bête is embedded within the framework of a
governess relating the tale to the young American girl she is educating. This reflects
Apuleius’s framing of Cupid and Psyche, in which an older woman tells the story to entertain
and comfort a younger woman, and it foreshadows the actual lived experience of Leprince de
Beaumont’s later abridgement of the novel. Korneeva articulates that both Villeneuve and
Leprince de Beaumont followed the tradition of conduct manuals of the time period, although
Swain grapples with the idea that Villeneuve followed the literary style of the grotesque, as
discussed earlier.
We have less information regarding the reception of Villeneuve’s novel at the time of
its publication. Wolfgang posits that the novel was received positively, due to one of the few
forms of documentation that we do have: the letters of correspondence between Graffigny, a
Parisian resident, and Devaux, his friend from a provincial town. These letters indicate that
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“all of Paris [was] crazy about it,” and they agreed that it was “entertaining” due to its folly
but was at the same time “beautiful” (Wolfgang 13). Wolfgang writes that Villeneuve
received no credit for the novel, since she published anonymously and since Leprince de
Beaumont’s abridged version was published a decade later and became more widely known;
by the early nineteenth century, Villeneuve’s works were no longer being published and sold,
and she has only received attention since in anthologies and dictionaries of women writers
(20).
Key Differences
To capture the connection between Cupid and Psyche and La Belle et la Bête using
the framework of circulation, I will conclude this chapter by tacking out even further to
highlight key differences between the two tales that arose over the process of circulation.
While similarities have bled throughout the temporal, historical, and lived contexts, here I
want to offer an overview of differences regarding how marriage related to higher and lower
forms of curiosity and love and the contrast in the two heroines’ reactions to their
circumstances.
One of the most significant changes between these two versions is the outlook on
high and low forms of curiosity and love and the role marriage plays in regulating them.
Cupid and Psyche centers on the higher and lower forms of love and curiosity warring over
the human soul. Psyche displays the lower form of love, passion, and is overwhelmed by her
lower version of curiosity, which leads her to disobey her husband and seek to discover what
he looks like. Cupid, representing higher love, also struggles with his passion as he disobeys
his mother to take Psyche as his wife. As the two show characteristics that are outside of their
gender roles, they demonstrate a lack of control between these lower and higher forms. Their
marriage, overseen by the gods, corrects their nonconformity and reinforces their proper
gender roles.
While some of the passion and sexual themes from Cupid and Psyche’s tale are
carried over into Villeneuve’s original text, Leprince de Beaumont’s La Belle et la Bête does
not permit for lower forms of curiosity or passion at all. Beauty displays just the right amount
of education and curiosity and never oversteps the boundaries suitable for her gender. The
passion of the tale is entirely removed; the word “love” never even appears in Leprince de
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Beaumont’s story, as Bottigheimer points out (8). In fact, the affective element is largely
absent from her story, as she removes the physical descriptions of the Beast and draws
attention away from the lavishness of the palace. Since the gender roles are never subverted
or challenged in Leprince de Beaumont’s tale, neither love nor gender conformity are issues
that are fixed by marriage. Instead, marriage is displayed solely as a commercial exchange
that is the duty of a young woman in order to support society, and love has no place in it.
While Villeneuve pushed back against some marriage norms concerning the lack of love and
the value of status over virtue, she, too, ultimately communicates that “love is not a free
choice but a potential reward for personal mastery” (Swain 209). Neither tale leaves room for
gender nonconformity, and both depict marriage as part of a girl’s designated role in the
world.
Another difference is in the agency of each tale’s heroine. Psyche actively embarks
on a journey that is directed by the caprices of the gods as she physically searches for her
husband. Beauty, on the other hand, internally seeks a way to come to terms with her
situation and find a “willing and even loving acceptance of a beastly suitor” (Bottigheimer
8). Bottigheimer acknowledges that “in both cases the heroine of these tales can be regarded
as victimized by her circumstances, but Psyche is an active heroine, while Beauty appears
curiously inert in terms of her world and of the people who inhabit it” (9). She goes on to
comment that the names themselves reveal this difference, as Psyche refers to “essential
personality,” which Psyche seems to create for herself, whereas Beauty refers to “a corporeal
attribute defined and conferred by others” (9). Thus, a tale that originally presented an active
heroine chasing after love morphed into a tale praising a passive heroine who finds love
through accepting her place in the world and embodying all of the virtues and roles ideal in a
woman. Despite these differences, both tales ultimately reinforce the gender conceptions and
roles of the times in which they were written and published.
CONCLUSION
Within the sixteen centuries that passed between Apuleius’s Cupid and Psyche and
Villeneuve’s and Leprince de Beaumont’s respective versions of La Belle et la Bête, the tale
transformed almost unrecognizably, as did the social fabric that contextualizes these stories.
A temporal analysis reveals that the characters of Beauty and the Beast convey full
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conformity to the ideals of gendered bodies and roles, with the tension of the one
nonconformity that drives the entire plot: an active heroine saving a passive prince. The
original novel by Villeneuve invites further complexity as she introduces aspects that revert
social gender norms, questioning society’s value of class over virtue and of complete
obedience to parents’ marital matches over any allowance of love. The historical context of
other circulating literary forms further extends our understanding of how French society
focused on marriage as a commercial venture that had no place for love, and the lived context
reaffirms the story’s purpose as an educational tool to mold adolescent girls into their
appropriate gender roles in society.
Just as a virus that mutates according to the environment it encounters, La Belle et la
Bête adapted the tale of Cupid and Psyche to incorporate new societal conceptions of gender
roles, love, and marriage. Unlike Cupid and Psyche, La Belle et la Bête depicts no character
fully straying from the gender performances expected of them, and the tale removes the focus
of passion and love that was integral to the Roman tale. Despite these differences, both tales
push for conformity to the expected gender roles and portray marriage as a social duty. The
following chapter will continue this line of analysis to untangle, and further complicate, the
temporal, historical, and lived contexts of our twenty-first-century version of the viral tale:
Disney’s Beauty and the Beast.
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CHAPTER 5
DISNEY’S LIVE-ACTION BEAUTY AND THE
BEAST
“Once upon a time in the hidden heart of France, a handsome young Prince lived in a
beautiful castle . . .”—so the female narrating voice begins the oral tale that opens Disney’s
2017 live-action Beauty and the Beast, instantly indicating a separation from the tradition of
Cupid and Psyche and La Belle et la Bête by providing backstory to the Beast and setting up
the tale’s focus on romance. The opening scene also follows the tradition of embedding
Belle’s story—like Psyche’s and Beauty’s—within a larger oral narrative told by a female
character. In the few centuries that have passed since Leprince de Beaumont’s publication of
La Belle et la Bête, the tale was circulated in a multitude of ways. Betsy Hearne comments
that, in the nineteenth century, the tale entered popular culture in France and England through
“chapbooks, toy book series, and nursery tale pamphlets” and generally focused practically
on education and marriage, although its fairytale qualities were eventually restored by Felix
Summerley (qtd. in Craven 126). The two most influential versions of the tale were Andrew
Lang’s 1889 The Blue Fairy Book and Leprince de Beaumont’s tale (Craven 126). Drawing
on Leprince de Beaumont’s tale, and reaching further to include aspects of Villeneuve’s tale,
Disney created a whole new life for the story with its 1991 animated film, carefully including
modern feminist notions into the narrative as a result of having received backlash for sexism
in the 1989 The Little Mermaid (Koushnik and Reed).21 Few people today may be familiar
21 Feminism is a complex term that has been defined in many ways. To define feminism in this chapter, I draw
on Sonja Foss’s summary of various types of feminism and definitions. Feminism is “a social and political
movement initiated to improve the lives of women” that focuses on equality and “equal opportunities for self-
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with the story of Cupid and Psyche, but Disney has ensured the worldwide fame of Belle’s
yellow gown and the animated Beast’s toothy smile.
Starting with the 2010 production of Alice in Wonderland, Disney began doing live-
action remakes of their animated classics. The remake of Beauty and the Beast began with
discussion in 2008 about creating a darker tale that centered on the Beast’s perspective, but
the success of the “bold female characters” in the 2013 film Frozen led to the decision to
create a lighter narrative that focused on a new portrayal of Belle (Rainey). With a budget of
$300 million and a star-studded cast, including Emma Watson, the United Nations’
HeForShe campaign ambassador, the 2017 film had huge success (Koushnik and Reed). In
the box office, it grossed $1.26 billion worldwide (domestically, over $500,000; and over
$759,000 internationally) (“Beauty and the Beast [2017]”).
The new film has received an abundance of attention from the media and has been
gaining acknowledgment in academic scholarship as well. Much of the scholarship on Beauty
and the Beast is older and still focuses on the 1991 animation, such as Allison Craven’s
discussion of feminism within Disney films in general and the transformation of Belle from
Psyche and Beauty, and Deborah Ross’s examination of curiosity and imagination. I extend
their work to consider how it applies to the 2017 film. Another influential article in the realm
of Disney scholarship is Dawn Elizabeth England, Lara Descartes, and Melissa A. Collier-
Meek’s 2011 study that codes and analyzes gendered behaviors in princes and princesses in
films from 1937 to 2009. Building on research such as this, Benjamin Hine, Dawn England,
Katie Lopreore, Elizabeth Skora Horgan, and Lisa Hartwell published a similar coding
analysis in 2018 studying behavioral characteristics, rescue behavior, and romantic
conclusions in Disney films from 2009 to 2016. I also extend the conclusions of England et
al. and Hine et al. to offer a deeper understanding of how the 2017 Beauty and the Beast fits
in with this larger picture of Disney trends over the last century and, more specifically,
expression” for all gender identities. Furthermore, it seeks to disrupt oppression and “eradicate the ideology of
domination that characterizes our culture” by “transform[ing] an unhealthy and dangerous system of domination
into one that is life affirming and nurturing” (142).
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within the last decade. Other recent scholarship has focused more specifically on the film.
Kailash Koushnik and Abigail Reed’s 2018 article, “Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Beauty and
the Beast, and Disney’s Commodification of Feminism: A Political Economic Analysis,”
takes a political and feminist economy of media and film approach to argue that the feminist
retellings of old Disney narratives serve purely economic motives and do not create any
social progress. In his article “Postfeminist Masculinity: The New Disney Norm?” Michael
Macaluso also analyzes more recent Disney films, touching on the 2017 Beauty and the
Beast, to demonstrate how Disney’s postfeminist portrayal of masculinity reinforces a
circulating conception that “men must be weak in order for women to thrive” and proposes
that the postfeminist hero become the norm for Disney instead.
In this chapter, I extend the findings of England et al. and Hine et al. to argue that
Belle and the Beast conform to Disney’s gender norms—both to older Disney gender norms,
exhibited in their physical, bodily appearances, and to newer “Disney feminism” norms,
exhibited in their performed roles. In doing so, I extend Macaluso’s work by elaborating
about how postfeminist masculinity occurs as part of “Disney feminism.” Furthermore, I
point out how tensions within the characters’ gendered performances ultimately reveal that
Disney’s feminism conforms to the patriarchal, capitalist society within which the company
and its audience exist. My analysis complicates the assertions of Koushnik and Reed by
analyzing the film through the lens of circulation studies and indicating that the film can
neither be seen as fully progressive or not progressive; instead, it follows the trend of
previous Beauty and the Beast tales by incorporating new social values and marking the
gradual progression of gender conceptions. The examination of the gender norms of Disney,
one of the most influential, far-reaching influences on the lives of children, is significant in
gaining a grasp on how society inducts children into its gendered view of the world. It further
contributes to the study of the viral spread of the tale, as different aspects of the story and
meanings bleed together in this latest take on the tale.
Beginning with a summary of Disney’s 2017 live-action Beauty and the Beast,
including a few key changes from the original 1991 animation, I provide the cultural context
for gender in Disney films. Specifically, I look at what I call “Disney feminism,” which
refers to the studio’s inclusion of feminist values and has developed notably in the past 10
years. As in the previous chapters, I consider the gendered treatment of the body and gender
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roles with regard to education and intellect in addition to marital roles. I also establish that
this “Disney feminism” actually demonstrates conformity to the broader patriarchal structure.
I then tack in to provide a temporal analysis of Belle and the Beast’s gender performance
through physical bodies and roles, portraying how both conform to what I call “Disney
feminism,” noting how Sonja Foss’s strategies of enactment and juxtaposition serve to
demonstrate this. Ultimately, I argue that Belle and the Beast’s conformity to “Disney
feminism” reflects how the company’s feminist values still fit within the patriarchal
structure. Tacking out, I trace the historical context of other circulating films—specifically,
how other Disney films treat the topic of curiosity (including how Foss’s cultivating
ambiguity strategy comes into play) and other contemporary Beauty and the Beast film
adaptations’ treatment of the topic of marriage. Examining the lived context, I look at
Disney’s two-fold purpose in creating the film: to generate revenue with a tentpole
production and to attract an older audience of the 1991 animation fans and a younger
audience of a new generation of children unfamiliar with the tale.22 Finally, I conclude by
tracing some of the key differences between Disney’s film and the previous two tales. Since
this chapter builds upon the layers of the previous two, the analysis will be lengthier.
SUMMARY OF DISNEY’S 2017 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST
The film opens with a female voice narrating the tale of a prince who had everything
he desired but was still cruel and unkind. As the prince is holding an extravagant ball, a poor,
elderly woman enters and asks for shelter from the storm, offering a rose for compensation.
When he scorns her, the woman turns into a beautiful enchantress and transforms him into a
“hideous beast,” and the narrator explains that the spell would be broken “if he could learn to
love another and earn their love in return” before the last petal fell off of the enchanted rose;
otherwise, he would remain a beast forever.
22 Defined by Merriam-Webster, a tentpole is “a big-budget movie whose earnings are expected to compensate
the studio for its less profitable movies.”
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Switching over to the setting of a provincial French town, mirroring the original
setting of Leprince de Beaumont’s story, the film then focuses on Belle—the daughter of a
working-class man who invents things. Although the town people declare her “looks
unparalleled,” they call her a “funny girl,” “nothing like the rest of us,” with “her nose stuck
in a book.” She also helps her father with his inventions and creates inventions of her own.
Gaston, the town heartthrob, continually woos Belle, who has no interest in him. Belle’s
father leaves for an annual fair, and Belle asks him to bring her back a rose, like he did every
other year. Having become lost in the woods and chased by wolves, her father ends up in the
Beast’s castle and helps himself to the set table. As he leaves, frightened by the talking,
enchanted silverware, he stops to pick a rose for Belle, and the Beast catches him and locks
him away for his thievery. Belle rides in search of her father and cunningly switches places
with him in the cell, tricking both her father and the Beast into taking her prisoner in place of
her sick, elderly father.
Initially, Belle and the Beast clash and argue; Belle, trying to escape from her room,
refuses to obey the Beast’s order to go to dinner with him, and she later disobeys his order to
not enter the west wing. The Beast loses his temper and scares her enough that she flees the
castle, only to be attacked by wolves and then rescued by the Beast, who is injured as he
protects her. She seems to consider leaving him and fleeing, but she turns back and helps him
back to the castle. She nurses him back to health, and the audience learns of the Beast’s
mother’s death and of his cruel father. The film portrays the process of the two then falling in
love as Belle tames him, teaching him to be gentle, and they learn to compromise, as
symbolized by Belle sipping her cup of soup instead of eating with a spoon to give the Beast
a way to eat civilly with her. They also recognize their similarities as they discuss their
shared tastes in literature, and the Beast gives his giant library to Belle. He shows her his
magic book that allows him to travel anywhere, and Belle travels back to her birthplace to
discover that her mother had died from the plague. Belle and the Beast bond over the loss of
their mothers and feeling like outcasts in their communities.
Eventually, Belle asks to be permitted to leave to help her father, who is sick and
being locked away in a mental institution by Gaston. As Belle leaves, the Beast sings about
how she has changed him, and he is waiting in his tower for her to return. However, the
townspeople learn of the Beast when Belle arrives, and Gaston leads the mob to the castle to
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kill the Beast, with Belle and her father locked inside of a wagon. Belle gives her father a pin
from her hair to pick the lock and rushes back to the castle, where a lively battle is in
progress between the townspeople and the living furniture. Gaston goes after the Beast, who
does not attempt to fight him until he sees that Belle returned for him. At one point he holds
Gaston, begging for his life, by the neck over the ledge, but he realizes what he is doing and
lets him go, saying “I am not a beast.” As he goes to Belle, Gaston stabs him in the back and
then falls off of the tower. Belle drags the Beast back from the ledge, weeping over his dead
body, and declares her love for him after the last rose petal has fallen and all of the enchanted
objects have lost their life. A spinster whom the townspeople have disparaged throughout the
film climbs the stairs and reveals herself to be the enchantress, transforming the Beast back
into a prince and restoring all of the live objects back into their human forms. The movie
concludes with a wedding dance, showing a happy ending for all of the castle and
townspeople, and Belle speaks the last line to her husband, the prince: “how would you feel
about growing a beard?”
Although I focus my analysis on the 2017 film, it is worth noting a few key changes
from the 1991 animation. The 1991 film does not show Belle asking her father to bring back
a rose from his trip, and thus the Beast punishes her father for eating his food and sitting at
his fire instead of for stealing a rose. The 2017 film restores this link to the original French
novel, indicating that it is not only rebuilding the beloved 1991 film but also taking into
consideration the tale’s rich history. The live film adds background information about the
childhoods of the Beast and Belle, the Beast’s song about waiting for Belle in his “lonely
tower,” more scenes about Belle and the Beast’s shared passion for literature, and greater
emphasis on Belle’s intelligence, cunningness, and bravery. It additionally provides more
background and visibility to side characters such as the enchantress/spinster, Agatha (whose
name means “good”), and LeFou (whose name means “fool” and refers to his blind loyalty to
his crush, Gaston)—the first character Disney has openly portrayed as gay. These differences
are pertinent to how the 2017 film both exhibits gender and contributes to the circulation of
the tale.
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CULTURAL CONTEXT FOR GENDER: CONTEMPORARY
“DISNEY FEMINISM”
To narrow the scope of this chapter, I look at gender within the context of Disney
princess films, specifically. As gender has been a complex topic in society since ancient
times, the scholarship on gender theory that has been built up over the years is vast. In
addition to the numerous ways of understanding gender in society, Disney’s vast collection
of films presents further complexity in its approach to gender representation. Since being
established in 1923, the company has made billions of dollars by incorporating old
fairytales—as well as some new fairytales—in mainstream popular culture via lively, musical
animations, merchandise, and theme parks (“Disney History”). Because Walt Disney
founded the company in Los Angeles, Disney reflects and reinforces western, U.S. gender
conceptions. A sort of “gate-keeper” of fairytales in today’s society, Disney wields an
incredible amount of power in its influence over children’s education, particularly with
regard to how its audience of children internalize the gender norms presented to them
(Wohlwend, Baker-Sperry). Thus, Disney has created its own culture that reinforces specific
gender norms. Within the last ten years, Disney films have begun to shift toward featuring
more powerful female leads, incorporating aspects of feminism. For this project, I offer brief
discussion on traditions of older Disney films while focusing more on how films during this
more recent period establish the gender conventions of what I call “Disney feminism.”
The portrayal of female bodies in “Disney feminism” is closely linked to older
conventions that Disney established with its first princesses: Snow White, Cinderella, and
Aurora. Amy Davis analyzes Look magazine’s review of the film Cinderella: “Like most
Disney heroines, Cinderella is . . . ‘the typical American girl.’ She is cute, lively, of medium
build, weighing about 120 pounds—and with a tender heart for boys and animals” (Good
Girls & Wicked Witches). Davis emphasizes that this description demonstrates how
Cinderella is viewed as a “typical” Disney heroine and suggests that there is a “typical”
American girl with specific traits that Disney is trying to emulate. England et al. draw
attention to physical attributes that can be seen as sexist and racist, such as idealizations of
“extremely pale skin tones, small waists, delicate limbs, and full breasts” (556). Other bodily
characteristics that Disney princesses presented included “exaggerated physical attributes
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(large eyes, thick eyelashes, long hair) and coquettish posture (tilted head, arched back)”
(Wohlwend 8). Davis acknowledges the influence of “various European children’s book
illustrators” in the creation of these characters, but she also points to how the characters’
dresses relate to physical stereotypes of the year (Good Girls & Wicked Witches). Snow
White has “touches which are unmistakably from 1930s Hollywood,” and Davis compares
Cinderella’s ball and wedding dresses to Grace Kelly’s attire and Aurora’s “tiny waist and
her full-skirted, three-quarter length dress” to Christian Dior’s “New Look” (Good Girls &
Wicked Witches). The early Disney princesses thus embodied physical attributes and styles of
celebrities in Hollywood while also representing the “typical,” or idealized, physique of an
American girl. Craven observes that the Disney princess’s costumes—their gowns—are
immediately recognizable and reveal their social mobility as they move from wearing more
peasant-like dresses in the beginning of films to richer gowns by the end (130).
These more traditional physical characteristics regarding dress, body type, and body
posture continue to be used by Disney even in more recent films. Stronger and more
independent animated princesses such as Elsa and Anna still have almost impossibly tiny
waists, and even the live-action Cinderella continues the trend of small waists (Ruiz). Disney
has been highly criticized for its portrayal of unrealistic feminine body types, resulting in a
2015 advertisement by a U.K. plus-size lingerie brand, Curvy Kate; the brand redrew the
classic Disney princesses as plus-sized lingerie models (Mazziotta). Some more recent
Disney films, such as Moana, have attempted to depict more realistic body types for women
(Flaherty). Madeline Streiff and Lauren Dundes also point out that Elsa, the heroine in the
recent film Frozen, defies expectations of what she is supposed to wear, dramatically
changing into a risqué dress for her “Let It Go” song, and embodies physical characteristics
that can be seen as more masculine. Streiff and Dundes argue that her physical appearance is
characterized by phallic symbols—her single braid, a tiara with multiple points, and the
impaling ice spikes she creates from her hands—showing more masculinity in her bodily
portrayal.
Disney princes in films released in the last 10 years generally exhibit traditional
physical ideals as well. Generally, male characters are “dashing” or “handsome” (Hine et al.
4), with Prince Naveen from The Princess and the Frog and Flynn Rider from Tangled as
examples of two princes who are particularly aware of the charms of their looks. In terms of
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physique, working out and demonstrating physical strength remain common in Disney men
(Macaluso). Hine et al. note that the male characters “use physicality to express their
emotions,” and display negative characteristics if they are overweight (4). One example that
highlights how these trends have continued into more recent Disney films is “the hyper-
masculinized Maui” (Hine et al. 4), who is voiced by retired wrestler Dwayne Johnson,
known for his muscular build as “The Rock.” This contrasts with Moana’s more realistic
body type for women, confining male expectations of physique to traditional values.
While the physical characteristics of Disney princesses and princes continue to
harken back to earlier gender stereotypes, the performative roles in “Disney feminism”
convey more signs of progress and reflect the movement of women into the working sphere.
While male characters were “promoted by the studio as its ‘stars,’” female characters began
to become more central in the mid-1930s with the production of the Silly Symphonies, a
series of short animations that accompanied music (Davis, Good Girls & Wicked Witches).
The general trend in recent years has been to feature female leads who are less passive and
have more masculine characteristics. In a society that has called into question issues of equal
pay and women’s rights in the workplace, Disney has included more female characters who
are educated and concerned with their careers in the past decade. In The Princess and the
Frog, for example, the plot revolves around Tiana’s dreams of opening her own restaurant.
Although England et al. point to the fact that Tiana’s career brings her back into the realm of
female domesticity (and that her restaurant career may have problematic racial implications
as well), she argues that it nonetheless conveys some sense of gender equality as her father
was the one who taught her to cook, and as she is teaching the prince how to be useful in the
kitchen (563).
Disney princesses also perform virtues that could traditionally be seen as more
masculine. Craven dubs “feistiness” as the most notable characteristic of Disney princesses
(127). This includes both a “graceful, perky, fighting spirit,” and a “tolerance of grossly
unattractive masculinity,” and Craven argues that these attributes ultimately lead female
characters to lose power and status (129). In England et al.’s study of the most common
feminine and masculine characteristics portrayed by princes and princesses, the top four
masculine virtues in princesses include being assertive, athletic, brave, and independent. At
the same time, the four most common feminine virtues in princesses are affectionate, fearful,
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troublesome, and tending to physical appearance (561). The princesses may be displaying
more masculine virtues, but they are at the same time maintaining their feminine virtues.
The study was conducted on films up until the 2009 The Princess and the Frog, but
this trend continues in recent films as well, unveiling a pattern of androgyny in current
Disney princesses, paralleling the androgynous male portrait busts in eighteenth-century
France. Frozen, the film that has been upheld for highlighting strong female leads, shows
Elsa and Anna as independent, brave, and assertive, especially drawing attention to Elsa’s
masculine characteristics as she is a political leader. Even in these powerful female
characters, their masculine virtues are balanced with feminine virtues (Streiff and Dundes).
Elsa has to develop her ability to control her impulses and emotions in order to not abuse her
powers, suggesting female sovereigns can only be successful if they control themselves—an
idea that was present in second-century Rome and eighteenth-century France as well. The
film also reinforces female virtues of compassion and self-sacrifice, as Anna sacrifices
herself for her sister and Elsa only becomes a successful ruler when she learns to “combine
passion and power” (Streiff and Dundes). Streiff and Dundes assert that the film shows
external validation and social acceptance as feminine traits; Elsa is concerned about what
others think about her, and her final self-acceptance also depends on her acceptance from her
sister and her people. Hine et al. point to this recent trend as a rise in androgynous princesses;
extending England et al.’s earlier study that coded gender in Disney films up until 2009, they
looked at Disney prince and princess movies released from 2009 to 2016 and found
princesses “to be less feminine and more balanced in their behavioral profiles over time”
(10). “Disney feminism” thus creates androgynous female characters by introducing
masculine virtues in princesses while at the same time maintaining female virtues and
characteristics.
Whereas the previous chapters focused on gender roles within a marriage, most
Disney princess movies end in marriages based on love, so the gender role of a love interest
is more relevant to this chapter than the role of a wife. In all Disney princess movies, the
main relationships are always heterosexual. Even if the film does not conclude in marriage, it
is uncommon that princesses remain single, “suggesting that finding love is a key goal for
any princess (and by extension any young girl/woman)” (Hine et al. 5). Disney princesses fall
in love “either very quickly, at first sight (Snow White, Sleeping Beauty), against all odds
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(Beauty and the Beast, Mulan, The Princess and the Frog), or both (Cinderella, The Little
Mermaid, Aladdin, Pocahontas)” (England et al. 565). For women, the role of finding and
securing a relationship emphasizes both recognizing those feelings immediately and finding
those feelings in unlikely places—against all odds. England et al. afford that the two most
recent films in her study, Mulan and The Princess and the Frog, show a “more balanced”
relationship that develops over time as the characters “[overcome] obstacles together and
[foster] a friendship” (565). However, she also takes a more negative stance, noting that the
only film in her study that concluded with a single female protagonist was Pocahontas, who
was still “romantically linked” but chose the more traditional route of staying with her family
(565). Hine et al. present a more positive view of Disney’s progress in the illustration of
female roles in a relationship, acknowledging that films such as The Princess and the Frog
and Frozen indicate “a shift to more well-rounded princess characters with deeper romantic
narratives” (5); furthermore, Brave and Frozen seem to ridicule marriage rituals, as the
princess in Brave competes among suitors for her own hand and as Anna humorously
prepares to marry a man she just met, and Moana has no romantic interest at all (Hine et al.
12). Clearly there has been change in Disney’s depiction of female roles in romantic
relationships, although Hine et al. call attention to the need for more research to understand
how gender portrayal is working in these newer Disney films.
Although Disney princesses are not generally shown as mothers, Disney’s treatment
of mothers is still worth considering as it is in some ways similar to second-century Roman
and eighteenth-century French expectations of women as mothers. In addition to Disney
films ending before the princesses become mothers, the mothers of the characters themselves
are largely absent. Lisa Fraustino points out that Disney’s animated films reflect “traditional
mothering ideology under patriarchy . . . not by animating the realities of marriage,
childbirth, and mothering work for girls to model after but instead by idealizing the dream of
romance that leads to the making of the traditional patriarchal family” (127). Thus, mothers
must be absent from these films to ensure that the heroines “yearn for love and transfer the
desire for mother to the desire for husband and children” (132). Female characters are shown
as wanting to create and raise a family due to the absence of their own mothers. Although
they are not shown as mothering or being mothered, princesses do consistently demonstrate
the trait of being nurturing, which “required direct interaction and was often shown as
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mothering. It involved prolonged touching and attention in a soothing manner (different than
a brief instance of affection) or lending care and help in a loving way to either animals or
people” (England et al. 559). In England et al.’s study, princes showed nurturing 9 times,
whereas princesses demonstrated nurturing behaviors 61 times (561). Disney princesses
demonstrate mothering behaviors and characteristics toward others in the absence of being
mothered or having children of their own. Just as devotion was expected of the ideal mother
in Roman and French society, Disney sets up this expectation for women to become
nurturing mothers despite the absence of their own mothers.
For male Disney characters—specifically, princes—performative roles have also
shifted over time. In earlier princess movies, the princes barely appeared, and when they did,
they were simply characterized as dashing princes and were rather passive (Macaluso).
Princes that had a larger role in the plot displayed masculine behaviors, especially being
portrayed as heroes defeating villains and saving their damsels in distress (Macaluso). The
more recent films in England et al.’s study showed men displaying behaviors that have been
perceived as more feminine. England et al. record the most common masculine behaviors in
princes as physically strong, assertive, athletic, curious toward princesses, unemotional, and
giving advice, whereas the most common feminine behaviors that princes exhibit include
showing emotion, being affectionate, fearful, physically weak, tentative, and sensitive (561).
The later films in the study highlight this change in men, as The Princess and the Frog
featured a prince who “was the first character that was portrayed as a bit incompetent, naïve,
and unable to financially support himself” (563). Although the study indicated both
stereotypical and non-stereotypical gendered behaviors in princes, it demonstrated less
change in behavior in male characters as compared to female characters, and in all of the
films in the study men were shown as more androgynous (566). Hine et al. demonstrate that
the trend of showing princes as “significantly less masculine, and more feminine, than
princess characters,” continued in 2010 to 2016. However, since the princes appear more
feminine than masculine, they do not agree that they are more androgynous than the
princesses. Unlike the eighteenth-century French portrait busts that demonstrated the male
ideal through androgyny, Disney conveys women rather than men as androgynous through
their balanced characteristics.
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To understand how conceptions of masculinity have been affected by feminism, it is
necessary to take a short digression to discuss the concept of postfeminist masculinity.
Examining Disney films from the past decade, Macaluso asserts that postfeminist
conceptions of masculinity have not replaced traditional conceptions of masculinity but that
they have added a new layer of complexity to masculinity within these films. Postfeminism,
in Macaluso’s definition, refers to gender discourses that suggest feminist goals of equality
have already been “achieved or actualized,” leading to “an era of post-feminism where
traditional feminist goals of gender equality, equal rights, and collective action are replaced
by discourses and depictions of female empowerment, choice, and independence.” This
involves a more negative portrayal of men, highlighting foolishness or incompetence, to draw
attention to the stronger, capable women.
Macaluso points to the new Disney model as “a sensibility [that] allow[s] for an
analysis of its discursive constructions and structure of feeling as one of many models of
masculinity.” This sensibility and feeling refers to male characters’ sensitivity and response
to emotion. Specifically, Macaluso asserts that this is demonstrated in how men are “gently
ridiculed” in recent Disney films. As examples, he cites Brave, which shows men “as
buffoonish thugs,” as well as Hans and Kristoff from Frozen, Flynn Rider from Tangled, and
Prince Naveen from The Princess and the Frog. All of these male princes “are portrayed as
immature or offer some comic relief . . . [they] are often portrayed as the butt of jokes . . .
and as the female protagonists’ unwilling and unwittingly travel partners who eventually fall
for her charm and charisma.” Thus, male characters in “Disney feminism” not only enact
behaviors that have been seen as more feminine (such as Kristoff sacrificing his career for
Anna just as Anna and Elsa sacrifice for others) but also fill roles that juxtapose “a strong
female character” with a “foolish male character.” Hine et al. offer two interpretations for
this newer trend of illustrating men as having more feminine characteristics: to put these
qualities in a negative light and discourage boys from acting effeminately or to offer models
of behavior as alternatives to hyper-masculinity in the media (11). Acknowledging the
negative consequences of such postfeminist versions of masculinity, Macaluso persuasively
argues that an alternative masculinity is in circulation in Disney and should be made the
norm: the post-feminist hero, who is somewhere between hegemonic masculinity and
effeminacy. While postfeminist masculinity does indicate awareness for a need for more
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alternative models of masculinity, reinforcing gender binaries by casting women as stronger
and men as weaker—and by using feminine traits to convey weakness—actually serves to
reinforce older gender stereotypes.
This foolish aspect of newer male characters ties into their portrayal of education and
curiosity. Although princes’ education level is not much discussed in scholarship, it can be
assumed that most princes in these films (with exceptions of characters who came from
poverty, such as Aladdin and Flynn Rider) would have been exposed to good education, as
they were meant to be the next in line to rule the kingdom. Even male love interests who
have not received the education of princes, such as Aladdin and Flynn Rider, demonstrate
their intelligence through the witty, learned banter that is characteristic of male characters in
Disney feminism. However, despite the levels of education and intelligence that they are
presumed to have, they are often juxtaposed with female protagonists to appear foolish and to
subvert the traditional male role of possessing superior intellect. England et al. record 11
instances of intellectual activity in princes as opposed to 38 instances in princesses (561).
Their curiosity also appears in the films to be more focused on the princesses than on
educational pursuits. In their study, England et al. describe princes as “exhibiting a studious,
concerned expression when looking at the princess. This behavior suggested that the female
had a mystique that was captivating and romantically compelling” (558-559). Few princes
demonstrate an interest in intellectual pursuits; thus, this focused curiosity on princesses
highlights the difference between the sexes and downplays male characters’ general curiosity
or interest in education.
There are specific expectations of male Disney characters within marriages and
relationships as well. In courtship, men in recent films have demonstrated increased respect
for their female protagonists (Hine et al. 5). Davis points to Pocahontas, Mulan, Jasmine, and
Tiana, specifically, as receiving respect from their male love interests (Good Girls & Wicked
Witches). Likewise, Kristoff demonstrates respect for Anna and Moana earns the respect of
all her people and Maui himself, furthering this trend. In marriage, postfeminist masculinity
shows men as “supportive husbands,” although Macaluso acknowledges that in some cases,
such as in The Incredibles 2, the husband is shown to be incompetent. While mothers are
largely absent in Disney films, fathers take a more central role and characters often
demonstrate great “loyalty and affection” for them (Craven 128). More recent films have
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acknowledged “fatherhood-on-film” as part of postfeminist masculinity; The Incredibles 2
provides an example of a stay-at-home dad who is deeply, and, sometimes, ineffectively,
involved in the daily lives of his kids.
Returning to one of the main vices of men that recurs through Beauty and the Beast
tales, male sexual aggressiveness is used in Disney to help differentiate the male heroes from
the villains. Macaluso states that villains are portrayed in a position of hegemonic
masculinity, which he defines as “a type of masculinity where men dominate and subject
other men and women.” He notes that this subjugation is thus connected to heterosexuality
and hypermasculinity, and I would add that this aspect of subjugation connotes the sense of
sexual aggression that eighteenth-century conduct books warned girls against. Hine et al. also
reveal that male characters tend to “lack control over their sexual impulses” (4). In contrast,
the heroes who defeat these villains take on “a lesser or more acceptable form of hegemonic
masculinity” (3). The heroes still embody characteristics such as aggressiveness and asserting
strength, but their violence is deemed acceptable in comparison to the villains’ similar but
more exaggerated traits.
While recent films suggest a trend toward more feminist views, it is important to
emphasize that “Disney feminism” still functions within the values of the larger patriarchal
society in which it exists. As current feminist movements continue to voice concerns about
equity in the workplace, Disney films have responded with stronger female leads and
demonstrations of women in power, such as Elsa in Frozen. They have also introduced
different understandings of masculinity, allowing both female and male characters to exhibit
characteristics that are more traditionally seen in the opposite gender. Yet, Macaluso warns
that these changes are not necessarily positive or aligned with the purpose behind the
movement of feminism. He writes that reaction to Disney films on reddit “incurs misguided
praise or criticism,” where people praise shallow forms of feminism or react in anger to the
depiction of both strong female leads and male characters who are being made fun of.
Ultimately, he argues that postfeminist Disney “reinforce[s] traditional male power as a
backlash against perceived feminism . . . [and] repudiate[s] feminism and further divide[s]
the sexes.” The study results insinuate that women cannot achieve success with feminist
traits; they must adopt traits traditionally seen as male, such as strength and bravery, in order
to reach their goals and receive respect from their communities (England et al. 563). Thus,
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“Disney feminism” can be seen as a type of commodity feminism, which puts women in
power within the patriarchal system rather than addressing the issues at the heart of
feminism: disrupting the actual structures of patriarchy and suggesting alternatives to the
patriarchal organization of society (Koushnik and Reed). While England et al. and Koushnik
and Reed read this development negatively, other scholars see it in a more positive light.
Davis indicates that Disney’s depictions of gender continue to be flawed but that the
depictions are nonetheless improving as the diversity of characters provides better gendered
role models for the children who are watching them, and Hine et al. agree (5). Although
“Disney feminism” does not seek to truly disrupt our societal structure, the strides it has
made in changing the way Disney films represent gender are essential for breaking down
gender binaries, and Beauty and the Beast reflects this slow but important progress.
TACKING IN
Temporal Analysis
In Disney’s 2017 Beauty and the Beast, both Belle and the Beast conform to the
traditional physical norms typical of “Disney feminism,” just as Cupid and Psyche and
Leprince de Beaumont’s Beast and Beauty fit their temporal gender norms in terms of
physicality. Their performative gender roles, on the other hand, fit more with contemporary
“Disney feminism” than these traditional stereotypes. Since the live-action version attempted
to follow various aspects of the 1991 animation closely, it is worth noting details from both
versions in this chapter. In terms of physical portrayals of gender, the 2017 version follows
the 1991 animation as closely as possible. The 1991 version reflected general marks of
beauty such as Belle’s large eyes and tiny waste. The animation exaggerates Belle’s “demure
shape, fineness against Beast’s excessive body,” indicating the typical bodily characteristics
of coquettish posture discussed before—especially in scenes that emphasize the demureness
of Belle’s body as compared to the Beast’s (Craven 130). Clothing is a form of visual
enactment, as it identifies one’s belonging to a group or cause (Foss and Foss 127); thus
Belle’s gowns “are typical of a Disney fairy tale heroine, and she wears them like uniforms: a
blue pinafore followed by transformation into a Cinderella-like ball gown (also a Queen
Antoinette-style crinoline)” (Craven 130). The transformation from her practical, everyday
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pinafore to the extravagant ball gown suggests her “coming out as sexual debutante and
possible wife” and indicates her mobility from lower class to upper class (130). Aspects of
her other dresses are similarly significant; Craven asserts that Belle’s hooded cape over her
pinafore makes her appear “nurse-like” in the scene in which she decides to stay with the
Beast, and she wears pink when she teaches the Beast to be delicate when eating. Craven also
notes that Belle appears “vaguely animal, wearing fur-lined hoods and luscious sexualized
capes,” emphasizing her sexuality through animals and bringing Belle and the Beast closer
together in physical likeness.
Appealing to its audience’s nostalgia for the 1991 animation, the 2017 live-action
film follows the original’s aesthetics as much as possible. In terms of bodily appearance, the
live-action Belle, played by Emma Watson, fits the general stereotypes of being slender and
dainty, which is especially emphasized in scenes where she is physically close to the Beast.
Her body is of course more realistic than the animated Belle’s tiny waist, and, although she
fits with the ideal slender woman stereotype, she presents a healthily proportioned female
body. Some scenes highlight similarities to the animation in showing Belle’s petite figure
demurely sitting next to the Beast’s massive body. Like the physical characteristics, the
costumes parallel the 1991 animation, with Watson wearing the same type and color of dress
for the same scenes, with a few notable changes. The costume designer, Jacqueline Durran,
worked with Watson to make Belle look more physically modern (Tietjen). Belle’s everyday
blue pinafore dress is slightly hiked up around her legs, allowing for more movement and
revealing her bloomers beneath—and hinting at Belle’s forward-thinking qualities by
pointing to the era when women will be permitted to wear practical pants. In this way,
Belle’s clothing serves as a form of enactment as it “disrupt[s] perceptions by deliberately
violating conventions of dress” (Foss and Foss 127). Durran states that this is so “she can not
be trapped by the skirt,” and she shares that they gave Belle a flexible bodice rather than a
corset, again ensuring that the ideals of femininity did not inhibit her activities (Tietjen).
Both bloomers and corsets—or lack thereof—carry with them reminders of the historical
struggle for women’s equality (Foss and Foss 128; Tietjen). Furthermore, when Belle rides
back to save her father, she is still wearing her yellow ball gown, and when she rushes off to
then save the Beast, the camera pans down as she gallops off in a shift to focus on the ball
gown she has left on the ground. Since these ball gowns represent appearance and upward
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status mobility, this could be seen as Belle tossing aside her interest in others’ approval in her
gender norms as she goes off to save the Beast, who also is not socially accepted. While
Belle’s physical appearance still conforms to more traditional Disney gender norms, these
slight changes in Belle’s wardrobe suggest that Disney is critiquing its own reaffirmation of
the traditional norms portrayed through their gowns.
As these slight changes in wardrobe suggest, Belle’s performative gender role in the
2017 film is more reflective of “Disney feminism” norms than the traditional female role.
Whereas Beauty enacted virtues to display utter conformity to eighteenth-century French
culture, Belle’s enactment of “Disney feminism” norms is more in line with Foss’s strategy
as she “embod[ies] the point they are making about the new reality they desire” (152)—that
is, she embodies the idea that there can be a strong, successful female lead. The director, Bill
Condon, expressed their desire to make Belle a twenty-first-century heroine: “she knows how
to ride a horse, she knows how to shoot, she knows how to invent something, she knows how
to fight, she knows how to read and teach” (qtd. in Koushnik and Reed). The casting of
Emma Watson as Belle also speaks to this goal, as the actress is well-known from her role as
the brainy and brave Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter films. In terms of education,
Belle is clearly more educated than the rest of the townspeople, who treat her as “odd,” a
“funny girl” with “her nose stuck in a book.” Specifically, she reads Romeo and Juliet,
demonstrating not only her knowledge of great works that preceded her time but also her
interest in romance. Later, she bonds with the Beast over his knowledge of Shakespeare and
passion for books. Filmed during an age when women are being encouraged to go into STEM
fields, the live-action film moves the focus away from the books and makes Belle an
inventor. She works beside her father in his workshop and hands him tools before he realizes
he needs them. She also creates her own prototype invention—a washing machine that is
hooked up to a mule—and teaches a young girl to read as it is doing her laundry beside them
(Koushnik and Reed). Her curiosity is not limited to books and inventions; in addition to her
curiosity about forbidden things, such as the west wing of the castle where the Beast keeps
his enchanted rose hidden, she expresses her desire to travel to different parts of the world
and to know more about her past. While her father will not answer questions about her
mother, the Beast uses his magic book to take her to Paris, where she learns her mother died
of the plague. Koushnik and Reed argue that the men in Belle’s life thus prevent her from
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having her own agency to pursue the curiosity she has about her past, as they either protect or
provide answers for her rather than showing her finding the answers herself.
Belle embodies the “Disney feminism” virtue of feistiness. Her “graceful, perky, fighting
spirit” is shown through her being “at odds with her community” for being interested in
books and through her “comic rejection” of Gaston (Craven 130); in the animation, she trips
him into a pond, and in the live version the comedy is more verbal than physical as she does
not attempt to make up a believable excuse or hide her disinterest in him. She also tolerates
the Beast’s “grossly unattractive masculinity,” which Craven cites as an aspect of feistiness.
The male virtues she embodies and performs include being assertive and brave, as well as
attempting to be independent. In the 2017 film, Belle enters the castle armed with a stick and
hits the speaking objects to defend herself, with Lumière the lamp then exclaiming “Oh, you
are very strong. That’s a great quality!” During her first scenes in the castle, Belle is assertive
and confident, commanding the Beast to step into the light so she can see him, tricking her
father into switching places with her in his prison cell, and tying together the clothes from the
wardrobe to try to make a rope to climb down the tower and escape. Although her attempts to
independently escape are futile, she at least tries to free herself. She also disobeys the Beast
by going to the west wing and then flees. At times her expression does betray her fear, which
is a feminine characteristic (England et al. 559), but the film emphasizes her bravery as her
ability to accept and embrace her fear; she tells her father, “I’m not afraid,” right before she
takes his place in the cell, and when her father warns her that saving the Beast will be
dangerous, she demonstrates her knowledge and willingness to embrace that fear by saying,
“Yes. Yes it is.” In addition to the masculine virtues that she embodies, however, Belle
maintains feminine characteristics typical of Disney princesses, including being described as
troublesome by others and being affectionate and nurturing. She nurses the Beast back to
health after he saves her and shows more signs of physical affection as they get to know each
other. By following Disney feminism’s growing trend of embodying both masculine and
feminine virtues, Belle fits into the new androgynous portrayal of princesses. Villeneuve’s
mix of gendered characteristics in Beauty served to push the focus away from gender and
towards virtue, but in Disney’s Belle androgyny seems to rather serve to empower her as a
stronger heroine.
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Furthermore, Belle’s role within her romantic relationship with the Beast follows
general trends in Disney feminism. In the 1991 animation, Belle laments to her father that
she has no one to talk to, to which her father responds, “What about that Gaston? He’s a
handsome fellow . . .” to which Belle responds, “Oh, Papa, he’s not for me.” The 2017 film
removes this focus on finding a man; instead, Belle and her father discuss the small-
mindedness of the town and how her mother, like Belle, had been different and ahead of her
time. Belle also turns down the most popular man in town, Gaston, seemingly unconcerned
by his threats about what happens to local spinsters. Despite her apparent independence and
disinterest in the men in her town, Belle’s interest in love is readily apparent throughout the
film. In the opening scene, she goes to her local library to return the tale she had just read
“about two lovers in fair Verona”—a reference to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. She
enjoys debating the merits of Romeo and Juliet with the Beast, reads love poetry with him,
and lightly teases him for reading a love story after he scorned Romeo and Juliet. As England
et al. observe, Beauty and the Beast is an example of a Disney film in which the main couple
falls in love “against all odds” (565). The Beast’s physical appearance as well as his
imprisoning of Belle, a young woman who loves her freedom and has big dreams, both act as
major blocks to the couple falling in love. The film also reflects Disney’s shift toward
showing more balanced relationships that take a longer amount of time to establish.
Compared to the 1991 animation, the montage of scenes building up the relationship between
Belle and the Beast is much lengthier, showing a slow build toward friendship. Belle does
continue to fulfill the roles expected of a woman in a relationship, as she is nurturing, caring,
and gently teaches and domesticates the Beast. Zipes observes that both Grimm and Disney
domesticate women by showing that “good girls” remain in the house (“Breaking the Disney
Spell” 37), indicating that Belle, as a woman, holds the role of domesticating the Beast, who
is in need of domestication. Libe Zarranz Garcia asserts that the Beast is “a tormented man
who needs to be re-educated to become a symbol for the ‘New Man’ in order to represent a
new kind of masculinity that will enable men to suffer, to love and to remain happily within
the domestic realm” (57). Like the majority of Disney princess movies, the 2017 film
concludes in Belle’s marriage to the Beast.
The 2017 film also shows Belle fulfilling typical behaviors associated with being a
mother. Belle is not a mother in the film, but she gets scolded for teaching a young village
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girl to read. Gaston tells her, “The only children you should concern yourself with are . . .
your own,” to which Belle replies: “I’m not ready to have children.” This suggests she is
pushing against the expectation of motherhood, or the expectation that that is the only role
that she can fulfill in society. However, she does not in any way indicate that she would
never want to fulfill this role, and her interaction with the young girl seems almost motherly.
Belle ultimately conforms to the norms of “Disney feminism” as she repeatedly seeks
answers as to why her mother abandoned her, demonstrating her longing for a mother, and
seeks a romance that ends with marriage and, presumably, the formation of a family. Her
nurturing behavior toward animals and the Beast further represent her potential for being a
mother.
Similar to Belle, the Beast reaffirms Disney’s physical gender norms. Both the 1991
animated Beast and the 2017 live-action Beast are huge, furry animals with intimidating
claws, a hairy mane, protruding lower canine teeth, a dog-like snout and ears, and large horns
set atop their heads. The eyes are the most human-like aspect, as the eyes provide depth of
emotion and humanity for the Beast in the animation and were meant to be, in producer
David Hoberman’s words, “the window on the soul” in the live-action film (Rainey). The
alarming mix of frightening animal features reflects the affective element seen in Psyche’s
serpent husband and Beauty’s enormous, furious, and scaly captor, but it removes the
reptilian elements, focusing on more mammalian, and therefore, slightly more human,
characteristics. Gaston, the heartthrob of the town and the Beast’s physical foil, exhibits the
most important physical features of Disney men; he is brawny, muscular, handsome,
constantly carrying his hunting gear to emphasize his skill, “biceps to spare,” and “every last
inch of [him is] covered with hair” (Ross 62; Macaluso). Interestingly, both the Beast and
Gaston are muscular, strong, and hairy, indicating the hyper-masculinized physicality of men
in Disney, but the contrast between the two makes the Beast’s unattractive appearance more
salient, emphasizing that he is not the typical handsome prince. Furthermore, the Beast
reflects the trend of Disney men expressing their emotions physically; in the 1991 animation,
the Beast tends to walk on all fours especially when he is angry, emphasizing his animal-like
lack of control and further contributing to the affective element of Belle’s fear. In the 2017
film, he does not walk on all fours, but his anger is also expressed through large, violent
gestures and animalistic roars—just as his affection is expressed through more timid and
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gentle movements that speak to his humanity rather than his beastliness. Craven points out
that, once he turns into a prince, he looks like Belle in terms of hair color and length, adding
to the theme of androgyny by emphasizing the physical similarity of the couple over the
differences that stood out throughout the film (Ross 62).
The Beast’s performative roles further reinforce “Disney feminism” gender
conventions, demonstrating Foss’s strategies through his embodiment of characteristics and
juxtaposition of gender roles. Like Belle, the Beast embodies some traditional characteristics
of his gender, such as when he saves Belle from the wolves or demonstrates his strength and
assertiveness. The 2017 film particularly indicates the movement toward postfeminist
masculinity and demonstration of more feminine characteristics in regard to the Beast’s
sensitivity to emotion. He portrays much more emotion than earlier princes, with several
scenes focusing on his anger and grief and showing his struggle to process emotions from his
past. The juxtaposition of the Beast’s passivity and Belle’s active role demonstrates Foss’s
strategy of juxtaposing opposites, which “disrupts settled assumptions and beliefs about the
words and concepts by introducing new ideas into them” (154). The new song in the 2017
film, “Evermore,” juxtaposes male and female roles in traditional fairytales, introducing the
idea that women can be the active heroine and men can be passive and lovesick. The Beast
sings the song as Belle gallops off to save her father, the lyrics emphasizing the juxtaposition
of traditional gender roles: “wasting in my lonely tower/ waiting by an open door/ I’ll fool
myself, she’ll walk right in/ And be with me for evermore.” Rather than the princess waiting
in the tower and wishing passively for her prince to return, the Beast has taken on the role of
passive and helpless pining.
The Beast fits the Disney mold in terms of education and curiosity as well, and his
characteristics of typical foolishness further indicate that he conforms to Disney’s
masculinity. Although he is clearly better educated than Belle and has comparatively had
much greater access to reading materials, Belle is still the one who teaches him. She
domesticates him, reminding him of his humanity by teaching him to gently feed the birds in
the garden, to eat at the table less savagely and more civilly, and reminds him how to
dance—even though this was something he clearly had been familiar with at the film’s
beginning—and, most importantly of course, teaches him to love. The Beast’s curiosity
appears to be focused more on Belle than on education, as he uses the library as a way to woo
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her and is only shown using his magic travelling book to further impress her. Macaluso
identifies the Beast as a blend across models of Disney masculinity:
. . . as he gains new knowledge and understanding over the course of the film, he
makes the ultimate sacrifice in defeating the villain, and he shows authoritative
and domineering behaviors, all while being gently ridiculed and chastised for
these behaviors in generally comedic ways (e.g., he is groomed with bows and
curls, he is shown how to properly eat soup and dance, he is hit with snowballs,
etc.).
While his domineering attitude is reminiscent of more traditional masculine values, the Beast
still fits the mold of contemporary Disney feminism; his need to be taught basic table
manners results in making him look comically foolish and highlights Belle’s contrasting
adeptness. Macaluso reaffirms Jeffords’ conclusion that the animated Beast “helps to forward
the image of unloved and unhappy white men who need kindness and affection, rather than
criticism and reform, in order to become their ‘true’ selves again” (qtd. in Macaluso). The
Beast’s education from Belle is not only an intellectual activity, as they discuss different
views on love poetry, nor is it just a reversed version of conduct books as Belle teaches him
society manners proper for a gentleman; rather, it is an emotional education that emphasizes
kindness and love over the short temper that often gets the better of him.
As a male love interest, the Beast exhibits growing respect for Belle throughout their
relationship. The 2017 film, as discussed previously, makes a point of creating a longer and
more balanced process of the two falling in love, and the Beast becomes more conscious of
Belle’s interests and dreams. Unlike the Beasts in previous tales, Disney’s Beast comes to
recognize Belle’s need for her freedom and lets her go, realizing he may never see her again
and that he may have doomed himself and his castle by losing the chance to break the curse.
Furthermore, Craven argues that “the love plot develops around the Beast’s anxieties not to
offend her feminist sensibilities,” indicating that he takes note of her values and changes his
behaviors to suit her more progressive views (124). Like Belle, he is neither portrayed as a
father nor is it suggested that he might become one. Whereas Belle’s father follows the
Disney stereotype of a loving and involved father, allusions to the Beast’s father suggest that
he was the opposite; the servants describe him as cruel and explain to Belle how “the master
lost his mother, and his cruel father took that sweet innocent lad and twisted him up to be just
like him.” In this way, the film slightly defies the general trend Disney has set forth. Despite
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the Beast appearing more supportive and respectful of his partner than in previous versions,
the film still carries traces of male aggressiveness and violence that fit with are reminiscent
of violence throughout the tale’s circulation.
Keeping in line with Disney’s typical treatment of masculine aggressiveness, the
Beast’s violence is conveyed as acceptable in contrast to Gaston’s. Ross asserts that Gaston
is “the real beast, of course, an animal who sneers at the Beast for being so openly in touch
with his feminine side” and who is “determined to possess [Belle] by force” (62). The 2017
film puts a greater spotlight on Gaston; he not only tries to woo Belle and pressure her with
threats of spinsterhood, but he also tries to coerce her father into letting him marry her—
leaving him to die when he refuses—and goes to kill the Beast thinking he can claim Belle as
his prize. His persistence hints at sexual aggressiveness, especially in moments when he
physically corners her or locks her in a cart so no one can have her if he cannot. In contrast,
the Beast’s violence seems more acceptable. He gradually learns to control his physical
outbursts of anger, and by the end of the film he is only violent toward Gaston to save Belle
and defend himself—and even then, he lets his enemy go. Of course, many have pointed out
the troubling and destructive messages in this Disney movie: that it is acceptable for a
woman to fall in love with her emotionally abusive captor (normalizing Stockholm
Syndrome) and that an abusive partner can be “fixed.” Still, by demonstrating the Beast’s
increasing control over his anger and aggressiveness, and by contrasting him with the easily
more despicable Gaston, Disney makes his violence appear acceptable for one of their
heroes.
Yet even as Belle and the Beast conform to the more progressive trends of gender
conceptions in “Disney feminism,” they demonstrate that “Disney feminism” aligns not with
feminist values or movements but with the very mainstream structures against which the
movement fights: the patriarchal structure. Like other Disney films, the implication of strong
female leads and weak males is problematic in that it appears to lower one gender in order to
uplift another; thus, Belle’s strength and resilience can be seen as somewhat dependent on
the Beast’s less positive image, and the Beast’s domestication by Belle indicates that the
Beast was in need of female guidance. Furthermore, the idea that Belle must perform
masculine qualities—such as being an inventor and demonstrating a lack of fear—in order to
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be a strong and successful female lead demonstrates that “Disney feminism” is actually
reinforcing the binaries that feminism seeks to subvert.
Specifically, the same juxtaposition of gendered roles that introduced a change to
traditional gendered roles can be seen as actually placing Belle and the Beast back within the
patriarchal hierarchy. Koushnik and Reed argue that Belle’s rebellion against the Beast in
going to the forbidden west wing is “immediately juxtaposed by timidity (fear of retribution,
the act of running away, fear of the wolves), and the heroic rescue by the Beast,” after which
she “assumes a submissive role to a domestic caretaker” as she tends to the Beast’s wound
and thanks him for saving her. Belle’s masculine bravery and rebellion are thus
overshadowed by her more feminine role as caretaker. Another juxtaposition that Koushnik
and Reed bring to light is how her masculine role as an inventor is quickly returned “to the
submissive realm of domesticity” when she invents a washing machine. Koushnik and Reed
label this as commodity feminism, defined as “a restructuring of feminist ideology to work
within a western patriarchal society.” In commodity feminism, women or other oppressed
groups are put in places of power, but the traditional social structures stay the same. In the
two examples just mentioned, Belle gains some amount of power and status in the patriarchal
structure by enacting masculine behaviors, but the behaviors that follow—or the inventions
she creates—reinforce a woman’s role in the patriarchy. The maintenance of the social order
is further reinforced by the film’s ending: as all of the servants come back to life, the Beast
remains the owner and master, and Belle takes on a similar role of power that keeps the
others subordinate to them. In this way, Disney feminism’s role reversals serve to keep
patriarchal power structures intact, as Koushnik and Reed argue. Like Cupid and Psyche and
La Belle et la Bête, Disney’s version of the Beauty and the Beast tale does serve to reinforce
contemporary, patriarchal gender norms.
Even as “Disney feminism” reinforces the patriarchal values of the U.S., however, the
circulation of the tale points to a perhaps more uplifting interpretation. The film offers a
promise of progress that Koushnik and Reed fail to acknowledge, especially in comparison to
the tale Disney adapted. While “Disney feminism” does not fully succeed in breaking
structures of oppression or dissolving binaries, it still is a nod to a growing social movement
from a large and powerful company and indicates awareness and willingness to work with
that movement in educating children. Compared to Leprince de Beaumont’s strict adherence
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to her time period’s mainstream culture, Disney’s recent treatment of gender can be seen in a
more progressive, though imperfect, light.
TACKING OUT
Historical Context
In the previous two chapters, I tacked out to consider the issues of curiosity and of
passion’s relationship to marriage in other circulating literature during the historical time
period of each Beauty and the Beast tale. Due to the vastness of Disney, I will focus on the
presentation of curiosity in other Disney films to offer context for the 2017 Beauty and the
Beast. However, because Disney more or less consistently concludes films with a marriage, I
will step outside the genre of Disney to briefly summarize how contemporary film
adaptations of the Beauty and the Beast tale treat passion and marriage.
In recent films, Disney has conveyed a confusing, ambiguous message regarding
curiosity by putting imagination and control in conflict with each other. Ross describes the
original animations of Alice and Ariel as “young women who fantasize about a life more
vivid and exciting than their reality” (54). Ross notes two approaches to romance novels; the
first is a conservative tradition, starting in the eighteenth century (during the time of Leprince
de Beaumont) when romance novels were used for “moral and social guidance” and taught
women that their dreams were “dangerous and of little relevance to their daily lives” (54).
The second is a progressive tradition, through which authors encouraged women to believe in
fantasy “to help them visualize what they want, perhaps as a first step toward going after it”
(54). Visual aspects and plots of these Disney animations encourage imagination—they
encourage the viewer to travel with Alice down the rabbit hole, to join Ariel’s magic world
of mermaids and dream about the world above. However, Ross argues that, despite
encouraging such imagination with surreal cartoons and speaking animals, Disney ultimately
privileges control over imagination. Alice is saved by waking up from her wild dream, and
Ariel ends up on land as she wishes to be—but it is much duller and less exciting than her
home under the sea (Ross 57, 60). Disney films thus show princesses as possessing curiosity,
but it is unclear to what extent this curiosity is actually desirable or socially acceptable.
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Ross points to Beauty and the Beast as providing a different message about curiosity
and control, and it appears that more recent films have also followed this trend. The tension
between control and imagination arises in Beauty and the Beast as Belle is punished for her
curiosity in the west wing and seemingly rewarded in other instances, as her curiosity in
books and learning about her past brings her closer to the Beast. However, although curiosity
and imagination “[flow] freely in the words and the images” as Belle’s curiosity allows her to
experience the magic of the enchanted castle, the film’s conclusion offers a contradictory
message. It indicates that Belle must learn to control her desire; like older Christian versions
of the tale that conceive of love “as an act of will rather than a feeling,” the Disney version
shows that Belle must learn to control her desire and learn to love the Beast (Ross 61). Still,
since she chooses the Beast over Gaston, she does seem to exercise her own free choice,
“help[ing] this ancient story confirm the value of a woman’s equal right to a will of her own”
(Ross 61). The ambiguity in control versus imagination seems more confusing than pointed.
As one of Foss’s disruption strategies, cultivating ambiguity allows rhetors like Villeneuve to
create open messages that can be interpreted in more than one way (148). However, Ross
points to how these multiple interpretations may impact the film’s didactic purpose for
children, since “for them, ambiguity at its best ultimately resolves into a connected but
complex world view that embraces difference and spontaneity; at its worst, it can produce
confusion and anxiety” (54). Despite the ambiguity of controlling curiosity in the plot of
Beauty and the Beast, Ross does acknowledge that the film made a positive step forward as,
in the 1991 animation, “imagination flows freely in the words and the images, allowing the
tale to work its magic” (60). Since the conclusion of the tale shows Belle in a castle that is
enchanting and always has “a new corner for the eye to explore,” Ross suggests that Belle
may have found “a home as big and beautiful as her imagination” (63). In more recent films,
the heroine’s curiosity has also been emphasized. For example, in the 2016 film Moana, the
island princess’s people had stopped voyaging because one of the gods had made the seas too
dangerous, yet Moana always longed to seek “the line where the sky meets the sea” because
“no one knows, how far it goes.” She accepts a mission from the gods and sets out on the
dangerous seas to fulfill it and save her people. The film concludes with Moana leading her
people back to their old ways of exploring the seas rather than staying on their island in fear
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of the rough seas. Thus, Disney appears to be pushing a more positive and less ambiguous
message concerning the value of curiosity.
Because the majority of Disney films conclude in a marriage, it is illuminating to
examine how non-Disney films circulating over the past ten years have portrayed the role of
marriage within the story of Beauty and the Beast. For period films that set the tale in France
around the time of Leprince de Beaumont or Villeneuve, marriage is central to the plot. As
discussed in chapter two, marriage was an economical arrangement in eighteenth-century
France, so it would be unrealistic for a fairy tale to have a happy ending that did not conclude
in marriage. Disney’s 2017 film follows this trend, as does another contemporary film: the
French 2014 La Belle et la Bête, screened at the Berlin International Film Festival. The
conclusion reveals that Belle is telling the story to her two children and is married to the
prince. Although both of these modern retellings conclude in a marriage typical for the time
period setting, they also emphasize contemporary values of passion and love being present in
marriage; in Disney’s version, Belle does not marry the Beast until she falls in love with him,
and the 2014 French film forefronts passion through scenes such as the Beast pinning down
Belle and trying to kiss her, as well as showing Belle break the curse by confessing her love
for the Beast.
Contemporary films set in a modern context, however, do not place the same
emphasis on the role of marriage in love. Although marriage was an aspect in two recent
television series’ retelling of Beauty and the Beast, it was not used as a simple and happy
conclusion. The 2012 Beauty and the Beast series is about homicide detective Catherine
Chandler’s connection with an ex-soldier who was genetically modified by the government
to turn into a beast when he is angered. The third season of the show concludes with their
wedding, but the fourth season moves beyond this and shows the couple after marriage as
well. The 2012 series Once Upon a Time, which is set in an interesting mix of both modern
and fairy tale time periods, also shares a retelling of Beauty and the Beast that replaces the
Beast with Rumpelstiltskin. Belle and Rumple’s story does not end with their marriage, as
the show continues to show their relationship after being married and reveals various trials
that plague them. Although these television series include marriage in a modern context, they
similarly show marriage as a part of life rather than as just a happy conclusion to a tale.
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One final film to consider, Beastly, released in 2011, conceptualized the story in a
modern setting and did not include marriage at all. Directed by Daniel Barnz, Beastly follows
the story of two high school students, keeping more in line with the 16-year-old Beauty of
Leprince de Beaumont’s and Villeneuve’s versions. In this tale, the Beast is a popular kid at a
prep school who is punished with a “beastly” appearance for being shallow and has to
exchange saying, “I love you” with a girl within a year to break the curse. The role of Beauty
is filled by Lindy, a girl with an addict father, contrasting with more positive images of
fathers in the Disney version. At the conclusion, Lindy tells the Beast she loves him and
breaks the curse, and, following their passionate kiss, the tale wraps up final loose ends and
concludes with the two together as a couple—and with no suggestion of marriage. This of
course reflects the change in age of marriage from eighteenth-century France to the twenty-
first-century U.S.; generally, society would frown upon a high school couple being married
since they are so young. More importantly, it demonstrates that the modern setting of the tale
shows that love and romance can be at the center without marriage being involved, as society
now focuses on the image of marriage as a romantic rather than an economic gesture,
regardless of how the arrangement of marriage does still carry with it economic
consequences.
Lived Context
Released in the modern era of the Internet, Disney’s 2017 Beauty and the Beast has
an ongoing lived context that is more easily tracked than that of Apuleius’s Cupid and
Psyche and Leprince de Beaumont’s La Belle et la Bête. Through company reports and
interviews, Disney has communicated its purpose in creating the film. In the 2017 Annual
MoffettNathanson Media & Communications Summit, Christine McCarthy, the senior
executive vice president and CFO of Walt Disney Company, stated that the studio’s strategy
is to release tentpole films that support the studio’s financial success. These films are seen as
events, with social media and trailers intended to build up the film and create attachment to
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characters before consumers view the film on a big screen—ideally two or three times,
McCarthy reveals.23 Part of this strategy includes “reimagining Disney IP in the live-action
format” (McCarthy). Integral to these tentpole, Blockbuster event films are “conservative
narrative form” and “the absence of complex experimental camera shots, radical use of
lighting, and unrelatable scenarios,” thus avoiding the grotesque style of Villeneuve and
eschewing feminist techniques such as Foss’s strategies of generating multiple perspectives
or cultivating ambiguity (Koushnik and Reed). The company’s absolute rights to the
intellectual property of Beauty and the Beast furthermore allow them to profit from
merchandise, although there is little data on the profits from this film’s merchandise alone
(Koushnik and Reed). However, the toy company Hasbro Inc. indicated that Belle was a top
selling princess toy in 2017 and that they expected her sales to “remain red-hot” due to the
new film, extending the studio’s monetary gain as the film’s lived experience extends to the
physical play of children (La Monica). Examining such evidence, Koushnik and Reed
conclude that Disney’s motive for updating the old tale was not based in feminism but in
“profit and market logic,” focused on attracting audiences to sell to advertisers. Disney is
responding to the cultural popularity that progressive gender roles are gaining, but its
intention in responding to this change is purely to garner financial success rather than to
incite change. Because of this, the 2017 Beauty and the Beast cannot be seen as truly
groundbreaking. Nonetheless, Disney’s very response to the cultural movement building
outside of the company legitimizes that movement by contributing to the growing collection
of progressive gender roles in media.
The intended audience for these films is an older age group that remembers the
original animation and feels nostalgia. The president of Walt Disney Pictures, Sean Bailey,
explains that Beauty and the Beast presented a challenge because it was one of the first
Disney “renaissance” films to be rebooted: “With the older classics, what people seem to
23 Post COVID-19, it appears that the box-office lifespan of a film is no longer existent. While attendance in
theater was one of the main ways to identify the spread and lived experience of the film before the pandemic,
the coming months and years will see a shift in how society consumes such films.
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remember are emotions. . . . But Beauty is the first from the renaissance. People really know
it chapter and verse” (qtd. in Desta). To successfully profit from this audience, the live-action
film had to closely parallel the animation. However, Yohana Desta notes that 52 percent of
the audience on the opening weekend were under the age of 25, indicating that another
purpose for the live-actions is “to reel in new viewers (who will hopefully then take their
children to the reboot of the reboot in 2037, and so on and so forth, forever and ever, amen).”
For these new viewers, nostalgia is conceivably less essential in comparison to creating a
film that boasts modern CGI technology and an updated reflection of societal values.
Beyond simply generating revenue, however, these fairy tale films still retain their
didactic purposes in teaching children about societal values. Karen Wohlwend’s study found
that “Through princess play, children enacted femininities and masculinities and negotiated
character roles with peers in ways that enforced and contested gender expectations circulated
in media marketing and enacted in play groups.” This study, along with others by Lori
Baker-Sperry and by Julia Golden and Jennifer Wallace Jacoby, point to Disney’s great
influence in children’s conception and enactment of gender (Hine et al. 6). As the storylines
teach children about societal values and norms, they become incorporated in the lived play
experiences of children. Regardless of the company’s financial motivation, the consequences
for how they teach children to understand gender roles are paramount, and Disney’s gesture
of incorporating more progressive roles provides a glimmer of hope for the future of gender
representation in children’s media.
In terms of the financial gain Disney was looking for, the reception of the $300
million budget film was a success. Beauty and the Beast grossed $650 million at the box
office, proving the value of the studio’s live-action film strategy (McCarthy). The U.S. film
has also experienced worldwide success, pulling in over $759,000 in box offices around the
globe (“Beauty and the Beast (2017)”). Originally, the 1991 animation was hailed as
significant progress compared to the sexism apparent in other Disney films, as Belle was a
strong lead. Koushnik and Reed point out that “the same appreciation and celebration is seen
in 2017, 26 years after the release of the animated move.” The strong female role presumably
resonated with old fans and new; the film particularly appealed to a primarily female
audience, with females making up 72 percent of opening night attendees and 60 percent of
the opening weekend attendees (Desta). On the popular movie-rating website Rotten
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Tomatoes, Beauty and the Beast received 71 percent approval, ranking number six out of the
16 Disney live-action remakes listed on the site (“All 16 Disney Live-Action Remakes
Ranked”). This relatively positive score indicates that it was received well but did not rank as
highly as some of the other recent live-action films, such as The Jungle Book (94 percent) or
Cinderella (84 percent). Generally, the reception seems to have been positive, with praise for
the star-studded cast and Director Bill Condon (Chicago Sun-Times and San Jose Mercury
News), for the adapted “gender politics” and spirited heroine (Time Out and Vox), attention to
detail in costume and visual design (Fort Worth Star-Telegram and Daily Express UK) and,
of course, catchy songs (Wittmer).
Of course, there are always negative reviews for popular movies as well. Newsday,
LA Times, and BBC all indicated that the live-action film failed to surpass the original 1991
animation (Wittmer), but the most notable negative responses to the film include backlash
regarding gender portrayal. The film has both been rebuked by conservative critics for
including the first openly gay character, LeFou, who has a crush on Gaston (Amiri), and by
feminists for not being progressive enough. In addition to the many scholarly discussions
surrounding the role of feminism in the film touched on earlier in the chapter, magazines and
social networks such as reddit provide a platform for even more voices to join the
conversation and lived experience of the film.24 As these conflicting discourses circulate
through news, social media, children’s play toys and even academic journals, the lived
experience of the film continually fluctuates, expanding, countering, complicating the
conventions of gender in contemporary U.S. culture.
24 This chapter discusses scholarship on the 2017 film written by Hine et al., Koushnik and Reed, and Macaluso.
I also reference articles from magazines and websites including Business Insider, BuzzFeed, Chicago Sun-
Times, CNN Business, Daily Express UK, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Geeks, People, Rotten Tomatoes, San
Jose Mercury News, The Numbers, Time Out, Vanity Fair, Variety, Vogue, Vox, and WWD.
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Key Differences
Tacking out to consider key differences between Disney’s 2017 Beauty and the Beast,
Leprince de Beaumont’s La Belle et la Bête, and Apuleius’s Cupid and Psyche, I will again
focus on themes of high and low curiosity and love—and their relationship to marriage—as
well as on the heroine’s activeness versus passivity. As these differences bleed across these
three contexts, cultures, and times, they bring to light how ideas of love and gender roles
have changed substantially since the eighteenth century.
Although both the Roman and French versions demonstrate marriage as necessary to
a woman’s place in society, they present different views on high and low forms of curiosity
and love. In Apuleius’s tale, Psyche’s low forms of curiosity are punished, and a proper
marriage abiding by social rules reinforces proper gender roles involving both curiosity and
passion. However, passion still remains in the marriage of Psyche and Cupid—it is simply
controlled by the institution of marriage. Leprince de Beaumont, on the other hand, presented
no low forms of curiosity or love, offering only gender roles that were appropriate for her
audience of young girls to imitate. In her tale, marriage was simply expected of women and
there was no place for love or passion in the decision to marry. Love came as a reward for
practicing virtue in marriage.
In contrast, Disney’s 2017 Beauty and the Beast forefronts romance over marriage,
privileging both passion and curiosity. Belle portrays both high curiosity (her interest in
books and educating other girls) and low curiosity (her interest in the west wing because it is
forbidden). Despite the tension between imagination and control, the film concludes with
Belle’s imagination and curiosity fulfilled through the enormous castle that she will live in
(Ross 63). High forms of love and passion—hinted at through Belle’s body language—take
center stage in this production, as the emphasis is not on consent to marry but on a mutual
expression of love. Craven states, “Disney twists the traditional story of the relationship of
Belle/Beauty and the Beast from one of learning and understanding to one of falling in love,
a very modern arrangement of romance stories” (124). Instead of focusing on how marriage
reinforces gender roles or is an expectation of women, Disney draws the focus to falling in
love—still within the limits of expected gendered behaviors.
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In terms of the heroine’s reaction to her circumstances, Psyche is much more active
as she actively searches and undergoes tribulations, even considering suicide at certain
points. Her search is external, and she creates her own personality or soul (Bottigheimer 8).
Leprince de Beaumont’s Beauty instead embarks on an internal search to find it within
herself to love the Beast, displaying passive behavior, embodying the virtues of an ideal
woman, and willingly allowing others to confer her identity on her, as she even goes by the
name of Beauty that others have conferred on her (Bottigheimer 9). One active and external-
looking, and one passive and internally focused, both heroines conform to the gender norms
of their societies.
Like her two predecessors, Belle conforms to “Disney feminism” culture, but she
seems to be more similar to Psyche than to Beauty (Craven 131). Belle is also on an external
search as she goes to save her father, and she takes many more physically active, masculine
roles than either of them as she acts as an inventor, defends herself physically, and attempts
to escape from her tower via a makeshift rope. Like Leprince de Beaumont’s Beauty, Belle
does have to undertake an internal search to find it within herself to love the Beast and to
communicate with him (Davis, Handsome Heroes & Vile Villains). However, she talks back
to him and argues with him, which Leprince de Beaumont’s Beauty never dared to do in such
a feisty manner. Although Belle comes across more androgynous, she still fits within
“Disney feminism,” which itself conforms to larger patriarchal structures. Belle’s path points
to progress in gender equality, which is a positive development for both Disney’s line of
films and for the viral strain of Beauty and the Beast tales—but it is also to be expected, as
the film continues these tales’ trend of reinforcing the contemporary gender conventions.
CONCLUSION
More similar in plot to Leprince de Beaumont’s La Belle et la Bête than to Apuleius’s
Cupid and Psyche, Disney’s Beauty and the Beast transformed the tale significantly to create
a story that has meaning for an audience of children (and parents) today. However, there are
still notable similarities between the three tales of the same viral strain. Looking at the
temporal context, the film follows the same pattern of conforming to contemporary gender
roles; Belle and the Beast embody recent films’ “Disney feminism” while at the same time
fitting in with the larger patriarchal system that is slowly incorporating aspects of feminism.
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Tacking out, the historical context indicates that there is a tension regarding curiosity and
control that introduces ambiguity, potentially injecting more confusion than opening the tale
up to more meanings. By looking at other contemporary film adaptations of Beauty and the
Beast, it is clear that society’s view of marriage has dramatically shifted to being focused on
romance and love rather than economics. The lived context calls out Disney’s purpose in
involving feminism in films to create tentpoles for their monetary gain by appealing to the
nostalgia of an older audience and drawing in a new, global audience of young children, with
the substance and educative value being of secondary importance to the film’s financial
success. Disney’s film contrasts with its predecessors by focusing more openly on curiosity
and love.
Much of the scholarship and public discussion that I have explored in this chapter has
argued either that the 2017 film fails to be progressively feminist or succeeds in offering
depictions of more progressive gender roles. In considering the film from the perspective of
circulation studies, I find that neither assessment is entirely productive. The fact that this
latest version of the tale is contributing to the representation of progressive gender roles in
children’s fairy tales is undoubtedly positive, but it follows the trend that the story has always
followed: it conforms to the popular gender conceptions of its time. Disney is contributing to
the feminist movement by providing alternative models for gender roles, which is a necessary
and essential step towards gender equality. However, these models are not perfect and are in
some ways harmful; Disney’s depiction of postfeminist masculinity, for example, reinforces
gender binaries by making men appear weaker in order to create a stronger female lead. In
this way, Disney’s 2017 Beauty and the Beast does not achieve the status of being fully
progressive, but it also does not entirely fail in challenging more traditional Disney gender
conventions.
Like the other tales in this viral chain, the film revamps the ancient plot line by
incorporating social values popular among its audience. It provides yet another iteration of
the tale, yet another iteration of feminism’s goal for nonbinary gender constructions,
simultaneously reflecting and adding to society’s constant transformation and gradual
progression of gender conceptions. As the most recent and widely spread version of the viral
tale, Disney’s 2017 Beauty and the Beast concludes this study of the circulation of a tale
across time and cultures.
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CHAPTER 6
CONCLUSION
As this project has demonstrated, extending circulation studies to trace how a fairy
tale has evolved through its various temporalities and historical and lived contexts offers a
glimpse of the complexity of rhetoric’s fluid, viral movement. These three instances of the
viral tale, spanning different cultures and time periods, indicate a great transformation in
terms of audience and purpose. Apuleius’s Cupid and Psyche, appearing in the middle of his
novel The Golden Ass, was intended for the entertainment of an adult audience, as the humor
was rather raunchy. However, the presence of Cupid and Psyche in the middle of the tale
suggests that the text also served the purpose of edifying its audience about devotion to the
gods, and the framing of the tale as one being told to a young girl about to be forced into
marriage herself further indicates such a purpose. As time passed, the tale’s audience
transformed; no longer a low-culture text read widely for enjoyment, it was confined to the
libraries of the intellectual elite and treated as a high-culture text for scholarly analysis.
The educational purpose of the tale continued through both Villeneuve’s version,
written for a perhaps more adult audience, and Leprince de Beaumont’s. Leprince de
Beaumont’s La Belle et la Bête was composed solely for the education of children (more
specifically, young girls) as she stated: “it is as an entertainment that I present this story to
the children. They should not suspect that I want to teach them” (Korneeva 233). She thus cut
out all content from Villeneuve’s tale that was not appropriate for children or introduced
ambiguity in a way that would undermine the virtues discussed in the tale. Disney’s 2017
Beauty and the Beast intended to draw in an audience of nostalgic viewers of the 1991
animation and a new audience of young girls by updating its previous film with more modern
gender constructions. While the company’s main purpose was to generate financial success
through the film’s release to support their smaller productions, it also retained an educational
quality as a fairytale teaching children about love and gender performance.
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As this animal bridegroom tale was circulated through new cultures and time periods,
some of the key differences between the versions reflect changes in gender conventions
regarding themes of curiosity, love in marriage, and female agency. In terms of curiosity,
Craven notes of the 1991 animation that Belle represents a social descent that is paralleled
with “a pattern of downgrading of Belle’s intellectual interests” (132); Psyche is a
princess/goddess, Villeneuve’s a princess, Leprince de Beaumont’s the daughter of a wealthy
merchant who becomes poor, and Disney’s the daughter of an odd tinkerer whose success is
questionable. Craven also argues that Leprince de Beaumont’s Beauty reinforced goals of
meritocracy, as she was an educated reader and musician, whereas Disney’s Belle reads, but
what she reads is unclear, and her habit makes her seem “odd” to her townspeople (132). The
descent does not apply to the entire sequence of tales in this study, however, since Psyche
exhibited low forms of curiosity as she sought forbidden knowledge. Beauty’s curiosity
shifted drastically in Leprince de Beaumont’s novel, as her curiosity was perfectly within the
proper bounds, and she removed Villeneuve’s mere mentions of the heroine’s lower curiosity
impulses. Disney’s Belle is not as accomplished as Beauty according to French society
standards, but her intellectual interests become more of a focus in the 2017 film; her curiosity
is portrayed as progressive more than odd or inappropriate, and she enacts the idea that
women can be engineers.
The Beast’s curiosity also changes over these three tales. Cupid does not demonstrate
lower forms of curiosity, nor, as a god, does his education come into play. Leprince de
Beaumont’s Beast lacks wit and intelligence, highlighting that these are not as important as
the values of kindness and good temper that he does show. Disney’s Beast’s curiosity is
largely focused on Belle, although the 2017 film does highlight his interest in literature and
travel. As a postfeminist male character, he appears foolish and has to be taught by Belle.
One might expect an increased value of curiosity and education through these tales, since
intellectual progress for both men and women improved substantially in the era of
Enlightenment and in our modern world. However, the tales point to how curiosity has gone
through ebbs and flows instead; the second-century Romans sought to pursue high curiosity
rather than low curiosity; the eighteenth-century French valued intellect, within gendered
limits, and valued virtue more; and contemporary “Disney feminism” pushes for women to
join STEM fields but still struggles with implications of how this changes masculinity.
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The shift in marriage as seen in these tales, however, is more linear in terms of its
economic purpose. In Apuleius, Villeneuve, and Leprince de Beaumont’s texts, marriage is
an economic transaction between two families. Psyche is concerned that she has not married
someone of equal or greater status, and Venus is likewise concerned that her son has lowered
himself by marrying a mortal. For Beauty, her “marriage” to the Beast saves her father’s life
and bestows upon her family a great deal of wealth. In these tales, marriage is essential for
the social structure; Psyche has a duty to marry, and proper marriage reinforces proper
gender roles in Psyche and Cupid; and for Beauty and her sisters, marriage is the sole option
for upward mobility. Although Belle also goes from living in a small village to a luxurious
castle, the tale does not focus on an economic exchange, as there is little concern expressed
about status or provisions for her family. While others in the town disparage spinsters, Belle
does not express concern about her capability of providing for herself.
The role of love in marriage changes drastically as well—again, not in a linear
fashion. Psyche and Cupid display passion and lower forms of love, which are corrected with
a proper marriage that allows them to attain heavenly love. Villeneuve offers hints of passion
in Beauty’s dreams, showing that love in marriage could be possible, but this suggestion is
undermined by the fairy’s insistence that the two be of the same class before marrying,
showing that the economic role of marriage is greater than both virtue and love in marriage.
Leprince de Beaumont removes passion and love altogether, reflecting a societal shift away
from all passion and towards morality, friendship, gratitude, and esteem instead. Disney
appears to link back to the values of Cupid and Psyche while combining some of the morality
of Leprince de Beaumont’s novel. The plot focuses on romance and love, much more so than
the Roman tale, but it also indicates a higher form of love—one that is not deceived by
appearances but is rather based on the character of the person. In Disney, the only reason to
marry is out of love, hiding any economic benefits under the sensuality of a love story.
Society has always faced the tension between high and low forms of love, and these specific
time periods reveal different approaches to how those forms should or should not fit into
marriage, which is essential as the formation of the family and the basic units through which
society is formed.
Finally, the three heroines differ in terms of agency. Psyche embarked on an external,
active search to physically find her husband after betraying his trust and giving into her
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curiosity. Beauty is more passive, allowing her father and the Beast to control her fate and
searching internally to find it within herself to love a Beast for whom she feels gratitude.
Belle is somewhat of a combination of the two; she is more similar to Psyche in that she is
active and curious, but like Beauty she must search internally to learn to love the Beast.
Unlike her two predecessors, however, Belle is much more confident, fearless, and
adventurous as she seeks “adventure in the great wide somewhere” from her very first scene
and seeks to escape on her own. Although the heroines do differ greatly in their sense of
agency, in all three tales it falls upon the female character to save the male by learning to
love him. The gender switch is intriguing, giving even the more passive of these heroines a
more active role.
Despite the significant changes that took place as the tale was picked up and
transformed by new cultures in new time periods, some rhetorical aspects of the tale have
remained consistent. For example, each tale centers on the affective element of the animal
bridegroom motif. Each tale implements phantasia, combining various aspects of threatening
animals to create vivid, sensuous images that bring the affective element into play and
effectively repulse and frighten the audience. A giant serpent shares Psyche’s bed; a strange
mix of talons and elephant trunks asks Beauty to sleep with him every night; and a massive,
hairy monster with a protruding lower jaw and giant horns atop his head insists on Belle
joining him for dinner. Even Leprince de Beaumont, who generally eschews most of the
sensuous elements of Villeneuve’s, incorporates a few physical details to indicate that the
Beast is ugly and has a terrible voice. The effect is not only what drives the plot but what
makes the story compelling and memorable. By dramatically emphasizing what is not
human, what is not ideal, the story brings to light what society conceives of as ideal—and
how that differs depending on the conception of gender.
Another similarity is that the tale retained its educational purpose throughout its
circulation; thus, it is unsurprising that the heroine and the Beast conform to their society’s
contemporary gender conventions in all three versions. Even instances of gender reversal
serve to reinforce these conventions; Cupid and Psyche both act outside of their gender roles,
and marriage is offered as the solution to restrain their base urges. Belle and the Beast
seemingly defy some traditional gender norms, but their demonstration of “Disney feminism”
values falls within the larger patriarchal society’s incorporation of feminism rather than
121
aligning with the minority movement itself. This repeated pattern of conformity serves the
rhetorical purpose of fairy tales to instill in children an understanding of their (gendered)
roles in society.
There are a few limitations to this study that must be acknowledged. The first is that
the scope of this project is extremely large, as I have traced three tales in three cultures over
nearly twenty centuries. In order to do this, I had to limit my scope considerably by focusing
on the performance of gender in only two characters—Psyche/Beauty/ Belle and Cupid/the
Beast. I also limited the historical section to other circulating texts’ discussion of certain key
ideas. A broader historical context discussing the political and religious situation of the time
could have more thoroughly explained external influences on each version of the tale, but
such a scope was too large for the purposes of this project. Another limitation is my lack of
fluency in the languages of the early Beauty and the Beast tales. The nuances of the original
Latin and French texts could have added a layer of depth to my assertions concerning the
tale’s circulation, but because my knowledge of Latin is limited and my knowledge of French
is largely nonexistent, I could only draw on nuances that came through in the translations of
the texts.
Despite the limitations, this study’s application of circulation theory provides a
fascinating look at how gender is rhetorically taught through fairy tales and how that rhetoric
morphs as the tales circulate across time and culture. This sort of analysis is significant
because of the vital rhetorical role fairy tales play in shaping generations across cultures. In
an increasingly globalized world, it is important to keep an awareness of various cultures and
how they do or do not mesh well together. As gender issues have moved to the forefront of
public discussions over the past few years with movements such as #MeToo, the Women’s
March, and the recent Supreme Court ruling protecting LGBTQ working rights, it is helpful
to see how the circulation of fairy tales across cultures and over time changes those tales to
alter gender expectations. Fairy tales, old as time, have been an important site for serious
cultural change concerning these expectations. As this project demonstrates, all rhetoric is
interconnected, with various influencing contexts that bleed into one another through a viral
circulation.
122
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