Folklore and Fairy Tales: Beauty and the Beast Part Deux
The “Beauty and the Beast” story is part of a collection of stories in classic folklore called the animal-bridegroom cycle, in which the hero or heroine is forced by circumstances with the awful idea of marrying an animal or a monster. In the Norwegian fairy tale “East of the Sun, West of the Moon,” the girl marries a bear, but in some stories she has to marry a frog and even a mole. I suppose in the times when marriages were arranged, many a bride looked on her husband-to-be and thought: “What a brute, what a monster, what a beast.”
The “Beauty and the Beast” story is actually about transformations and tricks of the eye: We think we know what we’re looking at, but we have no idea what’s underneath the beast’s fur. Through the magic of transformation we get to see what is underneath, what someone is like on the inside, what their hidden nature is like, what their character is like. People’s outer appearances can hide a more menacing inner nature. Someone who looks nice may actually not be nice, they may be a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Can you trust in appearances? Appearances can be deceiving, so don’t judge a book by its cover. How do we distinguish friends from foes? Who can you really trust? Stories like this one make us look at the world and the people around us, differently. And we have to, because some people, who may pretend to be nice, might be out to harm us, and others, who seem a little rough around the edges, might turn out to be a gem.
In some versions of “Beauty and the Beast,” the creature transforms into the shape of other animals, but in the classic French story recorded in 1756 by Jeanne-Marie LePrince de Beaumont, the beast is a hissing, scaly creature. That sounds like a dragon to me.
So let’s go to the world of enchantment and read this tale for ourselves.
Once upon a time in France, Beauty was the sixth child of a wealthy merchant. She is humble, sincere and kind, while her sisters, though pretty, are selfish and arrogant and rude and jealous of her beauty. They attend parties and balls and turn down suitors because they are not good enough for them, while Beauty prefers to stay at home and read. Although the sisters appear pretty on the outside, what kind of creatures do you think they are on the inside, what kind of creatures are they underneath?
The father loses the family fortune and they are forced to move to the countryside, far away from the French court, with its parties, suitors and intrigues, and live in a small house. Beauty wakes up every morning at four o’clock to clean the house, make the food, and make her father and family as comfortable as possible. After a while, the father receives a message that a ship carrying merchandise for him, his ship has come in, and he prepares to travel to the city to collect the goods that he plans to sell and restore his fortune with. The sisters ask him to bring them back fancy dresses, ribbons and jewels, but Beauty does not want anything. In order to make her sisters appear less selfish, she only asks for a rose.
In the city, however, things go wrong. The father is unable to attain his goods, because his partners thought he was dead and they divided it up between them. The miserable merchant returns home, poorer than ever. On the way he gets lost in the woods. A terrible storm breaks out, he gets chased by wolves and finally, after a harrowing flight, he stumbles into a palace, but finds nobody home. There is, however, a warm fire, food laid out, and a warm bed. The next morning he finds a glass of hot chocolate and clean clothes laid out for him.
As he leaves, he passes by an enchanted garden which is magically alive during the cold of winter. He sees a bush of roses and picks one for Beauty. Suddenly the beast appears, angry at the man for plucking a rose. The beast scolds the man and threatens to kill him. The man explains that he only wanted to give it to his daughter. The beast lets him go under the condition that he returns with one of his daughters to pay off the debt of the rose. The father returns home and tells his daughters the bad news. Beauty agrees to go since it was her request that got her father into trouble. The sisters rub some onion in their eyes to make themselves shed some tears.
The father travels with her to the palace. As they approach, the beast comes out:
“…a hissing creature…the monster made himself heard. A frightful noise, caused by the enormous weight of his body, by the terrible clank of his scales, and an awful roaring announced his arrival.” That sounds like a dragon to me.
Terror took hold of Beauty, but she is brave. The father unwillingly leaves, while Beauty willingly stays. She lives with the beast, exploring the palace, making some animal friends, and watches grand performances through a magic mirror. The Beast only visits her during dinner. The creature admits that he is ugly and that he has no wit, but Beauty sees that he is kind. The Beast makes her mistress of the castle. Whatever Princess wants, Princess gets. He proposes to marry her, but she refuses. Every night she dreams of a handsome prince who tells her to look past appearances. She keeps refusing the Beast, thinking that the handsome prince might be imprisoned somewhere in the castle.
After several weeks, she asks to visit her family. The Beast agrees and lets her go. Her jealous sisters make her stay longer than she promised. One night she dreams that the beast is dying. She wakes up and puts an enchanted ring on her finger that her back to the palace. She finds the beast in the courtyard, almost dead from heartbreak.
She says:
“No dear Beast, you must not die. Live to be my husband. The grief I now feel convinces me, that I cannot live without you.”
Suddenly the palace sparkles with lights, fireworks go off, and beautiful, triumphant music plays. At her feet, she now finds the beautiful man of her dreams. The handsome man tells her he is a prince, cursed by a fairy to be a beast, but that another fairy has changed the spell so that when Beauty agreed to marry him, she broke the curse. He offers her the crown and she accepts. They marry and live happily ever after.
The good fairy turns the cruel sisters into statues and says that the curse can only ever be broken when they see the error of their ways, something, she thinks, that will never happen.
In another version of this story from Germany, called “Beauty’s Stone Sisters,” the sisters are also turned into stone. In this tale the beast is enormous with a long ugly snout, its ears hang down, and it has a shaggy coat and long claws. It sounds a bit like a “dog-bear-pig” thing.
This version was collected by Ludwig Bechstein, who lived around the same time as the Grimm brothers. In his version, from 1847, the youngest daughter, Nettchen, has a friend who is poor, called Little Broomstick.
Like in the French story, the merchant ends up at the home of the beast, who tells the merchant he must bring back his youngest daughter, Nettchen. But the merchant waivers, and eventually he takes Little Broomstick to the beast instead of his daughter, trying to fool the beast.
Somehow the beast knows Little Broomstick is not his daughter, so he puts her into an enchanted carriage, sends her back, kidnaps Nettchen and carries her to his home. Each night, the beast comes and snuggles up to her and sleeps in her bed. Eventually she becomes more comfortable with the creature and she begins to feel sorry for him.
However, one night he does not come to her bed. She gets up and searches for him and she finds him dying. She cries for him, and her falling tears break the magic spell which has kept him cursed.
The beast says:
“My father wanted me to marry a woman I did not love. When I refused, he sent a sorceress to turn me into this monster, until a beautiful young girl would love me in spite of my ugliness and shed tears for me.”
Of course, they get married, but according to some weird fairy tale rule, she must remain in the castle for a year. She can, however, keep an eye on her father and sisters through an enchanted mirror. As the months pass, her father grows sicker while her sisters neglect him and entertain their friends with parties instead.
When the year is out, the beast gives her magic herbs to take to her father. The herbs bring him back to health. Nettchen invites her sisters to visit her, but when they see how happy she is, and the palace where she lives, they are filled with jealousy and they kill her. What I take away from many of these stories is, be careful of your siblings — especially sisters. Women can be nasty.
Luckily for Nettchen and us, a fairy, the same one who had enchanted the beast, appears, and she brings Nettchen back to life. The fairy decides to punish the sisters. Nettchen, far too good and pure, protests, but the fairy turns the evil sisters into two stone pillars. The fairy then announces that they will remain pillars until a man falls in love with them. The columns “to this day are still standing in the garden of the splendid castle, for it has not yet occurred to any man that he should fall in love with cold, heartless stones.” Nettchen and her husband and her father and Little Broomstick all live happily ever after.
I guess, for women, the take-away is: don’t be a nasty, jealous, bitch.
I find the scaly snake-like creature in the French “Beauty and the Beast,” much scarier than the white bear in “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” or the almost comical German beast in “Beauty’s Stone Sisters.” Perhaps that is just because I haven’t come face to face with a bear in the wild yet, but a cold, reptilian-like creature is, to me, the worst, perhaps because we humans are also mammals and feel just a little closer to mammals than other creatures.
Any girl would have to be extremely brave to go off with a scaly, snake-like monster, a shaggy, bear-like beast, or a dog-bear-pig thing. Being brave does not mean that we are fearless; being brave means that we face our fear. Fear is inherent in bravery and without it, bravery doesn’t exist. These stories teach us that it is okay to be afraid, but being brave means that we do not let our fears make our decisions for us. The girl faces her fears again and again, and in life, we also have to constantly face our own fears, fears that often recur throughout our lives.
In all of these stories the beast is transformed back into a human. The girl’s bravery, her inner strength of will, and her strength of character, make the magical transformation possible. In a similar way, if we are brave, determined, and we persists, we can also transform the situations that we find ourselves in. I am transforming into a creative writer right now, and these blog posts are part of my journey as I expand my mind, after I made the decision to turn my back on other careers and focus on becoming a storyteller.
The story “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” is very similar to a much older story, the Roman tale of “Cupid and Psyche.”
Cupid and Psyche
The story of Cupid and Psyche is based on much older folktales from Europe and Asia. It was written down in The Metamorphoses, a novel written in the 2nd century Anno Domini by Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis, a Numidian Latin-language writer, Platonist philosopher and rhetorician, who was born in the Roman province of Numidia, in the Berber city of Madauros, which is today M’Daourouch in Algeria. The Metamorphoses of Apuleius, called The Golden Ass by the great Christian theologian and philosopher, Augustine of Hippo, no relation as far as I am aware, is the only ancient Roman novel in Latin that completely survived and came down to us in its entirety.
In the story a king and queen have three beautiful daughters. One of them, Psyche is so beautiful that the goddess Venus, the Roman goddess of love and beauty, becomes jealous of her. Venus, a bit of a bitch, tells her son Cupid, the god of love, to take one of his magical arrows, the arrows which make you fall in love with the first person you see, and to touch Psyche with it and make her fall in love with a monster. Cupid goes to Psyche while she sleeps, but he is so struck by her beauty, that he pricks himself with the arrow and falls in love with her.
Love-struck, Cupid flies away. Psyche’s parents learn that Venus prophesies that Psyche will marry a monster. To protect her, they take Psyche to a high mountain, where Zephyr, the west wind, lifts her up and carries her off to a beautiful castle. At night, when all the lights are out, a monster comes into her room.
Psyche convinces the monster to let her sisters visit her. The sisters tell Psyche that the creature that comes into her room must be the monster she is destined to marry. They convince her to take a light and a dagger and to kill the monster while he sleeps. That night she grips the dagger firmly and she lifts the candle to look at the monster. She is surprised to see the beautiful face of Cupid. He is so handsome that she falls in love with him.
As she leans over, a drop of tallow from her candle falls onto his skin. He wakes up and flies away in anger. She tells her family what happened. Her sisters, jealous and hoping to steal Cupid as their husband, go to the mountain where they had first abandoned Psyche. They leap off the mountain, hoping that the wind will take them to the castle, but Zephyr somehow knows that they have evil intentions, and never comes. The evil sisters fall to their deaths on the rocks below.
Psyche, however, driven by love, keeps searching for Cupid.
She asks Venus, who, as we know, is a bit of a bitch. Venus tells her that she must go into her, Venus’s granary, and separate the grains of wheat, millet, and barley from each other, all before the end of the day. It seems like an impossible task, because the granary is huge, but Cupid sends ants that help Psyche, and she succeeds.
Then Venus sends Psyche to go gather golden fleeces from a herd of sheep by the river. Lucky for her, the river god warns her that the sheep hate humans while the sun is shining and that they will kill her. Forewarned, Psyche waits until the sheep seek shade from the noon sun, and then she takes their golden fleeces. It is lucky for the heroines of these stories that they always find someone who gives them good advice. Often in real life, we are not so lucky. Sometimes even those who are supposed to love us and take care of us let us down. In my experience, people are rarely as helpful as these mythical helpers.
Irritated that her plan to kill Psyche has failed, the goddess sends her to the underworld, the world of the dead, called the realm of Hades by the Greeks and ruled by Pluto according to the Romans, their version of hell, to find Persephone, the queen of the underworld, called Proserpina by the Romans, and bring some of her beauty back in a box. Psyche convinces the boatman on the River Styx to take her across and she gets past the vicious three-headed dog Cerberus to meet Persephone, who, kindly, gives her some beauty. However, Persephone warns her not to open the box.
Psyche leaves, but on her way back, just before she reaches home, she peeks inside the box and immediately falls into a deep, magical sleep. Cupid flies down to her, shakes his head and says:
“You just had to look. Once again, you just had to look.”
He wakes her up with one of his arrows and they go to Jupiter, the king of the gods, on Mount Vultur, the abode of the Roman gods. The gods give Psyche ambrosia, the food of the gods, and she becomes immortal, one of them. At last, as equals, Cupid and Psyche are together.
In this story Psyche defies the gods and becomes an immortal goddess, in the end. Her bravery, spurred by her love, drives her to face her fears, to go to Hades, to hell, and back again for the person she loves. In the process she transforms as well. In all these stories, it is not just the beast that changes, but also the heroine herself. By facing her fears, the girl or young woman becomes a queen or even, as in this last tale, an immortal goddess even though she often got into trouble because of her curiosity.
An important lesson from these stories is that being brave does not mean that we are not afraid; it means that we can do the right thing even when we are afraid. I wish more people can be like that. We need you.
Another theme is that it is never too late to turn the story, including your story, around. It’s not over until the final card has been dealt. I am now busy turning my story around by learning how to write.
Transformations, of course, are not always for the better. In some tales, a good person turns into a villain. Think about Michael, the good son, who turns into the Godfather in the terrific and terrifying movie and novel by Mario Puzo, or the transformation of Walter White from a high school chemistry teacher into an international drug kingpin in the television series Breaking Bad. They are two iconic villains in popular culture that have entered our psyches.
They are, however, manifestations of much older tropes.
In many parts of the world, people think that some humans can transform into animals to do evil deeds. This process is called lycanthropy, stemming from the Greek word lukos, which means wolf, and anthropos, which means man. These stories and myths come from cultures as diverse as that of Europe, Africa, India, China, Japan, and the Americas.
For example, in Nigeria, the Africans believe that some people can change themselves into hyenas and leopards. Some white, British colonial administrators even tell stories of seeing this with they own eyes.
The Hopi Indian Snake clan believes that they descend from a woman who could turn herself into a rattler snake and the Navajo tell tales of evil, cursed witches who can transform themselves into giant wolves.
The Sorcerer cave art. Sketch of Breuil’s drawing. Photograph. Wellcome M0008769.jpg
The roots of these stories may go right back to pre-historic times. In the caves of the Cro-Magnons in Spain and France, there is a painting of a man that is part man and part animal that is between twenty thousand and thirty thousand years old. The man has antlers and the ears of a stag and the tail of a wolf or a wild horse. It might be that he is just a shaman made up to look like an animal, performing a hunting ritual, or he might be a shape shifter. Who knows? The fact is that one of the earliest pictures we have is of a man that combines with an animal.
Eventually these beliefs gave us stories of two of the most fearsome monsters known to mankind, werewolves and vampires. I love stories like Dracula, Carmilla, and The Werewolf in Paris, but they deserve a separate blog post, all their own.
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Bibliography
Harvey, H.B. (2017). A Children’s Guide to Folklore and Wonder Tales. The Teaching Company. Chantilly.
Hicks, J. (1989). Mysteries of the unknown: Transformations. Time-Life Books. Alexandria. Virginia.