"Beauty and the Beast" is not only my favorite Disney movie, it is one of my favorite stories ever. I have always loved this story, but I recently read the book "Beastly" (Yes, I read it before I saw the movie, I do it that way most of the time if I can. Now I'm a little afraid to see the movie because it has Mary-Kate Olsen and Vanessa Hudgens in it, and I'm sure no good can come of that, but I probably will anyway), and in the back it talked a little bit about all of the other versions of this story, so I decided to do a little research on it, and here's what I found...
-Originally, this story was an allegory for (prepare to have a tiny piece of your childhood die) the way young women perceived the idea of having a relationship with a man, specifically the idea of having sex for the first time (this was back when girls were forced to marry 40-year-old men at like age 14), and how at first its terrifying, but with time you learn to deal. I told you a tiny piece of your childhood would die. But I still love this story.
-The Grimm Brothers version is, in my opinion, significantly lamer than most other versions, especially the Disney version. I say this partially because the Disney version is wonderful in every way, shape and form, but mostly because I always kind of related to Belle in the Disney version because, very much like me in elementary and middle school, she never wanted to hang out with people because all she wanted to do was read, and she read more than most of the people she met (which, when you're reading the Odyssey at 10 years old like I did, is a thing that becomes obvious when you start telling one of your friends about this awesome book you're reading and these totally badass Sirens who sing an enchanted song to make sailors crash into the rocks and die and about how Odysseus's ship has to get between a six-headed sea monster and an insane whirlpool and this freaky witch-goddess who turns his men into pigs and will only change them back to human if Odysseus "goes to bed with her", which we knew by then meant sex... and then my friend tells me that they're reading the "fudge" books by Judy Bloom. Which you've already read. Four times. The first time was in second grade. Sigh...) , and everyone thought she was a total freak because of her love of reading (Which is a feeling I also became well-acquainted with when I read the Odyssey, because when I checked it out from my elementary school's library, the librarian told me "You know you have to return this in two weeks, right?" and I said "Yeah, I know," not quite getting what she meant by that, and she went to the student teacher who was helping her out with the oh-so-difficult job of running an elementary school library, and pointed at me and said "This girl thinks she can read the Odyssey in two weeks" and they both laughed. I am completely serious-they laughed at me! So when I came back two weeks later and returned the book and they gave me a reading quiz on it and I got every last question right and they started asking me questions themselves and I got them all right and they were amazed I was like "AHAHAHAHAHAHA WHO'S LAUGHING NOW BITCHES?!?!?!".... then they put me in G & T, where I got to do things like learn how to make my own glue and really basic algebra-like how variables worked and stuff-and do word puzzles and riddles and learned how to knit and entered the young inventors fair and made it to the next level and got my name in the newspaper. To this day when I google myself I find stuff about the young inventors fair. Ahhhhhhhhh, that moment when I totally mindfucked those bitchy librarians was probably one of the best of my life... But I digress), And she has no real friends so she is talking to a sheep about her book at one point in the movie (Which I never did. I did, however, watch "Hercules" because every time I told someone my age that I was into Greek mythology, they mentioned "Hercules", so I figured I'd see just how much they knew about Greek Mythology. Let me say that the Disney movie "Hercules" is NOTHING like the actual myth-which is a rant for another day-and so I was quite disappointed that I obviously would not be able to discuss the books I was reading with any of my peers anytime soon. So if there were any sheep around, I might have given discussing the Odyssey with him/her/it a shot). Okay that is the last tangent I will go on. ANYWAY, I always liked Belle in the disney version because she was a smart girl who read a lot and wasn't shallow at all.
In the Grimm Brothers version, she didn't read. She mostly sat by the fire and sewed a lot. And after she and the Beast become fairly close friends, he proposes to her, and she thinks something along the lines of "well, he is pretty much my best friend, but he's too fugly to marry..." and says no. And he's totally nice about it too! He says he can understand how she wouldn't want to marry him and that he wasn't offended, and he even gave her an enchanted mirror so she could see her family and wouldn't feel so lonely! Did I mention the fact that he bought her tons of fancy gifts like jewelry and fancy dresses and fed her really well and gave her an amazing room to stay in and basically treated her like a princess? I would love to meet a guy like the beast, even if he was kinda freaky-looking. Freaky-looking people are more interesting anyway, and often less egotistical. And when she finds out that her father is sick, he lets her go visit him until he's better, and just asks that she checks in with him in a week so he knows she hasn't ditched him. She goes back home, her father gets better, and she totally forgets about the beast, until a few days after she was supposed to be back, she's like "oh wait..." and looks for him in the mirror, and he's crawling around his rose garden saying "Belle, please come back..." and basically as heartbroken as a teenage girl after a breakup (but in his case, it's not as fake and attention-seeking as most of the teenage breakups I've seen. He's actually heartbroken, so much that he starts to die. SIDE NOTE, FEEL FREE TO IGNORE: I was watching "1,000 ways to die" the other day, and this guy had something extremely dramatic happen to him and it gave him this intense rush of adrenaline, and he had a bad heart so it just gave out because of the stress of it all, and he died. It's kind of like that urban legend about the super-conservative Korean couple who had never had sex before, and when they finally decided to do it, they both dropped dead from the anticipation. I'm sure you would have t have some major health issues for that to happen, but I imagine the beast was experiencing something like this. But I'm no expert, and it's just a theorey. SIDE NOTE OVER.) She teleports back to the castle using this magic ring the beast gave her so she could return, and finds him lying on the ground next to a rosebush, and she says "don't die! I'll marry you!" and the spell is broken, he turns human, they get married, the end.
The reason I don't like that one as much is because there's no romance in it! She's shallow, but she doesn't want her friend to die, so she is like "fine I'll marry you if it means you won't die". Which is really sweet, but it would be better if she was already in love with him because of his personality... like in the Disney version.
-The classic version of the story, first published in French by Jeanne-Marie LePrince de Beaumont (SIDE NOTE: why do Europeans have so many names? Pablo Picasso's full name was Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso. How the hell did he remember all that?!? SIDE NOTE OVER), is quite a bit better, one of the main reasons being that Belle was the youngest of three daughters who all had a very rich father, and her two older sisters spent their time blowing their father's money on fancy clothes and extravagant means of entertainment, and they made fun of Belle because she preferred to spend her time reading (YES! Strike one point for introverted bookworm girls everywhere!!!!!). Then their father lost all of his money, and the two older sisters were basically screwed because they figured "we'll just find some rich husbands," but they were arrogant bitches and since now they had no money, no one wanted anything to do with them. However, since Belle was always so sweet and modest, everyone was worried about her and how she would adjust to being poor, and many rich boys proposed to her, but she chose to stay with her father to support him through the hard time he was having! How sweet is that? Basically, Belle busted her ass trying to make life as good for her family as possible, and her sisters just bitched about not being rich anymore and made fun of Belle a lot. Then, one day, their father got a letter saying that he had a chance to get some of his money back! Of course, his two daughters asked him for all sorts of fancy shit, and Belle just asked for a rose, because no roses grew by their crappy little house in the country where they lived now.
So the getting money back thing didn't work out for their father, and he got lost on the way home. He saw the beasts castle, walked over, found a shit load of food and wine on the table. He ate some food, had A LOT OF WINE, and fell asleep in one of the beds in the castle. The next day he found some new clothes laid out on his bed, and he was like "damn, the owner of this castle is a nice guy!" So as he's leaving, he sees a garden full of roses, and remembers that Belle wanted one. He goes to pick one... and this freaky beast appears and starts bitching him out. He says he loves his roses more than anything in the world, and that he's gonna kill the dude for trying to mess with them. He says he can have 15 minutes to prepare himself to die. The guy BEGS to live, and mentions that he has daughters to take care of, and the beast decides that he can send one of his daughters to take his punishment for him, but the daughter has to come willingly. The guy isn't thrilled about sending one of his daughters to the beast, but he also doesnt want to die, so he does what any good parent would do-he says "sure!" and goes off to send one of his daughters to be a prisoner and most likely killed, even though he was the one who accidentally pissed off the beast. Dickhead. Of course, Belle agrees to save her fathers life. (the sisters ended up marrying rich guys). Needless to say, Belle was FREAKING OUT, ut that night she had a dream that a fairy came to her and told her that her selfless act of giving up her life for her fathers would not go unrewarded, so that made her feel a little better. So Belle says bye-bye to her father, and is pretty much convinced that the beast is gonna kill her and eat her that night (why he would wait for night, i have no clue, but whatever), so she decides to explore the castle until then. Much to her surprise, she finds a room that says "Belle's appartment" on the door in gold, and inside there is a HUGE library (that's one of my favorite parts of the Disney movie, when he shows her the library!!!!!!!!). She finds a note that basically says "You are now the queen of the castle and whatever you want, I will get it for you". She wishes to see her father again, and she looks at a mirror and sees her family, and her sisters are glad she's gone. Later, the beast shows up while she's eating dinner and just asks her if she thinks he's ugly. She says "Yes, I'm not going to lie. But I believe you are a good person on the inside." He tells her that he just wants her to be happy in the castle with him and to make herself at home. So they chat for a while and he calls himself a monster, and she tells him that she knows a ton of normal-looking humans who are more deserving of the title of "monster" than he is because he is so nice. So, of course, he asks her to marry him. Keep in mind, this is still her first night at the castle, so she says "no". His feelings are hurt, but he doesn't get mad. She feels bad for him. Over the next few months, they become such good friends that Belle hardly even notices the way he looks anymore. The only problem is that he keeps asking her to marry him, and she keeps saying no. One day she asks to visit her father because since her sisters got married, he's alone now. The beast feels like she's gonna leave him and gets sad, and she promises to return in a week. When she gets home her sisters come for a visit. Her sisters are both very unhappy in their marriages, so when Belle tells them how happy she is with the beast, they get extremely jealous and decide that they want to convince her to stay for over a week, hoping that the beast will get mad and kill her. So when she say she's going to leave, they throw a huge fit and she promises to stay a little longer. While she's there, she worries about the beast and realizes that she really misses the beast. She doesn't want to hurt his feelings by staying longer than she said she would, but as i said her sisters threw a huge fit making it hard for her to leave. On her tenth night at her fathers, she dreams that she's in the castle's garden and she sees the beast lying dead in the middle of it. She wakes up and freaks out and decides that even though she doesn't love him as much as he loves her, she'd rather marry him than see him die, and she feels like she owes it to him (where is the romance in that, I ask you?!?!?!?!? That makes me angry. That little tidbit just ruins this version for me). She returns to the castle and finds him almost dead in the garden. He says "you forgot your promise. I got so depressed that I stopped eating. But at least I got to see you one last time before I died." When she hears this, somehow her feelings change from "we're just friends, but i guess I'll marry you because I owe it to you" to "NOOOOOO I can't live without you!" (sounds a bit like hysteria to me). She tells him this and he turns into a prince. she asks "where'd teh beast go?" and he tells her that a wicked fairy put a spell on him that could only be broken when a beautiful virgin agreed to marry him (?). They walk into teh castle and the fairy is there, and she turns Belle's two sisters into statues that have to stand outside the castle and see Belle be happy forever until they can get over their envy and realize the error of their ways (they never turn back to humans). they get married and live happily ever after.
Okay, now it's 3 am and I'm tired. Those two stories were kind of downers, ut i have read mroe cheerful versions, so i know theyre out there! These two-the grimm version and the original-are ones that i thought i should tell in a little more detail, but in the future i won't repeat so many things if they show up multiple times. I think I'm gonna make this a series of blog posts because I found it interesting to read about, but there is no way I can fit all of the different versions of this story into one post. And I know there are some really different ones, because ive read them before, and these two were pretty similar, but in the future they wont be like that.
Okay, im too tired to type. I'll post more tomorrow, after ive done more research. bye!
