beauty and the beast by gabrielle suzanne de villeneuve

Even Cocteau’s delicate, dreamlike 1946 film La Belle et la Bête focuses on Belle’s awakening to the Beast’s virtue rather than the Beast experiencing a change. It’s a pattern echoed by Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, and even by Pride and Prejudice, in which the proud, rich Mr Darcy must reveal his true goodness to win the witty, bookish Elizabeth Bennet.Īnthony Trollope’s Ayala’s Angel has its impoverished, idealistic heroine reject the honourable Colonel Stubbs because of his bristly red hair and ugly surname, until she is persuaded by events that he is “the real Angel of Light” she has been seeking all along. Her Beast must learn to express his heart and mind to become worth loving. Yet Madame de Villeneuve’s version, on which numerous novels and films are based, argues – as Marina Warner says in From the Beast to the Blonde – “for marriages of true minds”. From depictions in antiquity to Canova’s sculptures, artists have tended to present a swooning Psyche in Cupid’s embrace rather than showing her as an active protagonist winning love and divine status in her own right.īeauty and the Beast: trailer for live-action adaptation starring Emma Watson Guardian The original interpretations of it are distasteful. Originally one of what the psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim called “animal groom” stories, intended to reassure virginal brides about sex, Beauty and the Beast has itself been repeatedly transformed. United, the body and soul produce a child, Pleasure.Įffectively, this is the plot of Beauty and the Beast, written by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve in 1740, and retold countless times under other names, from the Norwegian fairytale “East of the Sun, West of the Moon” to Sarah J Maas’s bestselling 2015 fantasy novel A Court of Thorns and Roses. She wins through, and Cupid begs, successfully, for her to be made immortal. The unhappy Psyche must win him back by going on a quest to placate the jealous Venus. When she is persuaded to kill him, the candle she smuggles in to the room reveals her lover to be Cupid, who flees, angered by Psyche’s betrayal.

Beauty and the beast by gabrielle suzanne de villeneuve