beauty & the beast (+ variations)
There’s a certain danger when you call your story a feminist one. You set the bar for yourself, and it’s difficult to live up to. Oftentimes, when things call themselves “feminist” I find that they’re not feminist at all. This was the problem I had with Barbara Walker’s “Ugly And The Beast”. Actually there were a lot of problems I had with “Ugly And The Beast”, mostly there was absolutely no creative impulse. She basically rewrote the tale with an absurdly unattractive lady and called it good enough. The story still ends with some highly moralistic, twee drivel except for it’s more in line with the Walker’s personal ideology as opposed to the ideology in the Beaumont version. You see, for Walker the Beast isn’t under a spell - he’s just a beast. Similarly, Ugly is just ugly. But they fall in love anyway and learn to cherish one another without being vain the way attractive people are.
Which. Oh my fucking god. I understand that it’s easy to fall into this trap when you’re not traditionally attractive, and to some extent I’ve been there (and end up there still) as well but this bullshit that pretty people are always vapid and just can’t see beyond exteriors while ugly people can? No. That’s bullshit. And really, it’s blatantly bullshit from the outset because be identifying people as “pretty” or “ugly” you’re hung up on appearances. So no. “Ugly people” can be just as vapid as “pretty people” and “pretty people” are just as capable of looking beyond the physical as “ugly people” and. And.
And anyway, Walker just enforces a lot of normative beauty standards. You see, Ugly is fat. She has crooked teeth and a hunched back and small eyes which is to say, a ton of traits which mean you can never be pretty. Fat people aren’t pretty. People with crooked teeth aren’t pretty. Someone with a hunched back, or small eyes, or a bulbous nose, or bowed legs? No. People like this are always ugly. Which. Of course. She couldn’t just specify that Ugly was, well, ugly and leave it up to our imaginations. Oh no. She had to make sure that we knew just what kind of ugly she was. Which, of course, entailed being handicapped and fat.
And, of course, Ugly’s redeeming characteristic is that she’s nice and a hard worker. Is she smart? Nope. Capable? Nope. Resourceful? Nope. Strong? Not really. Her virtues are relegated to the same spheres as Beaumont’s Beauty’s were. Even worse, at least Beaumont’s Beauty was allowed to read, to love book and enjoy learning. Ugly doesn’t read. There’s only passing mention of her skimming a book. Mostly she’s just sitting around, getting to know the Beast and doing her womanly duty of being kind. I just. What.
In contrast is Tanith Lee’s “The Beast” which was fascinating. Gorgeously written and haunting and. I just. It’s always hard for me to talk about things I like, especially when compared with how easy it is for me to rant about things I don’t like, but I think what struck me about “The Beast” was it’s ambiguity, both narrative and moral, and how alluring it was, how sensual. Beauty (Isobel) and the beast (Vessavion) fell in love first. There was no coercion. They trusted each other, told each other everything, and had lots of, well, basically, really great sex together and honestly there was a lot more reader investment on my part because of that. I actually cared about their relationship - I thought it strangely codependent, but also gorgeous. As for the ambiguity, well, at the end you find out that Vessavion has been hunting down ugly creatures, rending the single beautiful thing from them (the beautiful thing which they always have - hair, breasts, eyes) and keeping these things in a storeroom. Isobel eventually finds this out. What’s truly interesting, though, is her response - she seems distressed mostly because Vessavion has been seeking out beautiful things beyond her; I didn’t get much disgust on her part considering that he was killing (or at least maiming) people. So it’s ambiguous in that respect. It’s also ambiguous morally because Isobel kills him pretty callously and I, at least, was left wondering who truly was the beast figure in the story.
At any rate, the story that made perhaps the most impact on me was Angela Carter’s “The Tiger’s Bride”, which dealt with a transformation of the beauty of the story into some kind of furred creature (the story is ambiguous as to what furred creature). I do think there is something really intriguing in transformation, especially when the transformation changes a character not back into the normative (human) state but into the abnormal state, the animal or the beast or the social outsider. The narrator’s transformation (into … what? A tiger-woman? A horse-girl?) was the most fascinating part of the story for me. Indeed, I was waiting for that moment of transformation ever since I read about it in Tatar’s introduction. What I wanted to know after that was this - how did she cope with those changes? What about those changes changed her internally? And what remained the same? I almost considered writing a piece for it, but realized that I didn’t really know the answer, and thus had nothing to write about. Thus ever a mystery it shall remain.
Which. Oh my fucking god. I understand that it’s easy to fall into this trap when you’re not traditionally attractive, and to some extent I’ve been there (and end up there still) as well but this bullshit that pretty people are always vapid and just can’t see beyond exteriors while ugly people can? No. That’s bullshit. And really, it’s blatantly bullshit from the outset because be identifying people as “pretty” or “ugly” you’re hung up on appearances. So no. “Ugly people” can be just as vapid as “pretty people” and “pretty people” are just as capable of looking beyond the physical as “ugly people” and. And.
And anyway, Walker just enforces a lot of normative beauty standards. You see, Ugly is fat. She has crooked teeth and a hunched back and small eyes which is to say, a ton of traits which mean you can never be pretty. Fat people aren’t pretty. People with crooked teeth aren’t pretty. Someone with a hunched back, or small eyes, or a bulbous nose, or bowed legs? No. People like this are always ugly. Which. Of course. She couldn’t just specify that Ugly was, well, ugly and leave it up to our imaginations. Oh no. She had to make sure that we knew just what kind of ugly she was. Which, of course, entailed being handicapped and fat.
And, of course, Ugly’s redeeming characteristic is that she’s nice and a hard worker. Is she smart? Nope. Capable? Nope. Resourceful? Nope. Strong? Not really. Her virtues are relegated to the same spheres as Beaumont’s Beauty’s were. Even worse, at least Beaumont’s Beauty was allowed to read, to love book and enjoy learning. Ugly doesn’t read. There’s only passing mention of her skimming a book. Mostly she’s just sitting around, getting to know the Beast and doing her womanly duty of being kind. I just. What.
In contrast is Tanith Lee’s “The Beast” which was fascinating. Gorgeously written and haunting and. I just. It’s always hard for me to talk about things I like, especially when compared with how easy it is for me to rant about things I don’t like, but I think what struck me about “The Beast” was it’s ambiguity, both narrative and moral, and how alluring it was, how sensual. Beauty (Isobel) and the beast (Vessavion) fell in love first. There was no coercion. They trusted each other, told each other everything, and had lots of, well, basically, really great sex together and honestly there was a lot more reader investment on my part because of that. I actually cared about their relationship - I thought it strangely codependent, but also gorgeous. As for the ambiguity, well, at the end you find out that Vessavion has been hunting down ugly creatures, rending the single beautiful thing from them (the beautiful thing which they always have - hair, breasts, eyes) and keeping these things in a storeroom. Isobel eventually finds this out. What’s truly interesting, though, is her response - she seems distressed mostly because Vessavion has been seeking out beautiful things beyond her; I didn’t get much disgust on her part considering that he was killing (or at least maiming) people. So it’s ambiguous in that respect. It’s also ambiguous morally because Isobel kills him pretty callously and I, at least, was left wondering who truly was the beast figure in the story.
At any rate, the story that made perhaps the most impact on me was Angela Carter’s “The Tiger’s Bride”, which dealt with a transformation of the beauty of the story into some kind of furred creature (the story is ambiguous as to what furred creature). I do think there is something really intriguing in transformation, especially when the transformation changes a character not back into the normative (human) state but into the abnormal state, the animal or the beast or the social outsider. The narrator’s transformation (into … what? A tiger-woman? A horse-girl?) was the most fascinating part of the story for me. Indeed, I was waiting for that moment of transformation ever since I read about it in Tatar’s introduction. What I wanted to know after that was this - how did she cope with those changes? What about those changes changed her internally? And what remained the same? I almost considered writing a piece for it, but realized that I didn’t really know the answer, and thus had nothing to write about. Thus ever a mystery it shall remain.