Fairy Tale and Film

Fairy Tale and Film
(ATU 1678).
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(Interestingly, in Tatar’s 
Hard Facts
, she simply describes 
this youth as a fool, protected by his ignorance (2003: 99), and while 
Zipes notes substantial revision to the tale by the Grimms – its hero 
changing from a ‘resolute young boy from a peasant family’ to a dumb-
bell king’s son who is too stupid to be fearful – the point about sexual 
excitement is seemingly missed altogether!! (2002b: 31).) 
Even if we read the tale as one of maturation through sexual initia-
tion, we might question how unique it is in presenting a hero craving 
‘emotion’. Contrary to Tatar’s claim about male stoicism in fairy tales, 
various figures are far from chaste or chivalrous in their pursuit of 
wives, and ‘love’ is assumed to simply occur between spouses. Female 
characters rarely have an opportunity to decline marital arrangements 
(haughty brides are humbled into submission, as we have seen) and few 
tales delve into any ensuing difficulties, leading Marcia Lieberman to 
argue that fairy tales are ‘preoccupied with marriage without portray-
ing it; as a real condition it’s nearly always off-stage’ (1984: 199). It is 
consequently notable that an attempt to interrogate matrimonial rela-
tions should be a key theme for so many female writers in seventeenth-
century France, who were accustomed to arranged marriages and either 
voiced objection to such a union (with tales featuring ogre husbands) or 
endeavoured to idealise the prospect by showing how a beastly man can 
transform into a caring partner. At the time, as Warner asserts, ‘romance – 
love-in-marriage – was an elusive ideal, which the writers of the 
contes
de 
feés 
sometimes set up in defiance of destiny’ (1995: 278). Interestingly, 
in the first published version of ‘Beauty and the Beast’, written by 
Mme de Villeneuve in 1740, the curse is attributed to a wicked fairy 
who was romantically spurned. As Warner puts it, ‘Villeneuve portrays 
the Beast as the victim of an aged and malignant fairy who laid the 
terrible curse on him when the handsome youth turned down her 
amorous advances’ (1995: 290).
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The Disney film, 
Beauty and the Beast
(Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, 1991), reworks this explanation, suit-
ably sanitised, yet significantly reproves the Beast’s demeanour. The 
prince rebuts an old woman at his door, who asks for a night’s shelter 
in exchange for a rose. The point is doubly ironic: having twice (mis)-
judged by appearances, the crone turns out to be a beautiful enchantress 
and the rose (whose worth he similarly dismisses) a magic device that 
will henceforth monitor his fate. Stating that he has no love in his 
heart, she turns him into a Beast until the last petal falls, asserting that 
if he finds no one to love him by this point (his twenty-first birthday) 
he will remain forever in this state. Although he initially treats Belle 
brusquely when she comes to live at his castle, the narrative reveals 

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Transformations and Male Maturation 
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him to be capable of change, favourably paralleling him against the 
dastardly Gaston. Chest swollen with pride, surrounded by flunkies and 
hunting trophies, misusing his power in his pursuit of Belle (and perse-
cution of her father), Gaston is an old-fashioned alpha male whose arro-
gant machismo simply aligns her loyalty to the Beast, and ultimately 
humanises him. Warner asserts that ‘attitudes to the Beast are always 
in flux, and even provide a gauge of changing evaluations of human 
beings themselves ... and specifically, since the Beast has been primarily 
identified with the male since the story’s earliest forms, what it is to be 
a man’ (1995: 279). Disney’s film version is considered a key turning 
point in this respect, the Beast winning Belle by his ability to change – 
under her guidance – and Warner goes so far as to claim ‘this fairy tale 
film is more vividly aware of contemporary sexual politics than any 
made before it’, its screenwriter, Linda Woolverton, deliberately aiming 
at a generation of ‘mothers who grew up with Betty Friedan and Gloria 
Steinem’ (313). Nonetheless, for all the ‘emancipated touches’ given to 
the heroine, ‘the film’s message concerns maleness, its various faces and 
masks, and in the spirit of romance, it offers hope of regeneration from 
within the unregenerate male’ (315).
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