If you ever want to see fairy tale nerds have a rumble, ask them whether or not “Beauty and the Beast” is a feminist story.
Disney has remained stalwartly on the affirmative side of the argument ever since it made its first version of Beauty and the Beast in 1991, when it positioned Belle as the studio’s “first feminist princess.”
Screenwriter Linda Woolverton — the first woman to write one of Disney’s animated features — says that in Belle, she wanted to create a princess “that isn’t based on being kind and taking the hits but smiling all the way through it.”
“Belle is such a hero of mine,” says Emma Watson, who plays Belle in the new live-action remake. “She was so fearless, defiant and had this independence of mind that I admired so much.”
But not everyone is so willing to interpret Belle as a feminist hero. In fact, some think she’s just the opposite. Take the recent Honest Trailers parody, in which Beauty and the Beast is “a tale as old as Stockholm syndrome,” and Mrs. Potts croons, “Cut her off from friends / And her family / Throw her in a cage / Fly into a rage / Unpredictably.”
The same argument tends to pop up around any version of “Beauty and the Beast,” including this year’s remake. Depending on your reading, the story is either deeply empowering and uplifting or profoundly oppressive and disturbing — and the roots of the debate go all the way back to the first canonical version of the story.
“Beauty and the Beast” is one of the only popular fairy tales with an active, take-charge heroine
In the fairy tales most of today’s Americans are familiar with, the heroines don’t tend to do all that much. Rapunzel waits listlessly in her tower for a prince to find her; Cinderella needs a fairy’s intervention just to get to a party; Snow White lies in her coffin like a corpse.
In large part, that’s because most of those stories come to us via the brothers Grimm, and as fairy tale scholar Ruth Bottigheimer has argued, the Grimms did not like active women. The Grimms wanted to make the stories they collected suitable for children, and so they curated, edited, and judiciously trimmed all of their folktales to reflect 19th-century German bourgeois family values. Wicked parents became wicked mothers and then wicked stepmothers; virtuous women lost their speech (Cinderella goes from 14 lines of dialogue to six over the course of the Grimms’ edits); and trickster girls and active-but-not-evil women disappeared entirely.
But “Beauty and the Beast” doesn’t come to us through the Grimms. The version of “Beauty and the Beast” that became canonical, and the primary source for the Disney versions, was written by an 18th-century French woman named Jeanne-Marie LePrince de Beaumont. Beaumont based her story on a popular folktale, but she gave it the form we know today. And she was writing her story specifically for young girls, which meant that her heroine became an active, story-driving protagonist.
So Beauty charges into the monster’s castle to rescue her father. She breaks the prince’s curse and saves the day. The Beast is nearly as passive as Rapunzel, sitting mournfully alone in his cursed castle, waiting for someone to break his spell, while Beauty is the active agent, the savior, and the hero.
This agency makes Beauty nearly unique among the classic fairy tale heroines that most Americans know, and it forms the crux of the argument that Beauty/Belle is an empowering feminist hero. We are used to fairy tale heroines being saved by handsome princes, but Beauty doesn’t need a man to save her. Beauty saves everyone herself.
“Beauty and the Beast” is designed to make arranged marriages look appealing. Today, that looks like Stockholm syndrome.
But Beaumont wasn’t writing “Beauty and the Beast” to empower girls as we understand the concept today. Her story has a clear moral lesson, one specifically meant for 18th-century France.
Beaumont’s “Beauty and the Beast” is framed as a story a governess is telling her young charges, girls aged 5 to 13, and its lesson is that arranged marriages aren’t as scary as you might think. It teaches a young girl that her new husband might seem monstrous — and, in the Beaumont story if not in other variations, exceptionally stupid — but underneath it all, he doubtless has a good heart. And once the young wife learns to see the goodness in her husband’s heart and love him just for that, he will come to seem beautiful and brilliant to her.
Beaumont’s Beauty is compelled to leave her home and live with a monster in order to save her father’s life, a move that in 18th-century France echoed and amplified the shock and fear an aristocratic young girl might feel having to leave her parents’ house to marry a much older near-stranger.
But modern readers likely don’t read it that way. In America today, we don’t generally approve of arranged marriages, and we tend to look sidelong at romantic relationships where one party is significantly older than the other. The power dynamics that Beaumont’s “Beauty and the Beast” works to render harmless and even attractive look, to today’s readers, like the setup for a situation rife with unhappiness, even abuse.
To modern eyes, Beauty’s decision to live with the Beast to save her father looks like a hostage exchange. The Beast is a kidnapper who holds all of the power, and Beauty is his victim. And that power disparity is amplified in both of the Disney versions, which each see the Beast locking Belle away behind bars and raging violently at her. (The violent rage isn’t in the original; Beaumont’s Beast provides Beauty with every luxury from the beginning, and chivalrously welcomes her with a poem: “Welcome, Beauty, / Have no fear, / You are queen and mistress here.”)
Under this reading, when Beauty at last tells the Beast that she loves him, it doesn’t feel like a genuine romantic decision made by a fully empowered woman under her own free will. It feels like the culmination of a whole story’s worth of emotional abuse and grooming.
“Beauty and the Beast” gives us a way of talking about consent and power and romantic relationships
The question of whether “Beauty and the Beast” is feminist or not will probably never be resolved one way or the other: It’s baked into the story’s structure and history. Beauty is one of the few really active, take-charge heroines in the fairy tales that we know well. At the same time, the power dynamics of her romantic relationship sure do look uncomfortably like Stockholm Syndrome in a modern context.
What “Beauty and the Beast” gives us is a way to talk about these questions. Like all great and enduring fairy tales, it serves a social function: It gives us a metaphor to use when we talk about romance and marriage and what the power dynamics therein should look like. For Beaumont, the story was a way of talking about arranged marriages. For the Greeks, “Beauty and the Beast” predecessor “Eros and Psyche” was a way of talking about the relationship between the soul and erotic love, and its other predecessor, “Hades and Persephone,” was a way of talking about the relationship between life and death.
Today, “Beauty and the Beast” is a way of talking about power, consent, and what constitutes inner beauty and who gets to have it. It’s about what we think love is, who is worthy of it, and when we believe in it.