By: Pedro Guzman
Abstract
Beauty and the Beast is a tale type that can be found across time, location, and culture, and that explores issues of acceptance, alienation, inner goodness vs. outer beauty, and arranged marriages. While not a direct adaptation, Doctor Who’s “Deep Breath” incorporates Beauty and the Beast archetypes to comment on the kinds of people our society paints as “the other” and to create a lead female character who presents us with an attainable path to achieving goodness.
Introduction
To explore how Doctor Who’s “Deep Breath” responds to “Beauty and the Beast,” we first need to understand some of the mechanics behind Doctor Who, mainly about the Doctor. The Doctor is a humanoid-looking alien, and one of the things that distinguishes them as a character is their ability to regenerate. At the moment of death, every cell in the Doctor’s body changes, giving them a new physical form and personality, while retaining the same memories and identity. In this way, they are at once new and the same, and this has allowed the character to be portrayed by a variety of different actors. In 2013, the Eleventh Doctor regenerated into the Twelfth Doctor, marking a drastic change in tone for the show. What’s notable about this is age: Matt Smith was 26 when he was cast to play the Doctor, the youngest actor to ever take on the role. Peter Capaldi was more than twice Smith’s age, 56 years old at the time he took over the role— the oldest actor to play the part since the 1960s. With this shift in appearance came a drastic shift in personality. For years, the Doctor had been played as a young, charming, and kind character, but this changed with Capaldi’s arrival. The Doctor’s companion Clara Oswald was also present during this transformation, and she now finds herself in Doctor Who’s own version of a Beauty and the Beast tale, confronted with a Doctor she must get to know all over again. In transforming its main character from welcoming and young to brash and old, and giving its traditionally female character a selfish, controlling personality— series 8 of Doctor Who tells a “Beauty and the Beast” inspired tale that is less about inherent virtue, and more about making an effort to do good. Using an Archetypal lens, we can look at how different elements in “Deep Breath” engage with themes found in Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s “Beauty and the Beast.”
A same-sex Beauty and the Beast couple. One “Other” vs. Three
“Deep Breath” opens, and almost immediately presents us with a same-sex, interspecies couple: Vastra and Jenny. Vastra is a Silurian, a humanoid lizard, and Jenny is a human woman from the Victorian era. These two characters serve a dual purpose in the story— to help Clara come to terms with the Doctor’s transformation, and to demonstrate to the audience that love can exist multiple ways. In an early scene in “Deep Breath,” Clara struggles to accept the Doctor’s regeneration and new body: she asks Jenny what she would do “if [Vastra] was different, if she wasn’t the person that you liked?” Jenny responds to Clara, telling her that she doesn’t like Vastra, she “loves” her, and that difference doesn’t matter to her (Moffat). Here, we see a criticism of Clara’s relationship to the Doctor: if she cannot accept that his physical form has changed, then she doesn’t truly love him.
Vastra and Jenny fit into “Deep Breath,” not just as a comparison point for Clara’s relationship to the Doctor, but as a commentary on same-sex relationships. It’s in this way that “Deep Breath” uses this Beauty and the Beast archetype to explicitly make a point about love in our modern world. Where de Beaumont’s tale is explicitly about looking past a person’s physical form to love the person inside, the presence of Vastra and Jenny asks us to take that same idea and apply it to conceptions about gender, love, and same-sex relationships. “Deep Breath” aired on August 24, 2014, only months after the United Kingdom legalized same-sex marriage, and nearly a year before same-sex marriage was legalized nationwide in the United States. (Gerzic, Dau).
“Deep Breath” takes the Beauty and the Beast archetype, a reference point for how Clara should be able to see past the Doctor’s change if she truly loves him, and uses it to challenge the audience. If they believe that love can still exist when a person in a romantic relationship has a beast-like figure, they should also believe that gender doesn’t matter in relationships.
Throughout the episode, Vastra challenges Clara, judging her for being so hostile to the Doctor’s change. At the end, Clara eventually comes around, sees the Doctor for who he is, and decides to continue traveling with him (Moffat). However, it takes three different representations of “others” to get Clara to come to this understanding. In Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s “Beauty and the Beast,” the only figure that represents “the other” is the Beast. He’s alone in his otherness, and he is the only one who can plead that Beauty see his kindness and love him. In “Deep Breath,” however, there are multiple figures who represent “the other:” Vastra— who is not a human— Jenny, a woman who is married to a lizard person of the same sex as her— and the Doctor, othered by his status as an alien, and by his new, prickly personality and older-looking physical form (Moffat). It takes three embodiments of the “other,” three entirely different characters, to help Clara adjust and accept the Doctor for who he is. In presenting Clara as a selfish, stubborn character, “Deep Breath” tells us that people who might not have been othered, may need a lot of help to be able to understand another’s experiences, and that Beauty’s change of heart towards the beast at the end of “Beauty and the Beast” may take a lot more work than the tale communicates.
Perfect Beauty, Human Clara.
In de Beaumont’s “Beauty and the Beast,” Beauty comes to love the Beast out of her own virtue, and her own ability to recognize his kindness. But In Doctor Who, Clara needs help— a lot of it— to be able to see the Doctor for who he is now that his physical form and personality have changed. One of the main ways that “Deep Breath” draws its strongest contrast to “Beauty and the Beast,” is through its treatment of its female protagonist, Clara Oswald. In many ways, Clara is the opposite of Beauty in de Beaumont’s traditional tale. She’s selfish and controlling, described by both the Doctor and herself as an “egomaniac” (Moffat). There’s little about Clara that reminds one of Beauty’s inherent gentleness, fidelity, and self-sacrificial nature. When given a brain scan at the beginning of the episode, Clara is described as having “deflected narcissism” and “traces of passive-aggressive” (Moffat). Where Beauty suppresses her emotions as to not “make everyone even more sad,” Clara lets her anger burst out when challenged and judged (de Beaumont 44). Comparing the two, Clara is a much more human character.
Beauty is an attribute that is a luck-of-the-draw kind of thing. Some people have physical appearances that are deemed beautiful, others don’t. It is not a thing one has control over, or that one can change too much. In “Beauty and the Beast,” de Beaumont positions Goodness in the same way: an inherent quality, held by some, that determines their worth and their nature.
De Beaumont’s tale shines a light on goodness as an inherent quality to Beauty. It’s presented as something that she has to a degree that nobody else does, to the point that she turned down “all those who proposed to her” to stay and take care of her father (de Beaumont 40). An inner sort of beauty— not a quality that can be cultivated, but an attribute that she was born with. It is because of this inherent inner goodness that she possesses, that Beauty is able to see through the Beast’s scary exterior and come to love him. It is because of this inherent inner goodness that Beauty is able to transform the Beast, and break the curse.
Reading de Beaumont’s “Beauty and the Beast,” it’s hard to find anything that Beauty does wrong. She voluntarily sacrifices herself for her father, wishes for the simplest gift possible when asked to wish for one, she looks past the beast’s scary form to love him, and is rewarded for it (de Beaumont). While de Beaumont may have intended for Beauty to be a role model for how young girls should behave, Beauty’s behavior is unhealthy. She suppresses her emotions, wants, and needs totally, and puts others ahead of herself on every occasion. While it might be easy for de Beaumont to call Beauty virtuous and good, this is an unrealistic, unhealthy, and unattainable portrayal of what it means to be good. In Doctor Who, Clara doesn’t have that inherent inner virtue— she’s probably more like Beauty’s sisters than she is Beauty. A large theme in series 8 of Doctor Who is this idea of goodness, with the Doctor’s driving question after having regenerated and trying to solidify who he is being: “Am I a Good Man?” Clara’s answer to him, when asked, is “I don’t know… but I think you try to be and I think that’s probably the point” (Moffat and Ford).
Through its depiction of Clara Oswald in “Deep Breath,” and her journey from rejecting the Doctor’s new form, to coming to accept him for who he is, Doctor Who says sends a different message than “Beauty and the Beast” about what it means to be good. It says that goodness is a quality that can be cultivated, that you can strive to have— not something that, like physical beauty, you are either born with or without. Clara’s struggle to see the Doctor for who he is, her complex emotions, her outbursts of anger, and her eventual change of heart at the end of the episode demonstrate to the audience how an actual human being would react in a situation when confronted with a more Beast-like figure. Doctor Who, in its most complex depictions of both the Doctor and companion, tells us that “Beauty and the Beast” is a lie. The truth, instead, is that people are messy, selfish, and rude. They don’t understand others off the bat, it’s not easy for them to change what they believe. It tells us that Beauty— the character— is an ideal that can’t be reached, and instead presents us with Clara: a flawed, complex, human character, who overcomes her fear and uncertainty to come to understand her friend.
Conclusion
Through its depiction of an interspecies, same-sex relationship, and the complex, flawed character of Clara Oswald, “Deep Breath” demonstrates how Doctor Who engages with the themes and archetypes in the traditional Beauty and the Beast tale. Presenting us with Clara Oswald, a stark contrast to de Beaumont’s Beauty, Doctor Who provides its audience with a realistic depiction of a character found in a Beauty-and-the-Beast-like situation, and a realistic model of what a path to being good might actually look like for a human. With the character of Clara Oswald— with all her flaws, anger, wit, and emotions— Doctor Who tells us that we don’t have to be perfect, like Beauty. Instead, we can be flawed, lean on others for help, and strive for goodness, like Clara.
Works Cited:
- Doctor Who, Series 8 Episode 1, “Deep Breath,” directed by Ben Wheatley, written by Steven Moffat, performed by Peter Capaldi, Jenna Coleman, and others, aired August 24, 2014, on BBC One and BBC America.
- Doctor Who, Series 8 Episode 1, “Into the Dalek” directed by Ben Wheatley, written by Phil Ford and Steven Moffat, performed by Peter Capaldi, Jenna Coleman, and others, aired August 24, 2014, on BBC One and BBC America.
- Gerzic, Marina, and Duc Dau. “’I Love Her and, as to Different, Well, She’s a Lizard’: Queer and Interspecies Relationships in Doctor Who.” The UWA Profiles and Research Repository, SWANSEA UNIV, 14 Jan. 2019, https://research-repository.uwa.edu.au/en/publications/i-love-her-and-as-to-different-well-shes-a-lizard-queer-and-inter
- Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, “Beauty and the Beast”
