Jaz Galvez // HNRS 3200 // Fall 2022
Literature takes many forms, with many purposes and many manifestations. It is often used as a mirror reflection to the world that is happening tangentially to it. Literature is used to tell the truth about events, showing us the unsavory history. However, literature is also used to cover up issues and shape our perspective. There is no one “right” history, and finding authenticity in history is a problem that has plagued scholars for many years.
With so many historical “truths” being molded by the victor, and even more being covered up by years of alternating history, what is “truth” is often impossible to find. In the midst of this confusion, we turn to literature as a pathway to guide us. When authors are oppressed, their words silenced by those who do not wish them to share their stories, they turn to the written word. Disguising their stories, lessons, and morals in fables and fairy tales, these morals sneak through unnoticed by those who wish to keep them hidden. As years go on, these fables are adapted over and over, slowly twisting and warping into versions almost unrecognizable with their original counterparts. These tales go from stories of morality and safety for children to adverts for the latest toy or marketed movie. We see this time and time again in modern media. “Beauty and the Beast” becomes Twilight, and with it the initial meaning of marital anxiety is boiled down to a tween heartthrob fantasy. The Little Mermaid gets her happy ending in arguably the world’s most famous iteration, the Walt Disney Animation Company’s movie, sapping out the heartbreaking ending and moral tied to our original version. Cinderella is rebranded as a feminist icon, hanging up the glass slippers in favor of a leather briefcase in career oriented movies. Meanwhile, a feminist viewing of her original tale showcases the ways in which Cinderella is the ultimate male fantasy who is doomed to a life of objectification.
This essay will aim to showcase how literature is both a tool for truth and a slave to ever changing history, with no two works of literature at different points ever being the same. Within these pages I will inquire into when literature has been a tool forging its own path, and when it has been a slave to its past and future readers and their ever-changing histories.
Firstly, I would like to examine literature as truth. As discussed in this course, oftentimes fables and fairy tales are instructional tools for the youth. Their use and purpose in the classroom of life is simple: instruct children. Asop’s Fables, Grimm Brothers tales, Charles Perault’s stories: all of these have morals and lessons built in for the greater good of the children in their target audience. These works act as thinly veiled allegories for anything from the dangers of sexual predators to kindness principles and the idea of creating a communal society. They serve as introductory thought and oftentimes tell real world issues in easily digestible parts.
Take for example, the fairy tale of “Little Red Riding Hood”. “Little Red Riding Hood” is a fable we all know and love. In this classic story by Charles Perrault, our protagonist, Little Red Riding Hood, embarks on a perilous journey through the forest to deliver cakes and butter to her sickly grandmother. She is stalked through the journey by a hungry and menacing wolf. Ultimately, she perishes at the hands of the Wolf.
This story is a thinly veiled allegory about sexual purity and the dangers of older, charming men preying upon and taking advantage of young, innocent girls. Lines like, “From this story one learns that children,/ Especially young girls, / Pretty, well-bred, and genteel, / Are wrong to listen to just anyone…” (Tartar 17) drive home how this story is one about sexual purity and vulnerability. “Little Red Riding Hood” is a tale in the first category of literature: one whose goal is to inform. The wolf is not to be taken at face value. Rather, he represents a litany of older men who prey upon young sexually immature girls. This story was told to children over and over from a young age in order to drive home its defining message of being cautious around strangers. Rather than explaining that message in their own words, fables and tales like “Little Red Riding Hood” were created to have a repetitive and sticking story that could slip the morals into the child’s subconsciousness much like you mask medicine in a sweet treat.
A multitude of other stories also have morals and messages slipped into them. One of the most notable ones is “Beauty and the Beast”. Most modern people view this story and its subsequent morals from the perspective of the classic Disney Animation movie. The 1991 Disney renaissance classic tells the tale of Belle, a wistful only child to oddball inventor Maurice. Belle is known as the most beautiful, and the weirdest, girl in the whole village. Nose always buried in a book, she rebuffs even the town’s most sought after bachelor, Gaston, in favor of dreaming of more than her simple life. Through a series of missteps and challenges, Belle finds herself captive in the Beast’s abandoned castle. Imprisoned there, Belle’s initial loathing of the Beast softens to love as she reveals his kindhearted nature and sentimental side. Through her interactions with the Beast, Belle learns– and the audience is subsequently taught- not to judge a book by its cover and that good can remain in the heart of all of us, no matter how ghastly the outer appearance (Beauty and the Beast, 1991).
Though this is the version most of us are familiar with, there was originally a different version, with different hidden meanings and morals for its audience. The 1750’s version of “Beauty and the Beast” by author Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont (hereafter known as Beaumont) was originally a story to address marital and sexual anxiety. The Beast in this story was a metaphor for a woman’s fear of her husband’s lustful desires and actions on their wedding night. Let us examine our cast of characters and their actions again, shall we? A father loses his daughter to a “Beast”, giving her away to live in a new location and share a home with a creature whose cold exterior and foreboding presence shake him to his core. This is a textbook analogy for a father giving away his daughter into marriage, and the unspoken but subsequent sexual activity that follows. On page 40, when Beaumont is describing the Belle character of this story, Beauty, she not only makes it a point to identify Beauty as the most attractive of her siblings, but then goes to identify her as fiercely loyal to her innocence and father. Beaumont writes, “Since the girls were known to be very wealthy, many prominent merchants were interested in marrying them… Beauty … (the youngest daughter)… very politely thanked all those who proposed to her, but she told them that she was still too young for marriage and that she planned to keep her father company for some years to come” (Tartar 40). The use of highlighting her age and her loyalty to her father is to pull on her audience at the time’s heartstrings. It is a way to say here, look at this young girl, look how vulnerable she is!
Beauty in this story is also highlighted for her docility and domesticity. She is seen as an idealistic daughter, heightening the feeling of protection the audience has towards her. When her father is going away on business all her sisters request lavish gifts. Beauty instead asks for a simple rose, saying she wished to have once as, “(for) there are none here?” (Tartar 41). This sense of idealistic beauty in viewing the world is what makes Beauty so pure. She craves not jewels, nor fancy silks, nor money. Insead, she simply wants to appreciate the beauty in everyday life. This innocence is all the more damaged then, when the picking of said rose is what leads to her capture and imprisonment by the Beast. The rose is often a symbol of innocence. The rose coupled with Beauty’s tendency to ask little of her family all paint a picture of a pure, virgin woman to whom the most frightening thing possible has happened: she has been promised to a man. This version of “Beauty and the Beast” being an allegory for sexual fears upon one’s wedding night is vastly different from the classic disney movie so many of us had on VHS as children. Though the two share plot points, characters, and settings, their cultural interpretation as well as the symbols and plot devices highlighted have changed these forms of literature to mean drastically different things. How can this be so? Simple, literature is ever changing.
No two story interpretations can ever truly be the same. Personal bias, cultural relevance at the time, and world events all shape our interpretations of stories. This has never been truer than in the vastly expanding instantaneousness of this digital age we find ourselves in. With the immediate transfer of information, it has never been easier to speedrun cultural interpretations of classic fairy tales and their adaptations. In the article “Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality, and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale (review)” published by the Wayne State University Press in the academic journal, “Marvels & Tales”, author Cathy Lynn Preston reviews a book categorizing the ways “Little Red Riding Hood” has transitioned from a story about sexual prowess to a family tale and bedtime story of a courageous little girl. When discussing the author’s delve into varying versions of “Little Red Riding Hood”, Preston states, “Each text is historically situated. For example, Perrault’s text is read in relation to the social history of the French court at Versailles, sexually charged and “notorious for its excesses,” a playground for seduction in “an age of institutionalized chastity” (36). The Grimms’ text is read against the background of German and English, middle-class, Victorian, family values: “discipline, piety, primacy of the father in the household and, above all, obedience” (55). Set side by side the two texts, Orenstein argues, represent a shift from “sexual parable to family fable” (56), while also marking a shift in audience from adult to child and from upper to middle class.” (Preston 133). Both the reviewer and original author agree, each version of a classic tale is molded and shaped by the views of people in its time. As young women gained more rights and protections, Little Red became less of a victim and more of a heroine. Going from being devoured in the original Perrult version (Tatar 17), to killing the wolf in more modern adaptations, such as the musical Into the Woods, Little Red as a character and her story as a whole are fluid with the time she is written.
No story better exemplifies this perhaps, than “Beauty and the Beast”. The original Beaumont version of this tale was an allegory for marital and sexual anxiety. It represented fear of sex and all things beastly, animalistic, and taboo. In the 21st century, Beauty and the Beast type stories have taken quite the opposite turn, with them now being framed as lustful, desirable sexual stories about an ordinary girl and her monstrous boyfriend. One famous example of this is the popular 2010’s book and movie series, Twilight.
Twilight rose to popularity in the 2010’s as a fictional novel series about human girl, Bella Swan, and her love triangle with brooding vampire, Edward, and loyal werewolf, Jacob. In these books, Bella falls in love with bad-boy vampire Edward. The trilogy culminates with Bella turning into a vampire and starting a family with Edward after her subsequent marriage to him. The fascinating thing about this modern “Beauty and the Beast” tale is that it completely flips the original moral of Beaumont’s version on its head. Instead of Bella – our Belle type – being afraid of the Beast (Edward in this case), she is drawn to him. One could argue this is simply because it is a teen-ified version of the classic Disney version of Beauty and the Beast. However, there are still major inconsistencies within this comparison being drawn. In the Disney “Beauty and the Beast”, the Beast does not have any malicious intent towards Belle. He is angry, sure, but never intends to harm her. In Twilight, on the other hand, Bella is outright prey to Edward and his family, and it is not until they begin to get to know each other that this fact changes. This shift from fear of animalistic instinct to longing and arousal at it marks a culture shift in the modern age, and showcases how historical context and popular culture of the time define our fairy tales.
In “Romancing the Plot: The Real Beast of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast”, an article published in the academic journal “Children’s Literature Association Quarterly”, author June Cummins discusses how history and narrator’s agenda work in tandem to change our heroines to best fit their time. On the topic of Disney’s Belle vs the classical Beaumont Beauty, Cummins writes, “In Newsweek, David Arisen claimed that “from the start, the filmmakers knew they didn’t want Belle to be the passive character of the original story or a carbon copy of Ariel in The Little Mermaid, a creation some critics found cloyingly sexist”” (Cummins 1). Additionally she quotes Janet Maslin from The New York Times, stating “Belle is “a smart, independent heroine . . . who makes a conspicuously better role model than the marriage-minded Disney heroines of the past”” (Cummins 1). These reflections upon direct quotes from authors and animators of this movie in relation to their view of Belle showcase how outside agenda can directly culminate into changes when it comes to how a classic character is written and portrayed in adaptations. These Disney animators went in with a mission, to rebrand Belle as less of a damsel and more of a heroine. They wanted to keep her soft sentimental side, but ax the docile nature she was originally written with.
Cummins goes on to say, “Although it is clear that “Beauty and the Beast” has always been in part a love story, earlier printed versions of the tale offer valuable lessons in addition to emphasizing the love relationship. Disney, on the other hand, strips the traditional fairy tale of anything but the romantic trajectory, throws in a dose of violence, and woos its vast audience into believing it has been educated as well as entertained. Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, while initially presenting a more interesting and better developed heroine than those we find in other Disney animated features, undermines the gains it makes by focusing narrative attention on courtship as plot advancement and marriage as dénouement” (Cummins 1).
And here lies the core of my argument: all literature will inherently be ever changing and different not just because of outright changes from adaptation or adaptation, but because of each individual reader’s inherent bias, memories, and experiences they bring to the table. No two people can ever read “Beauty and the Beast”, or “Little Red Riding Hood”, or even “The Little Mermaid” the same because no two people have the same experiences as human beings. Therefore, literature is both about history and is living history.
Fairy tales have the unique ability to have started out as morals and lessons for children. For many of us, they were our first teachers. And yet, as we grow older, we explore and discover just how many adaptations of fairy tales there are in the world. From the raunchy and lustful retelling of “Beauty and the Beast” with Twilight, to the feminist and empowering retelling of “Little Red Riding Hood” with “Into the Woods” – where Little Red flips the tale on its head and kills the wolf herself, adorning herself in its coat – adaptations of classic tales are proof of the fluidity and impressionability of classic fairy tales and literature. They are all ever moving, ever changing, and ever growing in their personal history as well as their reactions to human history. Whether literature is a tool to teach morality, or a commentary and reaction to the lack of morality at the time, it is never the same twice.
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** WORKS CITED **
Tatar, Maria, and Charles Perrault. “CHARLES PERRAULT Little Red Riding Hood.” The Classic Fairy Tales: Texts, Criticism, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, New York, 2017, pp. 16–18.
Tatar, Maria, and Jeanne-Marie Leprince De Beaumont. “JEANNE-MARIE LEPRINCE DE BEAUMONT Beauty and the Beast.” The Classic Fairy Tales: Texts, Criticism, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, New York, 2017, pp. 39–50.
Meyer, Stephenie. Twilight. Little, Brown, 2013.
Preston, Cathy Lynn. “Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality, and the Evolution of A Fairy Tale (Review).” Marvels & Tales, Wayne State University Press, 15 Apr. 2004, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/54923/pdf.
Cummins, June. “Romancing the Plot: The Real Beast of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1 Jan. 2009, https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/249468/pdf.
Sondheim, Stephen, et al. “Hello Little Girl.” Into the Woods.
