Beauty and the Beast
PENGUIN CLASSICS
BEAUTY AND THE BEAST
MARIA TATAR is the John L. Loeb Professor of Folklore & Mythology and Germanic Languages & Literatures at Harvard University. She is the author of many acclaimed books, as well as the editor and translator of The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen, The Annotated Brothers Grimm, The Classic Fairy Tales: A Norton Critical Edition, The Grimm Reader, and The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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Introduction, notes, and selection copyright © 2017 by Maria Tatar
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Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following copyrighted works:
“Zeus and Europa” from Mythology by Edith Hamilton. Copyright 1940, 1942 by Edith Hamilton, renewed © 1969 by Doris Fielding Reid, Executrix of the will of Edith Hamilton. Reprinted by permission of Little, Brown and Company.
“The Muskrat Husband” from Cev’armiut Qanemciit Qulirait-llu: Eskimo Narratives and Tales from Chevak, Alaska compiled and edited by Anthony C. Woodbury (Alaska Native Language Center, University of Alaska, 1984/1992). Used by permission of Anthony C. Woodbury.
“A Boarhog for a Husband” from African American Folktales: Stories from Black Traditions in the New World by Roger Abrahams. Copyright © 1985 by Roger D. Abrahams. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
“The Monkey Bridegroom” and “Urashima Taro” from Folktales of Japan by Keigo Seki, translated by Robert J. Adams. Used by permission of Chicago University Press.
“Tale of the Girl and the Hyena-Man” from Tales Told in Togoland by Allan Wolsey Cardinall. First published for the International African Institute by Oxford University Press. Used by permission of the International African Institute.
“The Girl Who Married a Dog” from Indian Tales of North America by Tristam P. Coffins. Used by permission of American Folklore Society.
“The Turtle and the Chickpea” from Folktales of Greece, edited by Georgios A. Megas, translated by Helen Colaclides. Used by permission of University of Chicago Press.
“The Frog Maiden” from Burmese Folk Tales by Maung Htin Aung. Copyright © 1948 by Oxford University Press. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press India.
“The Peasant and Zemyne” from The Serpent and the Swan: The Animal Bride in Folklore and Literature, translated by Boria Sax (McDonald & Woodward, 1998). Used by permission of Boria Sax.
Source information for all of the selections in this book appears here.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Tatar, Maria, 1945— editor.
Title: Beauty and the beast: classic tales about animal brides and grooms
from around the world / edited by Maria Tatar.
Other titles: Beauty and the beast (Penguin Books)
Description: New York: Penguin Books, [2017]
Identifiers: LCCN 2016040960 (print) | LCCN 2017000535 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780143111696 | ISBN 9781101992951 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Fairy tales. | Human-animal relationships—Fiction.
Classification: LCC GR552 .B43 2017 (print) | LCC GR552 (ebook) |
DDC 398.2—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016040960
Cover art: Mirko Hanák / © 2016 Artists Rights Society / OOA-S, Prague
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Contents
About the Editor
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction: The Odd Couple in Tales as Old as Time
Suggestions for Further Reading
Acknowledgments
BEAUTY AND THE BEAST
Model Couples from Ancient Times
Zeus and Europa (Ancient Greece)
Cupid and Psyche (Ancient Rome)
The Girl Who Married a Snake (India)
Hasan of Basra (Persia)
Charismatic Couples in the Popular Imagination
Beauty and the Beast (France)
East of the Sun and West of the Moon (Norway)
King Pig (Italy)
The Frog King, or Iron Heinrich (Germany)
The Swan Maidens (England)
Princess Frog (Russia)
The Peri Wife (Hindu-Persian)
Animal Grooms
The Condor and the Shepherdess (Bolivia)
The Parrot Prince (Chile)
Nicholas the Fish (Colombia)
The Muskrat Husband (Alaska)
A Boarhog for a Husband (West Indies)
The Monkey Bridegroom (Japan)
Tale of the Girl and the Hyena-Man (Ghana)
The Story of Five Heads (South Africa)
The Golden Crab (Greece)
The Girl Who Married a Dog (Native American)
The Snake Prince (India)
The Small-Tooth Dog (England)
The Queen of the Pigeons (South Africa)
Animal Brides
The Grateful Crane (Japan)
The Piqued Buffalo-Wife (Native American)
The Turtle and the Chickpea (Greece)
The Frog Maiden (Myanmar)
Chonguita (Philippines)
Urashima Taro (Japan)
Oisin in Tir na n-Og (Ireland)
The Dog Bride (India)
The Swan Maiden (Sweden)
The Hunter and the Tortoise (Ghana)
The Peasant and Zemyne (Lithuania)
Puddocky (Germany)
The Man Who Married a Bear (Native American)
Sources
Introduction: The Odd Couple in Tales as Old as Time
“Beauty and the Beast” may be our culture’s love story about the transformative power of empathy, but it also has a dark side. It is not just that the tale has a high coefficient of weirdness, with monkeys, goats, lizards, and bears courting beautiful young women, and with cats, tortoises, dogs, and frogs revealing their talents to enraptured young men. It also has an emotional ferocity that encodes messages about how we manage social and cultural anxieties about romance, marriage, and “the other.” Beauty and the Beast stories speak a universal language—the story is as ubiquitous as “Cinderella”—but with messaging that is nearly always culturally inflected. Like all good folkloric memes, the tale migrates and morphs into new versions of itself, becoming entertaining in its heterogeneity, especially to readers familiar with other versions. It may be the tale as old as time, but it is never the same old story.
“Beauty and the Beast” ranks among the most popular of all fairy tales. It has been retold, adapted, remixed, and mashed-up by countless storytellers, writers, filmmakers, philosophers, and poets. Rich with implications about matters both aesthetic and existential, as its title implies, it derives its power in part from the mysterious mismatch between its two protagonists, with t
he one not only classically beautiful but also instinctively generous, the other grotesquely ugly and desperately needy. In a move rare in fairy-tale worlds, it gives us a double trajectory in its standard version, a cursed Beast in search of redemptive love, and a captive Beauty who discovers that essences transcend appearances.
The genius of “Beauty and the Beast” lies in its engagement with the cultural contradictions that riddle every romantic relationship, as well as the perils of leaving home and the possibilities of new family constellations. How do power and wealth figure in the calculus of marriage? What is the value of beauty? Of charisma? Of charm? What are the limits to forgiveness and compassion? How does marriage change family dynamics and vice versa? What is the right balance between compromise and dignity?
As we shall see, there are just as many handsome men and beasts as there are beautiful women and beasts. The two antithetical allegorical figures in the title have traditionally resolved their differences in what can be seen as a heteronormative myth of romantic love, yet the story’s representational energy is also channeled into the tense moral, economic, and emotional negotiations that complicate all courtship rituals and do not yield to easy solution.
There is something unapologetically contrived, if not perverse, about choreographing human courtship rituals using a human and a beast. And yet nearly every storytelling culture maps out dating practices with animal partners. Are the animals reminders of our fundamentally primitive nature? Are they proxies for the “beastliness” of sex? Are they remnants of a totemic purpose that once captured the spirit of a clan, family, or tribe? And why the stunning variety of beasts, with creatures ranging from snakes and warthogs to cranes and pigs?
“Animals are good to think with.” That is the wisdom of Claude Lévi-Strauss and countless other anthropologists. “Beauty and the Beast” illustrates that truism supremely well, combining animal magnetism with human charms to create a symbolic story about what it means to form a partnership both passionate and principled. The odd couple featured in “Beauty and the Beast” may not be so odd after all, for the two embody the mind/body problem, along with the many other binaries that shadow it, including the hierarchy that sets zoe over bios, instinct over intellect, social life over brute animal existence, rational consciousness over intuitive know-how. Beauty and the Beast stories are, then, not just about marriage, but also about our relationship and connection to the social world we share with other living beings.
There are also sound pragmatic reasons for storytellers to pair humans with beasts. Tales are always better with animals in them, as Yann Martel tells us in Life of Pi. And a curved mirror, one that distorts and takes us into the fun house, is always more compelling—and often more true—than a purely reflective one. That every culture seems to tell “Beauty and the Beast” in one fashion or another suggests that it is part of our DNA. We make the story new so that we can think more and think harder about the stakes in partnerships and marriages, as well as about a world that today is not merely anthropocentric but also biocentered with an ecophilosophical orientation. There is good reason to keep hitting the refresh button, and this volume offers an opportunity to pause and reflect on different versions of the story and on how it has changed as it migrates across time and place.
“Beauty and the Beast” is so deeply entrenched in our thinking about tales featuring a companionate/romantic pairing of beasts and humans that we are often unaware that it is a mere nostalgic remnant of a vast repertoire of stories about animal grooms and animal brides. Beast was not always a suitor living in regal isolation; Beauty was not always kept in a castle. Sometimes a young man will court an enchanted cat living in a castle. Or he will take home a crane disguised as a beautiful woman. Empathy and compassion are not always the answer to the challenges faced by Beauty/Handsome and Beast. Some spells are broken when animal skins are burned. Some beasts are disenchanted when their repulsed partners hurl them against walls. And decapitation also often succeeds in restoring a Beast to the human condition. And, finally, tragedy often haunts these stories, with animals that follow the call of the wild and return to nature rather than endure life in the “civilized” world.
This volume seeks to create a fuller spectrum of stories that commonly go by the name of “Beauty and the Beast.” It will explore plots, broadly speaking, about what folklorists call animal grooms and animal brides. It will reach into the long ago and far away, and it will also consider how those tales operate in a global network and make their way today through multiple media channels. And, finally, it will draw attention to the slipstream, stories that continue to glide along and make themselves visible in brief flashes, even as the classic “Beauty and the Beast” dominates the mainstream, continuing to surge in popularity.
THE ORIGINS OF OUR “BEAUTY AND THE BEAST”
Before mapping out the terrain of tales about animal grooms and animal brides, it is worth interrogating the terms of a version that has received the lion’s share of public attention and lives on vigorously in the cultural imagination, constantly recycled and renewed. The animal-groom story most familiar to Anglo-American audiences was penned in 1756 by Madame de Beaumont (Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont) for her Magasin des Enfants, designed to promote good manners in the young. Based on a baroque literary version of more than one hundred pages written in 1740 by Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve, Madame de Beaumont’s child-friendly “Beauty and the Beast” reflects a desire to transform fairy tales from adult entertainments into parables of good behavior, vehicles for indoctrinating and enlightening children about the virtues of fine manners and good breeding, often by strategically inserting standard-issue platitudes into the narrative.
The lessons and moral imperatives encoded in Beaumont’s “Beauty and the Beast” serve as an ethical antidote in some ways to the outrageous subject matter of the tale—innocent girl incarcerated by a ferocious beast. They pertain almost exclusively to the young women in the story, who, in a coda, are showered with either praise or blame. As Angela Carter points out, the moral of Madame de Beaumont’s tale has more to do with “being good” than with “doing well”: “Beauty’s happiness is founded on her abstract quality of virtue.”1 With nervous pedagogical zeal, Madame de Beaumont concludes her tale in a frenzy of plaudits and aspersions. Beauty has “preferred virtue to looks” and has “many virtues” along with a marriage “founded on virtue.” Her two sisters, by contrast, have hearts “filled with envy and malice.”
What exactly makes Beauty virtuous? To begin with, she seems possessed of a yen for acts of self-sacrifice. After discovering that Beast is willing to let her father go as long as one of his daughters shows up at the castle, she declares: “I feel fortunate to be able to sacrifice myself for him, since I will have the pleasure of serving my father and proving my feelings of tenderness for him.” To be sure, not all Beauties are such willing victims, valuing subordination over survival. In the Norwegian “East of the Sun and West of the Moon,” the heroine has to be coaxed into submission with promises of wealth. She agrees to marry Beast (a white bear) because her father badgers her: “[He] kept on telling her how rich they would be and how well she herself would do. Finally, she agreed to the exchange.”2
That the desire for wealth and upward mobility motivates parents to turn their daughters over to beasts points to the possibility that these tales mirror social practices of an earlier age. Many an arranged marriage must have felt like being tethered to a monster, and the telling of stories like “Beauty and the Beast” may have furnished women with a socially acceptable channel for providing advice, comfort, and the consolations of imagination. Written at the dawn of the Enlightenment, Madame de Beaumont’s tale attempted to steady the fears of young women, to reconcile them to the custom of arranged marriages, and to brace them for an alliance that required effacing their own desires and submitting to the will of a “monster.”
It is easy to see why “Beauty and the Beast” managed to survive
at the expense of its folkloric cousins. By pairing two figures renowned for their spectacular looks, the story created endless possibilities for aesthetic collisions, emotional conflict, and cognitive wobbles. It also produced opportunities for talking about the moral and financial economies at stake in domestic arrangements. And it provided the consolation of happily ever after in a story that seems to be racing toward a tragic denouement. What is not to love about the romance in “Beauty and the Beast,” a story that turns antagonists into allies and brings out the best in both human and beast?
CLASSIFYING ANIMAL BRIDES AND ANIMAL GROOMS
Once we look at the entire array of stories featuring the romantic entanglements of humans and beasts, the phrase “absurd neglect” comes to mind. Why have we sacrificed richness and complexity for regimented predictability? To be sure, there is some melodic diversity and tonal variation in our reorchestrations of “Beauty and the Beast,” but why choose less when you can have more in the repertoire? And why, in particular, miss the opportunity to reflect on the full range of possibilities that once characterized the many narratives told by our ancestors, who each added new ingredients to improve the flavor and zest of the stories?
Folklorists long ago recognized that classification systems can be clarifying and that they help us understand what is at stake in clusters of tales with shared affinities. Beyond that, they shed light on the origins and dissemination of tales, on gender roles and generational conflicts, as well as on which elements of a story are universally relevant and which are culturally specific. What folklorists call a tale type provides a useful tool for broadening our understanding of “Beauty and the Beast.” A tale-type name offers a shorthand designation of a global theme or set of characters, and it is used as a category for collecting international variants that enable the study of how the tale is inflected at the local level.
“Beauty and the Beast,” as it turns out, is a subset of the tale type ATU 425 The Search for the Lost Husband. And that tale type is a mirror image, with genders reversed, of ATU 400 The Man on a Quest for His Lost Wife. However problematic those designations may be (note that the woman “searching” is not named as agent in ATU 425, and the man is on a “quest” rather than a mere search in ATU 400), they offer a convenient pair of categories for sorting out the standard features of the two tale types. It would not be out of line to rename them “The Woman in Search of Her Lost Husband” and “The Man in Search of His Lost Wife.”