“Perhaps that ancient trinity of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty is not simply an empty faded formula as we thought in the days of our self-confident materialistic youth? If the tops of these three trees converge, but the too blatant and too direct stems of Truth and Goodness are crushed, cut down, not allowed through - then perhaps the fantastic, unpredictable, unexpected stems of Beauty will push through and soar to that same place, and in so doing fulfill the work of all three?”
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1970 Nobel Prize speech—
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Once upon a time, there was a wealthy merchant who had three daughters. Two of these daughters—the oldest and middle—were spoiled and arrogant, neither honoring or cherishing their father, but only seeing him as a means to their comfortable lifestyle. The youngest daughter, however, truly adored her father and sought to cheer him at every opportunity. While her sisters constantly demanded expensive gifts at the end of their father’s long journeys, the youngest would only request his safe return. While the oldest and middle declared they would only consider suitors who were dukes or earls, the youngest longed only for a mate who was virtuous. And while the two sisters refused to make friends with the daughters and sons of other merchants—befriending only “persons of quality” who had more wealth and status than they—the youngest, by contrast, had many friends not only among the children of other merchants, but also among the poor and orphaned.
One day the merchant’s business went bust, and losing his nice home, he and his daughters were forced to move into a humble shed. Day and night the oldest and middle daughters berated their father, accusing him of “incompetence” and “recklessness” and of burdening them with unfair hardship. But the youngest remained steadfast in her adoration, and made sure her father always had hot soup in the evening. After living in relative poverty for quite some time, the merchant was offered a job from an old friend; a job that—though it required a long journey and a payoff that was not guaranteed—at least provided a chance to restore the family to their wealth, if successful. When he asked his daughters what kinds of gifts they wanted him to bring back upon his return, the oldest and the middle giddily repeated “Dresses and jewelry! Dresses and jewelry!” But when the time came for the youngest to give her answer, all she said was “A rose.” This annoyed the oldest and middle daughters, who hated the youngest for her modesty and contentment.
The merchant left on his journey, hoping and praying that the job he was undertaking with his friend would lead to prosperity. But it didn’t. After many months abroad, he and his friend were forced to make their return to their homeland empty-handed; the merchant now even poorer than when his trip began. Dreading the moment in which his two daughters would degrade him for failing to bring their jewelry and dresses, his body became exhausted with the weight of his failure as he walked through a forest while the sun set. Yet just as he began mentally preparing himself for the likelihood that he would have to sleep outside, he spotted a castle in the distance through an opening in the thick brush, and decided to knock on its door to ask the occupant for a night in. As the merchant approached the door, he found it unlocked and cautiously stepped inside. “Is anyone here? Anyone?” No response came. To his surprise, he soon found a table lavishly set with food and drink, as though a feast had been prepared for him. Famished from his journey, he decided to sit down and eat, though he was puzzled by the lack of any visible host. Afterward, he explored the castle—not only discovering magnificent rooms—but a comfortable bed where he decided to sleep off his full belly.
The next morning, the merchant awoke and walked outside to resume his journey. But before he could retrieve his horse, he spotted a beautiful rose in the garden of the castle and remembered the wish of his youngest. Reaching out to pick it, his heart jumped in terror when a hideous beast suddenly appeared - furious at the man’s theft of his precious flower. Begging for his life, the merchant pled through tears to the beast that though his attempt to steal the rose was wrong, his intention was only to give it as a gift to a daughter who never before had asked for anything. Halting his advance on the man and pausing to reflect, the beast finally declared to the merchant that his act of cutting the rose would come at a price: his life. Unless—that was—one of his daughters would be willing to come in his place as a lifelong servant. But if the merchant returned to his home and did not send a daughter in his stead, the beast threatened he would have him tracked and killed.
Though difficult to imagine a father unwilling to lay down his life to save the future of his kids—and choosing instead to sacrifice one of his children for his own sake—that’s exactly what the merchant agreed to. And returning home, after being thoroughly demeaned by his middle and oldest for not bringing them jewelry and dresses, he gave his family the sorrowful news of his bargain. Upon hearing that it was her item that caused her father his trouble, the youngest daughter cried, and feeling responsible for the entire mess, volunteered herself to be the one whom the beast would enslave. When she arrived at the beast’s castle a few days later, she was terrified of his fearsome appearance and loathed the idea of being his prisoner. Yet over the following months she found herself surprised by the beast’s kindness and warmth, as well as the amount of freedom he had given her as a captive. For her, not only was nothing off limits, but there was also no labor required of her. She could spend all day in the library, she could wander through the grand gardens, she could ride as far as her eye could see on horseback, and she could explore the castle’s many rooms and treasures. In time, she began to feel that she was not a captive at all, but a guest. Why had the beast been willing to make the arrangement he had with her father? Could it be that rather than having malicious intent, he was just… lonely? Whatever the beast’s reason had been, the young woman had come to love him, though she still missed her father deeply. Feeling secure enough eventually to confide in the beast about her longing to see her family, the beast in return was moved by her sadness and granted her wish; allowing her to visit her father for the duration of a week, but warning that if she did not return for a second week he would die of sorrow. When the woman inquired as to why, the beast answered by revealing that many years ago, a fairy had not only cursed him by turning him from man to beast, but also had placed a curse that he would grow sick and die if he was ever abandoned by his true love.
A few days later, when the merchant saw his daughter approaching in the distance, he ran and embraced her; both overjoyed at their reunion. But the woman discovered that in the time she had been gone, her older sisters had hastily married men that—though affluent—were neither dukes nor earls; and they had not married for love but for advantage, and doing such, they now were miserable with the husbands they had. Upon hearing of their youngest sister’s visit, both hurried to their father’s home and showered her with fake kindness and praise; for their father had told them in a letter of how her feelings for the beast had changed, and it was their intention to make her feel so “loved” that she would want to stay and as a result never see the beast again. For the only thing worse than being trapped in bad marriages, was being trapped in bad marriages and watching the one they despised enjoy true love. If they were to be miserable, then their youngest sibling had to be as well. For awhile their charm offensive worked. The woman decided to remain with her family at her father’s house for a few days longer than a week, causing the sisters to believe they were succeeding in their plan. But remembering the beast’s words—that he would die if her absence extended a full second week—the woman at last left her family in a hurry, and returned to the castle to find the beast terribly sick. Laying down beside him and wrapping her arms around, she buried her face in his chest and sobbed; expressing her guilt for prolonging her visit, as well as her hope that the beast would pull through his sickness now that she had returned. Unbeknownst to her—and the beast, who was slipping in and out of consciousness—the more tightly she held him, the faster he was being healed.
When the morning came, she awoke slowly and looked at her side to find a handsome man instead of a beast! The beast’s true love had returned to him, and because of that, the fairy too had returned and made him a beast no longer. At the wedding, the merchant and the entire town came out to celebrate; as it was revealed that the handsome man who was a beast had been a long lost prince - now next in line to the throne of the kingdom. But when the sisters arrived with their husbands to attend the spectacular event, the fairy halted them at the entrance and informed them of their fate: “You shall become statues of stone exactly where you stand, fully awake and aware as you remain motionless; and your movement shall only be restored when your hearts finally break down the vanity, deceitfulness, and insolence that so thoroughly defined your lives.” With one curse being lifted and another being levied, Beauty and her former Beast at last lived happily ever after.
This is a seven-paragraph summary of the original Beauty & The Beast written by Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve in 1740 and adapted by Jeanne-Marie Beaumont in 1756.
For those of us who were kids in the 90s and grew up watching the Disney version, we can’t help but notice in this original tale that there is no Gaston, no rose shedding its final pedal, no angry mob showing up to the castle to kill the beast, and no talking candlestick named Lumière or clock named Cogsworth (this last one is a bit disappointing; as a child I really enjoyed those characters in Disney’s retelling - didn’t we all?) More interesting, we find that “Belle” (the name Disney gave the princess in its adaptation) is French for “Beauty” and that—in the original story—Villeneuve refers to her main female character merely as “petite belle”, which is not a name but a description (“little beauty”). Hence, the main female character actually goes unnamed throughout the entire tale just as the beast does.
Villeneuve, it must be noted, is not the original author of the story of Beauty & The Beast. The “skeletal structure” of the tale dates back at least 4,000 years, originating somewhere in the Balkans. Its fairy tale cousins in the family tree of folklore are The Turnip Princess (10,000 years old; Pontic-Caspian Steppe) and The Frog Prince (2,000 years old; Roman). But Villeneuve and Beaumont’s version is certainly the most detailed and popular among the tellings.
In reading Beaumont’s adaptation of Villeneuve, a central theme emerges that you won’t find in modern storytelling: Beauty saves the beast because beauty is the transcendent piercing into the ordinary. Beauty is not a construct. Beauty is not conjured by personal judgement. Beauty is not a human invention. It comes from an Elsewhere. Another realm. A world of forms. And it appears like an invisible spirit to those whom it wishes to appear to; those individuals then channelling that beauty into works of art, powerful music, great literature, budding relationships, athletic performances, and so on. As such, when beauty comes into a person’s life, it often entails disruption. A process of creative destruction wherein beauty prods its host to eliminate all about themselves that stand in the way of its objective, and leaves intact only things about the host which assist beauty in its goal. In exchange, beauty revives that which is dead inside us. It turns the brown grass green and the barren meadow full. Hence, the tale of Beauty & The Beast resonates because we are all the beast. We are all the beast in search of that beauty which ultimately will lead us beside the still water and restore our souls.
While Solzhenitsyn in his 1970 Nobel speech posited that beauty is sought in moments when goodness and truth by themselves are not wholly adequate for stamping out our depravity and rebelliousness, there’s a deeper reason I believe for why we seek to be favored and possessed by beauty.
We seek beauty above all, I think, to weep. To weep the kind of weeping someone lost in a dark cave does when they finally see the light of the sun and know they are delivered. To weep the kind of weeping someone drowning at sea does when a hand reaches down from a boat and saves them. To exist in modernity is to be someone lost who desperately wants to be found; found in some way both spiritual and primeval. It is not enough that we merely be known. We seek rescue.
This is why Beauty & The Beast as a tale has endured for centuries. Because it emphasizes beauty’s saving power.
More: “Belle” is sacrificial - for her sisters, for her father, and for the beast. This is because true beauty—beauty with virtue—always involves a sacrificial element. By contrast the sisters represent beauty without virtue, and the beast represents virtue without beauty; critical deficiencies, because if beauty exists without virtue it is hollow, and if virtue exists without beauty it is impotent. Hence, because of the converse deficiencies of both the beast and “Belle’s” sisters, the fairy in the end must change both their forms - the beast back to his handsome self and the sisters into stone: again, to repeat myself, this is a metaphor for how becoming a vessel for beauty requires purgation on our part. A cleansing. A realignment of soul and body where stubborn excesses are burned away. (You may catch on at this point that aesthetic beauty is not to be defined then as only that which is pleasant or soothing, but also encompasses that which is hallowed, that which beckons, that which makes us silent, even that which frightens. In light of this understanding, it would not merely be the wonderstruck poems—say—of Walt Whitman which could rightfully be called “beautiful”, but the haunting and grim poetry of Edgar Allan Poe as well.)
But all of the forms through which beauty gets expressed that we might imagine—romantic love, athletic endeavor, works of art, or new discoveries—are only mere echoes of that ultimate beauty, the Deity. Only divinity “breaks the spell” of the human condition, because only the presence of the Creator in our lives can make us feel complete. The One who made everything good cannot be outdone by any good He has made. Herein lies a paradox of beauty: we are meant to enjoy the fine things of this world—indeed we are meant to enjoy them to the fullest if we can—but any idolatry of flesh or matter is a quick ticket to dissatisfaction. In order to live a beauty-filled life for a lifetime, one must persist in acquiring (and maintaining) an anti-materialist outlook. We must enjoy objects and situations without that enjoyment being dependent on the object or situation. Marcus Aurelius advises the same in Meditations, when he writes in Book 7, Verses 25 and 31:
“Do not think of the things you do not have, but ponder on the best of what you do have, and then imagine how you would have missed those things if they were not yours. Take heed, at the same time, not to overvalue the things you are thus contented to have, so you will not be troubled if one day they are not yours any longer [...] Make yourself glad in simplicity, self-respect, and indifferent to anything other than what is virtue and vice. Love mankind. Follow God.”
More, still more: A Jungian analysis of Beauty & The Beast reveals that the tale is also elaborate symbolism for the feminine journey from virgin innocence and vulnerability to assertiveness and sexual confidence (“Belle’s” arc), and the masculine journey from boisterousness and aggression to tenderness and quiet strength (the beast’s arc); both journeys occurring when male and female cohabitate and depend on one another for survival and comfort. In essence, there exists a “pure” or “undiluted” masculinity and femininity which has to be experienced in youth, but later must also be tempered for the building of home and family. When we consider Jung’s archetypes, this does not mean that the Hero or the Explorer or the Magician stops being those things. It only means that those archetypes evolve to confront life’s phases in their own ways. A man who embodies the Hero archetype, for example, goes from “fighting battles” for prestige and recognition when he is single (subconsciously to attract the most desirable mate) to “fighting battles” to amass money and necessities when he is a husband or father. How this Jungian analysis fits into the fairy tale’s wider theme of “beauty’s saving power” is simple: the ultimate expression of human beauty is the family. Without the family, civilization crumbles. Only when man and woman collaborate in sanding down each other’s immaturity and selfish individualism, can a next generation be made that—in seeing their parents’ example—is mentally healthy, productive, and respectful.
Finally, there’s an element of Beauty & The Beast that often gets overlooked and perhaps on purpose: the sisters. Their vanity knows no bounds. They spew venom not only at their father, but at anyone who they deem beneath them or does not give them what they want. Craving riches and popularity instead of true love and virtue, they marry men whom they perceive will give them the high life. And indeed, the story tells us that the husbands do provide riches and popularity. But once the sisters receive those things, they find that they’ve made a devil’s bargain: in exchange for wealth and renown, they’ve become lifelong partners to men who are effeminate and just as shallow as they are. The implication in Villeneuve’s tale is that one husband masturbates so much to his own appearance that he doesn’t have sex with his wife, and the other husband believes himself so intelligent that he argues with his wife at every opportunity and wears her down. Thus, discontented with their own lives, the sisters seek to lure the youngest away from the beast because misery loves company. They can’t bear the thought of someone so close to them entering into a good marriage whilst they languish in bad ones. The lesson in the story being that false beauty—beauty without virtue—seeks to corrupt or choke out real beauty before the difference is discovered.
This element of the story gets overlooked because it touches on a subject nobody today wants to touch: the corrosive effect of the Bitter Woman. The shrew. The hag. The wicked witch. The jealous stepmother. The conniving seductress whose honey is poison. The evil sisters. Fairy tales warn about the Bitter Woman a lot—and so does Tanakh and the Apocrypha (Genesis 39:9-14; Judges 16:13-18; Proverbs 5:3-11, 11:22, 21:19, 27:15-16; Sirach 25:16-26)—but modern PC storytelling either deliberately ignores such characters or “radically reframes” them (turning Maleficent, Cruella, and Medusa into feminist heroes who are only villainized because they “defy patriarchal norms”). Who are the Bitter Women in the real world today? Well, they’re the kinda gals—with lips like inflatable rafts and nails like Bugles—who look with contempt at happily married women who proclaim the joys of being a wife and mother. The Western world is filled with too many single women who are like “Belle’s” older sisters: addicted to gossip and drama, hungry for influence and money, hateful of men, and resentful if they wind up with a man of poor quality as a result (assuming they settle down with a man at all). They don’t believe they should suffer consequences for their actions, nor do they view the people around them as anything other than side characters in imaginary movies they’re the stars of. And ancient literature—be it scripture or mythology—constantly warns us to avoid these women, to shame them, to mark them as destructive, and to not reward them with children of their own or allow them to teach other people’s children. Our ancestors are unanimous when they scream to us that the only women worthy of a society’s trust and respect are ones who cherish their families, love their country, nurture those in need, and honor the men in their life. The only women worthy of a society’s trust and respect are those like “Belle”.
In conclusion, Beauty & The Beast teaches its close examiners that beauty is a muse who chooses whom to grace with her presence and whom to leave alone.* She has her bouts of loyalty and fickleness, but never wastes her bounty on those who are not willing to sacrifice on her behalf. And since God is the ultimate beauty—there is no beauty greater than Him or existing independent of Him—the implication of ultimate beauty being one of His attributes is that our attaining closeness to Him requires from us our greatest sacrifices. Furthermore, through a Jungian perspective, Beauty & The Beast conveys to us that when a man and woman give of one another to one another—plunging daggers into their pride—they in turn become great parents, which in turn strengthens society; a vital task, as only societies which produce well-adjusted youths and shun the shallow and the obscene can have the ability to transform its wayward citizens from beasts back to humans again.