The Enchanted and the Postmodern

Surrealist threads in “La Belle et la Bête” (DeDisneyfication, Part 4 Addendum)

I wrote about Disney’s Beauty and the Beast some time back, and hadn’t planned to revisit it. However, I’ve recently been reading Nicholas Jubber’s The Fairy Tellers. The book discusses the originators of various well-known fairy tales, including Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve. Within this section on the author of “La Belle et la Bête” (the tale’s original name, “B&B” hereafter), Jubber claims the work contains “surreal elements”.¹

I’m not bothered by the apparent anachronism of applying a word coined in 1917 to describe a status quo-challenging movement to a fairy tale written in 1740. However, the term is too often over- or misused. In the fairy tale genre of folklore, you can expect to encounter magic, enchantments, and whimsical creatures. And in general use, surreal means dreamlike or fantastical, so there’s clear overlap there.

Some elements of “B&B” definitely belong in the realm of folktale and myth. When the father arrives at the Château de la Bête, food is laid out and invisible servants attend him. This is not surreal, but commonplace in these tales. We see it repeatedly in Italo Calvino Italian Folktales.² Likewise, the super-swift horse conveying the father home and returning Belle to the castle. The transgression provoking the Beast’s wrath is picking a rose, which we see many corollaries to in myth: drinking from a sacred well, slaying an animal (often a deer), or even eating literal forbidden fruit.

But in the realm of art and culture, the surreal is more specifically defined. While there is an idea of giving expression to the unconscious, surprising juxtapositions are central to the movement. As André Breton, one of its leaders, stated in his manifesto:³

I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.

The illogic and non sequitur of surrealism are indeed what Jubber is referring to. He says:⁴

[S]urreal elements in Gabrielle-Suzanne’s fiction reflect a class in trouble, squeezed between monarchical absolutism and the rise of the merchant class. The Beast, courting Belle with magical gifts but locked in the castle by a curse, echoes the real-world aristocracy, stupefying itself with flamboyant delights while real power trickled away.

And many elements of “B&B” go further than the usual wonderments of fairyland. While we expect enchanted objects and magical occurrences, de Villeneuve takes it to a different level with passages like:⁵

[T]he monkey Captain of the Guard, by the beak of his parrot Interpreter, announced the visit of some ladies.

Where earlier works in the Animal as Bridegroom motif feature mere animals, particularly bears, as in “East of the Sun and West of the Moon”,⁶ “B&B” has the actual Beast. In the urban environs of the Enlightenment Paris (1715–1801), the terror of natural creatures had waned. Royal menageries were already well known and the city’s first zoo was only a few decades off.

Instead, de Villeneuve conjures her thoroughly chimerical Bête with his elephant’s trunk, enormous weight, and clanking scales, and who roars and howls.⁷ She gives these details, but few others, and with no attempt made to reconcile them into a whole. This allows the reader’s imagination to do the work — an excellent use of the Umberto Eco-esque open work.

Neither does she include the usual fairytale journey from poverty to riches, from rural to urban. Rather, Belle’s father is a merchant — a member of the bourgeoisie from “a great city wherein trade flourishes abundantly”.⁸ The family descends into poverty because of his speculation. He has invested in shipping, but rather than returning with goods to sell for a profit, the ships run afoul of storms and sink.

This seems an obvious reflection of actual issues de Villeneuve had to face. Widowed at 26, she found her husband had gambled away his wealth. Leaving her to:⁹

[…] parcel out the estate piece by piece, her property slipping away in “a succession of sales, attempts at recovery, contracts of retrocession, debtors’ seizures or standing requests”.

De Villeneuve drew on her knowledge of the noble classes she once belonged to for her tale. It’s clear Château de la Bête is really Versailles, with a hall of mirrors and a vast garden at which Belle’s “eyes were enchanted; they had never seen anything in nature so beautiful”, including:¹⁰

[…] groves […] ornamented with admirable statues and numberless fountains […].

Further, she:¹¹

[P]ortrays the Beast as the victim of an ancient and malignant fairy who cursed him when the handsome youth turned down her amorous advances. The story encrypts the corrupt and vicious intrigues of court life, of fortune-hunting and marriage-braking [sic], pandering and lust in the ancién regime […].

And in this regard, the surrealism borders on satire, for example, with the “monkeys”:¹²

[T]wo tall young apes, in court dresses […] advanced and placed themselves with great gravity beside her. Two sprightly little monkeys took up her train as her pages. A facetious baboon, dressed as a Spanish gentleman of the chamber, presented his paw to her, very neatly gloved […].

When it comes to the surreal and “B&B”, it’s obvious to point to the 1946 film of Jean Cocteau, a notable surrealist. Interestingly, however, he took an entirely different tack. We can assume he has full knowledge of the tenets of the movement, but he flips the script — going for a stylized realism and a realistic fantasy:¹³

To realism, I would oppose the simplified, formalized behavior of characters out of Molière […]. To fairyland as people usually see it, I would bring a kind of realism to banish the vague and misty nonsense now so completely outworn.

The juxtaposition of elements remains, of course, but becomes still more surprising.

The biggest change from de Villeneuve’s version of “B&B” to Disney’s and other modern ones is the portrayal of the Beast.

De Villeneuve’s Belle never falls in love with la Bête. Rather, she directs her affections toward a man termed “the Unknown”, who appears in her dreams. She describes him as, “a young man, beautiful as Cupid is painted”.¹⁴ portrayed as perfect in all other ways as well. Belle’s final crisis is choosing between the Unknown and la Bête, and when she accepts the monster, he becomes the prince. Similarly, Disney intended their Beast to be hideous and their Prince to be beautiful. But the tubeosphere has widely expressed disappointment with their Prince Charming.

So what happened between de Villeneuve and Disney? Cocteau. He had this effect clearly in mind:¹⁵

My aim would be to make the Beast so human, so sympathetic, so superior to other men, that his transformation into Prince Charming would come as a terrible blow to Beauty.

The other strategy he used to accomplish this was to twist his portrayal of the Prince:¹⁶

Slyly, and with much effort, I persuaded my cameraman [Henri] Alekan to shoot Jean Marais, as the Prince in as saccharine a style as possible.

And indeed, la Bête’s final transformation is parasitic — rather than returning to his true form, he steals the appearance of Belle’s human suitor, Avenant.

De Villeneuve innovated the animal bridegroom to instill new horror. She even employed the other meaning of bête, presenting him as stupid. Cocteau, on the other hand, wanted to subvert the standards of beauty he felt remained too narrow and conventional in his time, still hearkening back to these fairy tales. In the press book for the premiere of La Belle et la Bête in Los Angeles, he’s raw about how the film was received in France:¹⁷

There has never yet been an instance of something new not baffling the esthetes, the critics and the public, lazily accepting familiar formulas. The least challenge is apt to awaken a brutal and unpleasant response.

It seems this was just a slow burn. Just as Futurists like Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti expanded our notions of beauty to include the machine, Cocteau did so for the beast. As he relates poet Paul Eluard said:¹⁸

[T]o understand my film version of Beauty and the Beast, you must love your dog more than your car.

Read subsequent articles in the DeDisneyfication series

Part 5: Putting “Pocahontas” to Rest

Part 5 Addendum: Powhatan’s Mantle

Part 6: Trouble with “Tarzan”

Part 7A: The Wrong Rabbit Hole

Part 7A Addendum A: Curious Curation

Part 7A Addendum B: “Alice” in Revolt

Part 7A Addendum B: How “Alice” Grew Big in Japan

Part 7B: Alice’s Adventures in the Cousins War

Part 8: Guerrillas and the “Jungle”

Part 9A: Through a Magic Mirror Marred

Part 9A Addendum: The Woods “Over the Wall”

Part 9B: The Sum of its Versions

Part 9C: The “Snow White” Studio

Part 9D: Snowhaus

Part 10: The Little Less-Than

Part 11: Batmouse 3D

Read previous articles in the DeDisneyfication series

Part 1: Straightening out “Hunchback”

Part 2: Making over “Mulan”

Part 2 Addendum B: Your Western Wuxia Is Weak

Part 3A: “Hercules”: Myths and Mistakes

Part 3B: Doing Hera’s Work

Part 4: “Belle” Epoch

Notes

1. Nicholas Jubber, The Fairy Tellers: A Journey Into the Secret History of Fairy Tales, 2022.
2. Italo Calvino, Fiabe italiane (Italian Folktales), 1956.
3. André Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism”, 1924.
4. Jubber, 2022.
5. Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, “La Belle et La Bête”, 1740, translated in “The Story of Beauty and the Beast”, Four and Twenty Fairy Tales Selected from Those of Perrault, and Other Popular Writers, J. R Planché (trans.), 1858.
6. Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Engebretsen Moe, “East of the Sun and West of the Moon”, East of the Sun and West of the Moon: Old Tales from the North, 1914.
7. De Villeneuve, 1740.
8. Ibid.
9. Jubber, 2022.
10. De Villeneuve, 1740.
11. Marina Warner, “On beauties and their beasts”, Sight and Sound, 2021.
12. De Villeneuve, 1740. She uses the collective monkeys to include apes as well.
13. Jean Cocteau, “Once Upon a Time — French Poet Explains His Filming of Fairy Tale”, from the original press book for the U.S. premiere of La Belle et la Bête, 1946.
14. De Villeneuve, 1740.
15. Cocteau, 1946.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.