Member-only story
Beauty and the Beast: Why the Disney Version is Better Than the Original
His transformation into the Beast was not the result of an evil, jealous witch, but the fault of his own vanity and selfishness
I’ve always wondered why Cinderella’s glass slipper doesn’t disappear at midnight, along with the carriage, the horse, the dress, and all the other things her fairy godmother gives her. But after doing research for this post, reading countless versions of the same fairy tale, I now like to think of the slipper as a sort of metaphor for all fairy tales, in the sense that, despite variation and change, there is always something essential that remains, but also, despite attempts to sanitise them, and make them suitable for children, there is always an irrepressible core that cannot easily be expunged. This is because, as Marie-Louise von Franz says, ‘fairy tales are the purest and simplest expression of [the] collective unconscious’, including not only our better natures, but the darker side of our psyches, the beautiful and the beastly.
The Beauty and the Beast is unique among the popularised fairy tales in that we can actually identify its exact origin — that is, unless we broaden our terms to include all animal bridegroom stories, which would take us back almost two thousand years to…