One of my personal favorite tales of all time, Beauty and the Beast, has much more meaning to it than just some beautiful girl saving her fathers life from a monster. The best part about this tale, is that there are so many different versions of it, with different types of beauty’s and different types of beast’s. However, the one that most people are accustomed to, by Jeanne-Marie LePrince de Beaumont, is the one that I grew up reading as well.
I always wondered how people came up with these types of tales so long ago. It is said, that these tales were most likely brought about when having an arranged marriage was more prevalent. To the women that are being married, some of these men might come off as “beasts”. Older women were said to of told this tale to calm the girls that were getting married and to potentially raise her hopes that maybe her beast will turn into a prince as well.
“Written at the dawn of the Enlightenment, it 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 requested them to efface their own desires and to submit to the will of a ‘monster'” (pgs. 27-28).
This tale teaches so many lessons if you read between the lines. Not only does it teach how important it is to be a pleasant person but it also illustrates that love has no boundaries. In Madame de Beaumont’s version of Beauty and the Beast, Beauty ends up falling in love with Beast because he is a kind-hearted being. To her, it doesn’t matter that he looks like a beast. (Although at the end she has to be pretty excited when he turns out to be a handsome prince..)
“‘No, my dear Beast, you will not die,’ said Beauty. ‘You will live and become my husband. From this moment on, I give you my hand in marriage, and I swear that I belong to only you. Alas, I thought that I felt only friendship for you, but the grief I am feeling makes me realize that I can’t live without you'” (pg. 41).
Today, I found a video online, that shows exactly this, how it shouldn’t matter what people look like, but how they act. ( https://www.facebook.com/Upworthy/videos/967446766629515/) It’s a real tear-jerker. This goes to show how love has no boundaries in fairy tales like this one, and it should also have no boundaries in real-life.
Skylar Nerone 