From the Beast to the Blonde by Marina Warner

Author:Marina Warner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409028635
Publisher: Random House

The seduction of difference: the Beast gazes on Beauty in Jean Cocteau’s classic fairytale film. (Jean Marais and Josette Day, La Belle et la bête, 1946.)

CHAPTER 17

Reluctant Brides: Beauty and the Beast I

I never may believe

These antic fables, nor these fairy toys.

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,

Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend

More than cool reason ever comprehends …

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to aery nothing

A local habitation and a name …

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, V, i

THE FIRST BEAST of the West was Eros, the god of love himself. In the romance of Cupid and Psyche, Eros/Cupid makes love, unseen in the dark, to a mortal Beauty – Psyche – who rivals his own mother Venus in seductiveness; Psyche is forbidden to look at him. When she can resist no longer and breaks the prohibition, lighting a candle to look at her lover while he sleeps, he vanishes, and with him all her enchanted surroundings. But Eros, mysterious, unknown, feared, exceeds all imaginable degree of charm when Psyche sees him in the night:

There lay the gentlest and sweetest of all wild creatures … his golden hair, washed in nectar and still scented with it, thick curls straying over white neck and flushed cheeks and falling prettily entangled on either side of his head … soft wings of purest white … the tender down fringing the feathers quivered naughtily all the time. The rest of his body was so smooth and beautiful that Venus could never have been ashamed to acknowledge him as her son.1

Psyche’s failure to trust, and to obey, has cost her his adorable presence and his love.

Apuleius’ tale is the earliest extant forerunner of the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale in Western literature, and a founding myth of sexual difference.2 It includes episodes the fairy tale ‘La Belle et la bête’ has made famous, from children’s versions and films: the mysterious menacing lover, the jealous sisters, the enchanted castle where disembodied voices serve every wish and ‘nectarous wines and appetizing dishes appeared by magic, floating up to her of their own accord’.3 It echoes stories of Pandora and Eve when it relies on female curiosity as the dynamic of the plot, and the overriding motive force of the female sex. Punished for her disobedience, Psyche then has to prove her love through many adventures and ordeals; pregnant by Cupid, she struggles through one test of her loyalty after another until, finally, this Beauty is reunited with her Beast and adapts him, the god of love, to the human condition of marriage, and they have a daughter, called Voluptas – Pleasure.

The role of Eros/Cupid in the second-century romance echoes the manifestation of beast bridegrooms in much more ancient stories, not only in numerous classical myths of metamorphosis, but also in Chinese and Indian tales, like ‘The Girl who Married a Snake’, from the Panchatantra.4 Its progeny are numerous, scattered in all the great Renaissance collections like Straparola’s

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.