Desire and Desirability in Villeneuve and Leprince de Beaumont's "Beauty and the Beast"
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Desire and Desirability in Villeneuve and Leprince de
Beaumont’s “Beauty and the Beast”
Tatiana Korneeva
Marvels & Tales, Volume 28, Number 2, 2014, pp. 233-251 (Article)
Published by Wayne State University Press
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/555490
Access provided at 1 Apr 2020 21:05 GMT with no institutional affiliationTatiana Korneeva
Desire and Desirability in Villeneuve
and Leprince de Beaumont’s “Beauty
and the Beast”
In the mid-eighteenth century Marie-Jeanne Leprince de Beaumont, the pro-
gressive French writer and educator resident in England, embarked on her
great pedagogical project: providing a juvenile audience with reading material
suitable to their level of comprehension and adapted to their immediate inter-
ests. When she did so, she resorted to fairy-tale narratives. In the foreword to
her Magasin des enfants, ou Dialogues d’une sage gouvernante avec ses élèves de la
première distinction (The Young Misses’ Magazine, Containing Dialogues
Between a Governess and Several Young Ladies of Quality, Her Scholars,
1756), Beaumont explains the urgent motivation for her educational journal,
invoking the scarcity of books suitable for children, especially girls. Relying on
François Fénelon’s account of contes de fées,1 Beaumont argues that fairy tales,
“quelque puérils qu’ils soient, [sont] plus utiles aux enfants, que ceux qu’on a
écrits dans un style plus relevé” (969) (notwithstanding being puerile, are
more useful to children than the narratives written in a more elegant style).2
Wanting to make learning a more attractive process, Beaumont realized that
the genre of the fairy tale offered her a perfect camouflage for miscere utile dulci,
because children should not suspect her of harboring didactic intentions:
“C’est à titre d’amusement que je présent cette histoire aux enfants. Il ne faut
pas qu’ils soupçonnent que je veux les instruire; ce motif m’a autorisée à
retrancher tout ce qui pourrait les ennuyer” (972) (it is as an entertainment
that I present this story to the children. They should not suspect that I want to
teach them. This concern authorizes me to cut out all that can annoy them).3
Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies, Vol. 28, No. 2 (2014), pp. 233–251. Copyright © 2014 by
Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI 48201.
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The numerous tales interpolated in Beaumont’s Magasin tend therefore to
the moral tale, from which her pupils are supposed to be able to extrapolate
an immediate moral lesson. The action still takes place in fairy kingdoms, but
the plots hinge on conduct rather than on adventurous circumstances. With
archetypical names such as Bellotte and Laidronette, Belle and Bête, Charmant,
Absolu, and Sincère, the heroes allegorize the extremes of character and
behavior. Indeed, they are only a pretext for the sententious discourse elabo-
rated in the morally weighted dialogues of the governess and her pupils
referred to in the title (Debru 156). Writing almost exclusively for a young
female audience, Beaumont was especially concerned with guiding them
through the conduct of courtship, marriage, and family relationships. Thanks
to her thirty years’ experience as a governess, she was acutely aware that fairy
tales could provide an excellent means to make children understand “les
inconvénients d’un mariage fait par intérêt” (the disadvantages of arranged
marriages) and “les malheurs qui peuvent arriver du peu de complaisance que
l’on a pour les caprices d’un époux” (the misfortunes that can happen from the
lack of indulgence for the whims of a husband) (Beaumont 969). It is there-
fore legitimate to suppose that this concern induced Beaumont to adapt for
her Magasin the now almost forgotten version of “La Belle et la Bête” (Beauty
and the Beast) by Gabrielle-Susanne de Villeneuve, who deals with the issues
of marriageability and sexuality in the form of male and female desire.4
This precursor to Beaumont’s version of “Beauty and the Beast” is
embedded in Villeneuve’s 1740 novel La Jeune Américaine et les contes marins,
where it is also recounted by a governess for the entertainment and instruc-
tion of her pupil during the course of a sea voyage to Saint-Domingue.5 In
addition to the main story of the couple’s enchanted courtship, with which
the reader is familiar from Beaumont’s best-known tale, Villeneuve’s impres-
sively long narrative contains flashback accounts both of the Beast’s original
metamorphosis and of Beauty’s genealogy. The Beast was a prince, raised by
a fairy while his mother was waging war to defend his kingdom. After
unsuccessfully attempting to seduce the prince while he was growing up,
the malicious fairy transformed him into a beast. Beauty’s story also reveals
her royal origin: in reality, she is a daughter of the prince’s uncle and a good
fairy, and she was left in the care of the merchant’s family to protect her
from a vindictive fairy.
Further complicating Villeneuve’s version are Beauty’s dreams during her
stay at the Beast’s palace, which were shortened by Beaumont. These dream
visions present the image of a fairy lady and a handsome suitor who courts her
in a way that contrasts with the Beast’s insistent questioning, pressing her
whether “elle voulait la laisser coucher avec elle” (she would sleep with him;
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Villeneuve 50; my translation), which is carefully suppressed in Beaumont’s
didactic story. Beauty’s erotic attraction to this man, whom the lady advises
Beauty to ignore, makes the choice between him and the unappealing life with
the Beast even more difficult. The redemption sequence is also not limited to a
simple kiss: Beauty has to go to bed with the Beast in order to find him trans-
formed the next morning into the handsome man of her dreams.
Thus, notwithstanding the slight differences in genre (Beaumont’s peda-
gogical tale versus Villeneuve’s less moralizing, baroque conte), there are a lot
of structural affinities between the two narratives. Both stories are intended for
the same juvenile audience of marriageable girls,6 and both use the device of a
governess who recounts the tale, allowing moral instruction to be presented in
the guise of a delightful story.7 This intention to provide their female reader-
ship with practical guidance for worldly life brings both Beaumont and
Villeneuve’s tales close to the tradition of conduct manuals of the late seven-
teenth and early eighteenth centuries.8 They proposed to educate the daugh-
ters of the elite and numerous aspiring social groups and instructed them
about how to attract a prospective husband and keep him happy. Such educa-
tional treatises taught young ladies how to become desirable to men of supe-
rior social rank. However, as Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse
maintain in the introduction to their fascinating collection of essays on the
history of conduct books, such works “also determine what kind of woman
men should find desirable. Thus, the genre implies two distinct aspects of
desire, a desired object, and a subject who desires that object” (5). Hence this
type of literature was clearly designed to produce and maintain specific forms
of sexual desire. It is therefore interesting to investigate the representation of
the dynamics of desire and desirability in Beaumont and Villeneuve’s respec-
tive versions of the tale. Because the expression of desire is closely related to
ideology, gender relations, and kinship, I wish to explore whether or not
Beaumont and Villeneuve make any distinctions between male and female
erotic desire as they assume the position of a writer for children and
soon-to-be-wives. Do the conteuses reproduce or instead revise and redefine
the culturally approved forms of desire dictated by the dominant male
discourse?
Villeneuve and Beaumont’s tales of “Beauty and the Beast” seem to be a good
starting point for endeavoring to answer this question, first, because they contain
different and often contrasting expressions of both male and female desire and
sexuality. Because of the length and intense eroticization of the main characters’
relationships, Villeneuve’s version can be seen as a complementary narrative to
Beaumont’s politely abridged tale, and it will allow us to examine in more detail
how notions of desirability were constructed throughout the course of the
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eighteenth century and which cultural attitudes guided these women writers in
their treatment of gender relationships. Second, the investigation of this
immensely successful and popular story from the point of view of its treatment
of desire, explored as physical, erotic attraction and sexual passion, will highlight
a particular role played by the fairy-tale genre in the French Enlightenment,
namely, that of problematizing old paradigms of gender and social roles.
Triangular Structure of Desire
On the most immediate plot level, “Beauty and the Beast” constitutes a parable
of social climbing with a happy resolution. Using the example of the mer-
chant’s daughter Beauty, our conteuses do indeed show how one can marry a
prince and live happily ever after. It is therefore useful to determine which
qualities make women of lower social standing desirable to men of high social
position who went so far as to marry them. In other words, what were the fac-
tors that determined male erotic desire in rigidly structured, rank-based eigh-
teenth-century society? And what kinds of relationships were established
between desiring men and women?
Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale (1928) presents a series of
thirty-one functions or elements of action that make up folktales. Propp
specifies that the thematic progression of the fairy tale can be seen as pro-
ceeding from a lack or a problem to a state of equilibrium and neutralization
of contradictions (92, 107), where the initial situation provides the impor-
tant means of characterizing the heroes. In “Beauty and the Beast” the initial
narrative situation of the Beast is that of a character lacking an object
(35–36). Indeed, both conteuses define the Beast as a desiring hero in search
of a bride able to break the evil spell by wedding him. Propp argues further-
more that the character can become aware of a lack in the following way: the
object of desire somehow draws attention to itself, appearing suddenly and
leaving traces, or becoming known to the hero through some kind of descrip-
tion, such as portraits or stories (76). In fact, the Beast learns of the existence
of an appropriate object from the merchant’s story when he is picking a rose
for Beauty:
[Le Marchand]: Monseigneur, pardonnez-moi, je ne croyais pas vous
offenser en cueillant une rose pour une de mes filles, qui m’en avait
demandé. . . .
[La Bête]: Mais vous m’avez dit que vous aviez des filles; je veux bien
vous pardonner, à condition qu’une de vos filles vienne volontaire-
ment pour mourir à votre place. (Beaumont 1021)
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[Merchant]: Pardon me, my lord. I didn’t think that I’d offend you by
plucking a rose. One of my daughters had asked me to bring her one. . . .
[The Beast]: But you are telling me that you have daughters . . .? I’ll
pardon you on one condition, that one of your daughters come here
voluntarily to die in your place. (Zipes, Beauties, 236)
Whereas Propp focuses on the function of lack, René Girard provides further
insights into the hero’s desire through his theory of mimetic or triangular
desire. In Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (Deceit, Desire, and the
Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, 1961), Girard argues that our
desires are not innate or autonomous—this is the Romantic “lie” referred to in
the book’s French title—but we copy them from others. In simple terms an
object is desirable to a subject because it is desirable to another person whom
the subject has chosen as a model. That person, whether real or imaginary, acts
as a mediator between the desirer and the desired, but he or she also becomes
an obstacle and rival in the subject’s quest for the object.
The relation between the Beast and the merchant can be elucidated by the
psychological structure proposed by Girard, in which the Beast functions as
the desiring subject, Beauty as the desired object, and her father as mediator of
the Beast’s desire. Villeneuve’s version in particular foregrounds the ways in
which Girard’s schematization of triangular desire operates in the tale:
Le marchand, consterné par une si cruelle sentence, croyant que le
parti de la soumission était le seul qui le pût garantir de la mort, lui
dit d’un air véritablement touché, que la rose qu’il avait osé prendre
était pour une de ses filles appelée la Belle. Ensuite, soit qu’il espérât
de retarder sa perte, ou de toucher son ennemi de compassion, il lui
fit le récit de ses malheurs, il lui raconta le sujet de son voyage, et
n’oublia pas le petit présent qu’il s’était engagé de faire à la Belle,
ajoutant que la chose à laquelle elle s’était restreinte pendant que les
richesses d’un roi n’auraient à peine que suffi pour remplir les désirs
de ses autres filles, venait à l’occasion que s’en était présentée de lui
faire naître l’envie de la contenter (Villeneuve 26–27)
The merchant was dismayed by such a cruel sentence. Thinking that
submission was the only means of saving his life, he responded in a
truly touching manner, “The rose I dared to take is for one of my
daughters, called Beauty.” Then, whether he hoped to escape death,
or to induce his enemy to feel sorry for him, he told him all about his
misfortunes. He related to him the object of his journey and dwelled
on the little present he was bound to give Beauty, adding that it was
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the only thing she had asked for, while the riches of a king would
hardly have sufficed to satisfy the wishes of his other daughters.
(Zipes, Beauties, 159)
Mediated by the merchant’s story of his daughter’s beauty and virtuousness,
the Beast’s abstract desire for a bride-object who can save him from his bestial-
ity is transformed into a concrete desire for Beauty. The heroine’s father has in
fact equated her with all the virtues, notably, exemplary intelligence, generosity,
bon coeur, and beauty. Moreover, he considers Beauty his favorite and most
reliable daughter without in any way mistreating her siblings.
From this perspective the Beast’s reply to the merchant’s passionate por-
trayal of his daughter is significant. Instead of provoking the expected compas-
sion, his account makes the Beast desire to possess the young woman who has
been so well described to him
La Bête rêva un moment. Reprenant ensuite la parole, d’un ton moins
furieux, elle lui tint ce langage: Je veux bien te pardonner, mais ce
n’est qu’à condition que tu me donneras une de tes filles. Il me faut
quelqu’un pour réparer cette faute. (Villeneuve 27)
The Beast reflected for a moment, and then spoke in a milder tone,
“I’ll pardon you, but only on the condition that you’ll give me one of
your daughters. Someone must make up for the mistake.” (Zipes,
Beauties, 159)
Thus, contrary to his expectations, the merchant instills in the Beast a desire
for the object and holds the key to her possession. Indeed, the Beast implies
that the object of his desire is precisely the daughter who loves her father more
than her sisters; based on the merchant’s description of Beauty, she would be
the only daughter to willingly come and save her father:
“Je veux que celle de tes filles que tu conduiras vienne ici volontaire-
ment, ou je n’en veux point. Vois si entre elles il en est une assez
courageuse, et qui t’aime assez pour vouloir s’exposer afin de te
sauver la vie.” (Villeneuve 27)
“No matter which daughter you bring here, I expect her to come will-
ingly, or I won’t have her. Go and see if there’s one among them who
has enough courage and love for you to sacrifice herself to save your
life.” (Zipes, Beauties, 159)
The repetition of “je veux . . . ou je n’en veux point” in the Beast’s speech
defines Beauty as the object of his desire, and her desirability stems from her
designation by the mediator.9
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Girard’s schema provides us with a possible map of masculine desire in
the tales. This desire is indeed fundamentally triangular. In such scenarios the
bond of the two male protagonists is often as intense and important as the
relationship of either male to the beloved female. Moreover, Girard explains
that the potential solidarity of two men can be both secured and fractured by
their triangular relations with a woman (Beauty is indeed designated as both
an object of the Beast’s desire and as the only acceptable exchange to prevent
her father’s execution). Regarding the woman’s place in this male drama, both
Beaumont’s and Villeneuve’s versions show that her role is relegated to the sta-
tus of object, because the choice of the beloved is determined in the first place
not so much by her particular charms or qualities (the Beast had not even seen
Beauty before) but by her already being the choice of another man.
Girard’s triangular scheme thus offers a description of human desire and
gender relationships, making graphically intelligible a profound difference
between the erotic experience of men and women. The principle of the
exchange of women that lies at the core of Girard’s characterization of male
homosocial bonds bears a striking resemblance to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s the-
sis of the special function of women, which consists in their being exchanged
and circulated in order to express, affirm, or create a social link between
male partners.10 Like Girard, Lévi-Strauss understands the practice of mar-
riage as having less to do with love than with the exchange between the
groom and the bride’s male relatives. In his Elementary Structures of Kinship
(1949), Lévi-Strauss expands on Marcel Mauss’s theory regarding the gift as
the most significant feature of so-called primitive societies; he proposes that
marriage is the basic form of gift exchange, where women function as the
most precious gift: “The total relationship of exchange which constitutes
marriage is not established between a man and a woman, but between two
groups of men, and the woman figures only as one of the objects in the
exchange, not as one of the partners” (Lévi-Strauss 115). Daughters are thus
traded like objects in the marketplace among fathers and husbands, without
any concern for their individual desires.
The commercial nature of the marriage transaction is underlined through-
out “Beauty and the Beast” tales. Indeed, it does not seem to be a mere coinci-
dence that Beauty’s father is a merchant, and in several instances the Beast in
Villeneuve’s version specifically refers to his power to “trade” his daughter. The
hero thus reduces Beauty’s role to that of object of his desire in the negotiation,
ultimately qualifying the female body as merchandise in the marriage economy.
The episodes that focus on the collapse of Beauty’s sisters’ projects of mar-
riage, meant to permit them to escape their economic misfortune, elucidate
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further their dependence on the family’s social ties and their own lack of con-
trol over their bodies:
Elles pensaient même qu’elles n’avaient qu’à vouloir pour trouver des
époux. Elles ne restèrent pas longtemps dans une erreur si douce.
Elles avaient perdu les plus beau de leurs attraits, en voyant comme
un éclair disparaître la fortune brillante de leur père, et la saison du
choix était passée pour elles. Cette foule empressée d’adorateurs
disparut au moment de leur disgrâce. La force de leurs charmes n’en
put retenir aucun. . . . Dès qu’elles furent dans la misère, tous sans
exception cessèrent de les connaître. (Villeneuve 14–15)
They imagined that their many admirers would all strive to be the first to
propose marriage. But they did not stay deluded very long, for they had
lost their greatest asset when their father’s splendid fortune had disap-
peared like a flash of lightning, and their time for choosing had gone
with it. . . . From the hour they became poor, everyone, without excep-
tion, did not want to know them anymore. (Zipes, Beauties, 153–54)
Ses deux filles aînées répondirent, qu’elles ne voulaient pas quitter la
ville, et qu’elles avaient plusieurs amants, qui seraient trop heureux
de les épouser, quoiqu’elles n’eussent plus de fortune; les bonnes
demoiselles se trompaient; leurs amants ne voulurent plus les
regarder, quand elles furent pauvres. (Beaumont 1018)
His two elder daughters replied that they did not want to leave the
city and that they had many admirers who would be only too happy
to marry them even though they no longer had a fortune. But these
fine young ladies were mistaken. Their admirers no longer paid them
any attention now that they were poor. (Zipes, Beauties, 233)
As Luce Irigaray has argued in “Le marché des femmes” (Women on the
Market, 1978), women are alienated from their own bodies, becoming
instead “a mirror of value of and for man” (176–78). In other words, women
are valued only in the social context of being the commodity objects of men.
It is therefore not surprising that in Villeneuve’s version Beauty’s father explic-
itly advises his hesitant daughter to marry the Beast, especially because the
monster provided him with immense wealth to live agreeably with his sons
(“pour vivre agréablement avec ses fils,” Villeneuve 73). With such a mar-
riage, the groom and the bride’s male relatives will be united in an advanta-
geous social network. As Irigaray has argued, the female character performs
the mediating function establishing relations between men (183). Beauty’s
decision to marry the Beast is made difficult because she, like her sisters, has
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to give up any attempt to follow her personal desire for the tender suitor
from her dream visions in order to become the Beast’s wife and savior.
Beaumont and Villeneuve thus show that, whereas masculine desire is deter-
mined mostly by male homosocial bonds, female desirability stems from
women’s willingness to acknowledge superior male authority. Virginia Swain
remarks in fact that “Villeneuve’s story makes clear that . . . love crowns—
and masks—the sacrifices the virtuous maiden must make” (209).
Beauty’s Sacrifice and the Sacrifice of Desire
In Villeneuve’s version, even after Beauty consents to marry the Beast, this
strange mésalliance would not have been possible if the heroine’s royal origin
had not been revealed. Beaumont, on the contrary, is more convinced that if a
young lady possesses the requisite high moral qualities, she still has a chance
of receiving a good marriage proposal, even if there is no fortune to recom-
mend her: “Il y eut même plusieurs gentilshommes qui voulurent l’épouser
[Belle], quoiqu’elle n’eût pas un sou” (Beaumont 1018) (there were still many
gentlemen who wanted to marry [Beauty], even though she did not have a
penny; my translation). This points to the fact that in elite or middle-class
eighteenth-century society, women as objects of exchange and circulation
between men were still imbued with some significant personal qualities. Both
versions of the tale hint at the female characteristics that, according to the con-
teuses, make a young lady desirable to men of high social position.
Whereas the Beast is characterized as a hero on a quest for an object, the
narrative situation through which Beauty and her siblings are introduced
presents a picture of considerable prosperity that serves as a contrasting
background for the subsequent misfortune. In the tale the loss of status and
the collapse of social hierarchy and differences within the group lead to a
situation Girard calls a “crisis of distinction”:11
Hors d’état d’avoir quelqu’un pour les servir, les fils de ce malheureux
marchand partagèrent entre eux les soins et les travaux domes-
tiques. . . . Les filles de leur côté ne manquèrent pas d’emploi. Comme
des paysannes, elles se virent obligées de faire servir leurs mains déli-
cates à toutes les fonctions de la vie champêtre. (Villeneuve 15–16)
No longer in the position to have anyone to wait upon them, the
unfortunate merchant’s sons were compelled to divide the servants’
duties among themselves . . . . As for the daughters, they had plenty
of things to do. Like poor peasant girls, they were obliged to use their
delicate hands to do all the farm chores. (Zipes, Beauties, 154)
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Il [le marchand] dit en pleurant à ses enfants, qu’il fallait aller demeu-
rer dans cette [petite] maison [de campagne], et qu’en travaillant
comme des paysans, ils y pourraient vivre. (Beaumont 1018)
With tears in his eyes he told his children that they would have to go
and live in this [small country] house and work like farmers to sup-
port themselves. (Zipes, Beauties, 233)
In morphological terms the heroes’ interactions in this situation of crisis, and
especially the sister-sister relationships, constitute a powerful means of charac-
terization, in particular, serving to define their female qualities. As Girard
maintains, the effacement of social distinctions (or crisis of distinction) results
in the members of the community losing sight of who and what they are; their
identity is shattered.
In this light, Beauty’s sisters’ insistence on differentiating themselves from
her is significant. The loss of distinction is especially evident when they ask the
merchant to bring them expensive clothes and jewelry back from his journey,
whereas Beauty merely asks for a rose. Her sisters interpret this humble
request—more mischievously than erroneously—as an attempt by Beauty to
distinguish herself:
Cette réponse si bien marquée au coin du désintéressement couvrit
les autres de honte et de confusion. Elles en furent si courroucées
qu’une d’entre elles, répondant pour toutes, dit avec aigreur, cette
petite fille fait l’importante, et s’imagine qu’elle se distinguera
par cette affection héroïque. Assurément rien n’est plus ridicule.
(Villeneuve 20)
This unselfish response filled her sisters with shame and confusion.
They were so angry that one of them, who spoke for the rest, said with
bitterness, “This little girl wants to make herself seem important and
fancies that she distinguishes herself by these affected heroics. Surely
nothing can be more ridiculous.” (Zipes, Beauties, 156)
Ce n’est pas que la Belle se souciât d’une rose, mais elle ne voulait
pas condamner par son exemple la conduite de ses soeurs qui au-
raient dit que c’était pour se distinguer, qu’elle ne demandait rien.
(Beaumont 1020)
Beauty was not really anxious to have a rose, but she did not want to
set an example that would disparage her sisters, who would have said
that she had requested nothing to show how much better she was.
(Zipes, Beauties, 234–35)
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Just how important the sisters find it to reestablish the system of differences is
made clear in the following scene. When the merchant tells his children about
the Beast’s demand for retribution, the sisters again interpret the cause of the
disaster as Beauty’s wish to distinguish herself:
“Si par un désintéressement affecté elle n’avait pas voulu se distinguer,
comme elle est en tout plus heureuse que nous, il se serait sans doute
trouvé assez d’argent pour la contenter.” (Villeneuve 34–35)
“If she hadn’t sought to show off with a feigned indifference—she’s
always more favored than we are anyhow—he would have undoubt-
edly found enough money to content her. (Zipes, Beauties, 163)
Girard stresses, however, that in any human community there can never be
a state of complete undifferentiation, because there are always individuals who
are physically or emotionally different from the others. During times of crisis, if
human violence cannot be unleashed and directed against the event or creature
that provoked the original fury (as, in our case, the merchant’s bankruptcy,
shipwreck, corsairs, and, ultimately, the Beast), then a surrogate victim, a scape-
goat, will be found. This victim has committed no offense but is simply vulner-
able and at hand. Beauty serves as the scapegoat in “Beauty and the Beast.” Her
ability to happily carry out domestic work and her love of reading mark her as
different in the tale; her exemplary behavior contrasts with that of her sisters,
who reject domesticity and who love fashion, not books. As such, Beauty is
marginalized by her sisters, serving as an effective scapegoat on which to exer-
cise their fury over the family’s circumstances. In both Beaumont’s and
Villeneuve’s versions Beauty has done nothing to merit persecution; however,
her exalted status as the most beautiful of the sisters, as well as the youngest,
singles her out for the role of the victim. She is blamed for the family’s ills and
made solely responsible for the onset of the misfortune. The sisters express this
quite explicitly:
“Il n’est pas juste,” dirent-elles [les soeurs], “que nous périssions
d’une façon épouvantable pour une faute dont nous ne sommes pas
coupables. Ce serait nous rendre les victimes de la Belle, à qui l’on
serait bien aise de nous sacrifier; mais le devoir n’exige pas de tels
sacrifices de nous.” (Villeneuve 34)
“It’s not just,” they [the sisters] said, “that we should perish in such a
frightful manner for a mistake that we didn’t commit. It would be like
making us Beauty’s victims. Now, any one of us would be glad to sac-
rifice herself for her, but duty doesn’t demand such a sacrifice in this
case.” (Zipes, Beauties, 163)
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The merchant’s economic ruin and the calamitous state of affairs into
which his family has fallen bring to the surface the worst and the best of the
characters. Beauty indeed fully accepts her guilt and admits to the wrongdoing
attributed to her by her persecutors:
Je suis coupable de ce malheur: c’est à moi seule de le réparer. J’avoue
qu’il serait injuste que vous souffrissiez de ma faute. Hélas! Elle est
pourtant bien innocente. Pouvais-je prévoir que le désir d’avoir une
rose au milieu de l’été devait être puni par un tel supplice? Cette faute
est faite: que je sois innocente ou coupable, il est juste que je l’expie.
On ne peut l’imputer à d’autre. Je m’exposerai, poursuivit-elle d’un
ton ferme, pour tirer mon père de son fatal engagement. (Villeneuve
35)
I’m the cause of this misfortune. It’s I alone who must rectify every-
thing. I admit that it would be unjust to allow you to suffer for my
mistake. Alas! It was an innocent wish. How could I have foreseen the
desire to have a rose in the middle of summer would be punished so
cruelly? However, the mistake’s been made. It doesn’t matter whether
I’m innocent or guilty. It’s only fair that I should be the one to expiate
it, for it can’t be imputed to anyone else. I’ll risk my life to release my
father from his fatal commitment. (Zipes, Beauties, 163)
Girard states that once the scapegoat has been sacrificed and his removal
has led to the return of order and the easing of tensions within the commu-
nity, another transformation of an entirely different kind is likely to occur:
the scapegoat comes to be universally perceived as a savior. Once damned as
the source of chaos, our heroine is now proclaimed the source of well-being
of the entire family:
Mais le vieillard . . . se ressouvena[it] d’une ancienne prédiction, par
laquelle il avait appris que cette fille lui devait sauver la vie et qu’elle
serait la source du bonheur de toute sa famille. (Villeneuve 36)
But the old man . . . remembered an ancient prediction that this
daughter would save his life and be a source of happiness to her
entire family. (Zipes, Beauties, 164)
Thus Beauty stands out as a sacrificial character, a pharmakos, who is called on
to offer herself as the innocent victim needed to restore the surrounding com-
munity to happiness. Regarding Villeneuve’s tale, Judd Hubert claims in fact that
La Belle, who undertakes all the redemptions required of her, func-
tions as a sort of secular Christ figure. Like Jesus, she never hesitates
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to sacrifice herself to help others, including her nasty and ungrateful
sisters. And like Christ, she can claim royal as well as supernatural
descent while freely accepting a mission that she alone has the power
to accomplish. In any case, she behaves in behalf of her father, of La
Bête, and of his kingdom like a savior and not at all like a mediator:
the role of Mary, perhaps the highest ever entrusted to a woman in a
patriarchal society. (68)
This analysis thus makes clear that Beaumont and Villeneuve were proposing
an educational curriculum capable of producing a woman endowed with
psychological depth rather than being merely a physically attractive surface,
a woman who would excel in qualities that differentiate her in terms other
than her family’s wealth and title. By displaying tireless concern for the well-
being of others, Villeneuve’s and Beaumont’s protagonist embodies moral
rather than material values or idle sensuality. The main quality on which
both conteuses insist and that, indeed, distinguishes both Beautys from their
female antagonists and makes them desirable is their Griselda-like willing-
ness to be patient and dutiful daughters and wives.12
But, in writings by women, what is the significance of the idealization of
self-denial, martyrdom, and victimized femininity on the one hand, and the
negative representation of sisters’ relationships on the other? The answer is
again provided by Girard, who argues that such transference of violence to
women exonerates men, who “have the greatest need to forget their role in the
crisis because, in fact, they must have been largely responsible for it” (Violence,
139). Girard’s analysis brings out a new interpretative dimension in these fairy-
tale narratives: by emphasizing the malice of Beauty’s sisters, the obvious “vil-
lains” of the story, the narratives rehabilitate the figure of the father, making the
sacrifice of his daughter to the animal-groom seem legitimate. This sacrifice,
after all, restores order and, in so doing, allows Beauty’s father to reassume his
benevolent role. Villeneuve’s and Beaumont’s tales thus reveal a crucial truth
about gender relationships in patriarchal societies. Shifting the focus onto
female envy and jealousy is often just a way of exonerating men, the major
perpetrators of crisis and women’s oppression. However, by describing these
relationships, the conteuses provide preliminary diagrams of social mechanisms
that need to be restructured. The representation of the heroines as creators of
harmony and happiness at the end of the tales, as feminine figura Christi, testi-
fies to the fact that both writers had a strong belief in female potential.13 Similar
to the figure of Griselda found at the end of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron
and Charles Perrault’s “Grisélidis” (Patient Griselda, 1691),14 the sacrificial per-
formance of the heroines has a civilizing function, transforming the Beasts into
princes, thereby regenerating a whole society of men and women.
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Domesticating Female Desire
By depicting a sex/gender system that corresponds to the structures outlined
by Girard and Lévi-Strauss, Villeneuve and Beaumont effectively denounce the
practice of arranged marriages and reveal the uneasiness they felt concerning
the oppressed status of their female contemporaries. They had no illusions
about women’s lot in society. It is therefore no coincidence that the conteuses
made the issue of marriageability their central literary preoccupation. Indeed,
if we read their fictions against the background of male-authored animal bride-
groom tales,15 what is remarkable is the desire to explore the “prevailing con-
ditions of unhappy, forced unions between incompatible mates” (Warner 284).
But if Villeneuve and Beaumont so clearly recognized these structures of female
subordination, the question that remains is, What happens to female desire in
the process of the male exchange of women’s bodies? Answering this question
will allow us to highlight a further aspect of eighteenth-century notions of
desirability, specifically, women as desiring subjects.
Clearly, both Villeneuve, as mistress of Crébillon père (and only semi-
officially gouvernante of his son),16 and Beaumont, in her role as a governess,
could not overtly question a social order in which fathers and husbands pos-
sessed wide-ranging powers over women. However, as Jack Zipes and Lewis
Seifert have demonstrated, the fairy-tale genre has an enormous subversive
potential,17 and precisely by virtue of its marginality with respect to real life, it
confirms itself as being in a privileged position to comment on social practices
and gender dynamics. Perfectly aware of the disquieting duplicity of the conte
de fées, Villeneuve and Beaumont use this genre in a way that allows them to
evade the limitations of the dominant male discourse while remaining within
its boundaries. Their fairy tales have thus provided the conteuses with a means
of highlighting the constructedness of desire and sexuality and made it possi-
ble for them to indicate a liberating option for their young female readership.
By representing the marriage transaction as an economic or moral necessity
rather than an emotional imperative and by detaching both desire and the
need for its constraint from the principles governing the marketplace (indeed,
the word love never appears in the tales), Villeneuve and Beaumont sustain the
illusion of the heroines’ autonomy and control over their personal experience.
The sacrifice of active sexual desire thus becomes a strategy of women’s defense
against their imprisonment within patriarchal and legal structures, their
chance to negotiate the freedom. The recently discovered biographical data
related to the conteuses’ private lives seem to support this argument.18
Villeneuve was widowed and supported herself by her literary activity. When
Beaumont wrote her Magasin, she was involved in an unlegalized union with
Thomas Pichon-Tyrrel and was respectably earning her own living as an
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educator of influential London families. These biographical details thus testify
to both conteuses charting a path for girls to achieve success and self-definition
without passing through the obligatory marriage plot.19
Conclusion
Returning to our point of departure, namely, how Villeneuve and Beaumont
address the issues of desire and desirability and how they relate to and comment
on the real-life gender relationships in the eighteenth century, it is possible to
conclude that both conteuses show that women’s role in male-determined erotic
relationships amounts to being used as “exchangeable, perhaps symbolic,
property for the primary purpose of cementing the bonds of men and within
men” (Sedgwick 16). Villeneuve and Beaumont also reveal that the issues of
desire and desirability actually run parallel to the question of power, where the
categories of masculine and feminine belong to an economic and ideological
order. According to this perspective, the abdication of the right to exercise their
desires in their tales enables women to disrupt their subordination within male
bonds and to manipulate the male economy. These eighteenth-century versions
of “Beauty and the Beast” are thus remarkably modern in their capacity to explore
the performativity of gender identity and in their rethinking of sexuality.
Villeneuve and Beaumont’s narratives can therefore be read not only as a vindica-
tion of the rights of women but also as an attempt to renew social practices and
gender relations.
Notes
1. See Fénelon (ch. 6, 38): “Les enfants aiment avec passion les contes ridicules; on
les voit tous les jours transportés de joie, ou versant des larmes, au récit des aven-
tures qu’on leur raconte: ne manquez pas de profiter de ce penchant: quand vous
les voyez disposés à vous entendre, raccontez-leur quelque fable courte et jolie;
mais choisissez quelques fables d’animaux, qui soient ingénieuses et innocentes:
donnez-les pour ce qu’elles sont; montrez-en le but sérieux.”
2. All translations from the foreword are mine.
3. Inspired by Fénelon’s educational treatise, De l’éducation des filles (On The
Education of Girls, 1687), and John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education
(1693), Beaumont’s methods and techniques of instruction were more practical,
oriented toward application. See Latapie on Beaumont’s pedagogical motivations,
the Magasin’s structure, and the moral dimension of her contes.
4. Although Beaumont does not cite her sources, she acknowledges that she bor-
rowed many themes and motifs from the fairy tales of her predecessors (Beaumont
968). Starting with Apuleius’s romance of Cupid and Psyche included in The
Golden Ass, it is clear that a number of stories circulating in the oral and literary
tradition preexisted Beaumont’s version. At the end of the Grand Siècle, women
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fairy-tale authors such as Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, Henriette-Julie de Murat,
and Marie-Jeanne Lhéritier produced numerous variations on the “animal-groom”
folkloric tale type ATU 425. See Warner (273–74), Zipes (Fairy Tales, 35), and
Barchilon (2–3).
5. Notwithstanding the wide popularity of the “Beauty and the Beast” tale, not enough
has been done so far on the comparison of Villeneuve’s and Beaumont’s versions. For
the existing studies of these tales, see Barchilon (8–9) and Robert (150–53), who
concur in finding Beaumont’s streamlined plot superior to Villeneuve’s. See also
Zipes (Fairy Tales, 30–41), Hearne (15–28), Biancardi’s introduction to the 2008
edition of both tales (Beaumont 9–20), and Griswold on the comprehensive survey
of main critical approaches to the tale’s interpretation (psychological, sociohistorical,
and feminist), the analysis of contemporary adaptations, and selected illustrations.
6. On the educational function of Villeneuve’s “La Belle et la Bête,” see Defrance
(91–92) and the introduction to the edition of Villeneuve and Beaumont’s tales by
Elisa Biancardi (Beaumont 15): “Mme de Villeneuve dépasse assez souvent les
bornes des recommandations génériques aux jeunes gens, pour s’engager dans un
domaine plus spécifiquement pédagogique; elle manifeste en effet un intérêt con-
cret, tout ébauché qu’il est, pour l’importance de l’instruction et pour le rôle des
éducateurs, entrant même, parfois, dans le détail des objectifs et des stratégies les
plus indiquées pour une transmission convenable des connaissances.”
7. Whereas the didactic intention is only implicit in Villeneuve’s novel, Beaumont,
indeed, clearly states that her ultimate goal was to prepare her élèves de la première
distinction for life in society (“je veux leur apprendre à penser juste, pour parvenir
à bien vivre”; Beaumont 973).
8. On conduct and marriage manuals of the late seventeenth century, see, for exam-
ple, Fénelon’s De l’éducation des filles and Jacques Chaussé’s Traité de l’Excelence du
mariage (Treaty on the Excellence of Marriage, 1686), which presents itself as a
defense of marriage. See Duggan’s illuminating discussion of ideas on women’s
position in public and private spheres that such treatises promoted (130–39).
9. Critics such as Barchilon and Raymond have pointed out the substantial difference
between Villeneuve’s and Beaumont’s tales, which consists in Villeneuve’s erotici-
zation of the story and her explicit reference to sex. This is certainly true, if we
consider that Villeneuve’s Beast asks Beauty at least three times to go to bed with
him, and each time his question contains the verb coucher, whereas in Beaumont’s
version the Beast proposes that Beauty marry him. However, I would argue that
the female sexual desire in Beaumont is encoded not much differently compared
to Villeneuve’s tale. It is sufficient indeed to recall the passages on the unconsum-
mated erotic attraction between father and daughter that seems to be reciprocal:
“[Beauty]: Je me trouve fort heureuse, puisqu’en mourant j’aurai la joie de sauver
mon père, et de lui prouver ma tendresse” (Beaumont 1022) (“I feel very fortunate
to be in a position to save my father and prove my affection for him,” Zipes,
Beauties, 237). See also Villeneuve: “Le père seul ne voulut pas consentir au des-
sein que prenait sa fille cadette. Mais les autres insolemment lui reprochèrent que
la Belle seule le touchait, que malgré les malheurs dont elle était cause, il était
fâché que ce ne fût pas une des ainées qui payât son imprudence” (36) (“The
father was the only one who would not consent to his youngest daughter’s plan,
but the other daughters insolently reproached him, accusing him of caring only
for Beauty. . . . ‘You’re just sorry it’s not one of us who is going to pay for Beauty’s
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imprudence.’” (Zipes, Beauties, 164). For an interpretation of the incestuous rela-
tionship between father and daughter, see especially Bettelheim (245–46).
10. On the intersections between Girard and Lévi-Strauss’s theories, see Sedgwick
(21–27). Also see Irigaray, who also draws on Lévi-Strauss and Marx to explain
the commodification of women.
11. Girard’s notion of a crisis of distinctions is elaborated on in his La Violence et le
sacré (Violence and the Sacred, 1972).
12. The merchant emphasizes that Belle’s merit consists not so much in her beauty
but rather in patience, the supreme feminine virtue. See Beaumont: “Il admirait la
vertu de cette jeune fille et surtout sa patience” (1019) (“He admired the virtues
of this young girl—especially her patience”; Zipes, Beauties, 234).
13. Beaumont explicitly claims in her Avertissement that her goal was to uplift,
instruct, and improve the female sex: “En faisant réciter aux enfants l’histoire de
la Sainte Écriture, j’ai eu soin de donner à leur raison, des preuves à leur portée
de la divinité de cette Écriture. . . . Mes contes tendent au même but, tout y
ramène les enfants, et j’ai lieu d’espérer qu’à force de répéter les mêmes vérités,
sous des formes diverses, elles s’inculqueront chez eux d’une manière ineffaçable”
(971).
14. See Duggan (139–47) on the interesting discussion of Grisélidis’s figure as an
ideal of feminine virtue, the virtue that is synonymous with female submission.
Duggan argues that Perrault challenges negative stereotypes about women’s
innate immorality, expressed, among other places, in La Bruyère’s “Des Femmes”
and Boileau’s “Satire X,” while still sharing their fundamental misogynistic
prejudices.
15. See especially Giovan Francesco Straparola’s “The Pig King” (2.1) in The Facetious
Nights (1551–1553); and Giambattista Basile’s “The Serpent” (2.5), “The Chain”
(2.9), “Splendid Shine” (5.3), and “The Golden Trunk” (5.4) in The Tale of Tales
(1636).
16. On the liaison between Villeneuve and the dramatist, see Girou-Swiderski (107)
and Stewart (“Les vieilles fées,” 206–7).
17. A rich vein of recent critical works on fairy tales, most notably by Zipes, Seifert,
Duggan, Raynard, and Warner, has shown how many fairy-tale writers ques-
tioned the official order and the norms of femininity and marriage through their
tales and proposed more liberatory models. While acknowledging that there are
also some important limits to the conte’s ideological subversiveness, Seifert recog-
nizes in the tales of women writers a rethinking of sexual desire and gender,
which sometimes threw into question the very possibility of matrimonial bliss
and the “happy ending” we expect from the genre (cf., in particular, Female
Empowerment and Fairy Tales, 17–18).
18. Data discovered by Elisa Biancardi. See Biancardi, “Madame de Villeneuve entre
oubli et méprises.” On Beaumont’s biography, see Biancardi’s introduction to her
edition of Beaumont and Villeneuve’s tales (Beaumont 9–20) as well as Biancardi
(esp. 51–56).
19. It is also interesting to note that as early as 1748 Beaumont publicly expressed
her progressive ideas on women’s role in society in her Lettre en réponse (Letter in
Response to the “Wonderful Year”) to Abbé Coyer’s L’Année merveilleuse, ou les
homme-femmes (The Wonderful Year, or the Men-Women). For a discussion of the
debates that Beaumont’s Lettre provoked, see Stewart (“Allegories”).
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