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selenakA couple of days ago, apropos the newest version of The Phantom of the Opera, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ide_cyan quoted a rather interesting essay on the beauty and the beast myth. The gist of which - or at least of the excerpt - was that one of the beast's chief attractions lay in the fact that he's such a devoted, faithful lover, yet without the disadvantage of actually making claims. Quasimodo, the Mummy (I'm talking about the original Karloff version here, haven't seen the remake), Erik the Phantom - they'd never cheat. They have no messy relations dropping by at inconvenient hours. They move heaven and earth and kill for their beauty. But the utmost they ever demand from the Esmeraldas and Christines and Helens of the world is a kiss. A fully consumed relationship is presented by the narrative as impossible. (Except in the actual French Beauty and the Beast , which was written by a woman, not a man.) (Which is the difference to the Dracula/Blue Beard model of the Gothic Romance, in which the heroine actually does get violated in one way or the other, or if she falls for her Blue Beard voluntarily, quickly learns that she should not have.) I was reminded of this when rereading the SFX Christmas issue cover story, which is about Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong. Because of course King Kong is the beauty & beast principle taken to the extreme.
Kong is the ultimate hero of the Beauty & Beast principle, something even the creators of the original '30s movie were aware of when teasing Fay Wray that she was going to get "the tallest, darkest leading man of Hollywood". Quoth Peter Jackson about his version, which is going to be played by Andy Serkis in front of a blue screen and gorrilla'd by Weta Digital:
Kong has never felt a single bit of empathy for a living creature in his long life. Our King Kong is very battered, he's very ancient, he's the last of his particular race on the island. He did have a mother and father, but they're now dead and there are no more after him. He's the final survivor and he's a very old gorilla.
"Jackson will place more emphasis on the psychological aspects of the relationship between Darrow and Kong, who initially attempts to kill the actress before discovering the harbours feelings for her", adds the magazine. Yep, that would be our Beast, alright. He of the dark and bloody past, transformed by love. Given he's not just a different species but a different size altogether, there can be no physical aspect, so no matter whether Beauty is going to scorn him or requite at least some of his feelings, the relationship will stay in the chaste medieval pattern of knight and lady. And he will die for her. That's another quintessential part of the story, again with the notable exception of the French original. Kong dies. Quasimodo dies, though after Esmeralda. The Phantom dies (in most versions; Gaston Leroux and Susan Kay, in Phantom of the Opera and Phantom respectively, let him die a few days/weeks after the showdown/kiss/redemption, whereas most film versions let him die in a more gory fashion immediately after the showdown, and Webber leaves his fate open to debate in the musical) . You have to look for characters who only bear an echo of the beauty & beast pattern in order to find survivors.
(Mr. Rochester of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre comes to mind, though he gets blinded, and he's more formed after the somewhat different Byronic pattern anyway. Heathcliff decidedly does not die, until the end of the novel when he wants to, long, long after his own beauty has gone, but then Heathcliff is among other things almost Emily Bronte's way of savagely attacking the genre. See his sarcastic ridicule of Isabella for believing him to be a Beast transformable by love.)
(Oh, and there are also Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lector in Silence of the Lambs; in that case, the Beast-ness lies not in an ugly exterior but in a monstrous interior. Of course, when Harris instead of just toying with the scenario adopted it completely in Hannibal, people, by and large, were appalled… because in addition to Beast actually getting Beauty, Beauty had to become a Beast as well, and not in a comely Shrek way.)
Of couse, the great appeal of the Beauty & Beast scenario lies in other factors as well. Sympathy for the outsider, the outcast, which the beast always is, and the belief in the border-crossing, transformative power of love. Beasts in all their incarnations make the handsome young lovers who come attached to the beauties look pale in comparison. In the original Mummy, you've got to pity David Manners who was stuck with playing that kind of role in a lot of Universal films at the time, because one scene of Karloff's Imhotep and Helen Chandler staring at each other with minimum dialogue has so much more power than his endless protestations of love to her. (And if Manners was pale against Karloff in The Mummy and against Lugosi in Dracula, you can imagine how he fared stuck with the two of them at the same time in The Black Cat. Makes me think of Bruce Boxleitner's rueful comment on the Babylon 5 DVDs, regarding how a scene with Peter Jurasik or Andreas Katsulas was tough because they were so very good that they inevitably, even if the scene wasn't about them, got the lion's share of attention, but if you had to play a scene with both of them at the same time, you might as well be the wallpaper.) There hasn't been a version the Phantom story in which Raoul didn't get the hostility of the majority of the audience. And hey, Hugo actually did write Phoebus as despicable.
King Kong is somewhat different in that Beauty hooking up with Kong really isn't in the cards. Now matter whether it's the original's Anne Darrow or Dawn as played by Jessica Lange in the 70s' remake, their handsome love interests aren't perceived as rivals for the poor beast in the same way and hence don't get audience resentment. Incidentally, it probably says something about changing times that said love interest was a sailor in the 30s film, an enviromentalist in the 70s version, and will be a playwright (played by Adrien Brody) in Jackson's film. Audience hostility instead traditionally goes to Carl Denham, the entrepeneur who wants to exploit Kong and hence has the bright idea to bring him back to New York, and also has some unsavoury designs on Anne Darrow. Still, I'm willing to bet even the not-resented love interests won't get sighed over the way the big ape will be. It's in the nature of the story. The beast may always lose on screen, but he never loses the audience.
Which makes me wonder whether the story also works with reversed gender, or doesn't, and if not, why not. Stephen Sondheim's musical Passion actually is a pretty straight forward telling of the Beauty & Beast story with the beast being female. Fosca is intelligent but ugly, intense and highly manipulative. Giorgio is the handsome beauty who has an equally good looking love interest, Clara. Now I love Passion, but as far as I know, it wasn't very successful. I do recall reviews declaring themselves freaked out by Fosca the stalker, and the fact that Giorgio ultimately gives in and for one night, after which she, in true beast fashion, dies, requites her passion. What was Sondheim saying here, they demanded, that enough stalking by an ugly intense person would eventually pay off in love? Well, you can surely read it that way - though the way the musical meditates on the nature of passion, and the two views expressed by Giorgio early and late in the story, one that love is selfless and thinks of the other first, and the other, later view, that love is not convenient but selfish and all-consuming, is more complex than that - but what I wonder is why the critics were so freaked out as if the story was something new on stage. (Or novel. Or screen.) It wasn't. Just the gender was unusual.
Still, it's hard not to draw the conclusion that an ugly/deformed/somehow otherwise outcast woman falling for a beautiful young man is perceived as creepy and pathetic, whereas an ugly/deformed/otherwise outcast man falling for a beautiful young woman is perceived as romantic. In the screen adaption of Stephen King's Misery, psychotic Annie Wilkes gets a rare moment of not-King-authored humanity when Paul, and the audience, realize that she has fallen in love with him. (She's not in the novel; btw, generally I much prefer the novel which is a great treatise on the process of writing itself.) And is aware of the futility of it, because "people like you do not fall in love with people like me". Not in popular culture, anyway. If Jackson had made Kong into a female gorilla, going after Adrien Brody instead, you can bet the fans would be screaming for his head now before anyone has ever seen any scene, and the critics would be sharpening their knives.
Trying to think of other rare examples of female beasts, I'm wondering whether Ayesha counts (aka She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, thought up by Henry R. Haggard). We certainly have a handsome male beauty here with a pretty female love interest which makes Ayesha jealous, but Ayesha herself is beautiful beyond compare. Her beast-ness lies in her immortality and amorality. So no, she doesn't count. If anyone can think of female Quasimodos and male Esmeraldas, pray tell.
ide_cyan quoted a rather interesting essay on the beauty and the beast myth. The gist of which - or at least of the excerpt - was that one of the beast's chief attractions lay in the fact that he's such a devoted, faithful lover, yet without the disadvantage of actually making claims. Quasimodo, the Mummy (I'm talking about the original Karloff version here, haven't seen the remake), Erik the Phantom - they'd never cheat. They have no messy relations dropping by at inconvenient hours. They move heaven and earth and kill for their beauty. But the utmost they ever demand from the Esmeraldas and Christines and Helens of the world is a kiss. A fully consumed relationship is presented by the narrative as impossible. (Except in the actual French Beauty and the Beast , which was written by a woman, not a man.) (Which is the difference to the Dracula/Blue Beard model of the Gothic Romance, in which the heroine actually does get violated in one way or the other, or if she falls for her Blue Beard voluntarily, quickly learns that she should not have.) I was reminded of this when rereading the SFX Christmas issue cover story, which is about Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong. Because of course King Kong is the beauty & beast principle taken to the extreme. Kong is the ultimate hero of the Beauty & Beast principle, something even the creators of the original '30s movie were aware of when teasing Fay Wray that she was going to get "the tallest, darkest leading man of Hollywood". Quoth Peter Jackson about his version, which is going to be played by Andy Serkis in front of a blue screen and gorrilla'd by Weta Digital:
Kong has never felt a single bit of empathy for a living creature in his long life. Our King Kong is very battered, he's very ancient, he's the last of his particular race on the island. He did have a mother and father, but they're now dead and there are no more after him. He's the final survivor and he's a very old gorilla.
"Jackson will place more emphasis on the psychological aspects of the relationship between Darrow and Kong, who initially attempts to kill the actress before discovering the harbours feelings for her", adds the magazine. Yep, that would be our Beast, alright. He of the dark and bloody past, transformed by love. Given he's not just a different species but a different size altogether, there can be no physical aspect, so no matter whether Beauty is going to scorn him or requite at least some of his feelings, the relationship will stay in the chaste medieval pattern of knight and lady. And he will die for her. That's another quintessential part of the story, again with the notable exception of the French original. Kong dies. Quasimodo dies, though after Esmeralda. The Phantom dies (in most versions; Gaston Leroux and Susan Kay, in Phantom of the Opera and Phantom respectively, let him die a few days/weeks after the showdown/kiss/redemption, whereas most film versions let him die in a more gory fashion immediately after the showdown, and Webber leaves his fate open to debate in the musical) . You have to look for characters who only bear an echo of the beauty & beast pattern in order to find survivors.
(Mr. Rochester of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre comes to mind, though he gets blinded, and he's more formed after the somewhat different Byronic pattern anyway. Heathcliff decidedly does not die, until the end of the novel when he wants to, long, long after his own beauty has gone, but then Heathcliff is among other things almost Emily Bronte's way of savagely attacking the genre. See his sarcastic ridicule of Isabella for believing him to be a Beast transformable by love.)
(Oh, and there are also Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lector in Silence of the Lambs; in that case, the Beast-ness lies not in an ugly exterior but in a monstrous interior. Of course, when Harris instead of just toying with the scenario adopted it completely in Hannibal, people, by and large, were appalled… because in addition to Beast actually getting Beauty, Beauty had to become a Beast as well, and not in a comely Shrek way.)
Of couse, the great appeal of the Beauty & Beast scenario lies in other factors as well. Sympathy for the outsider, the outcast, which the beast always is, and the belief in the border-crossing, transformative power of love. Beasts in all their incarnations make the handsome young lovers who come attached to the beauties look pale in comparison. In the original Mummy, you've got to pity David Manners who was stuck with playing that kind of role in a lot of Universal films at the time, because one scene of Karloff's Imhotep and Helen Chandler staring at each other with minimum dialogue has so much more power than his endless protestations of love to her. (And if Manners was pale against Karloff in The Mummy and against Lugosi in Dracula, you can imagine how he fared stuck with the two of them at the same time in The Black Cat. Makes me think of Bruce Boxleitner's rueful comment on the Babylon 5 DVDs, regarding how a scene with Peter Jurasik or Andreas Katsulas was tough because they were so very good that they inevitably, even if the scene wasn't about them, got the lion's share of attention, but if you had to play a scene with both of them at the same time, you might as well be the wallpaper.) There hasn't been a version the Phantom story in which Raoul didn't get the hostility of the majority of the audience. And hey, Hugo actually did write Phoebus as despicable.
King Kong is somewhat different in that Beauty hooking up with Kong really isn't in the cards. Now matter whether it's the original's Anne Darrow or Dawn as played by Jessica Lange in the 70s' remake, their handsome love interests aren't perceived as rivals for the poor beast in the same way and hence don't get audience resentment. Incidentally, it probably says something about changing times that said love interest was a sailor in the 30s film, an enviromentalist in the 70s version, and will be a playwright (played by Adrien Brody) in Jackson's film. Audience hostility instead traditionally goes to Carl Denham, the entrepeneur who wants to exploit Kong and hence has the bright idea to bring him back to New York, and also has some unsavoury designs on Anne Darrow. Still, I'm willing to bet even the not-resented love interests won't get sighed over the way the big ape will be. It's in the nature of the story. The beast may always lose on screen, but he never loses the audience.
Which makes me wonder whether the story also works with reversed gender, or doesn't, and if not, why not. Stephen Sondheim's musical Passion actually is a pretty straight forward telling of the Beauty & Beast story with the beast being female. Fosca is intelligent but ugly, intense and highly manipulative. Giorgio is the handsome beauty who has an equally good looking love interest, Clara. Now I love Passion, but as far as I know, it wasn't very successful. I do recall reviews declaring themselves freaked out by Fosca the stalker, and the fact that Giorgio ultimately gives in and for one night, after which she, in true beast fashion, dies, requites her passion. What was Sondheim saying here, they demanded, that enough stalking by an ugly intense person would eventually pay off in love? Well, you can surely read it that way - though the way the musical meditates on the nature of passion, and the two views expressed by Giorgio early and late in the story, one that love is selfless and thinks of the other first, and the other, later view, that love is not convenient but selfish and all-consuming, is more complex than that - but what I wonder is why the critics were so freaked out as if the story was something new on stage. (Or novel. Or screen.) It wasn't. Just the gender was unusual.
Still, it's hard not to draw the conclusion that an ugly/deformed/somehow otherwise outcast woman falling for a beautiful young man is perceived as creepy and pathetic, whereas an ugly/deformed/otherwise outcast man falling for a beautiful young woman is perceived as romantic. In the screen adaption of Stephen King's Misery, psychotic Annie Wilkes gets a rare moment of not-King-authored humanity when Paul, and the audience, realize that she has fallen in love with him. (She's not in the novel; btw, generally I much prefer the novel which is a great treatise on the process of writing itself.) And is aware of the futility of it, because "people like you do not fall in love with people like me". Not in popular culture, anyway. If Jackson had made Kong into a female gorilla, going after Adrien Brody instead, you can bet the fans would be screaming for his head now before anyone has ever seen any scene, and the critics would be sharpening their knives.
Trying to think of other rare examples of female beasts, I'm wondering whether Ayesha counts (aka She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, thought up by Henry R. Haggard). We certainly have a handsome male beauty here with a pretty female love interest which makes Ayesha jealous, but Ayesha herself is beautiful beyond compare. Her beast-ness lies in her immortality and amorality. So no, she doesn't count. If anyone can think of female Quasimodos and male Esmeraldas, pray tell.
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Not quite the same, but...
Date: 2004-12-28 06:48 pm (UTC)In Phineas Finn and Phineas Redux you get a bit of the female Quasimodo, in that you have two middle-aged and socially marginal women both in love with handsome Phinny Finn. Lady Laura Kennedy is socially outcast because she has left her husband; Madame Max Goessler is--*gasp*--connected with continental Europe (her first husband may have been a Jew!!! and was certainly a businessman; Madame Max carries on his business quite ably, while charming Dukes left and right).
Lady Laura's story I would say fits the idea that middle-aged women in love are pathetic and distasteful. She clings to Phineas and is no use at all when he's in danger of being hanged for murder--just mopes around and talks her cousin into letting her visit Phinny in jail to weep on him. But Trollope is very sympathetic to her, clearly very fond of the character.
Madame Max is equally middle-aged, and in the first book puts herself in the inappropriate-for-Victorian-women position of telling Phinny that she's in love with him. But Trollope clearly thinks she's just fabulous, and eventually she saves Phinny's ass and they go off to have happy middle-aged
sexmarried life.So you end up with two women who are similarly outside of the traditional romantic heroine type, both quite openly in love with a no-longer-young (but still damn fine) man. One of them is a little too pathetic to be quite tragic and the other ends up not being tragic at all. I would say that what makes Lady Laura pathetic rather than appealing is her excessive availability, but then again Madame Max is just as available. She does pretty much propose to Phinny in the Phineas Finn and very publicly go to serious trouble to save him in Phineas Redux.
The biggest difference between them is that Lady Laura is helpless and passive and Mme. Max is efficient and active. Lady Laura has bad luck--her husband turns out to be insane and oppressive, and she doesn't have the funds on her own to build up a life for herself after leaving him. Mme. Max has the money to make a busy life, even if she isn't entirely socially acceptable.
I feel like I'm still circling back to the question of why it's tragic for "unacceptable" men to be in love and pathetic for "unacceptable" women. Mme. Max has some traditionally male qualities--she is in control of her own life--and, in fact, the times when she's romantically vulnerable are appealingly touching rather than distastefully so.
***
If you go to George Eliot's Middlemarch you get a very strong anti-Beauty&Beast situation with Dorothea's marriage to Casaubon. He's remote and cold--should be just the thing for converting into a romantic hero, because looks are deceiving and still waters run deep. But no. There's (romantically speaking) as little there as there seems to be to everyone but young Dorothea.
Re: Not quite the same, but...
Date: 2004-12-28 06:55 pm (UTC)Mr. Casaubon makes few claims, and that's what makes Dorothea so unhappy.
Re: Not quite the same, but...
Date: 2004-12-28 07:04 pm (UTC)Re: Not quite the same, but...
Date: 2004-12-28 07:12 pm (UTC)Re: Not quite the same, but...
Date: 2004-12-28 06:59 pm (UTC)Middlemarch: yep, and Isabel and Gilbert in Portrait of a Lady are a similar couple, where he's just as hollow and cold and awful as he appears to be. I remember complaints that John Malkovich is repellent in the film version, which always struck me as missing the point. Gilbert is supposed to be repellent. Anyway. Must read Palliser novels.
Re: Not quite the same, but...
Date: 2004-12-28 07:06 pm (UTC)But the whole end of the Lady Laura-Phinny Finn-Madame Max story is fascinating. Definitely all about the middle-aged love.
Re: Not quite the same, but...
Date: 2004-12-28 07:08 pm (UTC)Re: Not quite the same, but...
Date: 2004-12-28 07:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-28 07:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-28 07:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-28 07:50 pm (UTC)***
Which makes me wonder whether the story also works with reversed gender, or doesn't, and if not, why not.
Gender is a social class based on division of labour, where characteristics arising out of this division are ascribed to sexual differences in order to justify the hierarchies built on the exploitation of one class by another. (I use Christine Delphy's definition of it; correctly, I hope.)
I think you can probably easily flip the sex of the characters (one or both, depending on whether you're writing homosexual or heterosexual pairings), and have the story more or less remain the same, but the great difference that comes into play then must be the discordance between the characters' sexes and their genders. If you have a female beast, she will lack the license accorded to male beasts because of their gendered privileges, though she may have "unfeminine" qualities that distinguish her from her sex's assigned gender; whereas, a male beauty may or may not lose his privileges because of his feminisation, again in terms of gender. This must inevitably affect the power dynamics in a relationship where the pairing's sexes are flipped, unless you also change the entire hierarchy of the world in which you set your story.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-29 07:31 am (UTC)Re: changed power dynamics in the case of male beauty and female beast: it occurs to me these are a huge issue in Passion. Both in the main story and in the backstory, i.e. Fosca's marriage to a con man, the first time she fell for a male beauty, who told her, when the truth came out, "women sell their looks/ why not a man?/ if he can", and "we had an arrangment, did we not? I lend you my charm/ and my arm", and "although you are no beauty, my dear/ I fear/ you are not quite the victim you appear". In that case, the man is the heartless femme fatale (whereas Giorgio in the main story is the femme fragile if we're talking fin du siècle stereotypes), but because he is a man and she's a woman, he could financially exploit her (taking all her money, which as her husband in that epoch he's entitled to) in a way which would have been impossible with reversed genders.
In the main story, howeover, she uses the gender rules of her epoch to her advantage in as much as it's virtually impossible for Giorgio to avoid her company (without committing a serious break of etiquette) in the circumstances she arranges.
Incidentally, guess what: I recall several reviews in which the critics tried to ease their discomfort with the idea of Fosca, the female Beast, by telling themselves that obviously she's really a male homosexual (because her creator is).
*headdesk*
no subject
Date: 2004-12-28 07:23 pm (UTC)Susan Sontag dies
no subject
Date: 2004-12-28 07:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-28 09:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-29 06:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-29 07:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-28 10:52 pm (UTC)I'm inclined to agree with
Georgette Heyer played with the idea to an extent with her story The Civil Contract. It's not quite right but the hero does enter into an arranged marriage with an ugly woman while in love with an exceptionally drippy beauty. The ugly heroine is a social outcast in the sense that she is not of the same social class (trade!!!) as the hero but she's not a stalker and doesn't die so the analogy isn't exact. It's an interesting twist on romantic stereotypes though (something Heyer often had fun with).
no subject
Date: 2004-12-29 03:27 am (UTC)That said, Valmont is hardly Christine to her Phantom by any means; Cecile and Chevalier Danceny play the roles of virginal (until Merteuil gets her hands on them, at least) innocents, and Mme. Tourvel is the embodiment of virtue until Valmont (at Merteuil's instigation) seduces her. Interesting that Valmont ruins Cecile's innocence without a qualm, but breaking down Mme. Tourvel's virtue is what leads to love, and eventually his ruin at the hands of Merteuil. Thus suggesting that virue is better than simple innocence, and is more likely to redeem and/or reveal evil?
Now you're making me think. Stop that! *grins*
no subject
Date: 2004-12-29 06:37 am (UTC)BTW,
Male Beauty, Female Beast
Date: 2004-12-29 04:23 am (UTC)However, the concept introducing this discussion - that "one of the beast's chief attractions lay in the fact that he's such a devoted, faithful lover, yet without the disadvantage of actually making claims" - reminded me of a statement I've read about women's perception of the vampire as an ideal lover, because his attentions are all foreplay. I'm sorry to say I don't recall the source of this: It may have been Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, creator of the sexually impotent but boundlessly romantic vampire Count Saint-Germain.
Vampire romance is an evolving genre, but the "classic" vampire romance parallels the traditional Beauty and the Beast tale: the male vampire who falls in love with a human woman is cured of his vampirism so he can marry her as part of the happy ending. Stories have also been written to the "death required" formula: the vampire dies so the human hero can get the girl. Vampire romances generally conformed to one formula or the other until the early 1990s.
Re: Male Beauty, Female Beast
Date: 2004-12-29 04:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-29 04:24 am (UTC)Sunset Boulevard, aka Beast killing Beauty
Date: 2004-12-29 06:42 am (UTC)