I think it's important to specify who we're talking about when we say parents/in-laws. In the majority of the stories of this type, the only parent featured is Beauty's father. The mother is hardly, if ever, mentioned. The Beast's parents, as well, presumably a king and queen are only occasionally spoken of and always only at the very end of the story.
There may be a couple reasons for the prominence of the patriarch: 1) it develops Beauty's character and virtue by giving her someone to be obedient and dutiful to, 2) it creates a narrative engine - the father either becomes sick and Beauty must leave the Beast to see him, or, as in Frog Prince stories, the father forces Beauty to do as the frog says (tying back to #1), 3) it infiltrates every aspect of the story with men.
Why might fairy tales want to have men strewn throughout the plot? It seems that the presence of the father and of the beast creates a weird parallel between father-daughter relations and boy-girl relations, as though Beauty is passed on from father to husband... which I presume was fairly common for the time period these stories were told. This parental element, then, provides a sort of didactic training in which young girls are taught, from these stories, how to behave around men, and not too surprisingly, Beauty is meant to behave around both father and romantic interest almost the same way.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment