Parents in the Beauty and Beast week stories

In the stories we have read for this week, two or several characters who assume roles as beautiful princesses and scary beasts play the key active roles in stories about marriage. By active roles, I mean that these characters are the only to have roles as true agents of action, as the story focuses on them as the purveyors of conflict and resolution, and the other characters in the stories play side roles. In these stories, the parent's always play the part of the main side roles, and although characters with side roles can be of a variety of types, (those who give advice, those who attempt to foil a particular resolution etc.) the parents in the stories always play a particular type of side role.

In these stories, the parents are always involved as part of the setting. What I mean by this is that they are involved in creating the plot that the Beauty and the Beast must resolve, and they do not play an active role in its decision much at all. In Beauty and the Beast specifically, it is the father's mistakes (his failure to maintain his riches and his bad manners towards the beast) that cause the Beauty to have to come in contact with the Beast. From there, the two characters work out their own problems, and the Father has only been involved in the action that set up their coming together.

Similarly, in The Pig King, the pig plays the active role of searching for a bride, while his mother plays the part of setting up princesses to come in contact with the Pig. And in the Frog King, the father plays the role of mediator, as he bridges the ongoing conflict between the princess and frog and ensures their conflict continues and that the princess cannot simply shut him out. He is part of the setting as well. In the Tiger's Bride, the father of course loses his daughter in a bet, and he is of course merely playing the setting part of a character as well, as any other variety of circumstances could have trapped the princess into her conflict with the tiger. And in the Swan Maiden, the mother is a mediator as well, as her imparting to her son the path to resolving his conflict, his need to possess the maiden, is merely part of the setting as well.

These stories reveal how parents can shape the settings that their children have to unravel. The parents conveniently are there to explain why their children must fall in love with strange animals.