Fairy Tales 2010

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Role of Beauty's Father

It seems to me that the role of the parents is mainly, in the case of Beauty's family, a reminder of a child's duty to care for his or her parents-- an obligation certainly expected of young daughters, especially those who no longer have mothers caring for the family. It is very clear in both Madame de Beaumont's version of La Belle et la Bete and The Pig King that a daughter's priority should always be her family, and it is notably her parents to whom she essentially owes her life. Despite the center of the story being one of transformation and acceptance of those with horrifying outer appearances, the situation in which this lesson is framed does not even come about until after Beauty has done what every dutiful daughter in her position would do: sacrifice herself for her father. Not only out of expectation, Beauty is so moral a character that she genuinely insists out of love. She claims that, should she not give her own life so that her father may continue living his, she would die anyways, and it would certainly be a more painstaking death of despair and grief. This idea that the daughter cannot go on without her father also reinforces the idea of virginity and naivete in the sexual realm of the adult world. Beauty has never before loved another in the way that she does her father, and thus cannot imagine anything worse than living without him, nor anything that could plausibly replace him (or his role in her life). Therefore, the presence of the father in the story allows for the element of self discovery and sexual maturation later on, when Beauty falls in love with Beast and even remarks that she would be much happier living with him than with her own family. The story is thus not only one in transformation of the beast from hideous to pleasant, but that of Beauty from her young, dependent self (although moral and virtuous) to a woman and, accordingly, a wife.

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