Beauty and the Beast

It's lovely,isn't it--though of course Carter makes something much darker of the base story than Disney. Why do you think that she effectively 'doubles' the story by giving us 'The Courtship of Mr Lyon' as well as 'The Tiger's Bride'? Does she want us to simply know the base story to ring the changes on it? Or is there more to Mr Lyon than there appears to be at first sight?

Remember your question:

“Gothic texts often present a powerful opposition between dominance and submission” Discuss how far you have found this to be the case in any three of the texts you have studied.

Try considering how the repetition of the story strengthens or changes the ideas of dominance and submission...

Of course one other thing that repetition does is strenghtens or changes our preconceptions. One thing that inetrests me is the way that the beast is portrayed. I remember watching an inetresting interview with the animators where they discussed how they had come up with the Disney version--apparently a Wildebeest was a majoy contributor. The picture above seems very leonine, which goes with Mr Lyon (lions are also mentioned in The Tiger's Bride, and of course lions and tigers do interbreed (interesting but ultimately not very useful fact), and are both considered in some sense royal or dignified.


But what if the beast is not very attractive as an animal--if he is really beastly? Look at these illustrations, one by Walter Crane and one by Arthur Rackham. Neither seems to show the beast as particularly attractive as an animal in the way that a tiger or lion might be. How does this affect the story, and the transformation?

I especially like Rackham's rather piggy beast, because the incongruity is so great between his manner and his appearance--the way that he seems to be taking tea in a perfectly civilised manner in a smart suit, making polite conversation, with the head of a wild boar, though Crane's beast has a good deal of appeal as well. He seems to have cornered the market on pathos, looking rather like a sick frog in a ditch, though this is perhaps because of the point in the story from which this is taken. Anyway, neither of them look exactly like romantic heroes, whereas a more leonine or tiger-like beast seems to me to be closer to what human think of as attractive--what do you think?