BEAUTY AND THE BEAST FAIRYTALES AS NARRATIVES OF
OTHERING
By
JASMEEN GRIFFIN
Integrated Studies Project
submitted to Dr.Veronica Thompson
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts – Integrated Studies
Athabasca, Alberta
April, 2009
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Beauty and the Beast Fairytales as Narratives of Othering
Fairytales, recalling the illusory halcyon days of childhood, exert their fascination
on young and old from myriad cultures and throughout the centuries. The fairytale
“Beauty and the Beast” continues to be one of the most popular with versions in Asian,
African and European cultures. In the Aarne-Thompson classification index, “Beauty and
the Beast” is listed as tale type 425C in the Animal Bridegroom category. It shares the
same motif as the Sanskrit tale “The Girl who Married a Snake” in the Panchatantra, an
ancient collection of fables and instructive tales designed to impart wisdom and rules of
conduct to princes and future rulers which circulated in the west in Arabic, Persian and
Latin translations (Griswold, 15; Zipes, Oxford 45, 375). In this story, a father promises
his daughter to his friend’s son, not realizing that this son is a snake. The daughter insists
on carrying out her father’s word and marries the snake, who nightly abandons his
snakeskin to turn into a young man. The snake’s father breaks the curse on his son who
then lives happily ever after with his wife. In both “The Girl who Married a Snake” and
Beauty and the Beast tales it is the father who is responsible for his daughter being
delivered to the keeping of a monster. The beautiful daughter is compliant, selfabnegating, obedient and dutiful and sacrifices herself to fulfill her father’s promise. In
the European tradition, the origins of “Beauty and the Beast” are traceable to the tale of
Cupid and Psyche in The Golden Ass written by Apuleius in Latin in the second century.
Psyche, convinced by her jealous sisters that her invisible bridegroom is a monstrous
serpent, breaks her promise to her husband by looking upon him as he sleeps. He
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awakens when a drop of oil from her lamp falls on him and leaves because she has
broken her promise. She wins him back after obediently completing several arduous tasks
set by her mother-in-law, Venus. Motifs shared by Beauty and the Beast fairytales and
“Cupid and Psyche” include “the mysterious nature of the husband, whose invisibility or
bestial appearance is the supernatural effect of divinity or enchantment…and the
valorization of beauty over pride or vanity” (Bacchilega, Postmodern 73).
In eighteenth-century France the development of the printing press influenced the
rise of literary fairytales, which were predominantly written for adult consumption and
were an integral part of the salons and court of the French aristocracy, whose tastes and
preoccupations they reflected. Many of the writers were aristocratic women searching for
more fulfilling roles in society than those prescribed for them and the literary fairytale
became “institutionalized as an aesthetic and social means through which questions and
issues of civilite, proper behaviour and demeanor in all types of situations were
mapped…” (Zipes, Breaking 23). Mme D’Aulnoy was an illustrious member of this
group and was instrumental in the development of the tale of Beauty and the Beast. Her
versions are inherently ambiguous because although they portray the desirability of
independent women in charge of their destiny the destiny itself is to submit to men and
fit into patriarchal culture and “it is the prescribed taming of female desire according to
virtues associated with male industriousness and fairness that marks the morals attached
to the end of each narrative” (Zipes, Fairy Tale as Myth 28). In 1740, Mme de Villeneuve
used D’Aulnoy’s themes and motifs to write a long and rambling tale of Beauty and the
Beast. De Villeneuve’s heroine, distinguished by her docility, obedience and selfabnegation, steadfastly “chooses to fulfill her obligations rather than follow her heart”
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(Zipes, Fairy Tale as Myth 30). Mme LePrince de Beaumont, a member of the French
lesser nobility working in England as a governess, adapted de Villeneuve’s tale into a
much shorter version and published it in her Magasin des enfants, ou dialogues entre une
sage Gouvernante et plusieurs des Eleves in 1756. The first English edition The Young
Misses’ Magazine was published in 1761. The self-denying nature of de Villeneuve’s
Beauty suited de Beaumont’s purpose of creating a didactic tale designed to instil
prevailing moral and ethical values in children. (Zipes, Fairy Tale as Myth 24-35).
In de Beaumont’s “Beauty and the Beast” an impoverished merchant greatly
angers a Beast by stealing a rose from the Beast’s garden as a present for his youngest
daughter, Beauty. The Beast spares the merchant’s life on condition that one of the
merchant’s three daughters agree of her own free will to live with the Beast. Since her
request for a rose had endangered her father’s life, Beauty insists on sacrificing herself.
At the Beast’s magnificent palace she is treated as its treasured mistress and her fears of
the Beast’s ferocity are soon allayed but she refuses his daily proposal of marriage. When
he allows her to visit her ailing father, her jealous sisters conspire to delay her return.
Upon dreaming that the Beast has died in her prolonged absence, she rushes back to his
palace and is able to revive him with her assurances of love and acceptance of his hand in
marriage. Upon hearing her protestations the Beast is transformed into a handsome young
prince. In her initial bewilderment Beauty cannot forbear asking where is Beast; however,
she quickly adjusts to and accepts the handsome prince who has been released of his
enchantment by her promise of marriage. The fairytale ends with two morals: one, the
necessity of doing one’s duty, no matter how arduous, and the other, to not judge
character by appearance. Beauty marries the prince, who is her reward for displaying the
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virtues of self-sacrifice and gratitude and for learning to see and love the goodness of the
Beast despite his fearsome exterior, and the sisters are punished for their envy by being
turned into sentient statues. Unlike “The Girl Who Married a Snake” in which the father,
not the wife, rescues the son, de Beaumont’s Beauty has the beguiling power to transform
the Beast into a prince through the magnitude of her love.
“Beauty and the Beast” can be interpreted using several different approaches. It is
often viewed as coming to terms with sexuality either within oneself or in a heterosexual
relationship. Psychological readings of the narrative see each character in the story as a
facet of a single individual; hence, the Beast is the sexual side of Beauty’s character
which she must learn to accept in order to become a fully functioning person. Beauty
must awaken to “the power of human love concealed in its animal (and therefore
imperfect) but genuinely erotic form” (Henderson, 131). The Jungian approach sees in
the tale of Beauty and the Beast a universal myth of awakening and self-awareness, “a
process symbolizing the manner in which the animus becomes conscious” (von Franz,
“Process” 206).The animus is the masculine qualities of “initiative, courage, objectivity,
and spiritual wisdom” (von Franz, “Process” 206) that a woman must access to provide
her with the strength and courage she needs to support her gentleness. In anthropological
terms, the tale delineates a rite of passage in which the heroine leaves the family and all
things familiar to move into unknown territory. The tale explores the dangers of
exogamy, of marrying outside the community, an easy adventurous transition for boys
but one fraught with anxiety and uncertainty for girls: “daughters’ leave-takings inspire
powerful and contradictory passions which ‘Beauty and the Beast’ explores” (Warner,
Beast 276). Sociohistorical perspectives of the tale underline the harsh material
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circumstances of women’s quotidian life that dictate that women be obedient, compliant
and subservient to the desires of their fathers and husbands. Daughters have no choice in
the matter and may be given by fathers to husbands who may be brutes. Angela Carter
suggests that “relationships between the sexes are determined by history and by the
historical fact of the economic dependence of women upon men” (Sadeian 7). However,
fairytales are not historical documents and sociohistorical perspectives do change over
time, holding out the promise that change is possible (Warner, Beast xxii).
Feminist interpretations originally identified Beauty as submissive, selfabnegating and obedient to men. They rejected this Beauty as a role model for girls and
recognized that she had been acculturated to fit into a patriarchal culture which values
and rewards these virtues in women. As a manual of conduct the tale equates submission,
docility and meek compliance with beauty and goodness (Lieberman, 186-208). The tale,
like many fairytales, reinforces patriarchal ideals, subordinates women and portrays the
desirability of marriage to a dominant male figure as the road to financial security,
personal well-being and happiness. (Rowe, 218). However, by assuming a direct and
unproblematic connection between fairytales and women’s dreams and desires, early
feminists assumed that texts have fixed rather than mutable and polysemic meanings.
Advances in communication theory persuasively suggest that the line of communication
between the message sent and the message received is problematic and negotiated. (Hall,
“Encoding, Decoding” 513-17; Fiske 3). Fiske observes that “readers with different
social experiences or from different cultures may find different meanings in the same
text” (3). Similarly, readers of fairytales have complex responses that work against or go
counter to dominant interpretations (Harries, 139). Kay Stone devised a classification
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system for fairytale heroines that ranged from abject to heroic and discovered that the
heroines she thought were the most victimised and abject were considered by her
audience to be resourceful and admirable for overcoming tremendous hardship to prevail,
marry their prince and achieve happiness (128). From such a perspective de Beaumont’s
“Beauty and the Beast” could be considered a proto-feminist tale. In a time which set no
value on the education of girls, de Beaumont wrote stories that sought to instruct them to
be productive, upright, virtuous members of society. The plot of her “Beauty and the
Beast” revolves around Beauty as the pivotal point and the instrument of change. She has
autonomy and agency while the males are passive and unassertive. Her father is weak,
frightened and ineffectual. The Beast’s role is to patiently wait for her to see his innate
goodness and rescue him, which she ultimately does. Part of this tale’s tremendous and
enduring appeal lies in this alluring portrayal of Beauty’s power and agency, which is
allied with a nobly loving and sacrificing nature. Beauty is clearly the hero of this tale;
she embarks on a brave journey and is the saviour of both her father and the Beast. De
Beaumont worked within the confines of a patriarchal order which was firmly entrenched
and whose overthrow she could not imagine. Within these confines which required
Beauty to be docile, submissive and selfless, she paints an enticing picture of Beauty’s
power to effect transformative changes. Women who comply with the sacrifices and
obedience asked of them will be rewarded with marriage which is their surest and only
path to success. If women adhere to this path, which could be fraught with danger and
violence, they have the means to change a beast into a noble and gentle man.
Unfortunately this belief in the transformative powers of a virtuous woman’s love can be
carried to pernicious extremes, leading a woman to stay in abusive relationships with
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‘beastly’ men whose goodness only she is able to perceive. De Beaumont’s tale is a
narrative of the creation of a heterosexual relationship within patriarchy and embedded
within it is an “implicitly critical assessment of social norms shaping such relationships”
(Bacchilega, Postmodern 78). Ultimately de Beaumont’s story is not able to grant Beauty
true autonomy but instead upholds the sanctity of marriage and delineates the way
women function as an object of exchange within its economy and the rules of conduct
expected of them. Marina Warner observes:
We can see foreshadowed, already, the Victorian angel of the house, whose task it is to tame and gentle male
lust and animal instinct. We also see an intelligent governess preparing her charges for this wifely duty,
readying them to find the male spouse a beast at first, but, beneath the rough and uncivilized exterior, a good
man. The fairy tale emerges in its modern form as an instrument of social adaptation, spoken and circulated
by women to cast themselves as civilizers in the tabooed terrain of sexuality, turning predatory men into
moderate consorts. (Beast 294)
Although it is often considered to exemplify heterosexual relations, the
interpretation that most interests me and I would like to pursue in this paper is the way
the tale of Beauty and the Beast works out the encounter with the Other, and negotiation
and either acceptance or destruction of their threatening, inimical difference to oneself.
The most intransigent position of the Other is held by woman, who
is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the
incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is
the Other. The category of the Other is as primordial as consciousness itself. In the most primitive
societies, in the most ancient mythologies, one finds the expression of a duality – that of the Self
and the Other. This duality was not originally attached to the division of the sexes…Otherness is a
fundamental category of human thought. (de Beauvoir xliv - xlv)
Kristeva suggests that women are marginalised as the Other through the process of
abjection, the separation that begins between mother and child and is made explicit
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through the elimination of bodily waste which becomes associated with the feminine
(Minsky, 182-83). Read “as a colonial narrative of othering” (Bacchilega, Postmodern
80) the tale of Beauty and the Beast not only intimates anxiety about difference but acts
as a vehicle for examining our attitudes to otherness. It encompasses “the metaphors for
self-acceptance and reconciliation with the Other…” (Hearne, 118). This essay explores
“Beauty and the Beast” and particularly Angela Carter’s two versions, “The Courtship of
Mr. Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride” from the perspective of postcolonial theories of the
Other. Colonisation and negotiation with the Other were a major fact of life during the
rise of the proliferation of versions of “Beauty and the Beast” and its increasing
popularity. The seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were a period of great
imperial expansion for Europe which by the mid-nineteenth century had colonised 85%
of the world (Loomba, xiii; McClintock, 5; Said, Orientalism 122-23). Interest in the
Orient was intense in Europe and by the eighteenth century Orientalism, as well as
exercising a profound influence on the arts and culture of Europe, had become a scientific
field of study. Said remarks that while Orientalism became a major scholarly discourse
spanning many disciplines there was no concomitant Occidentalism since Europe saw
itself as the referent. Said observes that many writers of the nineteenth century and even
earlier were cognisant of empire, race and otherness, and shared in the belief of the
superiority of the European over the colonised Others whom they considered racially
inferior and less civilized (Orientalism 14). Although there are general expectations that
literature and culture are “politically even historically innocent” (Orientalism 27) they are
actually closely imbricated in the process of political and cultural hegemony. Thus, in
tales of Beauty and the Beast we can trace the background of imperialism, and the
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negotiation and anxiety about the Other. Many variations of “Beauty and the Beast”
reflect the deep and abiding interest in and exposure to the culture of the East, often
featuring Eastern settings with Moorish and Persian influences and costumes. The exotic,
mysterious and distant East made a far more romantic setting for the fairytale than, for
example, the prosaic and increasingly industrialised local English countryside (Hearne,
56).
Not only did the East provide a more exotic locale but it also was seminal in
shaping Europeans’ sense of their identity. The Occident used the Orient, the land
adjacent to it and the source of its richest colonies and the foundation of its wealth,
civilization and culture, to construct “its deepest and most recurring images of the Other”
(Said, Orientalism 1-2). Because it is negotiated and contested in a political arena the
construction of identity is imbricated with questions of power and powerlessness. Said
illustrates how Orientalism is a dogma and praxis constructed by western scholarship that
enabled its practitioners to dominate the Orient. “Orientalism demonstrates how every
branch of knowledge, scientific as well as that broadly denoted ‘the humanities’, is not
merely tinged with, but part and parcel of, the establishment of European political
hegemony through the process of colonial conquest and domination” (Azim, 237).That
the fairytale of Beauty and the Beast personifies the Other as a Beast is indicative of how
in “the general epistemic violence of imperialism” (Spivak, Three Women’s 844) the
Other is represented and thought of as bestial. The trope of the monster, a symbol of
societal attitudes towards difference, disrupts and challenges society’s view of itself as
unified and stable by revealing the “tensions, insecurities and gaps” (Punday, 803) that
construct identity. In the anxiety induced by such moments of threat and crisis the
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monster reifies difference; it becomes a figure of attributes that are rejected and repressed
by orthodox society.
Postcolonial discourse increasingly is preoccupied with speciesism, the
categorization of the colonised as subhuman and animalistic which justifies the
acceptability of killing without compunction those designated as nonhuman, uncivilized,
savage: “[s]lavery and imperial/colonial genocide was often justified on the grounds of
categorizing other peoples as ‘animals’” (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 215). Within this
discourse on Orientalism there was an insistent disposition by Europeans to classify
humankind and nature into types and to use physiological categorisations as the basis for
moral judgements: “Theses of Oriental backwardness, degeneracy and inequality with the
West most easily associated early in the nineteenth-century with ideas about the
biological bases of racial inequality” (Orientalism 206). The invention of race was a
central facet of both imperialism and of European sciences. Europeans were closest to
being godlike and the colonised were degenerates who so nearly resembled animals
( McClintock, Imperial 50; Suleri, Rhetoric 20) that Long expresses a prevailing belief
when he claims that “I do not think that an orangutang husband would be any dishonour
to a Hottentot female” (qtd in Bhabha, Mimicry 130). Linda Tuhiwai Smith understood
that according to the Europeans ‘primitive peoples’ such as herself and her forbears
could not use our minds or intellects. We could not invent things, we could not create institutions
or history, we could not imagine, we could not produce anything of value, we did not know how to
use land and other resources from the natural world, we did not know how to practice the ‘arts’ of
civilization. By lacking such virtues we disqualified ourselves, not just from civilization, but from
humanity itself. In other words, we were not ‘fully human’; some of us were not even considered
partially human. (100)
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Attitudes of inferiority became part of the psyche of the subjugated races. Imperialism
used both physical and psychological warfare to great effect to subjugate their colonised
peoples.
The practice of designating those who are different as monsters testifies to how
the real power of the west has been its power to “define, represent and theorize”
(McEwan, 95) its Others. Postcolonial discourse problematizes the ways in which the
world is known and examines how identity is constructed and represented in the face of
difference and within imbalances of power. Those formerly marginalised by imperialist
discourse, having now achieved agency, seek to understand and voice how “we have
constructed and do construct conceptions of ourselves and others as selves, subjects and
peoples” (West, 52). The opposition of coloniser/colonised has become a Manichean
binary of good and evil in which the coloniser sees him/herself as morally superior and
the colonised Other as worthless. As Frederic Jameson points out it “is not so much that
he is feared because he is evil: rather he is evil because he is Other, alien, different,
strange, unclean and unfamiliar” (115). In its search for ways of representing alterity
postcolonialism destabilises binary distinctions of center/margin, self/Other,
coloniser/colonised to look for the space in between, a place of enunciation, “the area in
which ambivalence, hybridity and complexity continually disrupt the certainties of
imperial logic” (Ashcroft et al, Key Concepts 26).
“Beauty and the Beast” is an intricate and multi-dimensional narrative marked by
moments of ambivalence and hesitation. Beauty’s initial dismay at the Beast’s
transformation into a man and her desire to have Beast back suggests that there may be
further means of “escaping imposed limits and prescribed destiny” (Warner, Beast 24)
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and opens the door for alternate ways of negotiating Otherness. Modern reworkings
amplify this ambiguity in the narrative. Angela Carter has taken full advantage of this
hesitation in her two versions, “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride.”
Both can be read as tales of othering and negotiating with the Other and have heroines
who are “struggling out of the straitjackets of history and ideology” (Simpson, para 9)
towards subjectivity, agency and autonomy. Carter avers that “[t]o be the object of desire
is to be defined in the passive case. To exist in the passive case is to die in the passive
case – that is, to be killed. This is the moral of the fairy tale about the perfect woman”
(Sadeian 77). If they are to be autonomous beings women need a certain amount of
ferocity and aggressiveness, indeed tigerishness (Atwood, “Runnng” 121). Carter’s
heroines cast off their passive roles of virtuous selflessness; they reject being the angels
in the house; from being lamblike they learn to run with the tigers. In their negotiation
with the Otherness of the Beast the boundaries between self and Other become shifting
and indistinct, changing both in the process.
Of British heritage, Angela Carter was born in 1940 and died of cancer in 1992.
She published a book of fairytales The Bloody Chamber, which included “The Courtship
of Mr. Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride,” in 1979. She loved fairytales and folktales for
they allowed her to unleash her imagination rather than “strive officiously after the
willing suspension of disbelief in the manner of the nineteenth-century novel” (Carter,
Old Wives xi). She took delight in the fairytales’ “lack of verisimilitude” and their
Utopian goals, which she called “a form of heroic optimism” (Carter, Old Wives xviii).
She also understood that narratives such as folktales and fairytales, appropriated by the
marginalised and suppressed, were a way to preserve and transmit local culture and create
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and maintain a sense of identity. They gave voice to the subaltern (Haring, 176-77;
Jameson, 85-87). Jameson calls fairytales “the inexpressible voice and expression of the
underclasses of the great systems of domination” (105). Carter uses her fairytales to
demolish the straitjackets of British convention, strictures and mores. She was keenly
aware of the colonial edifice of Otherness so carefully, systematically and deliberately
constructed by the British in their vast and far-flung Empire and of the clamour of the
many colonial voices who sought to dismantle it.
A seminal influence on Carter was a two-year stay in Japan in the early 1970s.
Her sojourn in Japan ‘bruised and challenged Carter’s imagination” (Rushdie, “Step
Across” 38) by foregrounding her foreignness and also “what it was to be a woman”
(Carter qtd in Sage 9). It intensified her life-long sense of marginality and of being an
outsider which became leitmotifs in her life and her writings. She deliberately sought and
maintained “‘the viewpoint of an alien in order to defamiliarize the landscape of habit’”
(Sage qtd in Lee, 3). By looking at familiar things in unfamiliar ways, Carter jarred her
readers out of their habituated responses and created in them an unease that enabled new
perspectives. Literature is used by both writers and readers to illume the structures that
govern relationships between peoples and their cultures and the processes of societal
action and transformation. Thus, literature “is more than a reflection of social life; it is a
reflexive engagement with it which is undertaken by writers and readers in a conscious
awareness of the essentially reflexive relations between language, subjective imagination
and the social structure. The force of its engagement is its ability to transcend the limits
of personal biographies, specific cultures and particular historical periods” (Filmer in
Seale, 284).
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Beauty and the Beast stories have been influential in promoting the desirability of
virtues such as self-abnegation in women. By engaging in an ironic dialogue with
traditional narratives of Beauty and the Beast, Carter advocates an active role for women,
in which, instead of being objects, they become subjects engaging in intersubjective
relationships. She makes compelling use of parody to comment on the past and to address
contemporary conflicts hinging on marginality and difference. In postcolonial discourse,
parody is a cogent tool for undermining certainties and fixed assumptions to create
hybridity, ambiguity and a third place of enunciation. Parody is a palimpsestic, doublevoiced genre that mimics and repeats the original text and through its ironical referencing
of familiar tropes disrupts its logic. When using parody an author stays within the rules of
the original backgrounded text and yet, at the same time, tries to transgress its limits. This
tension destabilizes both texts. Parody is inherently an ambivalent form because it is
“fundamentally double and divided; its ambivalence stems from the dual drives of
conservative and revolutionary forces that are inherent in its nature as authorized
transgression” (Hutcheon, 26). The nature of parody as an ambiguous form that
reinscribes tradition even as it questions it leaves Carter vulnerable to the accusation
by her critics that she ultimately leaves prevailing mores intact.
“The Courtship of Mr. Lyon” is a pared down version of “Beauty and the Beast”
which contains no sisters and a predominantly absent father. Beauty’s father lost his
fortune long before she was born and they live a simple impoverished life. Beauty does
the chores in her ‘mean kitchen’ and her father drives an old decrepit car which breaks
down near the Beast’s Palladian house. The father is awed by the magnificence of the
Beast’s palace and its atmosphere of great privilege. Unlike the father’s old sheepskin
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coat the Beast dresses opulently in a smoking jacket of red brocade and his spaniel sports
collars of diamonds and sapphires. The story is set in a modern England of cars and
electricity, the London scene, florists, roast beef, King Charles spaniels, Palladian
mansions and Queen Anne furniture. Despite the particularity of her setting, precisely and
lovingly described and detailed, which places the fairytale in a given cultural moment
Carter creates a distant magical land with an ethereal oneiric atmosphere in “The
Courtship of Mr. Lyon.” The paradox created by the specificity of location and material
circumstance coupled with an air of distance and frozen timelessness, which is
constructed by the use of double framing, gives the narrative an unsettling destabilizing
ambivalence. The opening scene is doubly framed with Beauty standing at the window
looking out at the snowy landscape and waiting for her father to arrive home. Looking
out at the frozen landscape and the unmarked road, Beauty is presented to the reader by
the external narrator as a snow maiden, as if she too is made all of snow. Carter
immediately references the virtuous qualities demanded by the traditional tale and
underscores Beauty’s purity by her insistent repetition of how the untouched snowy
landscape personifies and reflects Beauty’s purity. The snow gives “an unearthly,
reflected pallor” (41) to the landscape; the road too is unused, perfect, it is “white and
unmarked as a spilled bolt of bridal satin” (41). When the father looks out of the Beast’s
Palladian house, he notices that “the storm had cleared as the moon rose and now a
glance between the velvet curtains revealed a landscape as of ivory with an inlay of
silver” (43). Again the scene is doubly framed, we watch the father looking out of the
window and we view the landscape framed as a picture of ivory and silver. Since the
father is thinking of Beauty and trying unsuccessfully to reach her on the telephone as he
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looks out at the snowy landscape, we are once more reminded that this landscape
symbolizes Beauty and her snowy white innocence. While the tale uses an omniscient
narrator to create the double framing, “the focalization, or visual perspective, is often
character-bound. When for instance Beauty’s father comes to the Beast’s house, even if
the description may initially seem ‘objective’, the knocker is seen through his
eyes….Sometime later when Beauty first sees the Beast, he is different from the vast and
angry ‘leonine apparition’(44) her father had seen” (Bacchilega, Postmodern 92). The
shifting focalization destabilizes the narrative by engendering uncertainty about who is
seeing whom. Notably, also, the focalization presents the father’s point of view or
Beauty’s but rarely the Beast’s, suggesting that father and daughter occupy a dominant
position to the Beast.
Initially, Carter’s tale appears to be closely modeled on de Beaumont’s. The
father’s actions deliver Beauty to the Beast. Beauty is lovely and innocent and has the
traditional values of self-abnegation and of selfless love for her father. She consents to
stay with Beast because she understands that is the price of the bargain that will restore
her father’s fortune: “Do not think that she had no will of her own; only she was
possessed by a sense of obligation to an unusual degree and, besides she would gladly
have gone to the ends of the earth for her father, whom she loved dearly” (45-6).
Her reaction to the Beast is also reminiscent of de Beaumont’s Beauty. However,
her emotions are felt to such an intense degree that their very excessiveness announces
the author’s parodic intent. She finds the Beast’s “bewildering difference from her almost
intolerable” (45). She can’t bring herself to touch him because he is so different from her
that he seems of a different order entirely: “his strangeness made her shiver and when he
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helplessly fell before her to kiss her hands, as he did every night when they parted, she
would retreat nervously into her skin, flinching at his touch” (47-8). Although he is
invariably gentle with her she sees him as a fierce predator to whom in comparison she is
a lamb, a “tender herbivore…spotless, sacrificial” (45). Since she has been dining on cold
fowl and grilled veal this is an ironical reflection which displays her lack of selfawareness and perceptiveness. When she looks into his eyes she sees herself reflected
twice. That she sees herself in his eyes suggests that she is not able to see either of them
as subjects, only able to perceive in terms of objects. It is only later as she grows in selfawareness that, instead of seeing herself in his eyes, she notices him and observes that his
eyes are lidded like a man’s.
With the help of his ‘hirsute’ friend the Beast, her father recovers his fortune.
When Beauty joins her father in London she soon forgets her sense of obligation to the
Beast and her promise of return. She sends to the Beast, as a final thank you, white roses
that remind her of the ones he showered her with: “She sent him flowers, white roses in
return for the ones he had given her; and when she left the florist, she experienced a
sudden sense of perfect freedom, as if she had just escaped from an unknown danger, had
been grazed by the possibility of some change but, finally, left intact. Yet, with this
exhilaration, a desolating emptiness” (48). She tries to dissipate this feeling of loss by a
gay expedition with her father to buy herself furs, perhaps as a substitute for the Beast.
Beauty is unable to entirely suppress her nascent affinity to the Beast. She begins to lose
her ingénue freshness; she is no longer the tender bud that she saw reflected in the
Beast’s eyes, she “was acquiring, instead of beauty, a lacquer of the invincible prettiness
that characterizes certain pampered, exquisite, expensive cats” (49). When the Beast’s
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messenger, the now unkempt King Charles spaniel comes to urgently fetch her she is able
to easily leave behind the shackles of her old life, only pausing to leave her father a brief
note. Seeing herself as more of a cat and less of a lamb enables her to act on her own
desires. Once more Carter uses pathetic fallacy to emphasize Beauty’s state of mind. The
pure untouched landscape is gone, replaced by the Beast’s now derelict mansion.
Reflecting her sense of desolating emptiness the Beast’s place is dark and mournful, the
knocker is muffled, and cobwebs garland the dusty neglected rooms. She finds the Beast
dying and notices, for the first time, his close resemblance to a human being. The Beast
too has changed. He is no longer predatory. He can no longer bear to go hunting, no
longer bear to kill the gentle beasts and eat them (50). When she cries over him and
kisses him, finally able to touch him with love, the Beast transforms into a leonine man,
revealing his humanity.
The tale ends with a “telescopic view” (Hearne, 120) of Mr. and Mrs. Lyon
walking in the garden in a “drift of fallen petals” (51) in this traditional and-they-livedhappily-ever-after ending. The task of de Beaumont’s Beauty is one of perception
(Hearne, 27). Carter references this theme but goes farther. Her Beauty not only needs to
see past the Beast’s difference to his goodness, she also needs to undeceive herself about
the purity of her own character. Carter portrays a heroine who totally accepts societal
expectations of the necessary innocence of the young maiden as self-abnegating and
sweet, pure and innocent and passive. Beauty is convinced of her own purity. Even the
landscape reflects her snowy white unmarked innocence. The Beast buys her vision of
herself and sees her as if carved from a single pearl. Carter’s excessive language and use
of pathetic fallacy create a dramatically vivid picture of this pure Beauty but its very
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excess signals its ironic intent. This myth imposed on her by cultural and societal
conventions requires Beauty to create a setting that showcases her innocence and purity.
By focusing on the Beast’s difference to her and finding it almost unbearable she makes
the Beast the scapegoat she needs for her projections. “The threat existed solely in
Beauty’s perception, as a setting for her performance as virginal ingénue in need of
protection from the predatory …Beast” (Brooke 76). Once she gains entelechy she
realizes that her perceptions of the Beast are a chimera. Carter leaves the Beast’s
metamorphosis problematic and ambiguous. He transforms into a man but traces of his
former leonine self are readily discernible leaving open the possibility that the change is
only in her eyes, that she is finally ready to see him as he has always been. Beauty has the
controlling gaze in this story. The Beast can only wait for her to see his innate goodness.
His courtship of Beauty is so phlegmatic and submissive that, in an ironic inversion of
societal mores, it is really Beauty who is wooing Beast. Although the title “The Courtship
of Mr. Lyon,” is ambiguous and could be interpreted as a description of either one
courting the other the Beast’s passivity makes it unlikely that he plays this dominant role.
The Beast is not fierce and in need of a woman’s self-denying love. He is shy, diffident
and in awe of Beauty (46).
Throughout the story, Carter presents us with binaries whose limits are blurred
and indistinct. Who is doing the othering, who is othered, who is marginalised in this
story, who has the balance of power, who is beast and who beauty, who the virtuous one?
Beauty and Beast share the experience of being marginalised, Beauty by virtue of being a
woman and Beast because, even though he is a wealthy male with a powerful and
commanding presence, he has been made into a bestial other. He is seen by both Beauty
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and her father as a mimic man, a hirsute being courted as long as he is useful and then
discarded and forgotten. Rarely is the action presented from his point of view but both
Beauty and her Father’s perspectives are presented suggesting that they control how
events are represented.
Carter does not allow Beauty total control over representation. She uses the
traditional fairytale motif of the mirror to subvert Beauty’s picture of herself. The mirror
shows a spoiled, pampered girl, petulant if her whims are not promptly gratified, vain and
narcissistic who primps and preens in front of mirrors rather too often. She is so
egotistical that she even uses the Beast’s eyes as mirrors to see herself in them as a tender
bud, no less. She looks at herself and falls in love with the idea of herself as Miss Lamb.
In fact, she is a little beastly, an epithet that can also readily be bestowed upon the
feckless and irresponsible father, a weak and ineffectual figure who “had ruined himself”
(48) before Beauty was born. He accepts with alacrity the idea that the bill for his car
repairs is sent to the lord of the manor whose hospitality he is enjoying, he obeys without
demur when the Beast demands that the he bring his daughter to dinner as recompense
for trespassing in the Beast’s garden by stealing a rose. And he leaves Beauty with the
Beast without a qualm. When the Beast enables him to regain his former wealth, he has
no sense of obligation to him. He asks Beauty to join him in London for a social whirl of
parties and dining and theatre and he dismisses any sense of obligation to the Beast by
seeing their encounter with the Beast as an unreal insubstantial, dream: “now that they
were so far away from the timeless spell of his house it seemed to posses the radiant and
finite quality of a dream and the Beast himself, so monstrous, so benign, some kind of
spirit of good fortune who had smiled on them and then let them go” (48). Both the
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Father and Beauty have a more ‘beastly’ nature than the Beast who, apart from his initial
ferocity towards the father, is the epitome of meekness and gentleness and by extension
of beauty and virtue. Carter destabilises the binary of Beauty/Beast by reminding us that
neither Beast nor Beauty are immutably fixed in the roles assigned to them and that
beauty which implies virtue and goodness belong to both characters or shift from one to
the other. And the real Beast may be, not these two who are both marginalised by the
dominant mores of society but the father, the repository and upholder of these mores.
The rose, along with the mirror, is another recurring trope in Carter’s narrative.
The white rose signifies Beauty’s purity and goodness, selflessness and lack of greed. It
also, of course, symbolizes love. Her father steals one for her when he has no money left
to buy her one. The Beast showers her with white roses. The turning point in her
perception occurs when she sends the Beast roses from a florist in London. Sending the
Beast roses signals her recognition of his beauty and goodness and her, as yet, unwilling
and unacknowledged love for him. It is also a rejection of her former role of the tender,
selfless girl that had been assigned to her by societal strictures which she had so wholly
embraced. After sending him roses she buys herself furs, perhaps in an attempt to take on
some of his attributes. She starts to look like a cat. She stops seeing herself as Miss Lamb
and begins to see the Other in herself. Throughout the narrative Carter uses pathetic
fallacy to reflect and reveal Beauty’s state of mind. In describing the dilapidated state of
the Beast’s house Carter uses a metaphor that signals the nature of Beauty’s
transformation: “There was an air of exhaustion, of despair in the house and, worse, a
kind of physical disillusion, as if its glamour had been sustained by a cheap conjuring
trick…” (50). Beauty had managed to trick herself about who she was and now she sees
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that she is not that perfect pearl, that it was only a ‘cheap conjuring trick’ on her part.
Acknowledging her own otherness enables her to find the place between predator and
prey and self and other. Reconciling their differences permits Beauty to see the Beast’s
humanity and create a harmonious intersubjective relationship with him. In “The
Courtship of Mr. Lyon” Carter uses shifting focalization, pathetic fallacy, the symbols of
the rose and the mirror to a parodic excess that both references and disrupts de
Beaumont’s narrative and its moralising.
Carter also locates “The Tiger’s Bride” in an accurately and precisely described
specific place, this time a city in the Po valley “which is very flat and very far out, so in
the summer you can imagine the mist rolling over” (Katsavos para 26). She bases “The
Tiger’s Bride” on a lesser known and darker variation of Beauty and the Beast in which
the father precipitates the action by losing his daughter to the Beast in a game of cards. It
is a stark illustration of the harsh lot of women, given away to husbands through no
choice of their own: “Angela Carter’s Beauty is lost to the Beast at cards, a modern
variation on the ancient memory, locked into the plot of ‘Beauty and the Beast’, that
daughters were given in marriage by their fathers without being consulted on the matter”
(Warner, Beast xxiii). Although she has no choice in her father’s disposal of her, the first
person point of view serves to emphasize the centrality of Beauty’s role and the Father
becomes a peripheral figure after the opening scene. Beauty and her Father do not reunite
and she follows his changing fortunes in a magic mirror. The unnamed heroine of “The
Tiger’s Bride” though virginal, is made of sterner stuff than the Beauty of “The Courtship
of Mr. Lyon”; she is “a wild wee thing” (56) untameable and initiated into the titillating
mysteries of the farmyard. Instead of the vacuous saccharinity of the traditional versions,
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this Beauty is acerbic and disillusioned, self-possessed and perspicuous. She sees her
father’s follies without any sentimentality; she knows she is but a pawn, a sexual
commodity owned by her father to be disposed of at his discretion. Both the father and
the Beast inhabit a rarefied world of wealth and privilege. The father owns vast tract of
lands in his native Russia: “we owned black earth, blue forest with bear and wild boar,
serfs, cornfields, farmyards, my beloved horses, white nights of cool summer, the
fireworks of the northern lights” (52). And the Beast is the seigneur of the city with a vast
palazzo, immense revenues and rents, magnificent and rare paintings. The heroine and
her father are far from their native Russia and when she first arrives in Italy, where
lemon trees grow and everything flowers, Beauty feels as if she has arrived “to the
blessed plot where the lion lies down with the lamb” (51). Being Northerners they find
the warm South exotic, its warmth infuses one with madness and a “deathly, sensual
lethargy” (51). The motif of the Orient continues throughout the narrative serving to
exoticize the Beast and emphasize his difference, his foreignness.
Traditional Beauty and the Beast tales also contain recurring allusions to the
Orient reflecting the Occidental fascination with their Other. In “The Tiger’s Bride” the
Beast reminds Beauty of the tiger-man of Sumatra, a marvellous half-beast, half-man
who figured prominently in the old wives’ tales that her nurse regaled her with. The Beast
wears a dressing gown of Ottoman design, referencing the many illustrations through the
ages which featured the Beast and his sartorial elegance as of Moorish, Eastern origins.
The boudoir in his palazzo has a “jinn’s treasury of Oriental carpets” (65). There is a
glancing reference to Kubla Khan, a name which conjures Coleridge’s fevered visions of
enchanted far-away places of opulence and strangeness. Beauty’s father has an over-
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heated imagination that leads him into hyperbole and an excess of emotion. When he
loses her to the Beast, in a flourish of remorseful, chiding rhetoric, he compares himself
to the Moor, Othello: “one whose hand/Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away…” (55).
The father’s bathos is risible. Othello is a nobly tragic figure, whose isolation from
Venetian society as an racial and cultural outsider exposed him to a vulnerability that
causes him to kill his wife in a mistaken conviction of her infidelity whereas the base
father throws away his pearl in a fit of manic gambling. To compare his sharp, cynical
and worldly daughter to the glowing beauty and innocence connoted by a pearl is also a
wild exaggeration.
The ironical lack of perception of the father and daughter are also exhibited in
their condescending attitude to the Beast. Despite his great wealth and power, Milord the
Beast is a marginalised figure. He is known as La Bestia and both father and daughter
immediately other him as a mimic man, not quite human, a “two-dimensional” (53)
figure. The Beast masquerades as a man, he wears a mask with a man’s face painted on, a
mask uncanny in its perfect symmetry; he wears outmoded clothes. He is enveloped in an
overpowering scent of civet that befuddles Beauty’s senses. Even his voice seems
masked, a rumbling growl understood only by his simian valet. He is altogether a clumsy
“carnival figure made of papier mache and crepe hair” (53). The Beast reminds Beauty of
a clumsy doll, an ironical foreshadowing of the automaton doll in her likeness that serves
as her maid at the Beast’s palazzo. While Beauty demeans the Beast as a ventriloquist’s
dummy with his valet as the ventriloquist, she is blithely unaware that she acts the
dummy to her father. She has no voice of her own, she can only witness his follies mutely
(52) and she unthinkingly mirrors and apes her father’s attitudes.
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When she dutifully fulfills her father’s obligations and arrives at the Beast’s
crumbling palazzo the Beast has but one request – that she disrobe for him once and then
she would be returned to her father, untouched and unharmed and her father’s fortune
would be fully restored to him. She spurns his request, insulted that he would ask for so
little, that she would only be an object of his gaze rather than engage with him fully. The
tear of what she hopes is shame that the Beast sheds at her refusal turns, in a nice conceit,
into a diamond of the finest water. The scenario is repeated the next day and she is given
a pair of perfect diamond earrings. Her perception that she is only a sexual object to the
Beast indicates that she is still conditioned by the responses in her former life. She knows
that in her father’s world her skin is her “sole capital in the world” (56) and she had
expected that with the Beast she would be making her “first investment” (56). Although
she is only allowed a truncated life in her father’s world she is still attached to it.
The mirror is a motif which is consistently employed in the narrative to reveal
how Beauty’s life with her father has been an imitative, ersatz one which has allowed her
little agency. In keeping with that life she watches the card game in the mirror. The
mirror shows her the Beast’s impassivity, her father’s frenzy, her own mute cynicism as
her inheritance and finally herself are lost to the Beast at cards. At the Beast’s palazzo
when her automaton maid holds up a mirror to her face it shows, not her face but her
father’s “as if I had put on his face when I arrived at the Beast’s palace as a discharge of
his debt” (60). She does act as her father’s emissary at the Beast’s palazzo. And her
feelings of moral superiority to the Beast and her contempt for his request intimate that
she has actually taken on her father’s persona. She is his representative, a marionette
whose thinking patterns are still shaped by her father, the puppet master. Her position is a
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reflection of the ambiguous position women occupied in colonised countries where they
are still marginalised in relation to the colonizers who were men but occupy a position of
dominance over the colonised men and women. So, although coloniser women derived
little of the vast benefits and power of imperialism, their position as the colonising race
enabled them to collude in the colonising project:
The vast, fissured architecture of imperialism was gendered throughout by the
fact that it was white men who made and enforced laws and policies in their own
interests. Nonetheless, the rationed privileges of race all too often put white
women in positions of decided – if borrowed – power, not only over colonized
women but also over colonized men. As such, white women were not the hapless
onlookers of empire but were ambiguously complicit both as colonizers and
colonized, privileged and restricted, acted upon and acting. (McClintock, 6)
Beauty experiences a shift in perception when she goes out riding with the Beast.
As they ride out in the cold freshness of the blasted landscape, she muses on the
strangeness of being abandoned to her two companions, the Beast and his simian valet.
She has felt superior to them because she has been part of the world of men whereas they
are not quite human. She begins to realize though that both she and the Beast mimic
humanity. In a patriarchal and colonial world, she is not fully a rational being and he is
also not considered human. Out riding she begins to feel an affinity to her companions
despite their strangeness:
they had lived according to a different logic than I had done until my father abandoned me to the
wild beasts by his human carelessness. This knowledge gave me a certain fearfulness, still; but, I
would say, not much…I was a young girl, a virgin, and therefore men denied me rationality just as
they denied it to all those who were not exactly like themselves, in all their unreason. If I could not
see one single soul in that wilderness of desolation around me, then the six of us – mounts and
riders, both – could boast amongst us not one soul, either, since all the best religions in the world
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state categorically that not beasts nor women were equipped with the flimsy, insubstantial things
when the good Lord opened the gates of Eden and let Eve and her familiars tumble out… I
certainly meditated on the nature of my own state, how I had been bought and sold, passed from
hand to hand. That clockwork girl who powdered my cheeks for me; had I not been allotted only
the same kind of imitative life amongst men that the doll-maker had given her? (63).
This awareness signals a relinquishing of her position of moral superiority in the guise of
her father’s mimicking representative and moving beyond external reality to “internal
definitions of selfhood” (Brooke, 82).
When they dismount on the banks of a river, the Beast insists on discarding his
elaborate human accoutrements. In divesting himself of his masquerade the Beast is
refusing to be Othered; he is rejecting his charade of mimicking humanity. Beauty’s
initial demurral at his action suggests that, despite her dawning sense of affinity with him,
she does not want to recognize that he may have a point of view and a code of conduct
that is valid. Such recognition demands that she discard the social conventions she has
hitherto lived by. Repudiating them forces her to acknowledge their strangeness and her
own dawning sense of alienation. The realization that the societal mores that have
conditioned her life are strange and need to be renounced causes Beauty a moment of
panic. The Beast is not being a voyeur or treating her as an object in wanting to see her
unrobed – he is expressing a desire to see her without any façade, disguise or
dissembling. She understands then that “[t]he tiger will never lie down with the lamb; he
acknowledges no pact that is not reciprocal. The lamb must learn to run with the tigers”
(64). She too disrobes, thus reciprocally casting off their pretence, surrendering their
posturings in a convention that marginalised and othered both of them and didn’t accept
either as fully human, she because she is a woman and he because he is different. She
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abandons seeing the Beast as an exotic, uncanny, alien almost grotesque figure and
accepts their affinity to each other. She acknowledges that she too has been othered.
Julia Kristeva advocates intersubjective relationships founded on recognizing and
making peace with the stranger within oneself. Kristeva suggests that negotiating alterity
demands that we recognize how we create our Others by projecting onto them what we
reject in ourselves. In order to come to terms with difference and alterity we need to be
aware that it exists within us: “The foreigner comes in when the consciousness of my
difference arises, and he disappears when we all acknowledge ourselves as foreigners,
unamenable to bonds and communities”( Strangers i). We find otherness threatening
because we fear the otherness within ourselves. Accepting and respecting our own
otherness erases the fear. Their reciprocal act of disrobing enables Beauty to move
towards such an understanding of herself and the Other. Continuing in her self-reflexive,
self- conscious style Carter places this scene on the banks of a river. The river is a symbol
of a life-giving force. It heralds change and transformation and signifies a place of birth,
rebirth and also purification. This river is scarcely flowing, symbolising that this nascent
experience is tenuous and uncertain. Beauty experiences a moment of ecstasy and
epiphany by the river but the moment is undercut and made ambiguous by subsequent
events, and the sluggishness of the river marks the moment of hesitation. Back at the
palazzo, the mirror shows her father fully restored to his fortune and expecting his
daughter to rejoin him. Her moment of ecstasy is reduced to the level of an economic
transaction between her father and the Beast. By sending the clockwork maid back to her
father “to perform the part of my father’s daughter” (65) she severs herself from this
exchange and her simulacrum of a life which has been nothing but a performance. She
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strips off her clothes “to the cold white meat of contract” (66) reflecting that her life in
her father’s world has been lived under an indifferent gaze, as an object, a thing to be
bartered, given no selfhood of her own. As the heroine comes alive she is no longer meat
which is “dead, inert, animal and intended for consumption” but flesh which is “usually
alive and, typically, human” (Sadeian 137). She puts on the Beast’s perfect teardrop
earrings and in a foreshadowing of her imminent transformation clothes herself in the
furs that are a gift from the Beast. The valet who escorts her to the Beast’s lair has also
left off all pretence and is in his simian form. When he takes the sables off her shoulders
they turn into rats and scamper away. The Beast, too, has abandoned his masquerade.
The dressing gown of Ottoman design, the wig, gloves, mask have all been discarded; the
incense pot lies broken, the den reeks, bloody, gnawed bones lie on the floor that he is
ceaselessly pacing. When she gently reaches out to him, he begins to purr and his purring
shatters the palazzo to its foundation. He begins to lick her and “each stroke of his tongue
ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a
nascent patina of shining hairs. My earrings turned back to water and trickled down my
shoulders; I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur” (67). And so the heroine transforms
into a Beast and is anointed by the Beast’s tears. The Beast strips off the layers of her
skin to unveil her new identity. This image recalls how she stripped the white rose given
her by Beast of its petals as she watches her father lose her to the Beast at cards. Then,
the stripped petals were the layers of her past life that she lost when her father lost her to
the Beast. In stripping herself of that past she began to divest herself of its falsity, of the
obligations it placed upon her in terms of values, morals and duteous devotion to her
father. The motif of the white rose runs through this narrative also. This Beauty, whose
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nurse called her a rose, shreds it, she rejects it, and she offers her father one stained with
her blood. When the bouquet given her by the Beast dies she tosses it away without
compunction. She refuses it as a symbol of her sweetness and purity. Her acerbic
cynicism subverts the symbolism of the rose; indeed as Brooke points out “[c]onventional
elements of the tale are parodied throughout by Beauty’s sardonic tone and perspective”
(78).
Bacchilega suggests that how “we see ourselves …is predicated upon how we are
seen” ( Postmodern 95). In “The Tiger Bride” both the heroine and Beast experience
being objects, both finally refuse to be objectified and othered and both achieve a sense
of identity and selfhood. There is a dynamic quality to “The Tiger Bride” because the
narrative, in settling for a wild, untamed vitality “neither betrays Beauty’s desire nor
belittles the Beast” (Bacchilega, Postmodern 99). The tone of “The Tiger Bride” is
carnivalesque, exaggerated, extravagant, fantastic, gothic and grotesque. The father is
unredeemably bathetic, the Beast is massive, his palazzo is vast and houses horses on the
ground floor, the town the father and heroine arrive at is not only sombre and ‘decembral’
but so awful that they hang people in cages in it, and the landscape is cold and barren.
The carnivalesque is excessive; it dissolves hierarchies, resists fixed definitions and
immutability, seeks freedom from the bondage of cultural and social control.
Carnivalesque moments mark “the feast of becoming, change and renewal” (Bakhtin,
686). Carter uses the carnivalesque to create a dynamic expression of change,
surrendering the sterile outworn ways of the past for a future marked by jouissance and
exuberance. Using the carnivalesque enables Carter to test the limits of the traditional
Beauty and the Beast narrative and limn new possibilities. Bacchilega points out that
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“[b]y dwelling on physical, emotional and material excess, Carter thus does not
recuperate but amplifies Beauty’s moment of hesitation in de Beaumont’s text”
(Postmodern 101).
Both “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride” are pared down, there
are no sisters and the father is largely absent. By erasing the sisters and the concomitant
rivalry between them (a fact of life in a marriage economy which pitted women against
each other for the favour of men) and devaluing the motif of the oedipal attachment to the
father, Carter removes the story from being framed by patriarchal ideology. The story
then not only focuses on Beauty and her journey to entelechy but also becomes one of
Othering and of being aware of the Other within oneself. Both stories explore how
otherness is perceived and negotiated. The father in each story illustrates the attitude of
the colonizer in their condescension to the Beast. The father of “The Courtship of Mr.
Lyon” feckless and self-indulgent, uses the Beast to regain his own fortune and feels no
sense of obligation. The dissolute and vitiated father figure in “The Tiger’s Bride” sees
the Beast as a carnival figure, difficult to take seriously. Both stories delineate heroines
trying to throw off the constraints of past ideas of subjectivity to establish an identity
which is not a mere mimicry and shadow of their past and their father’s world. The
Beauty in “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon” is not entirely successful and the role of the
Beast is so passive that Otherness can only be softened and tempered. The lion is
emasculated and domesticated; he is forced to modify his otherness to accommodate
Beauty’s cultural expectations. “The Tiger’s Bride” is a plangent tale in which Beauty is
liberated from the bonds and limiting assumptions of her stifling past when she admits to
her own alienation and her affinity to the otherness of the Beast. The Beast in” The
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Tiger’s Bride” by removing his masquerade as a man accepts himself and impels Beauty
to reciprocate in an intersubjective relationship. In its search for subjectivity and a place
of enunciation which includes hybridity and ambiguity postcolonial discourse
interrogates intractable binaries and certainties. Angela Carter references de Beaumont’s
fairytale of Beauty and the Beast and destabilizes it with a mischievous parody that
fractures the boundaries between self and other, beauty and beast to limn new
possibilities.
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