A couple of days ago, apropos the newest version of The Phantom of the Opera,
ide_cyan quoted a rather interesting essay on the beauty and the beast myth. The gist of which - or at least of the excerpt - was that one of the beast's chief attractions lay in the fact that he's such a devoted, faithful lover, yet without the disadvantage of actually making
(
Read more... )
Comments 23
In Phineas Finn and Phineas Redux you get a bit of the female Quasimodo, in that you have two middle-aged and socially marginal women both in love with handsome Phinny Finn. Lady Laura Kennedy is socially outcast because she has left her husband; Madame Max Goessler is--*gasp*--connected with continental Europe (her first husband may have been a Jew!!! and was certainly a businessman; Madame Max carries on his business quite ably, while charming Dukes left and right ( ... )
Reply
Mr. Casaubon makes few claims, and that's what makes Dorothea so unhappy.
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
***
Which makes me wonder whether the story also works with reversed gender, or doesn't, and if not, why not.
Gender is a social class based on division of labour, where characteristics arising out of this division are ascribed to sexual differences in order to justify the hierarchies built on the exploitation of one class by another. (I use Christine Delphy's definition of it; correctly, I hope.)
I think you can probably easily flip the sex of the characters (one or both, depending on whether you're writing homosexual or heterosexual pairings), and have the story more or less remain the same, but the great difference that comes into play then must be the discordance between the characters' sexes and their genders. If you have a female beast, she will lack the license accorded to male beasts because of their gendered privileges, though she may have "unfeminine" qualities that distinguish her from her sex's assigned gender; whereas, a male ( ... )
Reply
Re: changed power dynamics in the case of male beauty and female beast: it occurs to me these are a huge issue in Passion. Both in the main story and in the backstory, i.e. Fosca's marriage to a con man, the first time she fell for a male beauty, who told her, when the truth came out, "women sell their looks/ why not a man?/ if he can", and "we had an arrangment, did we not? I lend you my charm/ and my arm", and "although you are no beauty, my dear/ I fear/ you are not quite the victim you appear". In that case, the man is the heartless femme fatale (whereas Giorgio in the main story is the femme fragile if we're talking fin du siècle stereotypes), but because he is a man and she's a woman, he could financially exploit her (taking all her money, which as her husband in that epoch he's entitled to) in a way which would have been impossible with reversed genders ( ... )
Reply
Susan Sontag dies
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
I'm inclined to agree with londonkds about Sir Gawain and the Loathly Lady which is a wonderful story in many ways.
Georgette Heyer played with the idea to an extent with her story The Civil Contract. It's not quite right but the hero does enter into an arranged marriage with an ugly woman while in love with an exceptionally drippy beauty. The ugly heroine is a social outcast in the sense that she is not of the same social class (trade!!!) as the hero but she's not a stalker and doesn't die so the analogy isn't exact. It's an interesting twist on romantic stereotypes though (something Heyer often had fun with).
Reply
Leave a comment