'Twas beauty who killed the beast...: or, meditations on a theme

Dec 28, 2004 18:12

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... )

misery, meta, stephen sondheim, beauty and the beast, passion, king kong, gender

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Comments 23

Not quite the same, but... janewt December 28 2004, 18:48:37 UTC
I don't know how familiar you are with Trollope's Palliser novels--probably more than I am--and I don't really know how relevant they are, but here goes:

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 ( ... )

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Re: Not quite the same, but... janewt December 28 2004, 18:55:58 UTC
D'oh! And in fact, I just ended up back where you started--the problem with "making claims." Lady Laura makes claims; Madame Max makes offers but only rarely.

Mr. Casaubon makes few claims, and that's what makes Dorothea so unhappy.

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Re: Not quite the same, but... selenak December 28 2004, 19:04:45 UTC
Fosca in Passion is decidedly of the claim-making type. Btw, of course beasts do, just not in a sexual fashion. The Mummy, Quasimodo, the Phantom and King Kong all abduct their beauties, after all. The only woman who does that I can think of is Annie Wilkes in Misery (and she's not after sex, either, but she is after a new novel, which puts her into the bizarre muse instead of the beast category).

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Re: Not quite the same, but... janewt December 28 2004, 19:12:42 UTC
Lady Laura kind of abducts Phineas, in a very real-life prosaic way--she insists on his coming to visit her while she's in social exile in Dresden. It's really a bad idea for him to go, seeing as the newspapers are full of scandal about him at the time.

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ide_cyan December 28 2004, 19:05:25 UTC
I wrote more on the topic here, after a fashion.

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selenak December 28 2004, 19:28:19 UTC
Ah yes. Very interesting, thanks. For some reason, it reminds me of the essay which discerned that much B7 either falls into the Bodice Ripper/Taming of the Shrew category (when set in the first two seasons) or in the Gothic Romance category (when set in the last two seasons). Making Avon the Shrew and the Byronic Hero both, which tells you something about the romance patterns many writers are most comfortable with...

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ide_cyan December 28 2004, 19:50:47 UTC
BTW, did you read the discussion that followed in the entry where I referred to suzych's essay?

***

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 ( ... )

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selenak December 29 2004, 07:31:17 UTC
No, I hadn't, I read the entry pre-comments. Thanks for pointing the discussion out!

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 ( ... )

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wychwood December 28 2004, 19:23:49 UTC
Not relevant, but I thought you would want to know:
Susan Sontag dies

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selenak December 28 2004, 19:30:44 UTC
Oh damn. I admire her. And her voice is so needed in the US.

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londonkds December 28 2004, 21:59:21 UTC
The nearest analogue in legend/fairy tale I can think of is the tale of Gawain and the Loathly Lady, which turns up in Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale.

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selenak December 29 2004, 06:29:22 UTC
Very interesting, though the fact this all starts with him raping a woman is disturbing as well.

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londonkds December 29 2004, 07:55:15 UTC
Yep, but that doesn't appear in all the versions of the story.

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kathyh December 28 2004, 22:52:05 UTC
If anyone can think of female Quasimodos and male Esmeraldas, pray tell.

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).

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