PSA about Beauty and the Beast
PSA about Beauty and the Beast:
Recently I have seen some strange posts along the lines of “Why can’t they follow the original dark ending? Why does Disney have to give it a Happy ending?” in regard to Beauty and the Beast.
I decided to get to the bottom of this and found there is an old Internet rumor that the original Beauty and the Beast ended with either the death of The Beast or The Beast eating Belle. Whoever started this rumor is confusing Beauty and the Beast for the oldest version of Little Red Riding Hood also known as Little Red Riding Cap (from 1693).
The version of Beauty and the Beast that is the popular fairy tale is an abridged and revised version of the surprisingly feminist 1740 French novel La belle et la bête by Madame Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve. (It talks about a woman’s right to choose a husband, and The Prince’s mother was a Queen who lead an army to defend her kingdom).
No version of Beauty and the Beast exists in which The Beast eats Belle (Beauty) or where The Beast dies and stays dead. There are versions where the evil faery haunts Belle with dreams that The Beast will bring her ruin if not kill her and there are versions where Belle’s sisters conspire to try to get the Beast to eat her but it never happens. The Beast comes close to death or briefly dies but he never once stays dead. That version simply does not exist. This Internet rumor needs to stop.
If you doubt me you can buy the original novel on Amazon translated by Rachel Louise Lawrence, completely unabridged or you can check out the book The Classic Fairy Tales by Iona and Peter Opie which gives the full history of many of the classic fairy tales and their various alternate versions.
The darkest thing about the original Beauty and the Beast novel is that the faery who raised The Prince (because his mother was off fighting a war) tried to seduce him as soon as he was of age and Belle (who discovers her mother was actually a faery and father was actually a king, she had only believed the merchant to be her father) and the Beast turned out to be cousins.
The faery tale that originally ended in the death of the protagonist was Little Red Riding Cap. The Little mermaid ended in death too but that was Hans Christian Anderson, not Madame de Villeneuve.
Also just because we are used to things ending tragically doesn’t mean it should. Think how cynical the world has become where enchanted castles and faeries aren’t what we consider far fetched but simply the idea of things ending well and yet things sometimes do end well in the real world. It’s not actually realistic to expect everything to always end poorly. Sometimes things really do end happily.
