Desire and Desirability in Villeneuve and Leprince de Beaumont's “Beauty and the Beast”

Abstract

In the mid-eighteenth century Marie-Jeanne Leprince de Beaumont, the progressive French writer and educator resident in England, embarked on her great pedagogical project: providing a juvenile audience with reading material suitable to their level of comprehension and adapted to their immediate interests. When she did so, she resorted to fairy-tale narratives. In the foreword to her Magasin des enfants, ou Dialogues d'une sage gouvernante avec ses eleves de la premiere distinction (The Young Misses' Magazine, Containing Dialogues Between a Governess and Several Young Ladies of Quality, Her Scholars, 1756), Beaumont explains the urgent motivation for her educational journal, invoking the scarcity of books suitable for children, especially girls. Relying on Francois Fenelon's account of contes de fees,1 Beaumont argues that fairy tales, "quelque puerils qu'ils soient, [sont] plus utiles aux enfants, que ceux qu'on a ecrits dans un style plus releve" (969) (notwithstanding being puerile, are more useful to children than the narratives written in a more elegant style).2 Wanting to make learning a more attractive process, Beaumont realized that the genre of the fairy tale offered her a perfect camouflage for miscere utile dulci, because children should not suspect her of harboring didactic intentions: "C'est a titre d'amusement que je present cette histoire aux enfants. Il ne faut pas qu'ils soupconnent que je veux les instruire; ce motif m'a autorisee a retrancher tout ce qui pourrait les ennuyer" (972) (it is as an entertainment that I present this story to the children. They should not suspect that I want to teach them. This concern authorizes me to cut out all that can annoy them).3The numerous tales interpolated in Beaumont's Magasin tend therefore to the moral tale, from which her pupils are supposed to be able to extrapolate an immediate moral lesson. The action still takes place in fairy kingdoms, but the plots hinge on conduct rather than on adventurous circumstances. With archetypical names such as Beilotte and Lai drone tte, Belle and Bete, Charmant, Absolu, and Sincere, the heroes allegorize the extremes of character and behavior. Indeed, they are only a pretext for the sententious discourse elaborated in the morally weighted dialogues of the governess and her pupils referred to in the title (Debru 156). Writing almost exclusively for a young female audience, Beaumont was especially concerned with guiding them through the conduct of courtship, marriage, and family relationships. Thanks to her thirty years' experience as a governess, she was acutely aware that fairy tales could provide an excellent means to make children understand "les inconvenients d'un manage fait par interet" (the disadvantages of arranged marriages) and "les malheurs qui peuvent arriver du peu de complaisance que l'on a pour les caprices d'un epoux" (the misfortunes that can happen from the lack of indulgence for the whims of a husband) (Beaumont 969). It is therefore legitimate to suppose that this concern induced Beaumont to adapt for her Magasin the now almost forgotten version of "La Belle et la Bete" (Beauty and the Beast) by Gabrielle-Susanne de Villeneuve, who deals with the issues of marriageability and sexuality in the form of male and female desire.4This precursor to Beaumont's version of "Beauty and the Beast" is embedded in Villeneuve's 1740 novel La Jeune Americaine et les contes marins, where it is also recounted by a governess for the entertainment and instruction of her pupil during the course of a sea voyage to Saint-Domingue.5 In addition to the main story of the couple's enchanted courtship, with which the reader is familiar from Beaumont's best-known tale, Villeneuve's impressively long narrative contains flashback accounts both of the Beast's original metamorphosis and of Beauty's genealogy. The Beast was a prince, raised by a fairy while his mother was waging war to defend his kingdom. After unsuccessfully attempting to seduce the prince while he was growing up, the malicious fairy transformed him into a beast. …