The Beauty of the Beast: Fairy Tales as Mystical Texts in Simone Weil and Cristina Campo

Abstract

a deformazione professionale (the English “professional bias” does not begin to convey the image of a mind irremediably deformed by one’s work), claiming there was nothing to be done about it. Now, after over two decades spent analyzing texts for a living, I too have my own deformazione professionale: it is difficult for those of us trained in literary criticism to read something and not interpret it—and, occasionally, over-interpret it. In the immensely popular tetralogy of vampire romances by Stephenie Meyer, Twilight, for example, I saw so much of my own familiar mystics: the nubile female protagonist is distraught with her love for a flawlessly beautiful, immortal male lover, whose perfection highlights her own insignificance. To me, the love affair between Edward the vampire and Bella the high-school senior is imaged, in some small ways, as the love between God and the human soul—the bridegroom and bride of Christian mysticism: like God, Edward is superhuman, perfect, male, and compellingly if a bit dangerously attractive; like the human soul, Bella risks much in close proximity with his fearsome intensity—if you would forgive the comparison, think of how shattered, how undone Teresa of Avila is during her ecstatic encounters. In terms of interpretive single-mindedness, I have found in Simone Weil’s and Cristina Campo’s readings of fairy tales kindred spirits—if you would once again forgive the comparison: their discovery of mystical love in fairy tales is not unlike mine in the Twilight series (Meyer’s books have indeed been likened to Campo’s favorite fairy tale, “Beauty and the Beast,” “La Belle et la Bete”: Bella Swan, the motherless female protagonist, is in love with a charming yet deadly monster). To different extents, popular narratives such as Twilight and fairy tales—not unlike spiritual texts such as mystical accounts and scriptural parables—abound in metaphors and extended similes pointing to another order of reality beyond the physical world. As Weil and Campo insist, proper attention to the deceptively simple surface of folktales and fairy tales leads the