[Ed. Note: At the end of this Introduction, readers are directed by links to the three pieces comprising the triptych.]
Introduction
I’ve had a bit of a love-hate relationship with the story of Beauty and the Beast ever since the Disney movie put it on my radar. On the one hand: dancing teacups! Catchy tunes! Bookworm as heroine! On the other hand, the underlying message to girls seems to be this: You can change him. If you love him enough, and if you’re good enough, you can change him. This message is a lie at best, dangerous at worst. No matter how jolly those dancing dishes might be, or how good or loving the Beauty is, even together they’re no match for a Beast if it turns out that he’s not Prince Charming.
William Trowbridge, poet laureate of Missouri, once introduced his work about King Kong by saying that “[King Kong] just wanted a pretty girlfriend.” That line stopped me in my tracks! My understanding of the story was that, after being kidnapped by humans and brought to New York City to be made a spectacle of, King Kong needed a friend. Why did it have to be “a pretty girlfriend?” Trowbridge went on to state that King Kong was “a classic story of Beauty and the Beast, just like The Phantom of the Opera, or The Hunchback of Notre Dame…”
His examples got me thinking: how many other examples of this story live in our collective consciousness?
- Family Guy: Brian, the family’s dog, constantly dates svelte yet busty young blonde women who never seem to notice that they’re dating a dog.
- Knocked Up: The female lead is also svelte and blonde, yet the best date she can get is an alcoholic, pothead slacker?
- Male rock stars who date and marry female models.
- Any movie (or real life) featuring Woody Allen as the romantic lead.
All of these examples led me to the conclusion that Beauty and the Beast needed a new flavor, one that women can appreciate.
The retelling and refashioning of stories is nothing new. People have been recycling myths, legends, bible stories ever since their first telling. The Disney movies are the most immediate examples to come to mind. If you look at older versions of the folktales on which they’re based, you’ll see how vastly different they’ve become in order to suit the audience of the day. Frozen is one of the more altered examples, as the moviemakers took the story of the Snow Queen who steals Kay away from his family until Gerda frees him, and they changed it to the story of two estranged sisters.
The folks at Disney are not the only ones who retell old stories though. My favorite book ever is John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, which retells the Cain and Abel story in at least two different ways; Katherine Paterson’s Jacob Have I Loved retells the story of Jacob and Esau, which in its essence is just another Cain and Abel story. Anais Mitchell’s folk opera Hadestown sets the story of Orpheus and Eurydice in 1930’s America. Shakespeare’s stories (not exactly original when he wrote them) have been retold in countless ways: West Side Story, Warm Bodies, A Thousand Acres, and Scotland, Pennsylvania to name but a few.
Although some of the examples I’ve given seem to have taken their original tale and turned them upside down (Romeo and Juliet in the zombie apocalypse—what?), they each retain enough of the essence of the original story to make it recognizable as a universal truth, and change the details enough to be accessible to a broader audience. At the heart of Beauty and the Beast, I found the story of a person who feels fundamentally unlovable (and haven’t we all, at times?), but who is given a new mirror in which to see the self. Have students write about their own favorite story, folktale or myth. Here are a few ways to get them thinking about the way it speaks to them, and how to retell it to make it relevant to others in the same way:
- Put the characters in a different setting. What would happen if the characters were part of a contemporary setting, or a futuristic one? In Alice in Wonderland High, Rachel Stone brings Alice & company to a contemporary high school setting. In Briar Rose, Jane Yolen takes the story of The Sleeping Beauty and sets it in Nazi-occupied Poland. If David and Goliath lived in contemporary America, would the stoning be a literal one or metaphorical? If Icarus and his father lived in the twentieth century, would they contribute to aviation or space travel? When they’re brought down by hubris, how could it come about?
- Change one or more characters in some fundamental way. In Murder at Mansfield Park, Lynn Shepherd takes the loveable Fanny Price and turns her into a shrew with as many enemies as there are motives to kill her. In The Lion King, Hamlet & cast are, well, you know! How would the wizarding world change if Harry Potter, embittered from years of ill-treatment by the Dursleys, teamed up with Voldemort in book 1? What if Bruce Wayne had a physical disability? What if the group in Lord of the Flies were girls?
- Insert a character from another reality. In The Eyre Affair, someone has changed the ending of Jane Eyre to pair Jane up with St. John instead of Mr. Rochester. Author Jasper Fforde sends Literary Detective Thursday Next into the pages to find the culprit. In Lost in Austen, 21st-century Amanda discovers a secret portal through which she can enter the world of Pride and Prejudice…and Elizabeth can enter 21st-century London! What would happen if Katniss found herself in the forest with Hansel and Gretel?
- Is there a minor character who might be rounded out? Jo Baker gives a compelling account of life as a servant in the Bennet household; Tom Stoppard brings Hamlet’s childhood friends to center stage in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (see also The Lion King 1-1/2). Diana Gabaldon’s Lord John Grey, a minor character in her Outlander series, became so popular that he now has a series of his own. Many of the fairy tales give little credence to the Prince, whose only role seems to be marrying the heroine. What might his real motivation be?
- What happened before Once Upon a Time? What happens after Happily Ever After? Gregory MacGuire is probably the most well-known current author for writing the story behind the story for tales such as The Wizard of Oz, Cinderella, Peter Pan and others; in these, he also tells these famous stories from points of view of than the main characters’. Jean Rhys does the same for Jane Eyre’s doomed Mrs. Rochester in Wide Sargasso Sea, and Budge Wilson fleshes out Anne Shirley’s back-story in Before Green Gables. As to what happens after the final page, Sandra Lerner imagines what happened in the Bennet-Darcy marriage after ten years in Second Impressions. What sort of adult might Holden Caulfield be? Or Tom Sawyer?
The above ideas barely scratch the surface of possibilities due to the myriad facets of the human psyche; what speaks to one person about a story may leave the next person cold. With the slightest change to a story as I’ve suggested, the universal truth inside each tale can become magnified, giving the opportunity for re-examination. With re-examination, another reader may find a truth that wasn’t readily apparent in the first reading, and could meet a new literary love.
[Ed. note: The three parts of the triptych are listed below. Click each title below to be magically transported to that story.]
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