A dark rainbow

"Wynken, Blynken, and Nod" , a nocturnal journey of three children through a dreamlike world of moonlight and stars.

I've been thinking of certain characters in Madame de Villeneuve's original version of Beauty and the Beast: Beauty's father, the merchant (spoiler alert: who's really her adoptive father), and her brothers.

Now, most retellings of the tale portray Beauty's father and brothers as fully sympathetic, loving characters, in contrast to her selfish and spiteful sisters. (That is, when they don't omit the brothers and leave only the father and sisters, as most recent retellings do.) On the surface, at least, Villeneuve's novella seems to do this too. But having read Villeneuve's version several times now, I'm wondering:

Are their portrayals really, wholly positive, or are they negative in their own ways, just less overtly negative than the sisters' portrayal?

@adarkrainbow's posts about Perrault have made me more alert than I once was to the possibility of hidden meanings and satire in French literary fairy tales.

Now there's no question that the merchant loves Beauty, or that she loves him, enough to sacrifice her very life to save him. An essay I recently read that analyzed the novella insisted that their relationship is framed as the ideal father/daughter bond. Not only because of their mutual love, but because Beauty often serves as an advisor to her father, to whom he listens and whose opinions he respects, while he in turn offers valuable advice to her too (namely when he encourages her to marry the Beast), yet respects her enough to let her make her own choices rather than demand anything of her. That's certainly valid.

But in the first place, the merchant so clearly favors Beauty above all his other children. Maybe it's only natural in the case of his other daughters, since they're detestable, but he also favors Beauty over her "brave and virtuous" brothers who were willing to die for him too. When Beauty comes home from the Beast's castle to visit and at first he thinks she's come home for good, his response is effectively "Now I can marry off your sisters and be rid of them, and it will be just you, I, and your brothers... or if you like, we can leave your brothers and it will be just you and I!" Is that really the stance of an "ideal" father?

Then there's the inescapable fact that he does take Beauty to the Beast's castle in exchange for his own life. As far as both he and Beauty know, the Beast is going to kill her. Of course, the merchant is extremely reluctant, and throughout the journey he begs Beauty to turn back and let him go alone, but Beauty insists on making the sacrifice. Still, the fact remains that he does take her to the castle and leaves her there, presumably to die. And before that, when the Beast first proposes the exchange, his response is "Could I be so inhuman as to save my own life at the expense of one of my children's, under what pretext could I bring her here?" In other words "Even if I were willing... which I'm not... what could I say to trick her into coming?" Then, after he learns that his daughter needs to come willingly, he thinks (paraphrased) "Even if I were such an unnatural father as to do this... which I'm not... none of my daughters would agree to it anyway." When he repeatedly phrases his objections as "Even if I were willing, I couldn't possibly persuade her to come anyway," it's tempting to think the gentleman doth protest too much about his unwillingness.

Beaumont's later version makes it clear that when the merchant accepts the deal the Beast offers, he intends to come back alone, but just wants to say goodbye to his children first. But Villeneuve's version mentions no such ulterior motive: it leaves open the possibility that at heart, he does hope one of his daughters will sacrifice herself for him, and that if he would really have rather died than lose a daughter, he would have rejected the deal and let the Beast kill him on the spot. The merchant himself contemplates that possibility as he rides home, thinking "What have I promised? I should have let him kill me!" in horror and remorse. Though to his credit, at that point, he does try to turn back to the castle to accept his doom after all, but is magically unable to do so. And then he resolves not to tell his children about the Beast, but just to say goodbye and then go back alone: only his children's curiosity makes him finally tell them the whole story. (Though at the same time, he's the one who rouses their curiosity by dropping dramatic hints about the terrible cost of Beauty's rose.) And when his sons want to kill the Beast, his sense of honor makes him refuse to consider it, even to save himself. Maybe it was only human of him to make an impulsive promise to save his own life in the Beast's garden, only to regret it afterwards, and we shouldn't hold it against him.

Later, after Beauty comes home and tells her father about her life at the Beast's castle, he encourages her to marry the Beast. Now, the essay I read views this advice in a positive light. And understandably so, because the whole story is building toward Beauty choosing to marry the Beast and finding her ultimate happiness with him.

But at the same time... her father is urging her to marry a gigantic scaly elephant monster (yes, the Beast has scales and an elephant's trunk in this version), who previously threatened to kill him, and who is (seemingly) stupid to boot. Even after Beauty makes it clear that the very idea repulses her and she would rather die. And very conveniently, the Beast just sent the family chests full of lavish gifts again, having already given them a vast amount of money and jewels. How much is the Beast's wealth influencing the merchant at this point?

As for the brothers, Villeneuve describes them as "full of courage and filial affection" and portrays them as wanting to take heroic action to save their father. First, as I mentioned, they propose killing the Beast, but the merchant refuses to let them commit such a dishonorable act. Then they insist that one of them should be the sacrifice in their father's place, but their father reminds them that the Beast specifically demanded one of his daughters, not a son. I have to give them credit for being just as willing as Beauty is to make the ultimate sacrifice. The essay I read viewed the brothers as straightforward heroic figures and argued that they embody the "masculine" virtues that were extolled in the Age of Enlightenment, so that when Beauty shows the same virtues, the message is that women can be just as selfless and brave.

But then the brothers turn to their sisters and start pleading for one of them to sacrifice herself for their father's sake. That doesn't seem very chivalrous, does it? And when Beauty decides to do it, the brothers grieve, but they don't object, because they realize it's necessary to save their father's life. That's valid... but it is interesting that they so clearly prioritize their father over their sisters and are willing to sacrifice one of them to save him. Even as Villeneuve held up Beauty to be admired for her self-sacrifice, might she have meant to subtly criticize the prioritizing of male family members over females?

In this version, it's also the fault of the merchant and his sons that Beauty delays her return to the Beast after her home visit. The popular theme of the jealous sisters feigning love for her and begging her to stay longer, in hope that the Beast will kill her for breaking her promise when she does go back, is an invention of Beaumont's version. In Villeneuve's original, it's the sincere pleas of her father and brothers that make her put off her return. Now of course this just shows their love for Beauty and their reluctance to say goodbye, especially because they don't know when, or if, they'll ever see her again. Still, it nearly causes the Beast to die of grief.

At any rate, we eventually learn that the merchant and his children aren't Beauty's birth family anyway. Beauty is really the half-fairy daughter of the king and queen of Fortunate Island. When she was three years old, the same wicked fairy who cursed the Beast wanted to kill her (it's a long story), so her good fairy aunt spirited her away. The merchant's real youngest daughter died of an illness, but the fairy replaced the body with little Beauty, then cast a glamour over her so no one would notice the difference and let the merchant think his little girl had recovered. (This whole plot twist might add further grayness to the merchant: allegedly his youngest daughter was always his favorite child, even when she was a toddler, yet for thirteen years he never realized she had been replaced by a different child, but just went on favoring the changeling.) In the end, Beauty still considers the merchant her father and his children her siblings, and she gives them all positions in her new court, but at the same time, she's reunited with her birth parents and restored to the royal status she was born into. Her relationship with her adoptive family will continue, but there will obviously be a certain distance between them from now on.

It is a very good and interesting point. It is further muddled by the fact that Villeneuve's fairytales are of the "second generation" (or third if you count the Arabian Nights-generation), the mid 18th century ones, which are when people started to take fairytales very seriously (such as Leprince de Beaumont's making them actual moral lessons for children)... But there were also a lot of fairytales that were so openly unserious and goofy it was impossible not to mistake them as humoristic (I am thinking of mademoiselle de Lubert for example). So it blurs the line.

“Little Brother and Little Sister” from the 1925 edition of Hansel and Gretel and Other Stories by the Brothers Grimm.