Something Darker Underneath: Origins of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast

 “Beauty imagined she saw the Unknown draw a daggar, and prepare to plunge it in the throat of the monster” (Planché 36).

I grew up with Walt Disney’s cartoon musical telling of Beauty and the Beast. I loved the scene where Belle swaps out her book for another read as the townspeople sing about how strange she is. As a fellow bookworm who never quite fit in at school, I resonated with Belle’s character and her whimsical, studious ways.

When the modern, live-action version of Beauty and the Beast came out in 2017, I couldn’t contain my excitement. Emma Watson was the perfect princess Belle, and I was already obsessed with the actress since she played Hermione in Harry Potter. Watching her fall in love with the beast and break his curse left me with that familiar grade-school butterflies feeling. I love a good fairytale romance, okay?

However, the Disney version truncates the original story, and most people who grew up with the iconic, modern rendering of Beauty and the Beast are unaware of just how much the Disney story is sanitized from its original, darker literary roots. In other words, Disney’s Beauty and the Beast hardly resembles the original story, favoring instead a palatable version that finds its plotline in song.

The Disney version comes from Jeanne Marie Le Prince De Beaumont’s didactic children’s story, first published in English in the The Young Missus Magazine in 1759, three years prior to its French publication. Beaumont rewrote the original tale by Madame Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villenueve. Villeneuve’s original Beauty and the Beast, titled La Belle et la Bête, was written in France in 1740.

Villenueve’s original tale is part of a larger literary movement of the 18^th century. The fantastical elements of La Belle et La Bête fit in well with the grotesque literature of the period. According to Wolfgang Kayser, a twentieth century literary critic, characteristics of the grotesque included deformity, terror, fantastical qualities, confusion, and monstrosity. Embodying these literary elements, the original La Belle et La Bête contains an almost ethereal quality to it, and reading it is like walking through a room full of mazes and mirrors.

Of course, there are major elements of the story that strongly resemble the tale readers (and viewers) are familiar with today: Beauty ends up in the Beast’s palace to save her father, a merchant deeply in debt who stumbles into the beast’s palace while looking for Beauty’s requested rose. The palace is enchanted, but not with talking teacups and furniture: instead, Beauty is surrounded by rare birds, monkeys, and apes. Like the more familiar modern versions of the tale, Beauty eventually falls in love with the Beast, stirring him from his slumber and breaking his curse.

The differences lie in the elements Beaumont left out from Villenueve’s story. For instance, the Beast’s form is much more illusory and contorted in Villeneuve’s original version of the tale, where he is described as “horrible” and “terrific” with an elephant’s trunk for a neck. The beast’s form combines the animal and the human, a common move in grotesque artwork. Given his terrifying form, it is even more abhorrent that the Beast continually asks Beauty to sleep with him.

Undertones of sexual violence are followed by Beauty’s experiences in a dream-realm, where she encounters a handsome suiter who she calls “the Unknown.” The Unknown appears to Beauty as a “charming apparition” and Beauty falls deeply in love with the dream-man who visits her nightly. The pages of Planche’s translation of Villeneuve’s work are filled with Beauty’s longing for the Unknown man to come and rescue her from captivity.

At times, Beauty feels indebted to her captor, a gratitude resembling a sort of Stockholm-syndrome. She lives out her days in the Beast’s castle feeling enormously conflicted by her emotions, her deep love for the dream-man conflicting with her sense of gratitude toward the Beast’s care for her.

Even her dreams of her suitor are not filled with joy and fairytale romance. She is woken by violent nightmares where the Unknown suitor violently murders the Beast.

In Villenueve’s story, nothing is at it seems… Beauty is really a princess, not a merchant’s daughter, and the Beast is really the Unknown suitor who haunts Beauty’s dreams. The Beast’s origins are far more tragic in the original story, and also tainted by darker, sexual themes.

Abandoned by his mother, the young Beast is raised by an Enchanted Fairy who serves as a mother figure to him, only to later groom him to marry her when he comes of age. Unwilling to have sexual relations with her, she turns him into the Beast.

For adult readers who loved Beauty and the Beast growing up, it’s time to take a look at Villeneuve’s work: there is much in her prose that resonates with the shedding of childhood innocence and the exploration of dark and fantastical content.