Ever a Surprise, Ever as Before: How Belle Moves Back in Beauty and the Beast

Pobody's Nerfect

Similarly, a crucial change is made in removing the personal growth of the heroine from the Disney narrative. In Beaumont's tale, Beauty, with all the wonderful qualities that she has over her heinous sisters, still has plenty of room to grow and better herself, as people invariably do. She chooses a warm heart over wit and good looks, but it doesn't happen right away. Indeed, she makes some mistakes along the way.

After three months of being utterly friend-zoned, the Beast sends Beauty to go and visit with her sick father. "You shall remain with him, and poor Beast will die with grief," he moans, laying on a first-class guilt trip that would give my mother a run for her money. Now attached to her homely pal, Beauty offers instead to return in one week. Upon breaking her promise (she's late by only three days, but as you know, the Beast is a drama queen), she dreams a guilty vision which reveals that her abandonment of the monster has nearly caused him to die. It's then that she tearfully reflects on her behaviour: "Am I not very wicked ... to act so unkindly to Beast, that has studied so much, to please me in everything? Is it his fault if he is so ugly, and has so little sense? He is kind and good, and that is sufficient. Why did I refuse to marry him?" Okay, not the most romantic declaration, but in her self-aware realization, she learns a lesson. By the time the Beast morphs physically, Beauty has done the same emotionally.

The movie, in its haste to create a perfect heroine to counterbalance the sinewy, egg-inhaling, book-hating chauvinist Gaston, does not offer Belle an emotional or mental journey with which to mirror the Beast's. She does not do anything to harm the monster and so she cannot be sorry; she does not do anything wrong and so she cannot grow. Despite the aforementioned tagline about learning "the most important lesson of all", there are no real lessons. Disney's Beast also allows Belle to go to her father (in this case, moribund in the woods trying to rescue his daughter from the castle), but her scene of introspective cognizance is substituted for the spectacle of Gaston and his pitchfork-wielding mob, moving in on the castle to slay the Beast. Belle returns to save him from them, not from the pain she's caused him herself. That she didn't fall in love with him sooner isn't really because she was superficial, but because he was a raging maniac not that long ago.

At the end, Belle's Beast is humanized, both figuratively (he refrains from killing Gaston when he has the chance) and literally (dude is a hunk). But the only noticeable change that Belle has undergone in the film is external: she dons a princess ballgown. "The most beautiful love story ever told," the theatrical poster coos.

I dunno. Is it?