help me write a modern, subverted version of beauty and the beast
please it is so hard
i need it for tomorrow and im started it today
had a 3 weeks
Answers
It’s easy to forget—amid the kicky tap-dancing kitchenware, the twinklingly romantic score, and the swooning waltz in both Disney versions—how strange the central concept of Beauty and the Beast is. Here, presented by the foremost corporate purveyor of children’s entertainment, is essentially a story about a woman who falls in love with an animal. In the 1991 cartoon, the animated Beast’s goofy facial expressions alleviate the weirdness of it all by making him convincingly human-ish (and so endearing that his actual princely form, as Janet Maslin wrote in her review of the first film, is actually a disappointment, a “paragon of bland handsomeness”). But in the 2017 live-action movie, the Beast is unabashedly ... beastlike. His blue eyes can’t quite conquer an ovine face crowned by a majestic lion’s mane and two disturbingly Freudian horns.
In the original version of the story “Beauty and the Beast,” though, published in 1740 by the French novelist Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, the Beast seems to be an awful kind of elephant-fish hybrid. Encountering Beauty’s father for the first time, the Beast greets him fiercely by laying “upon his neck a kind of trunk,” and when the Beast moves, Beauty is aware of “the enormous weight of his body, the terrible clank of the scales.” But in the most famous adaptation, a version for children abridged by the former governess Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, the question of what the Beast looks like is left to the imagination. De Beaumont specifies only that he looks “dreadful,” and that Beauty trembles “at the sight of this horrible figure.” The Beast could resemble a water buffalo, or a bear, or a tiger; he could also be interpreted as just a plain old man, essentially kind at heart but extremely unfortunate to look at. That’s the point of the story.
De Beaumont published most of her stories in instructional manuals for children, incorporating strong moral lessons into the stories. She wasn’t the only one to do so. “Fairy tales do not become mythic,” Jack Zipes wrote in his 1983 book Fairy Tale as Myth/Myth as Fairy Tale, “unless they are in perfect accord with the underlying principles of how the male members of society seek to arrange object relations to satisfy their wants and needs.” Indeed, as Maria Tatar points out in the superb introduction to her new collection Beauty and the Beast: Classic Tales About Animal Brides and Grooms From Around the World, the story of Beauty and the Beast was meant for girls who would likely have their marriages arranged. Beauty is traded by her impoverished father for safety and material wealth, and sent to live with a terrifying stranger. De Beaumont’s story emphasizes the nobility in Beauty’s act of self-sacrifice, while bracing readers, Tatar explains, “for an alliance that required effacing their own desires and submitting to the will of a monster.”
But “Beauty and the Beast” is also a relatively modern addition to a canon that goes back thousands of years: stories of humans in love with animals. Tatar’s collection features examples from India, Iran, Norway, and Ireland; she includes stories of frog kings, bird princesses, dog brides, and muskrat husbands. Each story is basically an expression of anxiety about marriage and relationships—about the animalistic nature of sex, and the fundamental strangeness of men and women to each other. Some, like “Beauty and the Beast,” prescribe certain kinds of behavior, or warn against being vain or cruel. But many simply illustrate the basic human impulse—common across civilizations—to use stories to figure things out.