Thinking About Books: Beastly

My favorite fairy tale is Beauty and the Beast. I've loved almost every version I've ever read, even the kiddy one with bad illustrations and the creepy ending where the stepsisters get turned into statues in Beauty's garden. (It helps that Beauty is often portrayed as bookish, which I very much identify with.) So of course when Beastly by Alex Flinn showed up on my desk, I read it. And loved it. But it reminded me of the most troubling aspect of the whole story, in any version, and that is the fact that Beauty and the Beast is a glorified case study in Stockholm syndrome.

Even in the best of versions, even in the Disney version, even in my most favorite version (Rose Daughter by Robin McKinley), the fact remains that Beauty falls in love with the one who kidnapped her. True he was lonely, true he lets her go see her father, true there was no other way to get her to love him without making her stay, but the fact is, he did make her stay, in some stories, for years. He may let her see her father towards the end of the story, but usually with the restriction that she must return or he'll die. That sounds like pretty manipulative behavior to me.

The reason I bring this up is that Beastly is a modern-day version, set in New York City. The beast is the spoiled son of a famous news-caster, and his castle is a five-story brownstone where his father locks him away with full use of a credit card as well as a maid, but no fatherly love (of course). The beauty-figure, having been brought there against her will, is at first afraid of what any sensible New York City girl would be afraid of- what, exactly, does he want her for? With a little earnestness and a change of heart, the beast convinces her that he is not looking for a sex-slave, but a friend, a companion: true love.

Alex Flinn makes the story work, but as someone who has read many, many different versions of the tale, saying this stuff out in the open made me wonder: how is it that a perfectly sensible girl (the Beauty figure almost always has Brains, too, and in most modern versions isn't even that Beautiful) can ever, and I mean ever, fall in love with, or even trust, the very one who is holding her captive, denying her her freedom, and not even telling her why?

I often tell people that my own personal love story with my husband reminds me a lot of Beauty and the Beast, but I can assure you that captivity had no part in it. (He's not ugly, either.) It involved my favorite aspect of the story: getting to know someone's inner self, without being swayed by a pretty face or false flattery. The central characters in the story get to know each other on the deepest level, as individuals separate and distinct from their appearance or status. But why can this not happen without making Beauty a prisoner, if only at first? Think about it: any story that claimed to be a re-telling of the fairy tale, but that did not include the captivity aspect, would be seen as being a radical departure from the original.

Perhaps even the insightful and un-shallow Beauty cannot see beyond the Beast's appearance without having a compelling reason to do so, and time to do it in. He is pretty scary-looking, after all, and usually emotionally unstable as well. In my own romance it took quite a few chance encounters from which there was no easy, socially acceptable escape, before I began to see my husband for who he really is. Perhaps sometimes even good people must be compelled in order to do good, but hard, things.