Beauty and the Beastly Patriarchal System in Disney's Beauty and The

Beauty and the Beastly Patriarchal System In Disney's Beauty and the Beast, after rejecting a marriage proposal from a horrid suitor, Belle proclaims: I want adventure in the great wide somewhere, I want it more than I can tell. And for once it might be grand, To have someone understand, I want so much more than they’ve got planned. Like Belle, the female protagonists in several of the “Beauty and the Beast” tales yearn for more out of their lives. Yet because of the patriarchal society in which they live, they are forced to abide by the rules and norms set forth by the men around them and ignore their own desires, settling into the roles of obedient, devoted daughters and wives. In some tales,however, the women rebel against the gender roles they have been made to fill, gradually changing their characters, as in “The Tiger's Bride.” While some tales show female characters as having fluid identities that are capable of changing, other versions, such as “The Swan Maiden,” depict women with static, unchanging characters regardless of what is happening around them. The identities of the women in “The Beauty and the Beast” tales are clearly influenced by patriarchal views, but they demonstrate different ways of responding to this influence by rebelling against it or ignoring its presence altogether. “The Tiger's Bride,” written by Angela Carter, recounts the story of a woman who is freed from living under the stifling rule of her father. The heroine begins the story traveling with her drunken, wasteful father who sees her as an object that can be gambled away. She describes her situation saying, “I watched with the furious cynicism peculiar to women whom circumstances force mutely to witness folly” (51). She is obedient and respectful to her father, even though he clearly does not deserve that treatment, and settles his debt to The Beast at the sake of her own freedom and well-being. Tales like this give women a glimpse at what married life will be like; Maria Tatar explains that these stories “brace them [young women] for an alliance that required them to efface their own desires and to submit to the will of a 'monster' ” (28). The “will” of the Beast is to see the woman without her clothing, after which he will allow her to leave with money and gifts (Carter 57). The woman assumes the beast has a sexual motive when making this request because of how she is used to being objectified by men, but that is not the case. Upon hearing the request, the woman laughs in an unladylike manner and remembers “no young lady laughs like that! my old nurse used to remonstrate. But I did. And do” (Carter 58). With no one to tell her how to behave, she is free to do as she pleases. With this revelation, the woman begins to change her behavior while with the Beast. She uses the opportunity of being away from her father and allowed to make her own decisions to transform herself. During her time with the Beast, the woman ponders the life she had lead under her father's rule, how she “had been bought and sold, passed from hand to hand,” and how she “felt at liberty for the first time” living with the Beast (Carter 62-3). When she is given the opportunity to leave, she looks at her maid, that appeared to be her twin when she arrived, and realizes that the maid's “face was no longer the spit of my own”; the maid hasn't changed, rather, the woman has evolved from who she was when she left her father's control (Carter 64). Instead of returning to life she had previously lead, the woman decides to stay with the Beast and continue on the new path her life has taken. She removes her clothes, which she describes as involving “a kind of flaying” and goes to meet the Beast who completes her transformation by licking off “skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world” and revealing her as a tiger (Carter 64, 66). Earlier in the tale, the woman mentions that the Beast “lived according to a different logic than [she] had done” prior to being gambled away by her father (Carter 62). Now that she is a tiger as well, she is freed from having to act like an ideal female and live up to the expectations of men. The ideal female, as far as patriarchal society is concerned, can be summed up in the description of the mechanical maid in “The Tiger's Bride”: “a soubrette from an operetta, with glossy, nut-brown curls, rosy cheeks, blue, rolling eyes … in her little cap, her white stockings, her frilled petticoats. She carries a looking glass in one hand and a powder puff in the other and there is a musical box where her heart should be” (Carter 58-9). While their appearances are identical, this wind-up woman is the antithesis of the real woman in the story. She is pretty and speechless and carries stereotypically female objects. Feminist theorists Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar assert that fairy tales depict “conventional female arts”; in this case, the mirror and the makeup are arts that traditional females would have been expected to use (295). Layering makeup on the woman in “The Tiger's Bride” made her reflection someone she “scarcely recognized,” as she had already begun transforming herself and behaving according to her own desires and not those of the men around her. (Carter 64). This unrecognizable image is the “idealized image of her” that Gilbert and Gubar maintain men prefer women to have (296). Similar to the beginning of “The Tiger's Bride,” “The Swan Maiden” tells the tale of a woman trapped in an inauthentic identity by a man, struggling to reclaim her identity. The woman in this story, a swan who sheds her feathers to become human for short periods of time, is treated as nothing more than an object by her husband and forced to behave as a woman, when she is at heart a swan. The language in this story proves this very clearly. The man takes the same approach to courting his wife as he does to his favorite pastimes “hunting” and “the chase;” he wants to “possess” her and, after succeeding, he recounts how he “sought and won” her by stealing her feathers so she could not escape (“Swan” 72-3). From the moment he first sees her, the swan exists as a beautiful object. Laura Mulvey, a feminist critic, argues that one of the purposes of women in entertainment is to be “displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men” (3). This is the case in “The Swan Maiden” where “neither night nor day could he [the hunter] tear his thoughts from the bright image” of the maiden frolicking with no clothing (“Swan” 72). Mulvey also discusses how entertainment that reflects the “unconscious of patriarchal society” depicts male characters “gaining control and possession of the woman,” just as the hunter does (2-3). Unfortunately for the hunter, “Swan maidens, domesticated by an act of violence, eventually seize the opportunity to return to an unsullied natural condition”; the maiden is never really tamed and, eventually, he loses control of his cherished possession (Tatar 31). Unlike the woman in “The Tiger's Bride” who reinvents her identity according to her own desires, the identity of the swan maiden is static and unchanging. Although she behaves like the “beautiful prize” which her husband thinks he has captured for seven years, performing the role of the doting wife, these behaviors do not alter her true identity (“Swan” 73). Her convincing performance leads her husband to feel secure in bringing out her old swan feathers; but no amount of time performing an unnatural role can erase her true identity, and takes this opportunity to regain her natural form and leave the man who had, essentially, enslaved her. Tatar attributes the maiden's decision to leave to “the secretly oppressive nature of marriage with its attendant housekeeping and childrearing responsibilities” (31). Gilbert and Gubar describe “woman's world and woman's work” in a similar way, explaining that women are trapped in the “realm of domesticity” where they amount to little more than an obedient servant (295). Domestication is against the swan maiden's true nature, and she fights it for years until she frees herself. In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, gender theorist Judith Butler questions whether gender is a fixed or fluid idea. She disagrees that “being female is a natural disposition”; instead, she suggests the view that “gender is a kind of persistent impersonation that passes as the real” (2540-1). This notion of fluid identity made up of “performative acts” is evident in “The Tiger's Bride” but is noticeably absent in “The Swan Maiden” (Butler 2541). Both heroines spend portions of the tales performing as ideal females in the eyes of men, but as soon as they no longer have to do so it is clear that their identities are fundamentally different. The seven years performing as a human woman have no effect on the swan maiden, who takes her earliest opportunity to regain her swan feathers and flies to freedom from her husband forever (“Swan” 73). In contrast, the time spent acting stranger and wilder while with the Beast, change the woman in “The Tiger's Bride” completely. She is not just performing these behaviors, she is living them and becoming them.

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