How Disney's 'Beauty and the Beast' Became the Darkest Tale of All (2024)

Disney often sands the edges off its fairy tales. Neither stepsister loses a toe in Cinderella; itsLittle Mermaid doesn't die. This is inevitable—it's the nature of fairy tales to change for new audiences, and every generation has a different idea of what young people can handle. It's interesting, then, that Disney's Beauty and the Beast is among the darkest versions of the tale.In 1740, Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve wrote the Beauty and the Beastfairy talethat's become so familiar, framing it as an allegory of arranged marriage: a beautiful young woman handed off to an ugly, rich noble who demands she leave her father and live with him forever (complete with a lavish brideprice). Faced with this separation and with his hideous appearance, it's no wonder Beauty quakes. What makes this story a fairy tale rather than a horror story? Beauty's consent.

"Oh! What shall I say?" cried Beauty, for she was afraid to make the Beast angry by refusing.
"Say 'yes' or 'no' without fear," he replied.
"Oh! No, Beast," said Beauty hastily
"Since you will not, good-night, Beauty," he said.
And she answered, "Good-night, Beast," very glad to find that her refusal had not provoked him.

But Disney's retelling doesn't acknowledge its darkness. Covering threats with musical numbers doesn't count as exploration of subtext. This wasn't the first Beauty and the Beast adaptation to feature a Beast with rough edges, either; a story centered on power dynamics in relationships will shift to include contemporary concerns. But Disney'sretellingasks Beauty to forgive abusive behavior, both ignoringthe sovereignty of her consent and erasingthe Beast's own obligations. And it's such an influential retelling, it's affected how the archetype has applied. By now, the label of a Beauty and the Beaststory applies as much to a relationship in which the woman's love "tames"the man as it does to one about looking beyond appearances. (The CW's recent Beauty and the Beast updated the 1987 seriesbut replaced the scholarly, leonine hero with a handsome man with uncontrollable bursts of violent anger; these abusive undertones are the new beastliness. These days, Beauty is trapped in the Beast's S&M penthouse, and his understanding of consent is decidedly murky.)This month's live-action Beauty and the Beast seems aware its predecessor charged Beauty with taming the Beast's violent instincts rather than just looking beyond appearances. This new Belle bristles at her captivity—not just declining dinnerbut alsoshaming the Beast for demanding her company on top of her compliance—and makes plans to escape. What it doesn't do is change much of the Beast's behavior. He now allows a brief farewell, but his demands and their violent implications are intact. (In fact, this remake removes one of his early moments of conscience.Now it's Lumiere who releases her from the dungeons, not a guilty Beast.)As if hoping to make up for that missed opportunity, the movie also has a few new beats of a "tamed"Beast providing company for Belle. But its first scene still cuts to the heart of the matter; the handsome prince coolly surveys available ladiesand violently dismisses the Enchantress who begs shelter. Despite its good intentions, this new iteration does as its forebear didand frames the Beast's predicament as a matter of personality as much as appearance. (This was by design.In the makingof Beyond Beauty: The Untold Stories, story supervisor Roger Allers admitted why some changes were made: "It's basically a story about a girl who keeps coming to dinner and keeps being asked to marry and saying no—that's pretty boring, you know?")Beauty and the Beasthas left an indelible mark on pop culture. (Among other things, it's led to a widespread assumption that beautiful women will find plenty to love in lessattractive men.) But Disney redefined a generation's expectations of the story. Under Disney, an allegory of arranged marriage in which Beauty's consent was the fantasy became the story of a woman whose captor eventually softened enough that he didn't punish her for challenging him. The substitution of "softened captor"for "bewitched suitor"has since become conflated in the pop-culture lexicon. Though we know the problems with uncritically accepting those as identical narratives (Fifty Shades Syndrome, among others), they can be fascinating when examined together as a story in conversation. A remake of Beauty and the Beast that took 1991's framing into account might have given us, if not a gentleman husband in disguise, a story that acknowledges its troublesome Beast and echoes the original's contemporary concerns about power and relationships. If nothing else, it would shift the remake out of the shadow of the original, a remake in conversation with its forebear. Instead we get the same old threatsand eventually a song about how much he'll miss her—too little, too late.