Censorship in "Beauty and the Beast"

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses censorship within the fairy tale, "Beauty and the Beast." It compares two versions of "Beauty and the Beast" - one of the original versions by Jeanne Marie Le Prince de Beaumont and a modern re-telling by Angela Carter, entitled "The Tiger's Bride." The paper examines the function of sexual desire and how censorship is employed to either dilute or completely erase representations thereof.

From the Paper:

"It is also interesting to note the difference between the depictions of Beauty in the two stories. In de Beaumont's story, Beauty exudes all the quintessentially feminine "virtues" that would go unchallenged for several centuries. She is devoted to her father, submissive to the demands of the two men in her life - namely, her father and the Beast, and completely passive. In Carter's story, Beauty is anything but passive. Rather than "taming" the Beast by submitting to him, she allows herself to be transformed into a beast, and can thus become one with all the typically "masculine" qualities assigned to the creature.
"One important difference between the two stories, however, is that de Beaumont's was written for an audience of children, while Carter's clearly was not. This is also why sexual desire is largely absent from de Beaumont's text. It has not been censored necessarily in order to protect children, but for the simple reason that this form of desire is too complex for children to understand. It thus reduces the relationships among adults to caricature-like renderings, to a polite code that can nevertheless be unscrambled by more mature readers."

Sample of Sources Used:

• De Beaumont, Jeanne-Marie Le Prince. Beauty and the Beast. Retrieved 23 March 2008 from: http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/beauty.html
• Carter, Angela. The Bloody Chamber. London: Virago Press, 1982
• Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. New York: Vintage, 1990.
• Simpson, Helen. "Femme Fatale." The Guardian, June 24, 2006. Retrieved 27 March 2008 from: http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1804397,00.html

More papers on Censorship in "Beauty and the Beast":

• Book Review # 106711 : "Fairy Tale: "Beauty and the Beast"
• Persuasive Essay # 149308 : "Beauty and the Beast": A Feminist Interpretation"
• Comparison Essay # 101845 : "Disneyfication of "Beauty and the Beast"

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