Over my vacation last week, I wanted to find out the origins of the tales anthologized in my Barnes and Noble 2016 edition of Beauty and the Beast and Other Fairy Tales. This and my B&N 2015 edition of The Snow Queen and Other Winter Tales are close to my heart, as Snow Queen was a catalyst in my decision to go to graduate school. I wrote my statement of purpose to the English Master’s program on fairy tales. I had picked up Joan Gould’s Spinning Straw into Gold: What Fairy Tales Reveal about the Transformations in a Woman’s Life as a continuation of my intense but unofficial studies in fairy tales as an undergraduate over ten years before.
Now, in 2025, fairy tales revitalize me again. Back then, the story of Snow White was the one so important to me. Snow White speaks to me particularly as a story in which a woman comes of age in a hostile environment. It may be that the environment becomes hostile to her as she comes into her power, or that it always was hostile to her, and she only realizes it just as she is fleeing. Now, Beauty and the Beast is the story I can’t let go of.
On a personality level, I have noticed lately my struggle with extreme judgment of other people. In some ways, it is a continuation of Snow White’s story, that hostile environment that she finds herself in that never really goes away. If I don’t examine my tendencies, I can fall into labeling everyone around me as a hostile enemy and behave accordingly, picking my battles and stewing in angry judgment about their flaws when not battling.
Seeing others’ inner beauty has been an intuitive focus of mine for a long time. When I know I have to get along with someone I dislike, I try to focus on a perceived beauty to get me through. But that is just an illusion. We are all complex, full of good and bad. Life has taught my time and again that my greatest foes have the same tendencies and kind of vitriol toward me that I have felt viscerally toward others. The desire I sense in them to turn me to ashes has been in me, toward others. What can be maddening is that I have a greater degree of self-awareness than they do, and I have not treated others of whom I felt envious in the way that I am treated time and again.
But sometimes, I can get a little crazy about it. Especially when I’m in a situation I can’t really escape. I begin seeing enemies where they don’t exist at all. And when the truth is revealed to me, I feel a sense of revelation that feels like the unraveling of a fairy tale.
Beauty and the Beast came to me again through a song by a band called The Rose called “Beauty and the Beast.” It’s written from a much more selfless perspective in that you’re (not the speaker) is the beauty, and I think it propelled me toward my more recent revelations about my own illusions about other people.
The song put Disney’s 1991 Beauty and the Beast in mind for me, and I began to search for Beauty and the Beast-inspired imagery on Rednote and Etsy for my digital journal, and I began to feel more curious about the origins of the tale, the contexts around which the author of the modern version penned it.
My Barnes and Noble edition of Beauty and the Beast attributes the original story to Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve in 1740, rewritten in 1756 by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont. Reading more about de Villeneuve, I learned that she was influenced by the Précieuses, a 17th-century literary movement that arose in French salon culture, substantially propagated by women, and framed around themes of gallant and courtly love. I also noticed that de Villeneuve and many of her predecessors had anywhere between bad to horrible marriages, often married off as young teens to much older men and finding refuge in lovers. French salon culture was the origin-point of many transformed or modernized fairy tales, since the telling of fairy tales, seemingly spontaneously, was a popular pastime at salon gatherings. Précieuses writers published editions of fairy tales for sharing at salon gatherings: therein was the point of satisfaction of my curiosity about how these tales came to be. Moliere wrote a play satirized the précieuses, further heightening a sense of these gatherings as a response to a hostile patriarchal environment which was still taking aim at women, or the feminine. That said, some of the participants were men, but lovers of the women, and the women’s choices indicate that they were a different kind of man than the men the women had been forced to marry.
de Villeneuve’s version of “Beauty and the Beast” was anywhere between 200 to 300 pages long (I can’t find a copy online and am going off heresay) in the French. I could find one copy online of a translated version, around 200 pages long. Andrew Lang abbreviated de Villeneuve’s story to around 16 pages in the late 19th century. He also collected many other French salon tales in his “Fairy Books” named after colors.
This, my Barnes and Noble anthology seems very much like “a copy of a copy of a copy.” A copy of Lang’s version which, in the 1891 Blue Fairy Book, strips the stories of their original contexts and presumably sanitizes them for children. In addition to “Beauty and the Beast,” the French salon tales I have found in this book are “The Wonderful Sheep,” “Graciosa and Percinet,” “Princess Rosette,” “The Story of Pretty Goldilocks,”
Princess Minon-Minette,” “The Princess Mayblossom,” “The White Cat,” and “The White Doe,” and I’m sure there are many more. I’ve only just started looking up the origins of the stories. I read that the original stories had some very “adult” elements to them which can still be glimpsed in the tales and can still indicate today that these were stories about sexuality (Rapunzel’s pregnancy after her many visits from the Prince in the tower is a well-known example) and violence, particularly violence against women. However, I have not found a way to read faithful translations of the original tales, just Lang’s adaptations (much of the work of which was done by his wife, Leonora Blanche Alleyne).
I have written about similar subjects before, but it bothers me when so-called feminists decry fairy tales and sexist and attempt to create so-called feminist reworkings that minimize elements that some find upsetting, such as dependency on men, “true love,” beauty, female jealousy, and so on. I’m bothered because these elements are such an unexamined part of our modern culture, and the French salon writers who created many of these modern renditions were probably far more self-aware in terms of these traits, judging by the contents of the works, and the highly patriarchal cultures in which they navigated a real literary life. Andrew Lang and other such writers are those who decided these tales would be good to read to children, not the original creators. I have fretted and still fret about these stories being sanitized (anyone can feel they have lost their verisimilitude) in contemporary Disney versions, then discarded as worthless, their original power no longer recognizable. Those I guess, in the powerful element that is literary culture, they will rise again.
Sunlight-Colored Roses 