Beauty and the Beast (folk tales)

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Belle dines with the beast, illustration by Anne Anderson

Beauty and the Beast , originally Beauty and the Beast (French original: La Belle et la Bête ), is a traditional folk tale from France ( ATU 425C). The first publication was a preparation by the French Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve , which appeared in 1740 in La jeune américaine, et les contes marins . This in turn relied on motifs found in the fairy tale collections of Giovanni Francesco Straparola ( King Pig in Merry Nights , 1550–1555).

Better known than the first version of Villeneuve, however, is an abbreviated version, which was published in 1756 by the French writer Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont in the Magasin des enfan [t] s, ou dialogues entre une sage gouvernante et plusieurs de ses élèves . In the same year a German edition appeared under the title Educational magazine for children to properly educate their minds and hearts for German youth , the translation of which was done by the writer Johann Joachim Schwabe . The story was entitled The Beauty and the Animal. A fairy tale .

content

After Villeneuve (1740)

Illustration by Walter Crane (1874)

A rich merchant has six sons and six daughters. The youngest daughter, called "the beautiful" ( La Belle ), is humble and friendly; her sisters, on the other hand, are malicious and selfish. One day the merchant loses all his wealth when his ships get caught in a storm on the high seas, so that his family has to move to a small house in the country, far from the city, and work for a living. After a few years the merchant heard that one of his merchant ships had escaped the storm and reached the port. So he makes his way into town to sift through the cargo. Before leaving, he asks his daughters if they would like something brought back from his trip. The older daughters want jewelry and expensive clothes; however, the beautiful only asks him for a rose. Once in town, the merchant is dismayed to find that his cargo has been confiscated in order to pay off his debts, so that he has no money to buy the presents for his daughters.

On his way back, the merchant gets lost in the forest. In search of a shelter, he comes to a magnificent castle. It is deserted, but he finds a large table, festively set with food and drinks that have apparently been prepared for him. The merchant eats and stays overnight. As he is about to leave the castle the next morning, he sees a rose garden and remembers his youngest daughter's wish. He picks a rose, and a hideous 'animal' ( Bête ), with a trunk similar to that of an elephant, appears in front of him. It says that he wanted to take away his most precious possessions, even though he was received so hospitably that now he must die. The merchant begs to be released and tells of his youngest daughter, for whom he picked the rose. The animal then allows him to give the beautiful woman the rose, but only if the merchant returns or one of his daughters voluntarily comes to the castle in his place.

The merchant accepts the condition shaken. The animal gives him a new horse and a coat, but emphasizes that a daughter must come to the castle as promised. On his return the merchant tries to keep the secret from his children, but they find out anyway. The beautiful, sad that she brought her father into this situation, agrees to go to the castle of the animal instead of her father, although she expects her death there. The beautiful woman and her father go to the castle together.

The animal welcomes both of them politely, but orders the father to leave the castle forever the next morning at sunrise. Once again the animal gives the trader horses, jewelry and clothes for his family back home. The beautiful woman is convinced that this is the price that the animal pays for her life. The beautiful woman says goodbye to her father in tears and returns to her room, where she falls into a deep sleep. The beautiful woman now spends her days exploring the castle and gardens. The best food awaits them every evening and the animal entertains them in the most pleasant way. Every evening the animal asks her whether she would spend the night with him (" Elle lui demanda sans détour si elle vouloit la laisser coucher avec elle." / " Are you willing me to sleep with you?" ), Yes she answers him every time with no. In her dreams, on the other hand, a beautiful prince appears again and again, begging her to tell him why she is rejecting him. She replies that she cannot marry the animal because she only loves it as a friend. The beautiful does not see the connection between the animal and the prince and begins to believe that the animal is holding the prince captive in the castle. She begins to look for him and finds several enchanted rooms, populated by monkeys, but never the prince out of her dreams.

The beautiful woman lives a luxurious life in the castle of the animal for several months. After a while she gets homesick and asks the animal to visit her family. It allows it on the condition that she returns in exactly two months, if she returns later the animal would die. When she arrives home, her sisters are surprised to see her well nourished and in fine clothes. They become jealous of their happy life, especially since their admirers are now only vying for the love of the beautiful.

After the two months with her family, the beautiful woman sees in a dream the animal that is dying because it has lost hope and no longer believes in her return. With the help of a magic ring, the beautiful girl returns to the castle and is able to save the terminally ill animal. In doing so, she becomes aware of her actual feelings for the animal. She confesses her love to him and finally agrees to marry. The next morning she wakes up at the side of the beautiful and eloquent prince who has been transformed back, the very prince who kept visiting her in her dreams.

On the following day a good fairy appear, who appeared to her now and then in dreams, and the mother of the prince in the castle. The queen, the prince's mother, refuses to agree to marry a merchant's daughter who is not noble. The fairy godmother then reveals to her that the beautiful is actually the daughter of a king and a fairy. It turns out that the beautiful is the prince's cousin on her father's side and the niece of the fairy godmother on her mother's side. The following is a long history of the prince, who drew the wrath of an old fairy because he did not want to marry her. As a punishment, she cursed him. He turned into the ugly animal that can only be turned back through a woman's sincere love and willingness to marry. The fairy godmother, thus the beautiful aunt, tried to weaken the evil curse a little by turning the court people into statues so that no one would reveal his secret. In addition, she caused a thick fog to rise around the castle, so that no one whom she considered unsuitable could enter it until the beautiful finally released him.

A few more excursions into the history of the king and the old bad fairy follow, until everything ends happily.

After Beaumont (1756)

Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve's story contained some elements that Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont left out . Above all, Villeneuve tells the background story of the beautiful and the animal in more detail. Beaumont, however, shortened the story. She rather emphasized the archetypal simplicity and allowed pedagogical elements in the sense of virtue, for example in the description of the figures of the beautiful, to flow: "... who devoted most of her time to reading good books".

At Beaumont, the merchant only has three sons and three daughters. The youngest is known as "the beautiful child" ( La belle enfant ). She is described not only as beautiful, but also as extremely virtuous: In order not to leave her father alone, she rejects all marriage proposals and does all work conscientiously. After work, she plays the piano, sings and spins. When the animal lets the merchant go, it hands him a suitcase full of gold pieces. When the beauties leave, the evil sisters rub their eyes with an onion so they can cry. On her first night in the castle, the beautiful woman appears in a dream with a lady who praises her good heart and promises her a reward for the self-sacrificing act. Nevertheless, the beautiful woman is convinced that the animal would eat her that evening. As she walks through the palace, she comes across a room that has been prepared for her with a large library. At this point in the story, Beaumont adds the motif of a magic mirror in which the beautiful can see her family. The animal's evening question about a night spent together has now become the question of marriage for Beaumont. After the beast has become a prince again, the couple meets the beautiful family in the palace and the lady who appeared to her in a dream, a fairy. She transforms the wicked sisters into living statues that are supposed to stand at the door of the palace and so are eternally witnesses of her sister's happiness.

Emergence

Motifs from the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast can already be found in Apuleius ' tale of Amor and Psyche from the 2nd century, such as the envious sisters who make Psyche believe that she is married to a monster. A well-known real model of the love story can be found in the marriage between Pedro Gonsalvus and Catherine Raffelin. However, using phylogenetic methods, Portuguese and British researchers came to the conclusion that the fairy tale is very likely to be around 2500 to 6000 years old.

To the motive

In La Belle et la Bête there is a modified fairy tale motif that a father of daughters in the wilderness promises a threatening power out of necessity to bestow on him the first living thing that comes to meet him when he returns home. The father assumes that he would meet a dog or another animal first, instead his dearest child runs towards him. This motif already appears in the Old Testament in the story of Jephtha , who must consecrate his daughter to God. The motif is also continued in the German fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, The Singing, Leaping Little Löweneckerchen . The chain of motifs of the hardworking youngest with the evil, envious, older sisters connects the fairy tales La Belle et la Bête and Cinderella . There is also the motif of the deformed prince in The Frog King . Here the prince wants to win the girl's love despite the deformity.

The material of La Belle et la Bête has been varied many times. It experienced a special modification in the Norwegian fairy tale East of the Sun and West of the Moon by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe . The animal here is a large polar bear. The main character, the beautiful girl, has to seek out and question the stars and all four winds before she finds her way back to the prince with the north wind.

Another story about beauty and the beast is told by the Greek fairy tale The golden-green eagle in the collection of Georgias Megas . The Rosebud by Božena Němcová is very close to the French version of the fairy tale ; In the further course of Němcová's story, however, the girl is challenged in an astonishing way: she has to endure tormenting ghosts in silence for three nights in order to redeem the monster.

Literary motivational transformations

Jules Laforgue wrote his Moralités légendaires in 1887 . In his story, Perseus and Andromeda or the happiest of the three , he combines the Greek myth of Andromeda with motifs from Beauty and the Beast in a surprisingly motivational way . The way in which Laforgue deals with the subject here also shows some parallels to the conception of the fairy tale by Jean Cocteau in his film adaptation La Belle et la Bête .

Adaptations

The fairy tale has been adapted in numerous artistic genres:

Visual arts

Literature (selection)

Opera and theater

  • André Grétry : Zémir et Azor , 1771, Opéra-Ballet in four acts, first performance in Fontainebleau.
  • Hans Huber : The beautiful Bellinda , 1916, opera in three acts and a prelude by Gian Bundi, world premiere in Bern.
  • Gail Bowen : The Beauty and the Beast , 1993, play, world premiere at the Globe Theater in Regina .

Movie and TV

Music and musical

Others

  • Disney's Beauty and the Beast , Super Nintendo game, first published in 1993.
  • Magic World of Fairy Tales 2: Beauty and the Beast , radio play by Markus Topf and others, 2015.
  • Titania Special 15: Beauty and the Beast. Radio play by Marc Gruppe, Titania Medien, with Reinhilt Schneider and Jean Paul Baeck in the leading roles as well as u. a. Dagmar von Kurmin and Max Schautzer . 2020.

swell

Villeneuve

  • French version : Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve: La belle et la bête . In: Le Cabinet des fées, ou collection choisie des contes des fées, et autres contes merveilleux . Vol. 26, Amsterdam and Paris 1786 (Slatkine Reprint, Geneva 1978), pp. 27-214.
    • English version : Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve: The Beauty and the Beast . In: JR Planché (Ed.): Four and twenty tales, selected from those of Perrault and other popular writers , London 1858, pp. 225–328.

Beaumont

  • French version : Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont: La Belle et la Bête . In: This: Contes moraux pour l'instruction de la jeunesse . Barba 1806, pp. 1-32.
  • German versions :
    • The beauty and the animal. A fairy tale . In: Dies .: Educational magazine for children on the right education of their minds and hearts for German youth . Translated by Johann Joachim Schwabe, Weidmann, Leipzig 1767, pp. 45–67.
    • Beauty and the animal . In: Project Gutenberg-DE . Translated by Luitgard Fidorra, 2006.

Web links

Commons : Beauty and the Beast  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Die Schöne, und das Thier  - Version by Beaumont in the translation by Schwabe

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Giovanni Francesco Straparola: Enjoyable Nights. In: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved September 28, 2015 .
  2. ↑ Martina Schönenborn: Virtue and Autonomy. The literary modeling of the daughter figure in the tragedy of the 18th century . Wallstein, 2004, ISBN 3-89244-760-8 , pp. 35-37 .
  3. ↑ Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve: La Belle et la Bete. In: Nouveau Cabinet des fées, 12. 1786, p. 75 , accessed on November 18, 2018 (French).
  4. ↑ Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve: La belle et la bête. In: Nouveau Cabinet des fées, 12. 1786, p. 95 , accessed on November 18, 2018 (French): “Pour votre retour vous n'aurez point besoin d'équipage: prenez seulement congé de votre famille le soir, avant de vous retirer, & quand vous serez dans le lit, tournez votre bague la pierre en dedans, & dites d'un ton ferme: "Je veux retourner en mon palais revoir ma Bête" [...] “
  5. ↑ Betsy Hearne: Beauty and the Beast: Visions and Revisions of An Old Tale . ISBN 0-226-32239-4 .
  6. ^ Jeanne-Marie Leprince Beaumont: Educational magazine for children . 7th edition. 1st volume. von Trattnern, Vienna 1777, p. 55 ( online ).
  7. ↑ G. Anderson: Fairytale in the Ancient World . London, Routledge 2000.
  8. ^ J. Swahn: The Tale of Cupid and Psyche . Gleerup, Lund 1955.
  9. ↑ Claudia Becker: Hypotrichosis. A man everyone else saw as a beast . In: welt.de , February 7, 2017.
  10. ^ Sara Graça da Silva, Jamshid J. Tehrani: Comparative phylogenetic analyzes uncover the ancient roots of Indo-European folktales . In: Royal Society Open Science . tape 3 , no. 1 , 2016, ISSN  2054-5703 , doi : 10.1098 / rsos.150645 , PMID 26909191 , PMC 4736946 (free full text) - ( royalsocietypublishing.org [accessed March 16, 2016]).
  11. ↑ Bible , Judges 11: 38–40.
  12. ↑ Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe: East of the sun and west of the moon
  13. ↑ The golden-green eagle in Greek folk tales ed. by Georgias A. Megas, Munich 1965, pp. 196-203.
  14. ↑ Božena Němcová: The King of Time - Slovak Fairy Tales , Bratislava 1978, pp. 29–33.
  15. ↑ Fabienne Will: On “Panna a netvor” . In: Andreas Friedrich (Ed.): Film genres. Fantasy and fairy tale films (= Reclam's Universal Library No. 18403). Reclam, Ditzingen 2003, ISBN 3-15-018403-7 , pp. 39-42.
  16. ↑ Cf. en: Beauty and the Beast (1983 film)
  17. ↑ See en: Beauty and the Beast (1993 film)
  18. ↑ See en: Beauty and the Beast (2003 film)
  19. ↑ See en: Beauty and the Beast Live on Stage
  20. ↑ cf. en: Disney's Beauty and the Beast (video game)
  21. ↑ Dagmar von Kurmin - She slipped into over 50 roles for 'Titania'. Retrieved August 24, 2020 .