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A beautiful fairy tale, which shows that true love comes from within.
A story with dozens of adaptations for film and theater.
A traditional folktale where everyone, since 1740, has grown up with.
But, how did it all start?
The plot is about a poor family.
When the father has to go on a trip he gets lost...
...and ends up in a strange castle.
But when he picks a rose from the garden, after a warmly welcome,
a ferocious beast appears.
The beast blames him that after all his hospitality he was trying to steal his roses.
When the father explains that the rose was for his daughter Beauty,
the Beast insists that he would bring his daughter to the castle.
When Beauty is staying at the castle, she gets strange dreams...
...in which a fairy informs her that everything is going to be fine.
After a year, Beauty was finally allowed to go home for three days...
...to visit her family.
But when she was being kept home for longer than three days,
she gets a dream one night, in which she saw the beast dying.
She hurries to the castle...
...and as soon as she expresses her true love for the dying beast,
he transforms into a handsome prince.
The Beast was changed by evil powers...
...and could only be cured if he would find true love.
They got married and lived happily ever after.
Beauty and the Beast is an interesting example to think about.
Because we generally think of it as an anonymous story...
...that was not written a long time ago.
But in fact, the story is a literary one,
created by the French writer Madame Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve in 1740.
De Villeneuve based her story on Cupid and Psyche,
a work of fifty years earlier.
It was a risky story for those days,
where women had few rights in love.
Her version, more than a hundred pages long,
is different than the version we know today.
Madame Leprince de Beaumont, a French woman who worked in England,
translated and shortened the story...
...and published it in a magazine for young girls.
Through the centuries, fairy tales shifted...
from adult, sensual stories,
to moral tales for childhood education.
In 1843, the poetic version by Charles Lamb introduced the idea of Fate.
Beauty's actions, such as going to the Beast's castle in her father's stead,
are not simply attributed to either blind obedience, like de Villeneuve,
or honor, like de Beaumont,
but to the heroine's acceptance of the predestined fate that lies before her.
In the 20th century the story was subtly altered again.
In 1909, the French playwright Fernand Nozier...
...wrote and produced an adult version of Beauty and the Beast...
...with a fashionable Oriental flavor.
Nozier's rendition is humorous,
yet beneath it's light surface the play explores a distinctly *** subtext,
and the duality of body and spirit.
In this version, all three sisters find themselves powerfully attracted to the Beast.
When Beauty's kiss turns him into a man, she complains:
"You should have warned me! Here I was smitten by an exceptional being,
and all of a sudden my fiancé becomes an ordinary, distinguished young man!"
This is a problem that has plagued most dramatic representations of the tale.
The Beast is such a compelling character...
...that it is frequently disappointing when he is turned back into a prince.
©Zandstra2012-2013