“Beauty and the Beast” must be one of the
most beloved, and most enduring of all the fairy tales; it more than just
about any other tale has been reimagined in ballet, films, opera, TV shows,
including the underrated 80s series of the same name and various episodes
of shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer—and, of course,
countless books. Robin McKinley, one of leading writers in the genre of
fairy tale retellings, has been so haunted by the tale that she has written
not one but two novelisations, twenty years apart—1978’s Beauty
and 1997’s Rose Daughter. In both these novels, the character
of Beauty plays the central role. While they are both fascinating and
beautifully written books that I commend to you, in many ways I find Donna
Jo Napoli’s novel Beast a far more interesting—well,
beast! As you can tell from the title, Beast is the familiar
story of Beauty and the Beast told from the point of view of the character
traditionally viewed as the villain of the piece–that is, of course,
until he is redeemed by the love of the heroine.
In Beast, Napoli tells the story of Orasmyn, a Prince of Persia,
who lives in a time not long since the conversion of his country to Islam.
He is a young man devoted to his new faith, yet proud of his pre-Islam
Persian heritage, a man who loves the poetry of the epic Shahnameh, the
Persian epic of kings as much as he loves to tend his rose garden. Napoli
apparently took inspiration for her novel from Charles Lamb’s version
of “Beauty and the Beast”; the beast in that story had also
been a Prince of Persia before the curse of the fairy fell upon him. When
Orasmyn is turned into a beast—a lion in this case—in punishment
for betraying a tenet of his faith in order to save a devoted family servant—he
finds himself torn between what he sees as his human dignity, and his
faith, and his new bestial nature, the power and vulnerability that is
his as a mature, hungry and horny lion—yes, there’s a female
lion in the picture, at least in the first few days after Orasmyn is transformed.
Like most of her colleagues in the genre, Napoli doesn’t mess around
too much with the basic structure of the story, and so it’s not
a great leap for the reader to engage their sympathy with the beast, even
given we get to know him as a human before his transformation. You see,
we know this story; we already know the outcome, that this beast is a
man enchanted, and that his redemption is certain. Less obvious, though,
are the reasons we may wish to ally ourselves with the villains of “Rapunzel”
and “Hansel and Gretel”, but Napoli successfully brings the
reader to a point of almost unbearable sympathy for the witch-mother figure
from these stories in her novels The Magic Circle (“Hansel
and Gretel”) and Zel (“Rapunzel”).
Mothers of various forms get short shrift in many of the fairy tales,
and none more so than the witch-mother substitute; I particularly like
this quote from Gregory Maguire’s novel Confessions of an Ugly
Stepsister, another retelling that positions this usual villain—in
this case, one of the Cinderella characters’ stepsisters—as
the hero/narrator of the tale. In this book, Iris, the natural born daughter
of the wicked stepmother, says:
How shallow the words are really—She is a witch. One might as well say, She is a mother, thinks Iris; that about covers the same terrain, doesn’t it?
Of course, things aren’t so simple about mothers and daughters in
Maguire’s novel, as nothing is simple in Maguire’s fairy tale
re-imaginings—I’ll be returning to his books a little later
on—and nor are they so straightforward in many of the retellings.
In fact, I think it’s fair to say that in the recasting of the wicked
stepmother as a more complex and pitiable figure than we are used to,
these retellings are as influenced by a psychological impulse as they
are by the more obvious feminist interest in reclaiming the witch from
dark patriarchal history.
In her novels Zel and The Magic Circle Donna Jo Napoli
gives the villain a back story—something we rarely get in the literary
tales—and this back story allows us an insight into the character
of the woman who in both novels is transformed from a genuinely loving
mother and compassionate woman into the mad and dangerous witch-mother.
In Zel, we learn that the witch-mother was once a barren, abandoned
wife, desperate for a child of her own—so desperate that she gives
into a bargain offered to her by devils. They will give her two gifts—a
way with plants, and a daughter. In return, when the time comes, the devils
will lay claim to the woman’s soul—with the requirement that
she do her best to provide for them her daughter’s soul as well.
Mother and (adopted) daughter live an idyllic and contained life, until
the day that, on a visit to the local market, Zel demonstrates she is
growing up and away from her mother when she shows an interest in a young
man she meets in a stable. It is the terror at the prospect of losing
her daughter that precipitates the witch-mother’s imprisonment of
Zel in the tower.
Zel is remarkable in that the suffering Zel endures during, and after, her several years’ imprisonment is dreadful, we never lose compassion for the woman who causes this suffering. Napoli explores with great compassion the motivations behind the witch-mother’s appalling cruelty, and because the enormity of the love between mother and daughter is never in doubt, the witch-mother’s betrayal is all the more agonising. Zel is an enormously satisfying novel, because of, and not in spite of the agony you feel on behalf of both Zel and her mother.
©Judith Ridge 2005