I hope that you'll forgive this young
astrophysics student with a vehement dislike of gaudy
post-modern literary criticism the present analysis of so long loved a story as
Beauty and
the Beast. My reason for this, aside from a passing trip along the nodes and a perchance reading of the story given above by SophiesCat, is that I see in it a great deal of depth as a
document pertaining to women in
European Traditional society and indeed women in any society. The story of a young girl who, for the purpose of saving her father from death at the hands of a Beast, willingly allows herself to be sent away from home. In another context, one less romanticized, the situation becomes more familiar to people who've read a bit of history.
The girl is sent to live with a Beast; an ugly, brutish mis-shapen creature. Her age is not given, but let us replace it with one that would be typical of such a precocious child; let's say that she is 15 or perhaps 14. Young enough to lose wealth gracefully but old enough to see the writing on the wall when it comes to getting it back. It is her father's bad luck to find in the forest the estate of an enchanted prince, of indeterminant age, and thus is forced to ask that one of his daughters go to sate the Beast's desire for a young maiden, whatever that may be. Let us also replace the Beast with something more familiar. A man. Of wealth and influence who, at leisure might demand the daughter of man of lower social stature; a nobleman. And perhaps I shall also define his age, let it be 38. This sort of arrangement was not uncommon in the 18th century and the centuries before. France and the rest of Europe had lived in a tri-class structure for the better part of two Millenia and indeed most societies gravitate to this sort of tiered structure the moment they stop following herds and start planting seeds.
The story speaks to the initial fright of Beauty and her family. That her father asks that one of his daughters go willingly and indeed that she does. And for her initial sacrifice, her family is rewarded, sent a dowry of incomprehensible size, in bags of holding no less. Over the course of some time the Beast opens his heart to Beauty and she eventually realizes that he isn't such a bad fellow after all. She asks that she might return home to her family whom she misses and on going finds herself bored of them. Back in town, rich on that dowry and once more exercising themselves socially, her sisters hang about with acquaintences and find her troublesome. Her father and brothers wish her to stay, but she quite willfully goes back on her own.
On returning and finding the Beast nearly dead, she realizes that she does indeed love the Beast. And thus does he become a prince, handsome and fine. It is harder to familiarize this, but to put it abstractly her love of this old, gruff man transforms him. Her acceptance of him leads to him becoming something that does not frighten on sight.
It is interesting to consider the story in a broader social context. There is more to it than the telling, but the storyteller. Throughout the story it is Beauty's actions that have had the most impact on the narrative and so give a greater agency to her character. The story was meant to be told by mothers to their children specifically their daughters. The narrative gives agency to the young heroine and so relates her to the audience, in marketing-speak it targets its demographic by setting them as the protagonist. The intention of the story was to prepare a young girl for the odd case that some man of greater riches than her father should see fit to wed her. And from her hearth and home take her. Her family would consent to this, with the understanding that she would be well treated and more importantly that they would find themselves financially well to do.
Beauty has been sold, for the price of an easy living for her father and siblings and quite importantly she has done so willingly. Because she is a clever and brave child she does not flinch under her new master. She learns to respect him and enjoy his company. She sympathizes with his ugliness and eventually learns to love him. So too was the hope of many parents at sending their young daughters off and it surely helped them sleep at night thinking that it was just as in this story. I do not make any remark upon the quality of life of young women sent to be brides to older noblemen in the 17th and 18th century. Their treatment likely falls on a Gaussian distribution (the Comte d'Sade being, of course, a deviant).
Another interesting point is the power that women have in this story. For instance, it is Beauty who changes the beast. Cleans him up. Makes him a prince fit for a girl of such lovely countenance. She has done what so many other women have failed to do in the past thousand centuries of human existence, which is to change a man. Such power has this young girl. And also interesting is that it is the Queen who must give her blessing upon their union. That she and a fairy are the ultimate authorities* in the story is also interesting. Essentially Beauty has been taken from deprivation to a life of supreme luxury, her love for the ugly man who terrified her turns him into a Prince and she, daughter of widower, is given a grateful and happy mother-in-law and, of course, lives happily ever after.
So here we have it then, a dream of luxury and comfort for a young girl as much as a dream for a doting mother that her child not spoil an opportunity for happiness in the face of a strange man. Simultaneously it is a story of a girl's understanding and affection being deeper than mere appearance. The moral of the story is that compliance with society's framework for romance will lead to happiness. It was important at the time that young girls believe that this was true.
An important realization is that this story was set to paper in 1740. Within two generations before all of those handsome noble countrymen were culled by the bourgeois uprising and subsequent upheavel of France and Europe. Indeed, comparison between this work and Madame Bovary is of particular interest, as the latter is a product of post-revolution France. There a young girl is coveted by an unscrupulous country doctor and with the inheritance from his wife's death the girl and doctor are wed. They move to town and she is immediately disillusioned by his lack of passion. She starts a credit account to bankroll her spending and gifts for her lovers. She urges him to increase his social standing by performing cosmetic surgery on a local boy with a club foot. And when the world comes crashing down and her fantasies are all as dust, she takes her own life. Her story is tragic and it is almost certain that if her mother did not read Beauty and the Beast to her, she was told similar stories and in the narrative she is described as having a love of pulp romance in general. It just goes to show that even in the 19th century people were able to parse the meanings of stories such as Beauty and the Beast separate from the intentions underlying them. Take that post-modernism.
*I note also the fact that the Deus ex Machina happens AFTER the turning point of the story, those silly backwards French.