Disney’s 1991 animated classic film, Beauty and the Beast, is still worth mining for its depth and meaning decades later.
The film, built on the original 1740 French fairy tale by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, is especially notable in what it communicates about human nature and the various possible interactions between men and women.
During a time where so much conflict seems to be erupting constantly between the sexes, and increasingly few people seem to believe in the value of self-sacrifice, virtue, and the real, transformative power of love, the significance of a good story truly asserts itself.
To watch Belle closely, in particular, throughout the story’s arc, is to be inspired. From the beginning, we see a woman concerned with learning, character, and loyalty to her father, despite being considered the most beautiful woman in town. She refuses to indulge in vanity or self-seeking, although in a more immediate way, these could serve her quite well.
She is well-contrasted with the blonde sycophant women who hang around Gaston, who in turn pursues Belle simply because she is difficult to attain. She is unimpressed with brawn, power, and popularity, seeking instead meaning and goodness. She is more interested in encouraging her eccentric father in his inventions—which she doesn’t find silly but instead the workings of a man who just hasn’t yet had his genius recognized.
Most of us know the rest of the plot: Belle’s father loses his way while traveling with an invention and ends up in the cursed castle of the pompous, angry Beast who is living out the punishment for his own vanity, self-indulgence, arrogance, and shallow cold-heartedness. Belle takes his place, and the story culminates, after extensive character development via long-term exchange of love, kindness, and courage, in one of the greatest love stories of all time. Gaston, too, proves to not just be an insufferable machismo character, but a murderous, jealous villain.
Everyone suffers their appropriate fate, in the end. Happiness and abundance pour out onto those who have the courage to open up to the noble heights of love despite appearances.
Some, disenchanted by their own experience of love and tendencies to co-dependence or lack of boundaries, view the dynamic between Belle and the Beast as programming women to put up with abuse. But this is not the case: Belle continually lives from the heart out, but without compromising her dignity. In fact, it is in part her own backbone that allows for the growth of love between them, paired with her feminine genius in approaching the bitterness and unkindness of the Beast.
She is not a shrinking flower, and she is not a flattened, pathetic woman.
She is a true heroine—one who displays a wide breadth of virtue, beautifully applied depending on circumstance: asserting her dignity and sincere desires to both Beast and Gaston; the ability to allow herself to be affected by her father’s needs, resulting in both a beautiful pathos and a remarkable courage; the warmth and forgiveness continually given to her captor, whom she has freely chosen to be subject to out of love for her father; her generous reception of the Beast’s kindness and protection as he learns to offer it.
The Beast also shows up as growing in virtue, ultimately leading to his winning of Belle’s heart in time to cement his own fate away from permanent misery. Importantly, it only fully comes about in his willingness to completely sacrifice himself without any promise of return.
But leading to this point, we also see the courage of a man slowly allowing himself to love and be loved. This mode of courage is not spoken of enough in our culture—the true courage it takes to remove the guard over the heart, and allow oneself to be made vulnerable. For the Beast, whose heart remains that of a man after the curse, albeit held captive in his own rage and self-interest, this movement toward love requires heroism.
But of course, it doesn’t build on nothing. Gaston, whose inner vapidity becomes increasingly more apparent as the film proceeds, shows himself to have little interior left to be developed. Although no one is beyond redemption, Gaston is a keen warning against allowing one’s heart to fully atrophy into shallow self-concern. This character, too, is the correct foil and warning in the relationship of the sexes: contrary to the film advising a to placate an abusive man, it seems instead to say that a woman’s rejection due to a complete lacking of real self and masculine character is apropos.
In the Beast, although his passions are untamed, we do see, even early on, an intact masculine drive toward courage and character. One of the key breaking points between Belle and the Beast after a seeming stalemate is when she leaves and he saves her from a pack of wolves—and not without significant risk to himself, leaving him injured. His character, unlike Gaston’s, is marred by years of malformation and pride, but it is intact, ready to be excavated by love.
We would do well to study the depths of the film to better understand human nature and a path forward for the sexes. The truth is that men and women are meant to be vessels of healing for one another, and the pairing of their complementary virtues is a gift to all.
Beauty and the Beast provides a fantastical but grounded expression of all of this.
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