I
cannot know for sure whether Charlotte Brontë ever read the story of Beauty and the Beast, but it seems quite
likely that as a child she would have read and loved the version by Madame
LePrince de Beaumont, first published in English in 1783 in a volume called ‘The Young Misses Magazine, containing
dialogues between a Governess and Several Young Ladies of Quality, her
Scholars’. The book contained a number of other fairy tales (all with a
moral message) and was very popular. I haven’t traced the history of the
various editions, but one at least was published in Glasgow by J Mundell in
1800: there must have been many more. Given Patrick and Maria Brontë’s family
of six children (one born each year between 1814 and 1819) of whom five were
girls, ‘The Young Misses Magazine’
would have been a natural choice for the shelves of their very, very
bookish family.
And
I realised a while ago how much of a Beauty
and the Beast vibe there is going on in Jane
Eyre. On the face of it you might not think that the quiet, but stubborn
and passionate Jane has very much in common with ‘charming, sweet-tempered’ Beauty,
but there are a number of interesting parallels and coincidences between the
two tales, ranging from fairly slight to really significant. Besides being
sweet-tempered, LePrince de Beaumont’s Beauty is herself quiet and bookish (a
trait the Disney cartoon took up and made much of), and in the days of their
merchant father’s fortune, Beauty stays at home reading while her elder sisters
mock her:
They went out every day to parties of
pleasure, balls, plays, concerts and so forth, and they laughed at their
youngest sister, because she spent the greatest part of her time in reading
good books.
(By good books, of course, is meant either religious or morally improving books.)
When
we first meet the young Jane Eyre, she is tucked behind a curtain with a book,
having been banished from the drawing room and the family circle of her Aunt
Reed and cousins Eliza, Georgiana and John Reed, as a punishment for not being sufficiently lively.
A
small breakfast-room adjoined the drawing room, I slipped in there. It
contained a bookcase; I soon possessed myself of a volume, taking care that it
should be one stored with pictures. I mounted into the window-seat, and …
having drawn the red moreen curtain nearly close, I was shrined in double
retirement.
Sitting
thus, she is happy until John Reed comes to bully her. Though he is her cousin,
he despises her as the orphan child of Mrs Reed’s deceased husband’s sister,
who married a poor clergyman. John Reed rubs this in well.
‘You
have no business to take our books; you are a dependent, mamma says; you have
no money; your father left you none: you ought to beg, and not to live here
with gentlemen’s children like us, and eat the same meals we do, and wear
clothes at our mamma’s expense.’
So
Jane is forced to live with an abusive family and so is Beauty, whose sisters grow
even more ill-tempered when they become poor: ‘they not only left her all the
work of the house to do, but insulted her every moment’. Nevertheless Beauty
applies herself to making the best of things, and Jane Eyre grows up. She
teaches at Lowood Institution for a while before taking up the post of
governess at a grand house, Thornfield Hall. And Beauty leaves home for the Beast’s
palace.
This
is the first of the major coincidences: in both narratives a young woman comes
to a great house to be courted by a Beast who isn’t what he seems. Thornfield
and the Beast’s palace are places of luxury, danger and mystery: but the Beast’s
palace is first perceived as terrifying and becomes domestic and familiar,
while at Thornfield the opposite happens. After the homely welcome Jane receives from cosy Mrs Fairfax, the mystery of Thornfield grows ever darker with midnight
visitations and strange ‘preternatural’ laughter from the upper floor, where
some sinister secret is guarded by Grace Poole with her ‘hard, plain face’.
Fairy
tale references pervade Jane Eyre. Rochester’s
moonlight arrival on horseback, heralded by his black dog, causes Jane to think
of the ominous Northern goblin, the Gytrash. Rochester too, perceives Jane from
the beginning in terms of folk or fairy tales: he
constantly compares her to a fairy or elf.
‘When
you came to me in Hay Lane last night, I thought unaccountably of fairy tales,
and had half a mind to demand whether you had bewitched my horse: I am not sure
yet. Who are your parents?’
‘I have none.’
‘Nor ever had, I suppose; do you
remember them?’
‘No.’
‘I thought not. And so you were
waiting for your people when you sat on that stile?’
‘For whom, sir?’
‘For the men in green; it was a
proper moonlight evening for them. Did I break through one of your rings, that you
spread that damned ice on the causeway?’
Though
Beauty does not (yet) wish to marry the Beast, she becomes more and more fond
of him as they converse every evening during and after her supper: in this illustration by Kinuko Y. Craft, she looks demurely away but holds his hand. Or his paw.
It is also
through conversation that Jane and Rochester fall in love. Jane is well capable of dealing with Rochester’s straight-faced accusation that it may have
been she who ‘spread ice over the causeway’ and felled his horse.
‘The
men in green all forsook England a hundred years ago,’ said I, speaking as
seriously as he had done. ‘And not even in Hay Lane, or the fields about it,
could you find a trace of them. I don’t think either summer or harvest, or
winter moon, will ever shine on their revels more.’
They
have imaginations that match. Jane’s capacity to meet and cap Rochester’s
faerie fancies is underscored by the bewilderment of Mrs Fairfax, who ‘dropped her knitting, and, with
raised eyebrows, seemed wondering what sort of talk this was.’
In
fact, the rough-edged Rochester resembles the gruffly-spoken Beast, who
announces: ‘I don’t love compliments, not I. I like people to speak as they
think’. At one moment in the fairy tale he asks Beauty, ‘Tell me, do not you
think me very ugly?’ and she answers, ‘That is true, for I cannot tell a lie.’ When Rochester famously asks Jane, ‘You examine me, Miss Eyre; do you think me
handsome?’ – he enjoys her blunt answer, ‘No, sir.’ (No wonder
he despises Blanche Ingram's insincere flattery as she compares his swarthy appearance to ‘the sort of wild, fierce,
bandit hero whom I could have consented to gift with my hand.’)
In
the fairy tale, Beauty accepts without embarrassment the fine gowns and gold pieces
which the Beast showers upon her and her family. True, when presented with ‘a
large trunk full of gowns covered with gold and diamonds’ she takes the
plainest, and tries to give the others to her sisters: Madame LePrince de
Beaumont intends this to illustrate her heroine’s modesty and generosity. In
similar circumstances Jane
Eyre is in contrast made desperately uncomfortable by Rochester's attempts to lavish gifts and fine
clothes upon her.
I
hated the business, I begged leave to defer it … With anxiety I watched his eye
rove over the gay stores: he fixed on a rich silk of the most brilliant
amethyst dye, and a superb pink satin. I told him in a new series of whispers,
that he might as well buy me a gold gown and a silver bonnet at once: I should
certainly never venture to wear his choice.
Jane
sees the balance of their relationship tipping disastrously. Rochester’s display
of wealth suffocates her and threatens to reduce her to his possession. ‘I
never can bear being dressed like a doll by Mr Rochester,’ she tells herself
and the reader; and hoping for a degree of independence writes to her uncle
John in Madeira, whom she has recently learned wished to adopt her as his heir.
And this letter in which she mentions her engagement brings Mr Mason hotfoot
from the West Indies to prevent Rochester’s bigamous marriage.
The
next event in the fairy tale is Beauty’s separation from the Beast. Though distraught at the thought of losing her, the Beast permits her to visit her family, and she
leaves him with the faithful promise to stay no longer than a week: a promise
she fails to keep. Her departure is reflected as if in a dark mirror by Jane’s
flight from Thornfield upon the dreadful discovery that Rochester is already married
to a mad wife he keeps confined in the attic. After days wandering lost on the moors, she finds
refuge with the Rivers family who turn out to be her own cousins
– as St John Rivers explains:
My
mother’s name was Eyre; she had two brothers, one a clergyman, who married Miss
Jane Reed, of Gateshead; the other, John Eyre Esq, Merchant, late of Funchal,
Madeira.
The
deceased John Eyre has left all his property to ‘his brother the clergyman’s
orphan daughter’, and Jane is now an heiress. This bequest from her merchant
uncle – a surrogate father – echoes the moment early in the fairy tale when Beauty’s
merchant father learns that one of his ships has been saved: both narratives play
with visions of trade, merchant ships, rich cargoes and unexpected wealth from
overseas.
And family members in both tales attempt to keep the young women from
returning to their lovers. Beauty’s sisters beg her to stay longer than she
promised, while the fervent missionary St John Rivers presses Jane to marry him
and come to India as his helpmeet. Almost too late, Beauty dreams of the Beast
lying at death’s door in the gardens, reproaching her for her desertion; deeply
upset, she uses the magic ring that will return her to the palace. Almost too
late, Jane hears a supernatural voice crying her name: ‘Jane! Jane! Jane!’ –
And
it was the voice of a human being – a known, loved, well-remembered voice –
that of Edward Fairfax Rochester, and it spoke in pain and woe, wildly; eerily,
urgently.
‘I am coming!’ I cried, ‘Wait for me! Oh, I
will come!’
Hurrying
back (on a three-day journey by coach) to Thornfield, Jane follows the
field-path and the high orchard wall to a place where she can peep at the house
through a pillared gateway... and now
comes the odd, curiously artificial passage with which Charlotte Brontë delays
for the reader the shock of Jane’s first sight of Thornfield:
Hear
an illustration, reader.
A lover finds his mistress asleep on
a mossy bank; he wishes to catch a glimpse of her fair face without waking her.
He steals softly over the grass, careful to make no sound; he pauses – fancying
she has stirred: he withdraws: not for worlds would he be seen. All is still:
he again advances: he bends above her; a light veil rests over her features: he
lifts it; bends lower […] How he starts! How he suddenly and vehemently clasps
in both arms the form he dared not, a moment since, touch with his finger! How
he calls aloud a name, and drops his burden, and gazes on it wildly! He thus
grasps and cries, and gazes, because he no longer fears to waken by any sound
he can utter – by any movement he can make. He thought his love slept sweetly:
he finds she is stone dead.
I looked with timorous joy towards a
stately house; I saw a blackened ruin.
Compare
that with the paragraph in the fairy tale which tells how Beauty finds the Beast
lying in the palace grounds:
[Beauty]
waited for evening with the utmost impatience, at last the wished-for hour
came, the clock struck nine, yet no Beast appeared. Beauty then feared she had
been the cause of his death; she ran crying and wringing her hands all about
the palace, like one in despair; after having sought for him everywhere, she
recollected her dream, and flew to the canal in the garden, where she dreamed
she saw him. There she found poor Beast stretched out, quite senseless, and, as
she imagined, dead. She threw herself upon him…
It
would have been impossibly melodramatic for Jane Eyre to find Rochester lying
in the grounds of Thornfield Hall at death’s door, but in this tale-within-a-tale,
beginning in Romantic pastoral and ending in Gothic horror, Charlotte Brontë applies
an inverted version of the fairy tale to Jane’s circumstances and substitutes
the bricks and mortar of Thornfield for the breathing body of the Beast. The
nameless male lover is powerless: so are Rochester and the Beast; the emphasis
is on the women. Beauty and Jane fear their lovers may be dead, but both possess
the metaphysical energy needed to restore them to life. And male passivity
responds to female potency:
Beast
opened his eyes and said to Beauty, ‘You forgot your promise, and I was so
afflicted for having lost you, that I resolved to starve myself, but since I
have the happiness of seeing you once more, I die satisfied.’
‘No, dear Beast,’ said Beauty, ‘you
must not die. Live to be my husband; from this moment I give you my hand, and
swear to be none but yours.’
Beauty’s
vow returns the Beast to health and breaks the spell. Revealed in his true
shape, a handsome prince, he declares his gratitude: ‘There was only you in the
world generous enough to be won by the goodness of my temper, and in offering
you my crown I can’t discharge the obligations I have to you.’
By just the same
means Jane brings renewed life to the mutilated but morally transformed
Rochester who, significantly, more than ever resembles a Beast. ‘It is time
someone undertook to rehumanise you,’
she tells him [my italics] –
‘for
I see you are being metamorphosed into a lion, or something of that sort. You
have a faux air of Nebuchadnezzar in
the fields about you, that is certain: your hair reminds me of eagles’
feathers; whether your nails are grown like birds’ claws or not, I have not yet
noticed.’ [Later she adds:] ‘Have you a pocket comb about you, sir?’
‘What for, Jane?’
‘Just to comb out this shaggy black mane. I
find you rather alarming, when I examine you close at hand; you talk of my
being like a fairy, but I am sure you are more like a brownie.’
‘Am I hideous, Jane?’
‘Very, sir; you always were, you know.’
I’ve
long thought Beauty and the Beast a
fairy tale much misunderstood, or at any rate over-interpreted. Bruno
Bettelheim saw it as a Freudian parable in which the timid virgin (with an oedipal
attachment to her father) manages to overcome her repugnance towards the male
body and her fear of sex, so that the male partner who at first seemed bestial appears
in a human light. And of course you can read it that way, though I can’t help
feeling that all this female dread and male dreadfulness is a little
over-heated. There are fairy tales such as that of Gawain and the Loathly Lady,
or the folk song King Henry, in which
a reluctant young man has to marry or mate with an ugly or bestial woman. Are
these stories ever interpreted as a male dread of sex?
After all, Beauty is no
shrinking violet but a practical young woman. When her father loses all his money, she rolls up her
sleeves and works. When he returns home with the news that his life is forfeit
to a monster, she ‘did not cry at all,’ but insists on saving his life: ‘You
shall not go the palace without me, you cannot hinder me from following you.’ While
her father panics, Beauty remains ‘resolute’, and once he has left her alone in
the Beast’s palace, Madame LePrince de Beaumont comments that although Beauty
does have a little cry,
as she was mistress of a great deal of resolution [my italics], she recommended
herself to God and resolved not to be uneasy for the little time she had to
live, for she firmly believed Beast would eat her up that night. However, she
thought she might as well walk about till then…
Whereupon, discovering a magnificent suite of rooms labelled
‘Beauty’s Apartment’, she is thrilled to discover ‘a large library, a
harpsichord, and several music books’ and is encouraged by the sensible reflection
that such preparations would hardly have been made if she were to be devoured
that night. She has moral courage too: when the Beast asks, as he constantly
does, ‘Beauty, will you be my wife?’ she refuses, because even as she grows
more and more fond of him, she is not
ready to say yes. If this is a parable about sex, it’s less about fear –
Beauty loses her fear of the Beast months before the end of the story – than it
is about taking the time to know your own mind. Finally – she leaves it rather
late, but that’s narrative tension for you – Beauty has the sense to realise
that this ugly Beast actually is
someone she loves.
If
Charlotte Brontë read Beauty and the
Beast (in which case her sisters would certainly have read it too, and most of their heroines are attracted to rough diamonds), she would
have found it the tale of a quiet, brave and determined young woman who sees through appearances
to the inner worth of one who appears to be a Beast – and whose love ultimately saves
and transforms him. I would argue that this is mirrored by the transformational
power of Jane’s love for Rochester. The Beast loses his beastliness and reverts
to a form suited to his inward gentility: the shaggy, mutilated Rochester outwardly
reminds Jane (not unflatteringly) of a lion, an eagle or a brownie, but has lost the inner
monstrousness that characterised his deception.
I
have no idea if all these echoes and parallels were consciously contrived, I
would guess – perhaps not – but I think they are there, that what Brontë does with them is striking, and that they may help to
account for that sense of inevitability about the way Jane Eyre unfolds.
[PS - After several friends online exclaimed 'But of COURSE she knew what she was doing!' I admit I may have been too cautious. Yes, she was a conscious artist and very likely did know that she was weaving in strands from the fairy tale. I just still wonder if all of them were intentional, and whether she ever mentioned or referenced 'Beauty and the Beast' in letters or any other writings. Not being a Brontë scholar, I do not know.]
Picture credits:Jane meets Rochester on Hay Lane - by Fritz Eichenberg
Jane reads behind the curtains - by Simon Brett
Beauty and the Beast - by Angela Barrett
Beauty and the Beast - by Kinuko Y. Craft
Jane's flight from Thornfield - by Edward A. Wilson
'A blackened ruin' - by Fritz Eichenberg
Beauty and the Beast - 'Don't leave me!' by Liiga Klavina at Deviant Art
Jane and Rochester reunited - by Simon Brett
