Beauty and the Beast. Father stays overnight in mysterious palace and takes a rose. Must promise daughter to animal (or she goes voluntarily). Tabu 1: overstaying at home. She finds the husband [emphasis added] almost dead. Disenchants him by embrace. (Hearne 9)

Meant as an instructive tale for children and young girls in particular (2), La Belle ET la Bête focuses on the importance of kindness to others and the value of inner beauty over physical appearance, but it also serves as a guide to choosing a husband. This becomes apparent when Beauty compares her experience with the Beast to her sisters’ marital woes, concluding, “It is neither wit nor a fine person in a husband that makes a woman happy; but virtue, sweetness of temper, and good nature, and Beast has all of these” (44). Once she has recognized and articulated the central moral of her existence, Beauty is rewarded with an ideal mate as her kiss transforms the Beast into a handsome prince. She is told by the fairy who enchanted him, “You have preferred virtue to wit or beauty, and you deserve to find one in who [sic] these three are united” (47). Although modern retellings such as Disney’s 1991 animated feature film Beauty and the Beast have eliminated lack of intelligence as an acceptable personality trait in a mate for the bookish heroine, the overarching lesson remains much the same. Unfortunately for the children who may be looking to the heroine as a role model, the Disney version also suggests far more explicitly than the original story does that the love of a good woman can transform a man from a beast into a suitable mate; where a mischievous fairy has transformed De Beaumont’s Bête for no other apparent purpose than the educational opportunities it presents to young readers, the Disney movie describes its Beast as “spoiled, selfish, and cruel,” justifiably placed under a curse that can only be broken “when he learn[s] to love another and is loved in return.”

Although all of this could be construed as quite romantic, it does little to further Betsy Hearne’s assertion that the story somehow empowers the little girls and young women who read it. True, Beauty does enter the castle of her own free will, but she does so out of a sense of obligation to her father, and so is literally a prisoner of her love for him. Hearne claims that “the Beast basically sits around waiting to be rescued by the handsome princess” (16), but the choices presented to Beauty by the story’s rigid structure are ultimately more limiting than the Beast’s imprisonment. She is offered only the dichotomy of father and suitor and must transfer her love and dominion from one to the other in order for the tale to succeed. It seems as if the story has been constructed to make it impossible for Beauty to conceive of an existence that is not defined by a male presence, and so Beauty and the Beast is not a story of empowerment or even of equality, but of female oppression framed as co-dependence.

Much like Carol Ann Duffy herself, the speaker of “Mrs. Beast” is determined to straighten out “these myths going round, these legends, fairytales” (1) and seeks to expose the inherent disadvantages faced by the women who exist within them. However, Duffy’s feminist critique does not stop at the sexism inherent in Beauty and the Beast as she also takes aim at the self-serving attitudes of self-proclaimed feminists that ultimately serve to maintain the status quo. As bell hooks points out:

Women, though assigned different roles to play in society based on sex, are not taught a different value system. Like most men, most women are taught from childhood on that dominating and controlling others is the basic expression of power. (256)

Ironically, although Mrs. Beast supplies her audience with seemingly infinite examples of women who have been maligned, cheated, discarded, idealized, or otherwise mistreated by men, she sees nothing wrong with the way she treats her husband as a disposable servant-cum-gigolo. Where the heroine of de Beaumont’s story exists in a world where women are defined by men and does not question the father/suitor binary she encounters, Mrs. Beast is aware of gender inequalities but is unable to see male-female relations as anything other than a struggle for dominance.

In contrast to de Beaumont’s obedient Beauty, the speaker claims to be free of any obligations save the creation and preservation of her own happiness. She tells the reader that she

Came to the House of the Beast
No longer a girl, knowing my own mind
My own gold stashed in the bank
My own black horse at the gates
Ready to carry me off at one wrong word,
One false move, one dirty look. (15-20)

Financial independence is often touted by experts as the battered spouse’s best chance of escape from an abusive relationship (SCVAN), but the speaker’s willingness to flee “the House of the Beast” before she has even arrived seems to be more of a threat to her suitor than a reaction to any real danger. This rather aggressive declaration of independence essentially amounts to emotional blackmail. Her suitor must acquiesce to her every whim, or face charges of abuse if he chooses not to endure hers.

Indeed, to Mrs. Beast the ideal spouse is not merely the kind, humble, and respectful Bête of de Beaumont’s tale, but one who is subservient, “knows he [is] blessed” and displays “an erection/ [the] size of a mule’s” (21-26). The speaker gloats that both their emotional and sexual relationships are characterized by her absolute dominance and the Beast’s unwavering desire to please. She tells the reader that after their first sexual encounter,

At last it all made sense. The pig in my bed
Was invited. And if his snout and trotters fouled my damask sheets, why, then, he’d wash them. Twice. (36-38)

When the speaker refers to her partner as “the pig”, it is not clear whether she is referring to his physical appearance–in addition to the aforementioned snout and trotters, the Beast is composed of bits of “an ape, a wolf, a donkey, dragon, dinosaur” (46)–or his gender, as a reference to the embittered cliché that “all men are pigs”. It seems most likely that she is doing a combination of the two–although Mrs. Beast has not changed her opinion of men as a group, she seems to think she has discovered the key to a successful relationship: cow a man into submission so that any extension of goodwill, be it actual kindness or merely an invitation to sexual activity, will be met with astonished gratitude and a lessening of the domestic workload. Although she describes the exual favors the Beast performs for her with his “horrid leather tongue” (39), “hooked and yellow claws” (41), and “bullock’s head” (43) quite graphically, there is no hint of tenderness in the speaker’s voice, and not once does she mention giving any reciprocal pleasure.

This graphic sexualization of what was originally intended as a children’s story is an obvious parody of de Beaumont’s (and possibly Disney’s) version of the original tale. Although the structure of Beauty and the Beast lends itself perfectly to subversion, Duffy’s critique of gender-based oppression and one form of the feminist response to it does not stop with the story itself. She also employs intertextuality, referencing and often mocks countless other stories. Sometimes the effect is purely humorous as when we are told that during a poker game, “Goldilocks’s eyes/ were glued to the pot as if porridge bubbled there” (59). More often than not, however, Duffy’s allusions to other fairytales, myths, legends, history, and pop culture are, as Linda Hutcheon suggests, an effective means of challenging conventional notions of authority (108). By having the speaker question the validity of certain narratives and the fairness of the fates of her fairy-tale sisters, Duffy is able to challenge both the stories themselves and the idea that breaking free of oppression is a battle to be fought individually.

For a woman who is so vocal about her independence, Mrs. Beast never reveals any other name than the one given in the monologue’s title. As previously suggested, the surname “Beast” is indeed an apt one for such a sexually voracious, greedy, and coldhearted woman, but it seems strange that one who appears to possess the loveliness and mystique of “Helen’s face, Cleopatra’s, / … Juliet’s” (3-4) is never referred to by any variation of the name Beauty. The speaker implies a reason for this when she asserts that she does not want to be associated with ladies who, although they possessed powerful feminine charms, ultimately wound up powerless at the hands of their men. These allusions, like many of the others Duffy employs, are diverse but fairly accessible to the average reader. This allows her to speak volumes within a limited space about both the speaker and society’s tendency to either romanticize victimized women almost to the point of canonization or completely dismiss them without actually listening to their stories.

Helen of Troy, a daughter of Zeus who famously possessed “the face that launched a thousand ships” (Bell), settled into domesticity with her husband/captor Paris during the violence of the Trojan War, which, incidentally, he caused but she was blamed for (Bell). Cleopatra, a powerful ancient Egyptian queen, seduced Mark Antony, part of the Roman Triumvirate, leading to a political alliance that prompted Octavius, another Triumvir, to declare war. Antony’s subsequent suicide led to Octavius’s victory, which caused Cleopatra to commit suicide in order to avoid being enslaved in her former kingdom (InterCity Oz). “Juliet” is most likely Juliet Capulet, the pragmatic love interest of Romeo Montague, the hero of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy Romeo and Juliet. The children of warring dynasties, the pair committed suicide after Romeo’s rashness caused their plans to elope to go horribly awry. At the end of the play, Romeo’s father commends “true and faithful Juliet” (V. III. 275) for her postmortem peacemaking skills, but the fact remains that she, just like all the other women whose stories Mrs. Beast seeks to subvert, came out on the losing end of a battle with male authority. If we think that Mrs. Beast is anything like these women and is willing to end up as a housewife, humiliated, or dead for the sake of the man in her life we are told to “think again” (5-6).

References to poker matches (46) and pop-culture icons such as Greta Garbo (6) give the poem a contemporary feel, which makes it not implausible to assume that the speaker’s mention of “ ’54, / the year of my birth” (28-29) refers to 1954. This would put her age at 45 in 1999; the year The World’s Wife was published, making her old enough to be the original Beauty’s mother. Indeed, Mrs. Beast is proud of her years of experience. She describes herself as “tough as fuck” (48), and suggests that young girls would do well to both heed her advice and follow her example. Duffy has her recount a darkly funny, modernized version of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, in which, like the original, the titular character essentially relinquishes her identity only to be rejected by the man she hopes to impress. The hissing sibilance, sharp, monosyllabic words, and hard t’s of Mrs. Beast’s description of how the poor girl “slit/ her shining, silver tail in two, rubbed salt/ into that stinking wound” (6-8) mimic the disgusted way in which one would spit out a story about a young girl who has been heartlessly “chucked” by a “pretty boy” (10). All of this helps the speaker drive home the moral that “they’re bastards when they’re Princes” (13), but also reveals a crack in her armor. She hints that she would have helped the Mermaid if she could, and that she has faced similar heartbreak when she brags, “look love -- I should know” (12), which could possibly account for her anti-male attitude.

Bell hooks states that “Feminist rhetoric pushing the notion of man as enemy and woman as victim enables women to avoid doing the work of creating new value systems” (257) and so is ultimately futile. Although Mrs. Beast surrounds herself by other ‘successful’ women who have chosen ‘husbands’ as unconventional as hers–“the Woman/ who married a Minotaur, Goldilocks, the Bride/ of the Bearded Lesbian, [and] Frau Yellow Dwarf” (49-51)–she feels powerless to change the end of anyone’s story but her own. Hooks would suggest that this is because

Despairing of the possibility that the feminist revolution will even occur, many women once committed to eliminating sexist oppression … now focus their attention on gaining as much power and privilege within the existing social structures. (257)

Until feminists refocus their attention on helping to change the world in order to accommodate their less fortunate sisters, hooks argues that they are in fact perpetuating the current oppressive system by maintaining the status quo (257).

Duffy comments on this by having Mrs. Beast and her friends mourn for “a line of ghosts/ unable to win” (70-71) and that they feel unable to help. The line is a long one, stretching its way through religion, history, and myth from “Eve” to “Ashputtel” (Cinderella) to “Marilyn Monroe” (71). It also includes the murdered wives of Bluebeard and Henry VIII (74). The most recent “ghost” is none other than “Diana, / Princess of Wales” (75-76), who died in a 1997 automobile accident after it seemed she had just begun to recover from the disastrous marriage and messy divorce that followed her “fairytale wedding” to Prince Charles of England (Kingston xiv-xvi). This is a contemporary reference that allows the reader to sympathize more directly with the speaker’s lamentations, and, coupled with the other examples she gives, it makes her single-minded objection to all things male understandable, if not acceptable. The reference also serves to indicate that the oppression of women both takes all forms and is far from over.

After her friends leave, the speaker tells us she “was hard on the Beast, win or lose” (75) because he is an easy, if undeserving, target for her frustration. She then stands alone on her balcony, and reveals a softer, more introspective side as she describes the night and her emotions in a series of haunting, feminine images that provide a stark contrast to the brash sexuality of the rest of the poem. She claims that she could “taste the stars/on the tip of my tongue” (84-85), and that “the moon was a hand-mirror breathed on by a Queen. /my breath was a chiffon scarf for an elegant ghost” (89-90). She then uses her pearls, “the tears of Marys”, to pray for “the lost, the captive beautiful, / the wives” (86-88). This unexpected turn to religion and her invocation of Mary–which seems a bit ironic, considering the Holy Mother is held up by Catholics as an exemplar of womanhood by virtue of her humility–lends the suffering of these women cosmic importance and indicates that the speaker is aware at least on some level that her own materialistic, self-serving brand of feminism cannot help “those less fortunate than we” (88).

This display of compassion seems to be fleeting, however. The speaker abruptly turns “to go back inside” and orders an unseen servant to “Bring me the Beast for the night. Bring me the wine-cellar key. / Let the less-loving one be me” (91-92). Although it is entirely possible that the speaker feels the only way to forget her emotional pain is by indulging herself physically, it is perhaps equally likely that she is seeking validation of her choice to assume alpha-partner status. If the Beast loves her more than she him, it is impossible for her to be hurt.

The ambiguity of these lines allows Duffy a final comment on the futility of adopting stereotypically ‘male’ behaviors to resist oppression. Because it has “little effect on the social status of women collectively … [and nor does it] lessen the severity of sexist oppression” (hooks 258), seeking to achieve dominance can only lead to the personal and social frustration the speaker feels. Because she values the Beast not for his kindness and humility but for his animal-like devotion, she is unable to see him as the ‘prince’ he really is, ultimately shortchanging both of them. Even though Mrs. Beast has rewritten her story, she cannot provide a happy ending, and perhaps this is why the tale-type the poem parodies is never resolved. Duffy never makes it entirely clear which of the Beasts needs to be transformed in order for them to live happily-ever-after.

Notes

1 "Tabu" as it pertains to folk/fairytales is defined as a ‘rule’ or directive that the protagonist disobeys (either intentionally or unintentionally), with this disobedience leading directly to the climax, resolution, and moral of the story. (“Semantics”)
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Works Cited

Andersen, Hans Christian. The Little Mermaid. New York: Bellerophron, 1980.

Baldick, Chris. The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.

Bell, Robert E. “About Helen of Troy.” Companion to the Norton Anthology of Modern American Poetry. Ed. Cary Nelson. University of Illinois Website. 2002. 5 April 2005
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/hd/abouthelen.htm.

De Beaumont, Marie. Beauty and The Beast. Trans. P.H. Muir. New York: Knopf, 1968.

Domestic Violence Q&A. South Carolina Victim Assistance Network. 5 April 2005
http://www.scvan.org/domestic_violence_qa.html#c.

Duffy, Carol Ann. “Mrs. Beast.” The World’s Wife. London: Picador, 1999. 7-75.

---. “Queen Herod.” The World’s Wife. London: Picador, 1999. 7-10. hooks, bell.

“Feminism: A Movement to End Sexist Oppression.” Excerpt. The ARTS 1000 Reader. 9th ed. Ed. John Geyssen. Fredericton: University of New Brunswick, 2003. 254-59.

Hearne, Betsy. Beauty and the Beast: Visions and Revisions of an Old Tale. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989.

Hutcheon, Linda. The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1988