- Title
- The many faces of Beauty and the Beast: A feminist and new historicist approach
- Creator
- Banks, Monique https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6887-7050
- Subject
- Fairy tales in literature
- Subject
- Women and literature
- Date
- 2020-10
- Type
- Doctoral theses
- Type
- text
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10353/23862
- Identifier
- vital:61068
- Description
- The fairy tale tradition is saturated with tales from male writers, and very little attention has been placed on the tales written by women. The tales which have made their way into the public realm and have been shared and passed down for years and identified as ‘classics’ are those which embody patriarchal ideas and expectations of men and women. Seventeenth century France played an integral role in the development of the fairy tale realm. The context of the French Academy and French Salons allowed writers to share their tales. Popular writer, Charles Perrault, published his collection of tales during this time and they became popular throughout France and other parts of the world. His tales were used as educational tools and, hence, they shared particular messages with their readers. More specific to this research are the patriarchal ideas these tales shared with their readers. At the same time, a number of French women, acting in the salons, also penned and shared their unique tales. Unfortunately, these tales and their writers did not receive the same acceptance as Perrault’s tales in the seventeenth century. Furthermore, as time passed, women writers were still not given equal recognition to male writers. As their tales were, for the most part, ignored by the public, their messages and ideas about gender were not shared with readers and the public this made the fairy tale genre overly patriarchal and gendered in nature. Therefore, the study’s primary focus is to analyse the Beauty and the Beast tales written by women writers from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the twenty-first century. It is important to make these writers’ literature known in order to broaden the understanding of the fairy tale genre as multi-faceted. Studying the characters, their behaviours and the gendered relationships within each tale provides a deeper understanding of women writers throughout the centuries. Analysing the social context in which each tale was written, along with each tale, presents a sense of how each woman writer continued and/or rejected the gendered ideas of her society. It also provides a picture of the timeline of women’s writing from the earlier centuries until today. To conclude, this study reflects an interesting movement in the fairy tale literature published by women. More recent tales produce more dynamic and empowered characters, who act outside of patriarchal limitations. The Beauty character of more recent tales, for instance, is given more of an independent role than her predecessors are. Ritchie’s female character is placed in a realistic setting and lives with both the ‘Beast’ and his mother, with her courage and bravery emphasising a new position for the female character. She becomes more and more aware of her position as an object to be traded in Carter’s tales and Block’s Beauty and craves the freedom and independence she feels outside of her father’s household, flourishing in the life of a beast. Flinn’s female character steps out of the box of physical beauty and represents a more normalised character. In modern times, the developments between each tale reflect that the ideas of gender are becoming more varied and fluid than earlier societies. The feminism and new historicist analysis of the traditional and remake Beauty and the Beast tales, therefore, highlights particular developments in fairy tale literature, together with shedding a brighter light on fairy tales written by women writers.
- Description
- Thesis (PhD) -- Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, 2020
- Format
- computer
- Format
- online resource
- Format
- application/pdf
- Format
- 1 online resource (259 leaves)
- Format
- Publisher
- University of Fort Hare
- Publisher
- Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities
- Language
- English
- Rights
- University of Fort Hare
- Rights
- All Rights Reserved
- Rights
- Open Access
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UFH Department of English & Comparative Studies
| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details | SOURCE1 | Banks Thesis.pdf | 1 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details |