Title: "Beauty and the Beast" and Great Expectations
Abstract: Despite the frequency with which critics have mentioned Dickens's use of fairy tales his writing, hardly any have considered the connection between Beauty and the Beast and Great Expectations (1860-61). As part of his career-long defense of the imagination, the novelist frequently employed fairy-tale motifs and allusions his fiction. Pip refers explicitly to fairy tales several times, casting himself a blend of Cinderella and the handsome prince Sleeping Beauty. Yet the relationship between Great Expectations and Beauty and the Beast is deeper than one of simple allusion; rather, the two share a concern with learning to shed assumptions and embrace the transformative power of love. Beauty and the Beast was familiar to Dickens and his contemporaries through translations of the popular French version of the tale, which Dickens may have read (see below). Great Expectations has even more common, though, with the version published 1740. This original and longer account of La Belle et la bete by Mme de Villeneuve (1695?-1753) features doubles, confused identities, intricate and surprising family relationships, and dream visions, addition to the overall theme of the transformative properties of love and generosity. Even if Dickens never encountered this version of the story, Villeneuve's provides a productive point of comparison with the novel. Ultimately, the moral of Beauty and the Beast and the moral of Great Expectations have something common: learn to see beyond appearances, for things and people are often quite different from what they seem. Dickens's use of fairy tales has attracted attention. Harry Stone and Michael Kotzin provide substantial discussions, noting the influence of fairy tales on Dickens a child and the many traces left by that influence throughout his work. Particularly appealing to Dickens, Stone argues, was the fact that in fairy tales all were transformed or transformable. That transforming power, which soon became a part of his own habit and vision ... he first found fairy stories (Stone 56). To objects one may add people; many a Dickens character functions both a realistic person and a fairy-tale archetype. Earlier his career, Dickens gave his characters and locales fairy-tale attributes order to endow them with that larger-than-life quality we now call Dickensian. Such diabolical characters Fagin, Uriah bleep and Quilp, well angelic ones such Little Nell, embody a fairy-tale quality that jars with reality. Later, though, Stone notes, in Dickens's art ... the supernatural resonates with the realistic and conveys a more profound and complete realism (197). Viewed by many the epitome of Dickens's mature art, Great Expectations displays this smoother fusion of fantasy and reality. It is in the first place a fantasy ... but it is not only a fairy tale, for it is set a moral universe, comments Paul Pickrel (158, 161). No supernatural elements remain the end; all seemingly miraculous events receive realistic explanations, and every action has its logical consequence. Even the fairy-tale characterizations themselves are complex and changeable; the witch becomes a fairy godmother and then a witch again, the ogre/beast becomes the good fairy, the princess turns out to be an ice queen, and the hero cannot even see what story he is living in. This faulty vision and gradual transformation link Great Expectations to Beauty and the Beast, a tale of learning to see beyond surface differences. Stone frequently highlights the motif of transformation an element of fairy tales general, but many of his broader statements are applicable to Beauty and the Beast particular; for instance, as Magwitch's symbolic upending of Pip at the dawning moment of his consciousness suggests, Great Expectations is an exceedingly subtle fairy story: things are rarely what they seem; values, identities, and relationships are hidden or reversed (Stone 309). …
Publication Year: 2014
Publication Date: 2014-03-01
Language: en
Type: article
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