De Beaumont published most of her stories in instructional manuals for children, incorporating strong moral lessons into the stories. She wasn’t the only one to do so. “Fairy tales do not become mythic,” Jack Zipes wrote in his 1983 book Fairy Tale as Myth/Myth as Fairy Tale, “unless they are in perfect accord with the underlying principles of how the male members of society seek to arrange object relations to satisfy their wants and needs.” Indeed, as Maria Tatar points out in the superb introduction to her new collection Beauty and the Beast: Classic Tales About Animal Brides and Grooms From Around the World, the story of Beauty and the Beast was meant for girls who would likely have their marriages arranged. Beauty is traded by her impoverished father for safety and material wealth, and sent to live with a terrifying stranger. De Beaumont’s story emphasizes the nobility in Beauty’s act of self-sacrifice, while bracing readers, Tatar explains, “for an alliance that required effacing their own desires and submitting to the will of a monster.”

But “Beauty and the Beast” is also a relatively modern addition to a canon that goes back thousands of years: stories of humans in love with animals. Tatar’s collection features examples from India, Iran, Norway, and Ireland; she includes stories of frog kings, bird princesses, dog brides, and muskrat husbands. Each story is basically an expression of anxiety about marriage and relationships—about the animalistic nature of sex, and the fundamental strangeness of men and women to each other. Some, like “Beauty and the Beast,” prescribe certain kinds of behavior, or warn against being vain or cruel. But many simply illustrate the basic human impulse—common across civilizations—to use stories to figure things out.

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“Beauty and the Beast,” Tatar writes, is a love story about “the transformative power of empathy,” but a dark and weird one. Coded inside it are all kinds of cultural neuroses regarding the social and emotional structure of marriage: fear of the other, fear of leaving home, fear of changing oneself by forming a new partnership. De Beaumont’s story, Tatar explains, “reflects a desire to transform fairy tales from adult entertainment into parables of good behavior, vehicles for indoctrinating and enlightening children about the virtues of fine manners and good breeding.” Beauty’s physical charms are matched perfectly by her virtue and selflessness, which contrast in turn with her sisters’ vanity, greed, and wickedness.

When Beauty’s father leaves to meet his ship, newly arrived in port, he asks his daughters what they would like as gifts. Beauty’s sisters ask for clothes and other finery; Beauty, not wanting to trouble him—or to make her sisters look bad—asks for a single rose, which precipitates her fate. Her father is knocked off his horse and welcomed into a mysterious house devoid of people, where he’s fed and sheltered. In the morning he remembers to clip a rose for Beauty, but the impertinence of his action summons the Beast, who sentences him to death, but allows Beauty’s father to send one of his daughters to die in his place.