Abstract
Precisely by virtue of its marginality as a literary genre, the eighteenth-century fairy tale can claim to be in a privileged position to comment on social practices and gender rela- tionships. I examine the representation and treatment of erotic desire and desirability in two versions of an immensely successful and popular fairy tale, "La Belle et la Bête," by Gabrielle-Susanne de Villeneuve and Marie-Jeanne Leprince de Beaumont. Drawing on René Girard’s study of mimetic desire and Levi-Strauss’s anthropological paradigm of kinship, as well as on recent developments in critical approaches to gender and sexuality (Luce Irigaray and Eve Sedgwick), I explore the ways in which women fairy-tale writers discover new ways of conceptualizing desire and gender dynamics in contesting the practices of female subordination, in particular, the practice of males treating women as objects of exchange.
Recommended Citation
Korneeva, Tatiana. "Desire and Desirability in Villeneuve and Leprince de Beaumont's "Beauty and the Beast"." Marvels & Tales 28.2 (2014). Web. <https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol28/iss2/2>.
