The Intelligent Woman's Not-So-Happy Ending

Beauty and the Beast is the classic girl-meets-boy, girl saves boy, girl and boy fall in love, story. Belle is exquisitely feminine; the Beast is as aggressive and masculine as they come. But there is an underlying tension, a chord that that rings low and quiet, and leads you to examine something else, something more, about these two characters.

Immediately after the opening song, Gaston-the "macho male" of this tale-runs into Belle, the leading lady. This brooding hulk of flesh (and I do not include brains in that description) meets and surpasses the basic rule for "manliness" put down by Paul Theroux (b. 1941) in his essay Being a Man, when he says,"It is very hard to imagine any concept of manliness that does not belittle women..." The oaf grabs the book right out of Belle's hands and says "How can you read this? There's no pictures!" Gaston is her antithesis-large, brooding, arrogant, unsophisticated, un-nurturing, rude, and stupid.

Belle is bookish. The townspeople are constantly chatting about her odd behavior and obsession with reading material. "Look there she goes, that girl is strange no question, dazed and distracted, can't you tell?" Like many intelligent women, Belle feels isolated: "It's just I'm not sure I fit in here. There's no one I can really talk to." She is normally gentle and, if not complacent, then contented with her life with her father. When she is provoked, however (like when Gaston demands that she marry him), she can get quite dissatisfied: "Madame Gaston, can't you just see it? Madame Gaston, his little wife! Not me, no sir, I guarantee it-I want much more than this provincial life!" After her outburst at the indignity of Gaston's "proposal," she becomes more introspective, a little less agitated, turning from her initial frustration to a long-held- and- thought-about dissatisfaction with the way things have always been: "I want adventure in the great wide somewhere; I want it more than I can tell. And for once it might be grand to have someone understand, I want so much more than they've got planned."

Belle reminds me so much of me that it's scary sometimes; from her frustration at her inability to fit in, her self-disgust at wanting to belong, and her fear of being an intelligent woman in a society where intelligent women are not necessarily cherished. "I want so much more than they've got planned."

Belle may be an intelligent woman, but she is still a woman. After going to rescue her father, trading places with him as the Beast's prisoner, and watching her father get carted away back to the village, Belle cries. "You didn't even let me say good bye. I'll never see him again. I didn't get to say good-bye." The kind of frustration that leads to tears is brought on by selfless love. Belle is not crying because she's a prisoner, that she's away from home, that it's cold, that she's staring in to the face of a horrible monster, she's crying because she didn't get to say goodbye to her daddy, the one man who has shown her compassion and understanding her entire life. As a freak, as an oddball, a social outcast, a "smart woman" (which, I'm sure, Gaston would find oxymoronic), the loss of her father is the loss of the hope of love. The question now is not "for who could ever love a beast," the question is "for who could ever love an intellectual woman?"

Hope returns, in some small measure, with the promise of her own apartments instead of a prison cell. As they're walking along the silent, frigid corridors of the castle, the Beast notices that Belle is upset. Suddenly, the silent, frigid beast (his soul, like the walls of his castle, deadened over years of neglect) is concerned about someone else. For the first time in who knows how many years, the Beast-though he doesn't realize it, and won't come to understand it for a long time-is beginning to have hope again, hope of any sort of love offered to him. As Gretel Ehrlich (b. 1946) said in her essay The Solace of Open Spaces, "What we've interpreted as toughness-weathered skin, calloused hands, a squint in the eye and a growl in the voice-only masks the tenderness within...their strength is also a softness, their toughness, a rare delicacy."

Unfortunately, at this point, he doesn't know how to verbalize these newly-revealed feelings very well. He begins somewhat clumsily: "I...um...hope you like it here. The castle is your home now, so you can go anywhere you wish, except the West Wing." Belle, being who she is, immediately asks: "What's in the West Wing?" Years of ordering his servants around angrily resurfaces when speaking with Belle, his "guest": "It's forbidden!" Which of course prompts Belle to go to the West Wing at the very first opportunity.

What we have here are two very similar personalities: Belle is stubborn, strong-willed, passionate, and intellectual; the Beast is the master of his house, obstinate, strong, and intelligent. If you read any romance novel, you will find two such characters. It is through their initial battle against each other, the weaknesses they see within each other, and the reconciliation they find through each other, that the greatest (or perhaps simply the most frequent) love stories are told. Tales with unequal personas are boring: if Belle were pliant, dull, and impassionate about life, she would still be stuck in a tower cell, and the story would end. Better yet, she probably wouldn't have gone after her father in the first place, so she'd be stuck marrying Gaston in her poor provincial town, and the story would end there.

I think this story resonates so strongly with me because I am Belle-I'm the strong-willed, passionate, intelligent young woman. The only sad part about this story is that it is a fairy tale: Belle may exist in real life-God knows there are plenty of intelligent, lonely women out there-but there is no Beast to match me, or any other "smart woman." David Brooks, a columnist for the New York Times, said this in his piece Mind Over Muscle, "[Women] will have a harder and harder time finding marriageable men with comparable education levels." Comparable education levels, comparable maturity, comparable compassion, empathy, kindness.I will be forever wishing: "I want adventure in the great wide somewhere; I want it more than I can tell. And for once it might be grand to have someone understand, I want so much more than they've got planned."

And that is where the intelligent woman's Not-So-Happy-Ending begins.