As a classic fairy tale, Beauty and the Beast enjoys a long history and various versions. The Disney’s film adaptation of Beauty and the Beast inherits the tradition as well as reverse it. As the film has reached quite a large audience since its release in 1991, it serves as an excellent popular culture text to analyze the feminist elements. In this , the very beginning scene after introduction of the film will be analyzed.
In this scene, a vibrant town is shot on the screen where everybody is busy with the living. Our heroin Belle, the most beautiful woman in the town, appears with a book and greets everyone she sees, while almost all other people around her do not seem to understand her. Gaston, a supporting role portrayed as strong and manly with many admirers, decides to court Belle for her sheer beauty.
In this very short scene of Beauty and the Beast, patriarchy, male dominance and stereotypes are seen almost everywhere. For instance, in the beginning, a baker in the town appears on the screen and shouts at his wife like that’s always the case, portraying a woman’s helpless dependence on men. The same baker also shows his disapproval for the heroin’s hobby of reading and instead emphasizes the importance of his business. He is clearly infiltrated with the idea that innocence is the virtue for women. Later, the image of the triplet is a typical example of “airhead” stereotyping of women, together with the morning market filled with mostly women noises, conveying the message that women are incompetent and uncreative while men are dominant. Similar Examples can be found elsewhere in the film.
In addition, we can deduce a very negative message conveyed in the film by looking at the image of the heroin Belle. The fact that Belle is the most beautiful woman in the town is the very reason that Gaston claims his ownership of her. That is to say, a woman has to be thin and beautiful before she is loved by men, and her value lies in how men judge her instead of something like self-realization, which is the pursuit of some feminists. This message apparently objectifies the women for it is only when women become objects and commodities, they can “belong to” and “be consumed by” men. This commodification of women is, actually, not uncommon in society when it is always ten times harder for women to be “successful” than men, for most women have to be attractive before they become successful in a man-dominated society.
Admittedly, in this modern adaptation, there are also some phanerous attempts to break the traditional gender stereotypes. The portrayal of the heroin, Belle, in this scene is a case in point. Unlike the traditional stereotyped women around her, Belle is a family centered girl who likes to read and wishes to go out for adventures. A woman like this is bound to possess an independent mind, make her own decisions and take the initiative. So she refused the advance of Gaston, a very strong, handsome, masculine yet shallow man.
In a way, our heroin is looking for A Room of One’s Own like Virginia Woolf, a pioneer feminist. This feminist consciousness may be inspired by liberal feminism, or a “can do” approach,where women are included in the traditional man-dominated areas like reading and writing. Of course, this “can do” approach dwarfed when compared with the “can do” approach employed in the Maoist era, that “women hold up half the sky”, when women took on almost all responsibilities of men irrespective of their physiological conditions, for they firmly believed in the doctrine that “anything a man can do, a woman can do too”. Compared to other approaches, this one puts too much emphasis on the emulation of male roles and reveals a sense of inferiority and search for identity on the part of the women, hence its replacement by other later feminist approaches. From this perspective, Disney’s efforts to break away from the traditional stereotypes of women through the “can do” approach are still very tentative.
In all, the Disney ’s Film Adaptation of Beauty and the Beast made some visible efforts to show its feminist consciousness, and try to free women from stereotypes and man dominance, with a not-so-satisfactory result.
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