Robin McKinley Weaves a Timeless Tale in Beauty

When I was ten, I found out that Disney’s next animated feature would be Beauty and the Beast. My initial reaction was surprise that this was a fairy tale they’d never tackled. I knew the story, or at least one version of it, quite well, and I was a little disappointed that the movie would be such familiar territory for me. As it turned out, however, it wasn’t. In the Disney version, Belle is an only child, so there are no petty, unkind sisters to contend with. Moreover, when her father seeks shelter in the Beast’s castle, it is his mere presence that sparks his host’s ire, not an act of thievery. Meanwhile, Gaston, the arrogant huntsman so intent on marrying Belle despite her lack of interest, was an entirely new character to me. Despite a few key similarities, the movie ultimately bore fairly minimal resemblance to the fairy tale I knew. Robin McKinley’s novel Beauty, published in the late 1970s, comes closer to the version I remember from my earliest years, though it too differs in some fundamental ways.

In this retelling, Beauty is the nickname of Honour, a young woman who has grown up reasonably happy despite the loss of her mother at an early age. She loves her father, a kind businessman, and her two sisters, Hope and Grace, both of whom are more obviously beautiful than she is. Beauty, who narrates the novel, considers herself plain, but she has an intellect that sets her apart from the others in her family. Growing up in luxury, she has easy access to books, and reading is her favorite leisurely pursuit. But when her father’s fortunes change, she and the rest of her family must adjust to a new way of life, one that involves hard labor and meager possessions in a town several weeks’ travel away. Industrious Beauty fares well in her new life, working as tirelessly as any man and tending to her beloved horse Greatheart, one of the few remnants of her old existence. Nonetheless, she feels a yearning for adventure, and when her father returns from a journey with a harrowing tale of an encounter with a fearsome Beast, she sees an opportunity to live up to her birth name and bring some excitement into her life.

The book is divided into three parts, with the third taking up more than half the book. Still, that leaves nearly half the book before Beauty even meets the Beast, who in this version is both hospitable and elusive. He provides Beauty with everything she could possibly want – except her family. Indeed, that is arguably the central conflict of the book. While his monstrous appearance makes her nervous, especially initially, what truly grieves her is the separation from her close-knit family and the thought that, though they reside only half a day’s journey away, she may never see them again. Because we spend so much time with her family beforehand, we understand the depth of her bond to them, which only deepened when the family’s fortunes took a tumble.

While I love her doting father and find her gentle sisters a refreshing change from the norm, the most dynamic member of her family is Hope’s cheerful husband Ger, a talented blacksmith who helps the family rebuild after bankruptcy seemed to spell their ruination. Beauty develops a special connection to her brother-in-law, who seems to understand her independent spirit better than her own flesh and blood. At the same time, the depth of the relationship between him and Hope is never in doubt, and Grace, too, demonstrates her capacity to love deeply in circumstances as trying in their own way as Beauty’s. I almost think the sisters’ names would have been better switched, as hope is such a fundamental part of Grace’s character and fuels the novel’s climax. Truly there are no villains in this book, just unfortunate events that often come about due to uncontrollable forces. Because of this, elements of the climax require Beauty to act illogically just for the sake of heightening tension, which makes the denouement slightly less satisfying than it could be.

The Beast does hold Beauty captive, though she has agreed to live in the castle of her own free will and is at liberty to spend her days as she pleases, riding the devoted Greatheart over the beautiful grounds and spending hours in her room or the library poring over books. While she is hardly treated like a prisoner and she comes to look forward to her conversations with the Beast, it’s easy to understand why she is reluctant to accept his declarations of love at first. As in the movie, I think it has less to do with his appearance than with his behavior, particularly the threats, idle though they may have been, that he lodged against her father. Additionally, Beauty is haunted by her own insecurities; her sojourn with the Beast is as much about learning to see the beauty in herself as it is about seeing it in him. McKinley shows Beauty’s perception gradually expanding in intriguing ways as she finds herself reading and even comprehending books that won’t be written for centuries and hearing snatches of conversations between the no-nonsense invisible servants who attend to her every need.

Disney’s Beauty and the Beast remains my favorite version of this story to date, in part because Belle and the Beast fall in love simultaneously. Here, the Beast asks her to marry him as soon as they meet. I get the sense that he’d been watching her for a while from afar and orchestrated the incident with her father to get her there, which reminds me uneasily of the vile Gaston’s manipulative tactics in the movie. And if he didn’t, then his love at first sight smacks of desperation because he knows the love of a woman can break the spell that holds him in his current form. Nonetheless, he grows as a character too, and as his regard deepens from a possessive fervor to genuine love, the landscape begins to change accordingly. As friendship gradually blooms, birds and blossoms reflect the alterations occurring within the castle’s primary occupants.

Beauty is a lovely novel with a fairy tale flavor that nonetheless feels steeped in realism, particularly in the scenes away from the castle. My friend Beth, who recommended this to me, mentioned that McKinley has written another retelling of this “tale as old as time,” and I would be interested to see how she approaches it from a different angle. In this case, I would say that the novel she crafted certainly lives up to its name.