What romance novels inherited from fairy tales, and what the oldest stories keep rehearsing.
Depending on the version of Beauty and the Beast you were introduced to, you may have brushed over this part of the story, because what comes after is what keeps us on the edge of our seats. It’s how the story starts, with Beauty’s father losing the family’s fortune. The fall from grace that leads to the request for a single rose, the catalyst for a daughter to go from one kind of life to another: overnight.
Kelly Jarvis, today’s guest, who teaches fairy tales and folklore, said something in this episode that reframed the whole tale for me: Beauty and the Beast is an economic story. Beauty loses her place in the world through her father’s failure, and the Beast restores it. He is, after all, rich.
Which led to an important distinction about wealth: the Beast’s wealth is not billionaire wealth. It’s not the hoarding kind, the kind that only wants more of itself. Beast’s wealth is about access: to books, music, food, a fire, beauty. It’s the kind of wealth that lets a person freely give love and freely take it - it’s shared as a gift. It’s generative.
I know why that lands right now. Look at what wealth looks like on the front page these days. It isn’t generative. It’s greed eating itself, self-destructive in its manic cannibalism.
But there is something more in the Beast’s palace that also circulates. Beauty is not just receiving from the Beast’s wealth. No. She arrives with curiosity, with aliveness, with the willingness to be in relationship at all, while he has been alone in that house for a very long time. Beauty brings him back, back into relationship with life, and in a way into circulation, meaning he isn’t devolving into his cursed monstrosity. While his wealth gives her somewhere to expand more fully into herself. Her type of emotional wealth helps him reclaim his sense of self. Two containers, each transforming the other.
Then Kelly gave me the second thing.
There is a whole category of fairy tale called the Search for the Lost Husband. East of the Sun, West of the Moon. Psyche and Eros. Beauty and the Beast itself. The shape is always the same. A couple comes together. There is a rule she is not supposed to break. She breaks it. He vanishes, or is sent away, or is lost to her. And then she goes after him.
She is the one who goes. Every time.
Now hold that next to almost any romance novel you have read. They meet. They come together. Something breaks them apart. She crosses whatever has to be crossed, and they find each other on the other side.
I said out loud on the recording that I wondered if I was going off the deep end with this, but here it is anyway. If these stories are two thousand years old and still being told, and if the shape that survives is the feminine going out after a masculine that has been lost, I don’t think that is only about two people. I think something in the collective keeps rehearsing it because the work is still unfinished. What does this say about the relationship between the masculine and the feminine?
There’s more in the conversation than I can fit here, and it’s worth the listen.
And near the end she offers an image for how folklore sits underneath every story we read, a weaving image I have used in my own work for years and had never once seen from the angle she came at it, and it reorganized something for me.
Come sit with us. Bring something warm to drink and get cozy.
Guest Bio:
Kelly Jarvis is the Contributing Writer for The Fairy Tale Magazine and a Recurring Columnist for Eternal Haunted Summer. Her work has also been featured in A Moon of One’s Own,Baseball Bard, Blue Heron Review, Corvid Queen, Enchanted Conversation,Forget Me Not Press, Mermaids Monthly, The Chamber Magazine, The Magic of Us, and the World Weaver Press Anthology Mothers of Enchantment: New Tales of Fairy Godmothers. Her debut novella, Selkie Moon, is a semi-finalist in the Speculative Fiction Indie Novella Championship. Her first novel is Sea and Stars.
