Marvels & Tales

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 relationships. 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.