Beauty by Robin Mckinley

Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast by Robin McKinley


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I read this as a wee thing, and remember very little except loving it. And the dresses! That image of them bursting open the doors of the wardrobe in Beauty's room has stuck with me. (When discussing childhood book loves with C, I said of this book "the dresses!" as she simultaneously said "the horses!" Baby butch and baby femme: a tale of alternate literary recollections.)

I still like it as a grown up. It's a very simple story, prettily told, with some very quiet thematic conversations about virtues – about honor, in particular. Sweet and largely sanitized of the, you know, creepiness and rapiness of the story in its goriest forms without making it feel artificial or lacking.

But it turns out that I don't actually like Beauty and the Beast. The bones of the source story, I mean. I think it's that I automatically code the beast's . . . beastliness as disfigurement, so it slots into the 'disability' category in my head. So the outcome of the story quietly pisses me off, because he's cured by love. Gag me with a spoon. (I should mention I've been thinking a lot about Lucy Grealy lately.) And even if you take out that idiosyncratic reading, you're left with, what? A man – and in the case of this book also a girl – who are ugly but who are rewarded with sudden beauty at the end of the book because they are virtuous enough to be able to see through appearances and learn not to care about them. Way to undercut your message, there. The better reading is that it's a message about finding your beauty through the eyes of another – the Beast says so to Beauty here, when he asks her how she can think she's ugly when he's the only one who can see her and he thinks she's beautiful. But too many sign posts point to the first reading, such as a parallel treatment of wealth. Beauty's family loses their money, but endures with virtue and fortitude, and are rewarded with enormous wealth and luxury in the end. All this rubs me the wrong way.

Anyway. It's still a pretty, enjoyable little book, and I can totally see how my inner princess adored it as a child.

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