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Trapped in Bluebeard’s Castle: Disney’s Beauty and the Beast as a Self-Contradictory Story of Empowerment and Imprisonment

  • Melanie Hurley

    Melanie Hurley recently graduated from Memorial University of Newfoundland with a PhD in English. Her doctoral research understands Disney’s Cinderella as an icon and examines how and why this icon’s significations have changed and multiplied from 1950 to today. Hurley’s publications include articles in the journals Artifact & Apparatus and Fandom/Cultures/Research and chapters in the edited collections The Velveteen Rabbit at 100 (University of Mississippi Press, 2023) and The ’80s Resurrected (McFarland, 2023). Her research interests include film, animation, children’s literature, and dolls.
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Narratives of Confinement in American Popular Culture
This chapter is in the book Narratives of Confinement in American Popular Culture

Abstract

This chapter examines Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991) as a ‘ Bluebeard Gothic’; that is, as a story that adapts the “Bluebeard” fairy tale in a Gothic format. Using Jane Eyre, the Ur- Bluebeard Gothic as an intertext, this chapter focuses on the depictions of the Beast, the Enchantress, and Belle, arguing that these characters mirror and adapt Jane Eyre’s Rochester, Bertha, and Jane, respectively. It is argued that the film’s incorporation of the “Bluebeard” plot results in seriously and dangerously mixed messages about romance and gender: the film depicts normative masculinity as toxic and cursed and includes powerful women who stand up to misogyny and maltreatment, only to render the abusive man as a romantic hero and to pair the heroine with her abuser. Consequently, neither the men nor women ever escape their imprisonment in patriarchy, misogyny, and harmful gender ideologies; they remain confined to these injurious social structures and within the abusive romantic relationships that these structures perpetuate. Everyone stays trapped in Bluebeard’s terrifying castle of violence.

Abstract

This chapter examines Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991) as a ‘ Bluebeard Gothic’; that is, as a story that adapts the “Bluebeard” fairy tale in a Gothic format. Using Jane Eyre, the Ur- Bluebeard Gothic as an intertext, this chapter focuses on the depictions of the Beast, the Enchantress, and Belle, arguing that these characters mirror and adapt Jane Eyre’s Rochester, Bertha, and Jane, respectively. It is argued that the film’s incorporation of the “Bluebeard” plot results in seriously and dangerously mixed messages about romance and gender: the film depicts normative masculinity as toxic and cursed and includes powerful women who stand up to misogyny and maltreatment, only to render the abusive man as a romantic hero and to pair the heroine with her abuser. Consequently, neither the men nor women ever escape their imprisonment in patriarchy, misogyny, and harmful gender ideologies; they remain confined to these injurious social structures and within the abusive romantic relationships that these structures perpetuate. Everyone stays trapped in Bluebeard’s terrifying castle of violence.

Chapters in this book

  1. Acknowledgments 5
  2. Table of Contents 7
  3. Confinement Studies in American Popular Culture 1
  4. Part I: Confinement Narratives on the Screen
  5. Cinema and TV Series
  6. The Individual vs. the Institution: Narratives of Confinement in New Hollywood Cinema 15
  7. Trapped in Bluebeard’s Castle: Disney’s Beauty and the Beast as a Self-Contradictory Story of Empowerment and Imprisonment 31
  8. (Dis)‌ableing the Confinement: Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water and Mark Medoff’s Children of a Lesser God 47
  9. Transformative Power of Confinement and Subversion of Identity in The Experiment (2010) 63
  10. “Where the City Started and the Suburbs Ended”: The (Sub)‌urban Confinement of Post-Industrial America in David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows 87
  11. Never Let Me Go: Home, Family, and Confinement in Umma 103
  12. Confinement and Consciousness: Exploring the ‘ Nomadic Consciousness’ in Maid 117
  13. Documentaries
  14. Incarceration Documentaries after the Curious Eclipse of Prison Ethnography 133
  15. Dream in Place: Understanding Confinement through the Tactics of Fiction in Crystal Moselle’s The Wolfpack 151
  16. Part II: Confinement Narratives from/about American Prisons
  17. Claudia Jones and Angela Davis: Literature in Confinement 171
  18. Confined to the Margins: Necropolitics, American Identity, and Racial Separation in Assata by Assata Shakur 185
  19. Into the Lone Star Labyrinth: Texas Prison System Reflects The Death Gate Cycle Prison 201
  20. Our Time on the Rock: Narrating Voluntary Confinement in Tommy Orange’s There There 217
  21. “Have You Ever Seen a More Focused Killing Machine?” The Extreme Spectacle of Carceral Punishment in Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain-Gang All-Stars 235
  22. Part III: Confinement Narratives within Performances
  23. Taylor Swift’s American Retreat: Covid, Cardigans, and Confinement in folklore 253
  24. In The Devil's Grip: Competing Narratives of Confinement in X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X Opera 269
  25. Index
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111474137-004

Chapters in this book

  1. Acknowledgments 5
  2. Table of Contents 7
  3. Confinement Studies in American Popular Culture 1
  4. Part I: Confinement Narratives on the Screen
  5. Cinema and TV Series
  6. The Individual vs. the Institution: Narratives of Confinement in New Hollywood Cinema 15
  7. Trapped in Bluebeard’s Castle: Disney’s Beauty and the Beast as a Self-Contradictory Story of Empowerment and Imprisonment 31
  8. (Dis)‌ableing the Confinement: Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water and Mark Medoff’s Children of a Lesser God 47
  9. Transformative Power of Confinement and Subversion of Identity in The Experiment (2010) 63
  10. “Where the City Started and the Suburbs Ended”: The (Sub)‌urban Confinement of Post-Industrial America in David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows 87
  11. Never Let Me Go: Home, Family, and Confinement in Umma 103
  12. Confinement and Consciousness: Exploring the ‘ Nomadic Consciousness’ in Maid 117
  13. Documentaries
  14. Incarceration Documentaries after the Curious Eclipse of Prison Ethnography 133
  15. Dream in Place: Understanding Confinement through the Tactics of Fiction in Crystal Moselle’s The Wolfpack 151
  16. Part II: Confinement Narratives from/about American Prisons
  17. Claudia Jones and Angela Davis: Literature in Confinement 171
  18. Confined to the Margins: Necropolitics, American Identity, and Racial Separation in Assata by Assata Shakur 185
  19. Into the Lone Star Labyrinth: Texas Prison System Reflects The Death Gate Cycle Prison 201
  20. Our Time on the Rock: Narrating Voluntary Confinement in Tommy Orange’s There There 217
  21. “Have You Ever Seen a More Focused Killing Machine?” The Extreme Spectacle of Carceral Punishment in Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain-Gang All-Stars 235
  22. Part III: Confinement Narratives within Performances
  23. Taylor Swift’s American Retreat: Covid, Cardigans, and Confinement in folklore 253
  24. In The Devil's Grip: Competing Narratives of Confinement in X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X Opera 269
  25. Index
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