Beauty And The Beast By Leprince De Beaumont

LePrince de Beaumont presents the story of “Beauty and the Beast” with a lesser authorial voice to imply the moral upon the intended reader through implicit telling through dialogue. The implicit interplay of the narrator and the imagined reader allows for further analysis and interpretation of values presented within the tale. The intended moral is expressed through the dialogue of characters. When Beauty returns to the Beast she tells him, “there are many that deserve that name more than you, and I prefer you, just as you are, to those, who, under a human form, hide a treacherous, corrupt, and ungrateful heart” (Beaumont). Her statement expresses the intended moral of the importance of inner beauty, but Beaumont integrates the values within
The contrast of Beauty and her family appears through the dialogue of the fairy to display the consequences of both the virtue of the protagonist and the wickedness of her sisters. The beautiful woman punishes the sister’s for their pride by saying to the sisters that, “I know your hearts, and all the malice they contain. Become two statues, but, under this transformation, still retain your reason” and continues to state, “You shall stand before your sister's palace gate, and be it your punishment to behold her happiness; and it will not be in your power to return to your former state, until you own your faults, but I am very much afraid that you will always remain statues. Pride, anger, gluttony, and idleness are sometimes conquered, but the conversion of a malicious and envious mind is a kind of miracle” (Beaumont). The juxtaposition of the protagonist to her sisters displays the rewards of Beauty’s action expressing the lesson of the fairy tale through the rewarding of the protagonist’s character and her choice to return to the Beast for his good-natured
Beaumont uses the rewarding of the protagonist and the punishment of her sister’s for their behaviour that displays the consequences of their wicked actions. However, Perrault does not punish the wicked rather displaying Cinderella’s gracious forgiveness to her sisters. He expresses this by stating, “And now her two sisters found her to be that fine, beautiful lady whom they had seen at the ball. They threw themselves at her feet to beg pardon for all the ill treatment they had made her undergo. Cinderella took them up, and, as she embraced them, said that she forgave them with all her heart, and wanted them always to love her” (Perrault). Although Perrault does not punish the sisters, the moral is presented through the narrative to the intended reader, displaying the benefits of a gracious heart. The integration of rewards does not undermine the authoritative voice of the narrative because Perrault expresses two morals that are shown not through development, a reward system or dialogue, but through an explicit statement telling the reader what to take out of the fairy tale. At the end of the narrative, Perrault breaks from the story to explain the meaning by stating, “Beauty in a woman is a rare