What You Don’t Know About Beauty and the Beast:

Some backstory: due to this little discussion, I was considering writing a continuation/expansion of Beauty and the Beast. I read up on it and found out everything I thought I knew about it was wrong.

-It was created by one, singular, female author in 1740: Madame Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve

-It is not a retelling of a pervasive folklore like Perrault’s Cinderella, for example. It was influenced by folklore but is an original story and is very “post” the fairy tales you might be familiar with. The story is also influenced by women who gathered together and told each other revisions of fairy tales in Parisian salons.

-It’s over 100 pages long

-Though written simply and in a straightforward manner, the characters have personalities and are much more complex in their emotions than a normal folkloric tale. They behave in a diverse and fairly realistic manner to their situations. The Beast’s mother in particular is a complex woman, protective of her son and a capable military leader but not progressive in her attitude towards marrying below your station.

-Women are overwhelmingly the masters of the plot and outnumber the men in number and priority.

Female players include:

-It contains considerable world-building. Fairy language, Fairy law, Fairy influence over monarchies, Fairy hierarchy, Fairy magic are all things she depicts. (eat your heart out, Tolkien fans).

-The curse is broken halfway through the book. The rest is devoted to comments on class, monarchy, marrying for love vs. status, appropriate conditions for love, and marrying below your station among other things.

-The Beast is cursed to punish his mother.

-The book’s plot turns out to be entirely due to the machinations of The Mother of the Seasons and the long-game trap/revenge story orchestrated by the Nice Fairy to defeat The Mother of the Seasons Fairy.

-The book takes place in a specific time period rather than in a nebulous “before-time”, somewhere, as I figure, between 1669 to the early 1700s. It might even be contemporaneous to when it was published. It references the age piracy, revolutions, the merchant class, the presence of slavery, Belle watching comedies, operas, and plays the Fair of St. Germain, and a Janissary battle.

-The Beast’s Queen mother led troops into battle for several years, put down a revolt and defeated an encroaching enemy monarch.

And this is only a partial list.

If you’d like to read the original version by Madame de Villeneuve, it’s collected in a book by J. R. Blanche.

It’s available for free:

Archive.org (they don’t mention her name in the author list but it’s there)

Google Books

I’ve uploaded a PDF of the Beauty and the Beast part on Google Drive.

Do you know wat this is? This is the opening page of the Book of Kells that is, from today… drum roll… Free to view online thanks to Dublin’s Trinity College.

How cool is that?

Dream on

Reblog if you've ever yelled at a book.

#cried at a book #threw a book across the room #slammed a book down #apologized to a book #stroked a book like a lover #kissed a book #hid a book #pet a book #patted a book like a dog 

#fallen asleep with a book in your hands #eaten dinner with a book propped up on a fruit bowl #hidden somewhere at a family gathering to read a book in peace and quiet

#walked into a pole because you were reading a book

A fuckload of classic literature:

Click on the motherfucking Hypelinks bitches.

On Having Figured Out the Twist

“Why, for example, do the great writers use anticipation instead of surprise? Because surprise is merely an instrument of the unusual, whereas anticipation of a consequence enlarges our understanding of what is happening. Look at a point of land over which the sun is certain to rise, Coleridge said. If the moon rises there, so what? The senses are startled, that’s all. But if we know the point where the sun will rise as it has always risen and as it will rise tomorrow and the next day too, well, well! At the beginning of “Hamlet” there can be no doubt that by the play’s end, the prince will buy it. Between start and finish, then, we may concentrate on what he says and who he is, matters made more intense by our knowing he is doomed. In every piece of work, at one juncture or another, a writer has the choice of doing something weird or something true. The lesser writer will haul up the moon.” -Roger Rosenblatt, How to Write Great

There seems to be a feeling among readers these days that if they see an event coming, the book is less than it might’ve been. I couldn’t disagree more.

I stand with Rosenblatt in celebrating anticipation over surprise. Even when reading mystery novels, the pleasure for me is never in the feeling of, oh I didn’t see THAT coming. The pleasure is living with another’s dread and pain and yearning and hope. All of that is a hell of a lot more fulfilling than being surprised by the killer’s identity.

This is the whole reason foreshadowing exists. Foreshadowing, at its best, is not a trick demonstrated to brag about what a fancy writer you can be. It’s about building anticipation, so that the reader can more fully empathize with the characters in the story: I want s/he to battle and hope against the inevitable while reading just as we all do while living. When it works, anticipation is far more fulfilling than surprise, because we are reminded that a sunrise is precisely as magnificent as it is inevitable.

tricksterofthelight:

fyeahnerdylolitas:

You should date a girl who reads.

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Wow.