SOUL FOOD:Disney’s ‘Beauty’ exhibits selfish values

Calling into question the moral lessons of Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” feels akin to publicly questioning the moral integrity of one’s own mother. So have mercy on me for rushing in where most Disney-loving Americans might never think to tread.

I’m going to pursue the notion I broached last week when I wrote about the local production of the Disney story at the Latter-day Saints Huntington Beach North Stake Center: When it comes to moral lessons, I think Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” gives us a mixed bag compared to the French fairy tale upon which it is based.

Yes. It has its positive messages. It portrays the value of sacrificing for those we love, for example, and it shows us how deceptive appearances can be.

But does it also embody messages that serve to undermine these? Recently, I got to talk with John Mark Reynolds, associate professor of philosophy at Biola University and the founder and director of its Torrey Honors Institute, about his ideas on this.

Sadly, a book containing the 18th-century French tale written by Marie Le Prince de Beaumont is hard to find. Its text, however, is available through Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org).

Even before contending with moral lessons, the stories are strikingly different. In de Beaumont’s telling, Beauty (in French, Belle) has sisters and brothers.

Her father is a wealthy merchant who loses his great fortune — not a poor inventor on the verge of striking it rich, as Disney fashioned him.

In both tales, Beauty lives in a small country home. In Disney’s version, Belle complains of this “provincial” life and wants much more.

In de Beaumont’s story, it was Beauty’s sisters who disdained their poor, rural life. Beauty rose at 4 a.m., without complaint, to clean and cook.

Beauty had her suitors but none like Disney’s Gaston. This lout seems to be a substitute for the original Beauty’s vain and churlish sisters and (late in the story) their husbands.

In the Disney retelling the Beast is changed from a rich and handsome prince because of a dereliction of his own heart. When a lovely enchantress disguised as an old hag knocks on his castle door seeking shelter from the cold, the ill-tempered prince brusquely turns her away.

In the French tale, his transformation at the hand of a fairy is part of a nobler plan to secure a suitable queen for the prince’s kingdom. Monstrous in appearance though he be as the Beast, his “heart is good,” de Beaumont tells the reader.

Beauty’s character is also changed in the Disney story. From the get-go, Belle is discontent. In her opening song she sings of wanting “so much more than this provincial life.”

With her nose in a book that carries her away from a life she plainly abhors, her fellow villagers are invisible to her as she wanders through the town. Stifling dolts, they worship the boorish Gaston.

As scornful of Belle as she is of them, they get her attention only when — to her consternation — they gossip about her being “odd.”

In de Beaumont’s book, Beauty’s neighbors are wise and discerning. They find her sisters unbearably proud but find Beauty “charming and sweet-tempered,” kind to the poor with “an affable, obliging disposition.”

When Reynolds first encountered Disney’s Belle he mistook her for “one of the bad sisters from the original fairy tale.” She is, he says, “when you get right down to it … a snob.”

Of de Beaumont’s Beauty, on the other hand, he says, “She is more giving … more loving, more content with her lot” than are her sisters. “She’s a harder worker. She’s the one who keeps things going when Dad appears to be broke.” He describes her as “holier than anybody else.”

And I think de Beaumont would agree. Like Disney’s Belle, Beauty saves her father’s life by taking his place as a captive in the castle of the Beast.

Beauty, though, exhibits none of the defiant spunk with which Disney’s Belle confronts the Beast. Instead, she gives herself with confidence “to the care and protection of Providence.”

In the end, the fairy who sought a fitting queen for the prince tells Beauty, “Come and receive the reward of your judicious choice; you have preferred virtue before either wit or beauty … you are going to be a great Queen.”

The two stories, de Beaumont’s and Disney’s, are similar enough, says Reynolds, to each resonate with us. Yet Disney’s Belle is rewarded, not for her “judicious choices” but for being discontent and demanding more from life.

For Reynolds, Disney’s story represents a subtle lie. “Fundamentally,” he says, “we all have an equal ability to be good or [to] tell the truth or to be courageous.” Any one of us can, like de Beaumont’s Beauty, choose virtue over wit or beauty.

But not all of us will — or can be — smarter, more beautiful or richer. If we can’t be the exceptionally smart and pretty Belle and live in castle, Reynolds asks, “does that mean we’re no good, that we live meaningless lives … that we’re going to be fooled by people like Gaston?”

He thinks of another fairy tale, “The Wizard of Oz,” and asks, “Why in the world [did] Dorothy want to go home from Oz [when] she could have lived in the Emerald City like a princess?”

Answering his own question, he contends: “She recognizes, ‘Well, I’m a Kansas girl after all. Time to go home.’ ”

The virtue of contentment. The desire to be who you are. Those are things, Reynolds says, “we have forgotten all about.”

He finds it hard to imagine someone in our present culture doing what Dorothy did. We’re told, he says, “Want more. Want more. You can be anything you want to be. Strive. Dream.”

It’s something he says spawns cynicism in the students he teaches by the ages of 16 or 17. In Oz, he conjectures, unlike Dorothy, we’d be scheming on how to take over.