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| Are you reading Shakespeare there? (CGI) Dan Stevens as the Beast, Emma Watson as Belle. |
Another change in the new version is the addition of a lot of unnecessary backstory about Belle's family. We learn that Belle and her father Maurice moved to their "provincial" village when she was a baby, after her mother died of the plague. At first, this sounds slightly odd: wasn't plague a medieval disease, and doesn't this movie take place in the 1700s? (Why not smallpox or tuberculosis?) However, there were scattered outbreaks of plague long after the medieval Black Death epidemic, including a really devastating one in Marseille in 1720 (the Great Plague of Marseille). And if we assume that that outbreak killed Belle's mother, and further assume that Belle is about 20 years old when the main action of Beauty and the Beast takes place, we can pinpoint the exact setting of the film as 1740 — which was the year the original French "Beauty and the Beast" fairy tale was published! Brilliant!
The only problem with this theory is that the film makes clear that Belle
and Maurice are from Paris, not Marseille, and as far as I can tell from Wikipedia,
there were no Parisian plague outbreaks in the 1700s. I am left angrily
shaking my fist at the screenwriters: "It would have been so easy to say
they are from Marseille and not Paris and it would have been a great Easter
egg for us history nerds!"
I suspect that both of these matters — having Belle and the Beast discuss Shakespeare, and saying that Belle and Maurice come from Paris — can be traced to a larger problem with movies made for mass audiences: the fear of including information that isn't 100% familiar to everyone. Belle and Maurice are Parisian, not Marseillais, because American audiences can be trusted to know where Paris is but may have never heard of Marseille. Belle and the Beast read Shakespeare, not Racine or Corneille, because those French authors are not part of Anglo-American culture. (I do like that they also show the Beast reading Arthurian romances; this strikes me as historically plausible, understandable to a modern American audience, and not quite as much of a lazy choice as Shakespeare.) Perhaps this is even why Belle's mother dies of the plague, rather than of something like tuberculosis. I suppose I shouldn't be looking to a nostalgia-flavored Disney remake to expose people to unfamiliar ideas, but it makes me sad when mass culture doesn't take the opportunity to try to tell a mass audience something they may not have heard before.
I suspect that both of these matters — having Belle and the Beast discuss Shakespeare, and saying that Belle and Maurice come from Paris — can be traced to a larger problem with movies made for mass audiences: the fear of including information that isn't 100% familiar to everyone. Belle and Maurice are Parisian, not Marseillais, because American audiences can be trusted to know where Paris is but may have never heard of Marseille. Belle and the Beast read Shakespeare, not Racine or Corneille, because those French authors are not part of Anglo-American culture. (I do like that they also show the Beast reading Arthurian romances; this strikes me as historically plausible, understandable to a modern American audience, and not quite as much of a lazy choice as Shakespeare.) Perhaps this is even why Belle's mother dies of the plague, rather than of something like tuberculosis. I suppose I shouldn't be looking to a nostalgia-flavored Disney remake to expose people to unfamiliar ideas, but it makes me sad when mass culture doesn't take the opportunity to try to tell a mass audience something they may not have heard before.
4 comments:
Really fun! My sisters and I did the same thing. Apparently the Marseille plague did pass through Northern France quickly, so its quite possible that someone in Paris died because of it. But nothing is certain.
Kudos on your interest in the historical accuracy of Beauty and the Beast, even though technically it is fantasy. That said, I too am always interested in the underlying historical accuracy of this and other movies. Another point is that Blacks/Africans were "slaves" at this point in the history of France, so the new movie's "PC" attempts to equalize everyone (not to mention gaining larger audience) while laudable is, alas, woefully inaccurate. While History is written by the victors, overwriting history on important issues such as slavery and race only leads to history repeating itself.
True, while my original post did not touch on this aspect of the film, the casting of people of color in the new "Beauty and the Beast" is another way in which it blends a 21st-century American perspective with a 1700s France historical setting (which you could say was the overall subject of my post). However, with your interest in historical accuracy, you may wish to recall that, while slavery was rampant in France's colonies in the 1700s, it "had been illegal in metropolitan France since 1315 and thus any slave would be freed de facto by being in the country."* It is important not to overwrite historical facts, but we also must remember that history was often more complicated than shorthand pop-culture tropes and mass-produced entertainment make it out to be.
*This sentence is quoted from the Wikipedia entry on Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, the highest-ranking man of African descent ever in a European army, father of novelist Alexandre Dumas, and a fascinating figure whom I would gladly watch a movie about.
Don't forget she claims Jane Austins Pride and Prejudice as her favorite book, which wasn't written until the 1800's
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