Beauty and the Beast: The Original Story by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve (review)

Reviewed by: Beauty and the Beast: The Original Story by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve Kelsey B. Madsen Villeneuve, Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de. Beauty and the Beast: The Original Story. Ed. and Trans. Aurora Wolfgang. The Other Voices in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series, 74. Iter Press, 2020. Pp. [i]-xviii; 191. ISBN 978-0-86698-627-4. $41.95 (paperback). ISBN 978-0-86698-760-8. $41.95 (eBook). Aurora Wolfgang recontextualizes the classic tale of Beauty and the Beast by providing a robust historical and interpretative introduction alongside a full translation of Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve's original text from the 1740 book La jeune Américaine et les contes marins, as republished and edited by Élisa Biancardi in 2008. Wolfgang makes a compelling case for re-examining Villeneuve's sprawling fairy tale (in translation, it is nearly 100 pages long) for [End Page 165] its own literary qualities, rather than simply as the inspiration for a story frequently adapted in popular culture across several centuries. The publisher describes Wolfgang's edition as "the first integral English translation of Villeneuve's original tale." While other translations of Villeneuve's Beauty and the Beast exist, they omit the original dedication, preface and frame story. The most commonly reproduced English translation also modifies the main text; James Robinson Planché's 1858 version edits passages to create a more "wholesome" tone. For instance, in Villeneuve's version and Wolfgang's translation, the Beast asks Beauty every night if he may sleep with her, but Planché sanitizes this request into a nightly proposal of marriage. We learn in Villeneuve's original version that the Beast's curse can only be broken if he marries a worthy woman who asks him to marry her. Furthermore, the Beast's curse encompasses both his physical appearance and his wits (that is, it makes him appear stupid and brutish) so that he is an unappealing romantic partner; he is doubly bête in Villeneuve. In fact, the crude nightly question is actually a means of prompting the virtuous Beauty to ask for marriage when she is finally ready to accept his attentions. Wolfgang offers anglophone readers an accurate rendering that reflects Villeneuve's intentions, and her scholarly footnotes clarify pertinent literary details and translation choices. Her translation flows smoothly; she achieved her goal to "reflect the simple, unembellished language used in the fairy-tale genre" (71). By reuniting The Beauty and the Beast with the frame story of La jeune Américaine, Wolfgang draws attention to thematic resonances between the realistic frame story and the fantastical tale, such as preoccupations with finances and marital relationships. The frame story recounts the lives of two young men originally from La Rochelle, one of whom leaves to make his fortune in Saint Domingue (present-day Haiti). His daughter is sent to France to be raised in the family of her father's friend. When she eventually begins a long sea voyage back to her parents' household in Saint Domingue, she begs a tale from her chambermaid to pass the time—the aforementioned Beauty and the Beast. While the girl's fiancé and her governess perceive the request for entertainment as childish, the narrator notes that the captain "knew, as an experienced sailor, that you have to do whatever you can when at sea," and he encourages the tale (88). It must be supposed, then, that Villeneuve is also making the case for her writing to be seriously considered as worthy of the reader's attention. The chambermaid's story is a mise-en-abyme, followed by further stories embedded within Beauty and the Beast, such as the Beast's tale and the Fairy Lady's tale. Wolfgang's translation is accompanied by a 72-page introduction that includes a biographical background of the author, an overview of the fairy tale as a genre of women's literature that flourished in the salons of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and a literary analysis of the text itself. She notes that Beauty's nerve-filled arrival at the Beast's home echoes the ambivalent situation of many contemporary young women who were also sent (via marriage) to a stranger...