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Beauty and the beast interpretation
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What pops into your mind when you hear the word ‘love?’ Do you think of a person who loved you or someone you’ve admired? We, as human beings, are made to love. We even distinguish love as family, romantic, and selfless love: also known as, storge, eros, and agape. As much as we desire to love others, we hold high values of being loved by others. Humanity’s great appreciation towards love is so great, it is even portrayed in fairy tales. Little Mermaid is a story about a mermaid who exchanges her beautiful voice to human legs so that she could be with her true love, Sleeping Beauty is a story about a prince who strives to fight against the evil witch in order to save his true love from a deep sleep, and Beauty and the Beast is about a young lady who falls in love with a Beast, solely because of his good virtue and character. The most influential book to humanity, the Bible, also carries the message of love through the gospel. God’s love for human being is purely displayed through the life of Jesus Christ: Jesus’ birth, death, and resurrection. Could there be mere connections between the gospel, fairy tales, and humanity under the topic of love? Jeanne-Marie LePrince De Beaumont’s Beauty and the Beast echoes the Evangelium by reflecting upon unconditional, sacrificial, and transformative love. Such love is demonstrated through Beauty’s action, motivation, and her relationship with others.
First, unconditional love is portrayed within Beauty’s relationship with her two mean sisters. The two sisters are disliked by others because of their vain and pride (De Beaumont 32). They ‘always insisted that they would never marry unless they found a duke or, at the very least, a count”, but when men asked Beauty in hand of marriage, she pol...
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... loved more than loving others. Hence, we are never satisfied. The only way for a human being to be fully satisfied of love is to be loved by the absolute completeness. The whole representation of love is God and He is perfect. The Son of God, Jesus Christ, was perfect and love, which was how he died on the cross for the sins of others. The ultimate wholeness of love died for the sins of you and me. Christ did not die in order to take benefit from human beings. He is perfect in himself; he does not need mankind to fulfill his completeness. Hence, Christ died on the cross simply because he loves mankind. He loves you and me so much he gave his own life. What greater love is there than the love of Jesus Christ? As much as human beings strongly desire to be loved, why doesn’t one satisfy one’s hunger of love through the ultimate representation of love, Jesus Christ?
While Anna Williams views escaping the confines of marriage as a desirable thing, Charlotte Lennox’s greatest lament, as expressed by her poem “A Song,” is merely to have the freedom to love who she pleases. Although Charlotte Lennox has a more romantic view of men and love than Anna Williams, neither woman denies the need for companionship. Charlotte Lennox’s opinion towards love is expressed clearly in her piece “A Song.” The poem’s female speaker is experiencing unrequited love.
In The Lais of Marie de France, the theme of love is conceivably of the utmost importance. Particularly in the story of Guigemar, the love between a knight and a queen brings them seemingly true happiness. The lovers commit to each other an endless devotion and timeless affection. They are tested by distance and are in turn utterly depressed set apart from their better halves. Prior to their coupling the knight established a belief to never have interest in romantic love while the queen was set in a marriage that left her trapped and unhappy. Guigemar is cursed to have a wound only cured by a woman’s love; he is then sent by an apparent fate to the queen of a city across the shores. The attraction between them sparks quickly and is purely based on desire, but desire within romantic love is the selfishness of it. True love rests on a foundation that is above mere desire for another person. In truth, the selfishness of desire is the
“LOVE”, a simple word with four letters, sounds very simple but has a vast and deep meaning. From the very ancient time till today there have always been a topic called “Love” in every work of literature. Even in the ancient Biblical times, we see “Love” carried a deeper meaning. Several chapters and verses from the Holy Book are the evidence that “Love” existed during that period too, be it God’s love to all His people, or a man’s love to his wife, or vice-versa. The book of Genesis not only talks about the history and origin of the world, but also talks about several things on “Love”. In 1 Corinthians 13, we read, “Love” is patient and kind, which is not boastful and has no arrogance at all. It is not rude and self-seeking. This extract from the Bible is really meaningful and powerful in the sense that how well it describes the feeling of deep affection; also, it mentions “Love is greatest”. The purpose of my essay is to analyze Anne Bradstreet as a loving, caring and Godly wife using the theme of the verse "If ever two were one, then surely we…." from her poem "To My Dear and Loving Husband".
“Love does not obey our expectations, it obeys our intentions.” –Lloyd Strom. These wise words relay one important message: love is intentional, which is rather obvious in Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” and the Bible. In Pride and Prejudice, readers see Mr. Darcy falling in love with a much lower class citizen, Elizabeth Bennett. In The Great Gatsby, the readers perceive Daisy to be in love with Gatsby who, though had money, obtained it by the wrong means (so believed by aristocrats in the nineteen-twenties). The Bible expresses to its readers that God sent his son to Earth to die for His people so they could spend eternity with Him. Elizabeth had flaws, but Darcy chose to look past those flaws.
“There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make fools of themselves in various styles,” George Eliot. Beauty has caused men to move mountain, and jump through countless hoops. It is a quality that is subjective and affects the beholder differently. In Poe’s Ligea and Hawthorne’s The Birthmark, Ligea, Rowena, and Georgina all had different orders of beauty that similarly affects how their husbands saw them. In these two pieces of literature there was an exaltation of beauty as an abstraction that hid the depth of the women and led to deceit and the sense of superiority in their husbands.
Beauty’s sisters marry rich men, who seemingly have acceptably desirable attributes as husbands. One man is detailed as a man of good looks. The other man is noted for having great wit. The two possess qualities most women seek in a husband, but it is indicated in descriptions that the two sisters are both unhappy in their marriages. Although the first husband is handsome, this serves him as a drawback, for he is a narcissist, only concerned with himself. The second husband’s wit is also a severe disadvantage due to the fact he uses his wit to torment other people, including his wife. It is when Beauty reviews her sisters’ marriages and the unhappiness her sisters experience in relation to their husbands that helps Beauty realize The Beast’s true worth and her love for him: “I should be happier with the monster than my sisters are with their husbands; it is neither wit, nor a fine person, in a husband, that makes a woman happy, but virtue, sweetness of temper and complaisance and Beast has all these valuable qualifications.” (9). The juxtaposition made between the husbands and The Beast create the disclosure of the appropriate masculine qualities a man should encompass. De Beaumont presents the contrast of characters to the reader as a method of emphasizing the
During the Middle Ages, Courtly love was a code which prescribed the conduct between a lady and her lover (Britannica). The relationship of courtly love was very much like the feudal relationship between a knight and his liege. The lover serves his beloved, in the manner a servant would. He owes his devotion and allegiance to her, and she inspires him to perform noble acts of valor (Schwartz). Capellanus writes, in The Art of Courtly Love, “A true lover considers nothing good except what he thinks will please his beloved”. The stories of Marie de France and Chrétien de Troyes illustrate the conventions of courtly love.
“The Wife of Bath’s Tale” is written in an entertaining and adventurous spirit, but serves a higher purpose by illustrating the century’s view of courtly love. Hundreds, if not thousands, of other pieces of literature written in the same century prevail to commemorate the coupling of breathtaking princesses with lionhearted knights after going through unimaginable adventures, but only a slight few examine the viability of such courtly love and the related dilemmas that always succeed. “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” shows that women desire most their husband’s love, Overall, “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” shows that the meaning of true love does not stay consistent, whether between singular or separate communities and remains timeless as the depictions of love from this 14th century tale still hold true today.
The Woman in Love, a section taken from Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, describes her theories on men and women in love and the vast differences and purposes they think love is for. This book was published in 1949, and with this in mind we can understand the way she describes women as the weaker sex and how dependent women are on men. In the beginning of the text she states that “The word ‘love’ has not all the same meaning for both sexes, and this is a source of the grave misunderstandings that separate them...love is merely an occupation in the life of the man, while it is life itself for the woman(683).” This first quote from this chapter is important because it really outlines what she is about to get at throughout the entire...
Trousdale, Gary, Kirk Wise, Don Hahn, Linda Woolverton, Paige O'Hara, Robby Benson, Richard White, et al. 2010. Beauty and the beast. Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Studios Home
Many versions of Beauty and the Beast have been made. In this essay we will be comparing Beauty and the Beast and Rose. Rose is the Irish version of Beauty and the Beast. Rose and Beauty and the Beast are similar stories, but there are parts were they are not alike at all. There are many differences and similarities in both stories.
I would want a roommate that is responsible, caring, accepting, and has a sense of adventure. Belle from Beauty and the Beast would be the fictional character that I would want as a roommate. She is a person that knows her boundaries but is still willing to go past them if it means helping others or adventure. Belle is also aware that other people have their own boundaries and will respect them. When the Beast pushes her away and treats her poorly, she continues to help him see that there is still good in the world despite what he seems to believe. Part of her being so accepting is due to her unconventional methods of looking at things. She does not judge things as quickly as other people and gets to know what she is facing before judging.
Beauty and the Beast Disney is an excellent example of a Media corporation as it is known
In the satiric novel, Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray exposes and examines the vanities of 19th century England. Numerous characters in the novel pursue wealth, power, and social standing, often through marriage or matrimony. Thackeray effectively uses the institution of marriage to comment on how these vanities often come at the expense of the true emotions of passion, devotion, and, of course, love.
Beauty and the Beast is probably one of the most well known fairy tales that the Grimms’ reproduced. In it’s original form it was a long, drawn out story that was catered to adults. The Grimms’ changed the story to be more understood by children and made it short and to the point. Unlike many of the other fairy tales that they reproduced, Beauty and the Beast contains many subtle symbols in its purest form. It shows a girl and how she transfers to a woman; it also shows that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The one major thing that separates this story from all the rest is that Beauty gets to know the Beast before marrying him.