Lions and Tigers and Bears! Oh My!

Ok...so there have only been lions and tigers up to now but I couldn't pass up on the opportunity to quote the Wizard of Oz. Since I last blogged, we've read both 'The Courtship of Mr Lyon' and 'The Tiger's Bride' - I missed the first lesson in which we discussed and read the latter but I'm going to use everyone's Wunderbar (That's wunderbar with a capital 'W' Emma!!! Satisfied?! Hmmmm?!) blogs to catch up. Anyway...I'll start with 'The Tiger's Bride' as that's relatively fresh in my mind...Mr Francis asked us to ponder why Carter made the decision at the end of the story to revert the idea of the beauty/beast transformation and I think this decision could be rooted in Carter's feminist agenda (or at least her aim to promote gender equality) - rather than the story being about the 'beauty' (woman) learning to love the 'beast' (man), I felt that The Tiger's Bride was concerned with the 'beauty' learning to accept and perhaps love the 'beast' inside herself - in other words, learning from the Beast (who literally takes off his mask), to metaphorically take off her own mask and face up to her real self, regardless of how horrific or gruesome it may be. I got the impression that, rather than 'The Courtship of Mr Lyon', The Tiger's Bride was about self-discovery and acceptance rather than a story in which someone changes in order to 'match-up' with someone else. To this end, even though we spoke of how 'The Courtship of Mr Lyon' is a fairly straight-forward fairytale, it could be argued that 'The Tiger's Bride' with all its strange concepts and symbols has a more positive end message. The fact that, as a class, we came to the conclusion that 'The Courtship of Mr Lyon' was a quite traditional fairystory with a narrative and message not dissimilar to others we'd heard in the past, I think, says quite a lot about the fairytale genre and Carter's purpose in retelling the 'Beauty and the Beast' tale twice. As is the nature of the gothic genre, it seems to me as if Carter could be trying to present something to us that we are certain and sure of (the 'traditional' fairytale of 'The Courtship of Mr Lyon') before showing us how that concept is somehow odd or wrong, leaving us to question and feel less secure about it. At first reading, I imagine most people expected the 'Beast' to turn into a 'Beauty' at the end of 'The Tiger's Bride'...but why? This is, I think, what Carter is trying to get us to think about by placing the two re-tellings/re-workings together - why do the fairytales we have all grown up with teach that 'Beasts' should change in order to be with 'Beauties'? In 'The Courtship of Mr Lyon', the Lion changing back into human form is seen almost as a reward to Beauty for seeing the good within him while he was a Beast, whereas, in 'The Tiger's Bride', it is as if the woman changes into a 'Beast', not for the Beast, but for herself. It is implied that the Beast in 'Mr Lyon' is trapped in a world of magic in which he doesn't belong - a man trapped within a Lion, whereas, in 'Tiger's Bride' there are no hints towards there being a 'Beast' behind the Beauty until the very end.

I'm sorry I've just got one jumbo paragraph but the main point I'm trying to make is that maybe Carter placed the two re-tellings together in order to lead the reader to question the expectations of and morals within 'traditional' fairytales - getting us to question, as the gothic genre often does, which morals are the most positive. Just a thought.