ABSTRACT
Andrew Lang published The Blue Fairy Book , the first of his widely read and influential series of collected folk and fairy tales, on the cusp of the 1890s. This volume included many now-canonical stories in which pure-hearted adolescent girls faced off against fearsome beasts, including “Goldilocks,” “Red Riding Hood,” and “Beauty and the Beast.” Scholars have frequently understood such tales as meditations on the blossoming of female sexuality counterpoised against the domestication of male carnality. 1 The coming-of-age beauty must warm up to the “beast” of male lust who is then, through the alchemy of her true love, transformed into a romantic and chivalrous prince. Henri Rousseau’s 1909 painting “Beauty and the Beast” clearly reveals that this subtext was hardly lost on artists and thinkers of the age (Figure 13.1).
