Beauty and the Horde of Ruiners

Does Belle have Stockholm Syndrome?

No.

Thank you for watching. Like, share, and subscribe to my channel. Thank you of course to all my lovely patrons, I couldn’t do this without y- … oh. You want me to actually, like, talk about the thing.

—Lindsay Ellis, Is ‘Beauty and the Beast’ About Stockholm Syndrome?

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So listen. I am here for weird, creepy readings of films. The Brazil reading of Sleeping Beauty, for example: it makes more sense to think that after Prince Philip’s capture by Maleficent, the rest of the film is an illusion crafted by her to keep him quiescent. After all, she knew about Flora, Fauna, and Merriweather (fairies so incompetent they can’t bake a single cake in secret), and Maleficent is the mistress of all evil—how plausible is it that she would leave the one person with the ability to break her revenge spell, unguarded no less [1], in a dungeon that her principal rivals can enter and leave at will? It makes much more sense to suppose that the vision of Aurora in the castle is only the beginning, and that the rest, fairies, dragon, and triumph, is still part of the vision. Prince Philip never gets out.

Or, this woman lost. Which is plausible. Sure. Sarcastic? Why would you ever think I'm being sarcastic?

Or the interpretation of 101 Dalmatians that it’s secretly a coded anti-nuclear satire, in which the dogs are the ordinary people who will be both metaphorically and literally skinned by the H-bombs crafted by the wealthy and insane elite, and—wait, this was the actual premise of a bizarre sequel to the novel? Really? Huh.

Or the incredibly uncomfortable reading of I, Robot, which, well, was just not a very good movie in the first place; but it becomes rather nauseatingly lucid if you read it as a race allegory, with the humans as white people and the robots as their black slaves. Detective Spooner is an abolitionist, not although but because he’s a racist: basically he doesn’t trust the robots to be slaves, which is an unkind but not wholly false interpretation of the original Republican Party (look up how Oregon handled the slavery controversy); meanwhile Sonny, the good robot, is a race traitor, raised to the level of human free will by a kindly, white-man’s-burden-minded scientist. Through the race lens it is a super fucked up movie, though to be fair I doubt this was intentional on the part of the filmmakers.

But there is a steaming cold take that I am not here for: partly because it ruins the single best Disney film ever made, yes I will fight you, but chiefly because it isn’t actually justified by the story. And that is the obnoxious ‘Beauty and the Beast is about Stockholm Syndrome and/or falls into the toxic I-can-fix-him trope’ take. [2] These takes typically rely on the fact that the Beast is savage at first, but later Belle falls in love with him. Which, yes, that’s the plot of the movie. What it isn’t is an adequate analysis of Stockholm Syndrome or the I-can-fix-him trope.

Now, there is dispute in the psychiatric and law enforcement professions about whether Stockholm Syndrome is even real; it has not been thoroughly researched and does not appear in the DSM-V. So rather than beg that question, and since the trope of abuse victim who is loyal to their abuser due to affection-based denial does have a basis in reality, independently of the events the putative disorder is named for, I’m going to refer to this trope as Frollery. Frollery, thus defined, would include all varieties of loving and trusting an abuser or believing that one can ‘fix’ an abusive partner with enough longsuffering sweetness and obedience. The question, thus re-termed, is this: is Belle a victim of Frollery?

The answer is still no: Belle maintains her freedom, her own judgment, and (most importantly) complete clarity of mind throughout.

Let’s start with Belle’s captivity in the Beast’s castle. She agrees to this under some duress—well, she suggests it under duress; the Beast either isn’t mean enough (not likely, he’s still in jerk mode at this point of the story) or isn’t cunning enough (more plausible) to suggest this; but it is still under duress, insofar as it’s to save her father from imprisonment and possible death. [3] So I’m prepared to agree that she’s being held against her will. Captivity, check.

… Except that it’s quickly made clear that she has no intention of respecting the promise she made if the Beast gets intolerable, as he does over the enchanted rose. He acts violently, maybe not toward her per se but in a way that could certainly have injured her; she leaves immediately, and to all appearances for good. Whatever implicit threat there may have been in living with the Beast, there is evidently no threat involved in leaving the Beast, implicit or explicit.

And even after he saves her from wolves, there is a clear moment of hesitation in Belle’s face over whether to take him back to the castle and patch him up, or to just leave. She chooses to take him back out of compassion—which is demonstrated even further by her repeated, point-blank refusal to accept his blame-shifting or excuses in the scene where she tends his wounds. She gives absolutely no weight to anything he says, and isn’t even intimidated by his roars of anger, insisting that no, both this situation and this narrative are going to go down her way. This is not only uncharacteristic, it’s the exact opposite of how a victim of Frollery behaves. Placating and agreeing with an abuser are the traits of Frollery, not telling him in no uncertain terms that this mess is entirely his fault.

Moreover (though this is a less important note), it’s worth pointing out—as Lindsay Ellis does in the excellent video that I’m more or less ripping off—that the animation of the Beast and the backing score after his rose-rage episode, showing a sudden devastating realization that he’s made a horrible mistake, reveals a genuine example of something that abusers like to pretend to have: genuine regret. An abuser exhibits their regret to the victim as a manipulation tactic. The Beast, though he has this beat of regret, never brings it up to Belle at all; it is shown exclusively to the audience: the Beast, in a moment where he can gain nothing by it, experiencing and exhibiting remorse. Taken together with his trying to save face with Belle in the wound-tending scene, as opposed to trying to manipulate her by saying how sorry he was that she drove him to his bad behavior, that is one of several reasons we have to credit his change of character as the film proceeds.

And speaking of that change of character, while it’s occasioned by Belle, she doesn’t prompt it. That is, she doesn’t take it upon herself to be his therapist, or threaten to leave again if the Beast doesn’t clean up his act. He feels for her, wants to be better because of her, and she responds to him actually doing that. At no point does she set out to fix him. He fixes himself. The literary parallel is Darcy's change of character in Pride and Prejudice after being called out by Elizabeth, not the dubious penitence of Christian Grey.

Grey is a Gaston type when you think about it; he only gets away with it because 

Jamie Dornan's smouldering gaze and sharp jawline and perfectly sculptured torso, 

which is set off so perfectly by the lines of suit, and, uhh, what was I talking about?

The famous library scene has been criticized on the grounds that the Beast was really just informing Belle of an additional room in the house that she hadn’t known about, which is stupid on two different levels. To begin with, him giving her the library as a gift is not just telling her about a room. It’s a transfer of ownership (i.e., what a gift is, guys). That library is now hers. She could ban the Beast from it, like he banned her from the West Wing, if the mood struck her. She could demand to take the books with her if she ever decides to leave again.

Which leads us to the second point. Belle, as she has demonstrated, is prepared to leave; she’s staying because she made an agreement, but she doesn’t think that agreement outweighs her safety. There’s no indication that the Beast could leave even if he wanted to, but even supposing he could, where is he going to go? He’s not only a monster, he’s one who has a curse to break that’s intimately connected with his castle. Other than (i) the castle itself or (ii) some of its contents (like, say, a library), what the hell was the Beast supposed to give Belle? And the choice to give her a library, i.e. something that’s transportable at least in principle, suggests that this is not an attempt to bribe her to stay. He’s doing this because he likes her and wants to do something for her that she will enjoy. Remember your fairy-tale rules: something other than genuine love wouldn’t have broken the curse.

And speaking of the agreement and of fairy-tale rules, here, as so often, the fairy-tale tellers show a very sound instinct for orthodoxy and even for canon law. Westley in The Princess Bride is a similar exemplar, quite correctly pointing out that Buttercup’s putative marriage to Humperdinck was invalidated by both defect of form and lack of consent on her part. Belle being held in the Beast’s castle is cited by some critics of the story as a diriment impediment to their possible marriage, a diriment impediment being one that voids a marriage (as distinct from a prohibitory impediment, which simply makes it an act of disobedience to the Church but still a valid marriage).

But what the crucial Canon 1089 of the Code actually states is this: No marriage can exist between a man and a woman who has been abducted or at least detained with a view of contracting marriage with her unless the woman chooses marriage of her own accord after she has been separated from the captor and established in a safe and free place. Well, the captivity itself was suggested by Belle in the first place and had nothing to do with marriage, even on the Beast’s end (since it is mutual true love that he needs, not marriage); but even if we fudged those facts, Belle was separated from the Beast and established in a safe and free place when she went to rescue her father from dying of exposure. True, her village rapidly became unsafe for her—thanks to Gaston, who had been stalking her and ignoring her No for months at least, and who is the only character in the film who does imprison her against her will, in the cellar, while he leads the townsfolk off to murder the Beast. And speaking of Gaston, his increasing violence throughout the film and especially his threat to commit Maurice does arguably bar him from ever validly marrying Belle: Canon 1103 says, A marriage is invalid if entered into because of force or grave fear from without, even if unintentionally inflicted (an ameliorating clause, but Gaston clearly can’t plead even that), so that a person is compelled to choose marriage in order to be free from it.

A last-ditch effort I’ve seen to make Beauty and the Beast problematic is the argument that Belle is self-isolating, even that she has Schizoid Personality Disorder—which is characterized by a lack of interest in relationships, detachment, apathy, and emotional coldness—on the grounds that she has no real friends in the village. This, it is argued, is why she doesn’t respond to Gaston’s advances either, and it also explains why she is more at home with a castle full of animated objects than she is in the town.

But here again, the actual facts of the film refuse to fit that narrative. For one thing, Belle does have relationships she cherishes, not only with her father Maurice but with the bookseller; she’s even shown trying to be friendly with the baker, telling him about the book she’s reading, but he shuts her down with a dismissive ‘That’s nice’ and immediate pivot to his business concerns. And the notion that Belle is emotionally self-isolating and cold is ludicrous. She’s introverted, certainly, and it doesn’t help that the villagers harp ceaselessly on her oddness, that being the only thing other than her beauty they’ve bothered to notice—of course it’s going to be hard to make friends in that environment. But she’s capable of everything from casual kindness to animals and strangers (as shown in “Bonjour!”) to finding compassion for a hideous monster. Cold, she ain’t.

Critique is so limiting and emotionally draining.

So yeah. If you want a bona fide example of Frollery romanticized and justified, try the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise, or Overboard (which is a fun romp and was also Problematic Romance: The Movie before E. L. James ever set pen to royalty check). Or hell, look to something like Interview With the Vampire for a toxic romance acknowledged and deconstructed within the narrative itself. But get your grubby illiterate paws off Beauty and the Beast’s innocence, ruiners.

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[1] And don’t give me any ‘But there’d be no point in guarding him because her minions are incompetent’ stuff. She’s well aware of that after their failure with Aurora, and if Maleficent can transmogrify herself into a dragon, I decline to believe that she can’t magick up a simple home security system with fairy-oriented facial recognition software.

[2] Note that I am not saying the film couldn’t be used as a manipulative pretext by an abuser; it absolutely could. But I don’t consider ‘An abuser could lie about it’ to be a particularly damning critique of anything.

[3] Not that the Beast was planning to kill Maurice or anything. But it was a freezing, drafty cell, and Maurice was an old man.