Disappointed by the Prince

by Annabeth Leong

At first I thought I was the only one unsatisfied by the ending of Beauty and the Beast. On paper, the story ought to work. Beauty learns to see through the Beast's monstrous veneer and falls in love with the man underneath. At the right moment, that man—a prince—emerges. I suppose it's meant to play as if the prince is the person she has learned to see, so that his appearance is confirmation and validation of the feelings she develops over the course of the story. There's a moral to that story, the idea that true beauty and goodness are inside, not on the surface.

Except that to me the prince always seemed like an imposter who showed up and usurped the place of the dear beast. I knew my heart was supposed to leap with romantic joy when the thin blond man joins Beauty at the end of the story. But I couldn't make myself feel that. I missed the monster, with his awkward sweetness, his turbulent moods, and, yes, his sexiness. Before I was old enough to put that into words, I sensed that Beauty had a lot more chemistry with the Beast than with that perfect-looking prince.

I know plenty of people hate to see the Beast replaced. In the foreword to Kristina Wright's Fairy Tale Lust, Angela Knight discusses this at length. "Personally," she writes, "I liked him better with fur, claws, and a bad attitude." Indeed, the opening story of that book, Delilah Devlin's "The Obedient Wife," is a riff on Beauty and the Beast and allows the beast to remain a beast.

You could talk about kinky sex and bad boys, but believe it or not, that's not where I'm going with this.

My favorite case of this realization (that the beast should stay) is in the body of work produced by fantasy author Robin McKinley. Her first retelling of Beauty and the Beast, called Beauty, was an early work. I remember liking the book, and recognizing that it had been a heavy source of inspiration for the Disney movie (bookish Belle seems to have been cribbed from McKinley's story). This book follows the traditional script and changes beast to prince at the end.

However, in 1998, twenty years after writing Beauty, McKinley produced Rose Daughter, another retelling of Beauty and the Beast (and one that I consider to be better, deeper, and much more original). I've lost track of my copy and there doesn't seem to be an electronic edition, so I'm afraid I can't pull out exact quotes, but I recall a fascinating introduction in which McKinley discussed why she felt the need to revisit the story. Then, at the climactic moment, the Beauty character sees the Beast beginning to change into the prince and feels loss, because that's not who she's fallen in love with. The Beast's body reasserts itself, however, and she is glad of it. I remember being so pleased by that moment, that revision of the story.

I think it's because it's actually truer to the moral of Beauty and the Beast than the more common ending. "Rewarding" Beauty for falling in love with a monster by replacing him with a non-monster is actually a slap. It disrespects the nature of the sort of love she's experiencing. Learning to love a person as is, flaws and ugliness included, is a beautiful thing, and I think the true romantic vision of it is not just about acceptance, it's about embrace. Taking away the flaws and ugliness, once they are included in the love, diminishes the love.

Not only that, who's saying those things are flaws? To me, the Beast generally looks better as beast than as prince. Correcting his supposed flaws becomes doubly misguided.

The point is that the Beast of this story actually isn't a monster—not in the sense of evil. As people have written on this topic over the past couple weeks, I've realized that this is an important distinction. Garce and Lisabet, for example, both gave examples of true monsters—beings who by nature aren't capable of loving back. A story about loving a monster, as in loving a being of implacable evil or utterly alien disposition, is disturbing to say the least. Stories about loving a bad person and believing that person will become good make me cringe because to me they ring with the rationalizations of victims of domestic violence.

On the other hand, there is Beauty and the Beast, which I think is about loving someone who is considered by society to be a monster—a very different thing altogether. In my vision of this story, Beauty falls in love with someone who doesn't look "right" and has moments of monstrosity, but is deep down a fundamentally good person fully capable of returning love. This could simply be a comment on how everyone is human and all of us have unlovely parts. I think it's more, though, because of the important role that prejudice and societal judgment often play in the story.

Whenever a monster appears, the question is always whether this is a real monster (implacable evil) or something that seems to be a monster because of prejudice (the Beast, beneficial and nonvenomous snakes, and so on). I look at Beauty and the Beast and see a representation of people who don't live lifestyles approved by the mainstream, or who don't look attractive in a traditional way. I really don't want the message of this story to be to transform and conform (to turn into that bland and supposedly handsome prince). I want to see the Beast stay the Beast, because he's awesome that way.

Waiting for Anthony

By Kristina Wright

Anthony’s wife worships at Sacred Heart Catholic Church, two blocks from my condo in the city. They drive in from the suburbs because Sacred Heart is the only Catholic church in the area that still observes Latin mass. Anthony’s wife prefers the old-fashioned church services of her childhood to the contemporary version offered in the bland suburban church near their stylish five bedroom, three bathroom home. Each Sunday, Anthony dutifully drives his wife and their two little girls to church and drops them off at the curb in front of that imposing stone building. Then he drives a block to the coffee shop where he will get the Sunday Times and an extra hot double latte, killing time while his family attends services (and prays for his soul, presumably).

Or, he used to. That was before me.

We met at the Colley Café one particularly chilly autumn Sunday morning. I was nursing a nasty tequila hangover and sipping a heaven-sent chai latte when he strolled in, wearing grey chinos and a black sweater, looking like the suburban dad he is. I didn’t take much notice of him as he purchased his newspaper and latte and settled into the red overstuffed chair caddy corner to mine. He was a hairy Italian guy with a well-fed belly and an expensive gold watch on his wrist to match the gold band on his ring finger. Most definitely not my type.

Our eyes met over the top of his paper and he arched one thick, dark eyebrow at me as if I had said something of which he disapproved. He stared a fraction of an instant too long to be polite. My pick-up radar went off as I recognized the glimmer of interest in those dark, unreadable eyes. Even though I looked like Technicolor death in my pink and red flannel pajama pants and purple Stockley Gardens Art Festival sweatshirt, my dirty blond hair twisted in a knot on top of my head, the Italian guy thought I was hot. That spark of desire in his eyes felt like a physical touch and left me with a surprising ache between my thighs.

We started talking and discovered we had absolutely nothing in common. He is a financial advisor with a wife and two kids, a hefty mortgage and a time-share in Orlando. I’m a happily single artist who pays the bills waiting tables and teaching middle-aged women how to find their inner goddess through yoga and belly dancing. Anthony is only five years older than me, but he lives in a different world—a world of two-week vacations and minivans with screaming children and rigid rules of right and wrong. That first Sunday, Anthony told me he liked my laugh and my ladybug pajama pants. I liked his big, strong-looking hands and the way his dark eyes never wavered from mine when I told him I hadn’t had sex in nearly two months.

Three Sundays later we gave up on small talk and gave in to temptation. On the pretense that Anthony wanted to see some of my art, we walked the short distance from the coffee shop to my building. That familiar walk felt like the walk of shame before the deed is done. I was getting ready to take a married man to my bed and fuck him. I’m no angel—I’ve been with my share of guys who were supposedly already in a relationship, but though I had toyed with the committed and the affianced, Anthony was my first married hook-up. What surprised me was not the guilt, but the lack of it. I didn’t give it a thought. The only thing I could thing about was fucking him, feeling those big hands on my body and his cock—hopefully as big as his hands—moving inside me.

I was painfully aware of Anthony behind me, staring at my ass, as we climbed the stairs to the third floor of the brownstone where I lived. I kept waiting for him to touch me—wanting him to—but it never came. My hand trembled, jangling my keys loudly, as I let us into my condo and his deep laugh at my awkwardness eased my nerves. It felt as if we were moving in slow motion as we crossed the threshold and a tingle of restless anticipation danced along my rigid spine. Then he laid his big, warm hand across the back of my neck as the door closed behind us and my sigh was almost a moan.

I led him directly to the bedroom, feeling no need to play coy at this point. We both knew why we were here—and it wasn’t so Anthony could look at my watercolors and oils. Sunlight streamed through the drafty, hundred year old windows, illuminating the white sheets on my rumpled, unmade bed. For a fleeting moment, my thoughts went to his dutiful wife sitting in the church a few blocks away, sunlight streaming in through stained glass windows. The sun shone on both of us that day, the virtuous woman and the whore. My twinge of guilt fled before it could take hold when Anthony gently turned me toward him. His hands were warm and steady, soothing.

He cradled my face in those large hands and placed the sweetest, most chaste kiss on my lips as we stood beside my bed. I knew this was the point of no return. He was giving me the option to walk away. I could say no. I could be virtuous, too. Instead, I whimpered one word against his soft lips. “More.”

He gave it to me. He gave it all to me that first Sunday afternoon on my unmade bed. While his wife knelt in prayer two blocks away, he knelt between my thighs, thick and rigid, his cock all I had prayed for.

When he entered me that very first time, I cried out, over and over again, “Oh, God!”

For six months, with the exceptions of Christmas and Easter, when even bad Catholics make an appearance in church, Anthony has worshipped my body every Sunday as if it is the only cathedral he will ever need to enter. When I let myself think about it, which isn’t often, I feel the sharp edge of guilt knocking against the ache of desire. I push it aside because I want him so bad he makes me ache—and because being with him has opened up something inside me, unleashing a frenzy of creativity I’ve never experienced before.

I spend the nights between our meetings painting. I don’t go out with friends anymore, I don’t want to. I want to fuck Anthony—and if I can’t satisfy that desire, I want to be alone and paint. Canvases are lined against the walls and perched on window sills. The longer I am with him, the more… feral, for lack of a better word, my art has become. My art is darker, wilder, almost frightening. And in some of my work, I find myself painting Anthony. But not the Anthony I know, or at least not the suburban dad he appears to be. No, the creature in my paintings is the man who brings out this wildness in me in bed and in my art. The guilt of being with him never goes away completely, but it seems an small sacrifice for what Anthony gives me in return.

Anthony has no such guilt about being with me. I ask him, but the answer is always the same.

“She has her faith and I have mine,” he tells me, using his long fingers to part my plump labia. He opens me to his heavy-lidded gaze, hovering over me like a dark devil while his cock lies thick and hard against his thigh.

I moan, writhing in anticipation as I clutch the brass headboard. “What is your faith?”

“This,” he says, slowly pushing a thick finger inside of my wetness. “Desire is the closest we get to heaven in this life. Passion is sacred.”

I am intrigued even while I’m aroused. He slides a second finger in me and I nearly come off the bed. He knows how to touch me, this middle-aged, middle-class suburban husband and father. He knows what I need and he gives it to me like a gift.

“That sounds like sacrilege,” I gasp.

His laugh is fiendish as his fingers coax me into incoherence, gliding over the engorged bump of my G-spot like it was a worry stone. “I don’t believe anything is sacred,” he says. “But I believe in fucking you.”

I don’t know what I believe in, but at that moment it doesn’t seem to matter. All I know is his fingers are moving inside of me, stroking me in a way I’ve never experienced. An image of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam flits through my fevered brain—God reaching down to touch Adam, their fingers not quite touching. Anthony’s fingers inside of me are like the fingers of God, creating me from the inside out. Conjuring my soul into existence from the sheer will of his dark desire, making me in his image. And then making me come.

Excerpt from "In the Dark Woods" (Fairy Tale Lust: Erotic Fantasies for Women, Cleis Press 2010)