My Own Personal Fairytale Revisionism
This morning I remembered the beautiful Grimm’s fairytale book my father bought us and its version of Beauty and the Beast. One of the passages remains upon my mind, but not for the reason I used to think.
In this particular retelling, Beauty’s dad is a merchant. He has to travel to the coast to check up on his latest shipment. Before he goes, he asks Beauty and his two stepdaughters if they want him to bring anything back.
The first stepdaughter glances over her shoulder and says, “Diamonds” or “Gold” or just “Money.” Something boring like that. The second stepdaughter jumps up and busts out something like, “I want an apple-green silk dress with seed pearls embroidered on the bodice. And an apple-green hat with pearls and a white feather. And apple-green satin pumps, with red heels!”
Now, let’s stop the story for a second, here. I have to tell you that, when I read that, as a child, I thought, “Damn.” I mean, damn. Girlfriend had taken the time to think it all out. And all green with pearl accents… and red heels. This girl blew my mind open. She changed my view of the world.
Okay. So the dad says okay, and then he asks Beauty, the youngest and his only real blood daughter, what she wants. She thinks for a while and then says, “Oh, just bring me a rose.”
Her two stepdaughters get mad. “You’re just saying that so father will think you’re less selfish than we are!” they say. The father tells them to hush up and then kisses and hugs Beauty and tells her he’ll bring her the prettiest rose he can.
And you all know what happens after that, of course. The dad gets waylaid by a monster and Beauty ends up prostituting herself to said monster in order to set her dad free.
All this time, I’ve remembered that story set-up because of the green dress with the red heels. It was only this morning that the probably hitherto subconscious thought surfaced in my mind: Hell, yeah, Beauty only said that shit because she was trying to seem unselfish. And, if I were the stepdaughters, I would have asked for something bad-ass and expensive, too. The man asked, didn’t he? He was rich, wasn’t he? If my stepfather wants to prove his love by buying me something, who the hell am I to shoot him down? If I were one of the stepdaughters, I would have been pissed at Beauty, too. And I like that they came out and told her to her face how annoying she was. Just a rose, indeed. What a freaking brown-noser. Like they didn’t have roses all over their rich people mansion, anyway, probably.
So, anyway… The moral of the story was supposed to be something like, “Be self-denying and you just may luck out and marry an asshole who turns out to be rich.” But, what I took from it was: “Be honest about what you want, and don’t be afraid to mix bold colors.”
I’m working on that second thing. I can wear green with pink, but haven’t yet worked my way up to green with red. But I’m young. There’s still time.
