Well, I would begin with a book
opening and a narrators deep intriguing voice, however this type font and a
screen prevent me. Fiction along with all of literature is written to evoke an
emotion in the readers. Just recently I journeyed into Baltimore and saw the
play “Beauty and the Beast” a new hit musical. I was impressed with the cast
and enjoyed the performance. The play included new songs that were not in the
original Disney movie and added dancing, plus amusing antics to make for an
entertaining evening. This performance struck a different emotional chord with
me because my younger sister played Belle in her middle school musical back
when she was in 9th grade. I can recount the many hours when I could
here her matching pitches with recordings trying to adapt the perfect “Belle”
voice. She succeeded and as a result I subconsciously learned all the words. It
made this viewing of the play even more special.
In the play, Belle has visions of
the fairy tales that she reads in her books. The townspeople judge her but she
continues to read and wish to be in any other place but her town. This aligns
perfectly with what William Wordsworth is conveying through his poem “I
Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”. The speaker is caught up in a daydream. He is
ignoring the pains of everyday-life and would much rather be like a cloud,
soaking in the sights of nature. It brings the speaker great joy to dream of
far off fields of daffodils; the very same is felt by Belle when she reads her
books.
One of the most important lessons
that Beauty and the Beast can teach us is to not make judgments based on
appearances. Belle learns to love the Beast and he learns to love her as
well. Unfortunately, the same
cannot be said for Aylmer and Georgiana, the main characters of the short story
“The Birthmark” by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Aylmer is married to the
closest-to-perfect woman in the world and he becomes disgusted with her one and
only flaw, a birthmark in the shape of a tiny hand on her check. Eventually
this becomes an obsession and he has to remove it by means of alchemy. In the
end the birthmark is removed but Georgiana dies in the process. That Aylmer
failed to see was the beauty of his wife’s spirit; what she had that was inside
of her. One example is when he asks her to sing. She obliges and it is
beautiful and soothing. This further drives Aylmer to create a perfect human
being out of his wife and she ends up paying the ultimate price.
As the plot thickens in Beauty and
the Beast, Belle’s father is accused of insanity because of his ravings about
the Beast. As it turns out, Belle saves her father from asylum by showing the
beast and thereby proving that he is not crazy. One of the most convincing
insights to the mind of the insane comes from the short story “The Yellow
Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The narrator in this story describes a
life of solitude as a prescription for her nervous condition. Her husband is a
physician and insists that this is the cure for his wife; however, he is the
one that brings about this horrible, slow slide from sanity. The wife is
appalled at first by the ugly wallpaper that coats her room. As the story
continues, she becomes more and more attached to and intrigued by the woman
that she sees inside the paper. At the climax of the story, the woman is
convinced that she is the woman in the paper, thus completing her one-way trip
to insanity. Not quite the story of the kooky father of Belle but at the same
time provides the casual reader with a notion of what is is truly like to be insane.
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