Inner Growth and Outer Transformation: "Beast-Like" Characters from The Golden Ass to The Fire Rose Grace E Cornelius College

Beast-bridegroom stories have been around for centuries. They can be traced back to the story of Psyche and Cupid, written in the second century as a side story of The Golden Ass by Lucius Apuleius. In these stories, a young maiden falls in love and marries a hideous beast. Then, the beast transforms into a handsome man, seemingly due to the woman completing series of tasks and seeing the beauty within the man. This theme, “seeing the beauty within”, is common throughout beast-bridegroom stories; however, upon a closer look, one might notice that these stories revolve more around the man being transformed from the inside out. How can a woman notice a man’s inner goodness if the man has none? One might theorize that it is the inner change that takes place in the beast that causes the outer transformation, rather than the woman’s love.

When comparing Jeanne-Marie Leprince De Beaumont’s Beauty and the Beast with Mercedes Lackey’s The Fire Rose, this theory of inner transformation becomes evident. In Beauty and the Beast, the beast shows his ugly inner character by condemning the merchant after he takes a single rose from a branch with many flowers. De Beaumont writes, “‘You are very ungrateful,’ said the beast in a terrible voice....