Beauty And The Beast And The Pig King

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Beauty and the Beast are perhaps one of the most romantic fairy tales ever told. The tale manages to sustain its audience for so long by painting a picture of the beauty and ugliness that lurks in all of us, which is relatable to all humankind. When one digs deeper inside the tale, discovering the foreshadowed lining of “Beauty and the Beast”. In the following response, I aim to deconstruct by comparing and contrasting both the 1891 Italian fairy tale, The Pig King, written by Giovanni Francesco Straparola, and Disney’s 1991 animated film, Beauty and the Beast, and how both the Beast and the Pig Prince were transformed by the kindness and love of a virtuous woman. An enduring curiosity of Straparola’s work resides in how the sign, the pig skin, expound upon the reversal of gender roles, good will and nature of women and the acceptance for women to overlook the nefarious behavior of men. …show more content…
The cleverness of Medina made her stand out from all the other fairytale women. Throughout the history of fairy tales, women were always portrayed as beautiful, submissive and powerless, while men are pictured as powerful and dominant. Even thought, Medina was submissive to her husband she also was very intelligent because she was the only one out her sisters to stay alive because she allowed herself to accept his flaws which later rewarded her a handsome prince. Her role challenges gender stereotypes and patriarchal ideologies because roles generally classified with men such as being the