MONSTERS - Oliver Bayliss

Can we read the Beast as the Levinasian 'Other'?

The concept of Emmanuel Levinas' radical 'other' could possibly be read into Jeanne-Marie Leprince De Beaumont's Beauty and the Beast.  In the story, while Beauty represents a selfless virtue and unwithering loyalty towards her father and family unit, an idealised female character,  the Beast can be seen as the opposite, in that he is alienated and exists outside normal civility and social morality. An example is when the father mistakes the Beast's open household as an hospitable invitation and the picking of a rose as a harmless gesture, while the Beast views both a violation of his own personal taboos. The Beast's and Beauty's extreme opposites generate meaning for each other.

The Beast can also be read as the 'infinite other' as his demands cannot be refused by the father. The Levinasian Other is regarded as above the self, the self's top priority, and the very presence of the Other exerts authority over the self even before any demands are made, an example being the will of God in scripture. In both Beauty and the Beast and Angela Carters's The Tiger's Bride, the Beast's all-powerful position is taken as a given and his commands are expected to be followed. In Beauty and the Beast, this cruel authority is conquered by Beauty's virtue, suggesting ethnically that it is in fact Beauty who serves as the 'infinite other', the moral of the story being that virtue should always be adhered to and will eventually win over misfortune and brutality in a seemingly unfair world.

In The Tiger's Bride, the meanings are less oppositional and the author appears to be subverting the original relationship into symbiosis. The Beast remains authoritive but is no longer an alienated monster, while the Beauty character is given no cause for loyalty for her gambling father, who serves as a cold patriarch. Beauty is not obliged to obey the Beast in the manner of the 'other' but goes along willingly, and the final transformation at the end suggests that the two characters, beauty and horror, are the same concept, and the unfair world cannot be conquered.

He is a monster but what is a 'monster'?

A monster can be seen as a representation of mortal danger and destruction outside the human sphere of control.  Traditional monsterous concepts feature elements of animals aggressive and/or lethal to people, such as claws, fangs, stings, talons etc. A monster may also feature natural forms of destruction, such as fire-breathing dragons or earthquake-stamping bulls. A traditional monster also represents the grotesque and the mutated human form which we would instinctively find threatening, such as the Cyclopes. In modern industrial civilisations, the animal kingdom poses very little threat to the populous, so modern usage of 'monster' tends to refer to a person who operates with no regard for morality or social conduct and causes harm and death for others, but does so consciously without any mental malfunction of insanity. The media will label extreme taboo-breakers, for example rapists or paedophiles, as monsters. The media might also use the 'term' monster in a more comforting way by promoting the sense of 'other' to distance the offender from the self. For example, Adolf Hitler might be labelled a monster to explain his actions and motivations, beyond our control and personal responsibility, as opposed to the far more disconcerting explanation that his motivations were typically human.