The Tigers Bride

The Tigers Bride is another contemporary version of the Beauty and the Beast; it is narrated by the heroine as she watches her father play a stranger, the Beast at a game of cards. She witnesses her father lose everything “rids himself of the last scraps of my inheritance” (pg.56) to finally losing his daughter to the game also “My father lost me to The Beast at cards” (pg.56) leaving the father in squalor and then the young girl is left to live on the Beasts estate. After close observation the young girl notices the Beast is dressed like a man “only from a distance would you think The Beast not much different from any other man, although he wears a mask with a man’s face painted most beautifully on it ... with too much formal symmetry of feature to be entirely human ...He wears a wig, too, false hair tied at the nape with a bow” (pg.58). It is quite clear the Beast is making attempts to act human despite the awkwardness he presents trying to avoid his feline like stance, young and naive the girl is frightened yet inquisitive what the Beast could want with her as she remembers tales of old told to her as a child “Yes my beauty! GOBBLEYOU UP! How I’d squeal in delighted terror, half believing her, half knowing that she teased me” (pg.62) at the tales of the half men half beasts.

When she enters the Beast’s abode it was not to her expectations “I saw The Beast bought solitude, not luxury, with his money” (pg.63). Everything in his home was wild and animalistic “The Beast had given the horses the use of the dining room ... gaping doors and broken windows let the wind in everywhere” (pg.63). When the Beast summons the girl, the valet explains “My masters sole desire is to see the pretty young lady unclothed without her dress” (pg.64) if the girl is to accept the proposal she would then be free to return home. Undoubtedly the girl declines the Beasts offer and she bravely stands up to The Beast “If you wish to give me money, then I should be pleased to receive it. But I must stress that you should give me only the same amount of money that you would give to any other women in such circumstances” (pg.65). The Beast is left feeling ashamed and the young girl is escorted to “a veritable cell, windowless, airless, lightless” (pg.65) resembling a cage for an animal or a prison cell. She is then sent a gift of some diamond earrings “a single diamond earring, perfect as a tear” (pg.67) to which she “snapped the box shut and tossed it into a corner” (pg.67).

The valet then invites the girl to go horse riding which she playfully accepts, she is then halfway through her riding experience stopped for a break to which the valet dares to see ‘Milord’ in his naked state seen as though she declined the Beasts offer to make herself naked to him. The Beast in his natural state exposes himself as a tiger “a great, feline, tawny shape whose pelt was barred with a savage geometry of bars of the colour of burned wood. His domed, heavy head, so terrible he must hide it” (pg.71). In return the girl generates some sexual arousal and she exposes the top part of her body to The Beast “I showed his grave silence my white skin, my red nipples, and the horses turned their heads to watch me” (pg.72). The Beast then leaves with his valet to hunt. Once returned to her new home she sees through the enchanted mirror that her father’s finances have once again returned and keeping to The Beasts word he frees the young girl. The girl soon realises that she does not want to leave this place and this mere voyeuristic encounter has ignited something inside her; again the girl strips off, totally naked this time “I was unaccustomed to nakedness. I was so unused to my own skin that to take off all my clothes involved a kind of flaying. I thought The Beast had wanted a little thing compared with what I was prepared to give him; but it is not natural for human kind to go naked, not since first we hid our loins with fig leaves. He had demanded the abominable” (pg.73) and makes her way to The Beasts chamber. The comfort both the young girl and the tiger have in their own nakedness in their own habitat which generates highly sexualised imagery of both sex and rebirth, the tiger ends with licking the young girl who transforms into a tigress where her skin is replaced by fur “And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shining hairs” (pg.75).

ANALYSIS

This is a retrospective tale which considers the similar theme of The Courtship of Mr. Lyon which is female objectification the prime example would be her dad losing her to The Beast at a game of cards. There seems to be a similar transaction of both daughters in both tales although one seems to be centred on the love for ones child (The Courtship of Mr. Lyon) and the other on personal and financial gains (The Tigers Bride). There is a considerable difference in the type of objectification the previous father tries to make a suitable trade with his daughter’s welfare in mind whereas the latter father is careless and bargains with his child as if she were an object in his possession. It is however Carter’s use of diction that emphasises these transactions completes with objectifying overtones. It is clear that from the beginning of this tale the heroine was to be the object that was to be the prize to be bought and sold for her father’s personal advantage.

The soubrette is a doll that powders the heroines face and many a time ponders “that clockwork girl who powdered my cheeks for me; had I not been allotted only the same kind of imitative life amongst men that the doll-maker had given her?" (pg.70). What could this soubrette represent social femininity which upholds society’s idea of a woman; the fact that the soubrette has to be wound up to perform her task represents the idea that women are unable to think and act for  themselves. Once the heroine begins to accept her forthcoming desires, she states she can no longer be of any resemblance to the soubrette, as she is breaking away from the fixed stereotypes placed upon the female section of society. Here the heroine plans to return the soubrette to her father in place of herself “I will dress her in my own clothes, wind her up, send her back to perform the part of my father's daughter” (pg.73).

Compared to The Courtship of Mr. Lyon, Beauty is described as unspoiled living away in the countryside away from societal influences but when she moves to the city she transforms into a materialistic young lady concerned with female vanity, looks and materialistic possession and gains. In The Tigers Bride, the heroine soon realises that men treat her like the soubrette, never as an equal; she then notices she is no different than The Beast, he wears a mask painted with a human man’s face on it to conceal his real identity and as an act of preten. The narrator considers this mask as too perfect and represents the idealised civility of a person; the heroine understandably does not want to be seen as an object so she finds it difficult to understand why The Beast should want to model himself as one.

Comparably in The Courtship of Mr. Lyon Beauty is the character that has to accept the Beast in order for him to transform into a human, so that they can be together in a human reality; however in The Tigers Bride it is both the heroine and The Beast who have to accept one another, and their pure animalistic core so that together they can break free from the social constraints applied within the human world. Carter believes that the individual must be strong enough to break away from their social identities of the soubrette doll to live a wholesome life with desire.

Again sex and sexual desire are catalysts for transformation in both the heroine and The Beast, the symbol of the rose she gives to her father represents her virginity that it is intact, pure and beautiful; but when it becomes “smeared with blood”(pg.61) it foreshadows the imminent transformation of character to lustful and loss of virginity, the heroines growing maturity. The Beast does not ask the heroine to fulfill his desire out of an act of voyeurism; he wants her to see him in his purest animal form and to be accepted as again he is othered by his physical appearance. The Beast is only interested in the exposition of the true animal self which he can see in the heroine. The final scene of the heroine is a transformation mixing both sexual activity and the consequence of the latter, birth. Inherently the heroine acknowledges a change in herself but it is the aid of The Beast which is needed for full transformation. The sexual act of licking is represented as the heroines rebirth as a tigress, the idea of sex here is not considered a male dominated act but rather the heroine claiming herself in her bare animalistic form.