BEAUTY AND THE BEAST: THE DARK SIDES OF LOVE

[...]I argue that beauty not only promises happiness, as Stendhal's famous quote states, but also threatens its lovers with misery, frustration, and disorientation. By pairing beauty with ugliness and attraction with repulsion, the fairy tale invites investigation into the phenomenon of love, which, according to Plato's Symposium, is the natural and appropriate response to beauty. Beauty falls in love with the Beast, and Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, is often portrayed in company with a satyr, a strange and ugly beast, part human and part animal, who is in permanent erection (Images 3 and 4).3 By reading Beauty and the Beast alongside Alexander Nehamas's Neoplatonist account of beauty in Only a Promise of Happiness. According to Nehamas, beauty is a mystery (ibid., 78), that is always just beyond understanding (ibid., 76). [...]the experience of beauty calls forth the movement of interpretation, which itself is always a work in progress (ibid., 105).