In Memorium: Sir Terry Pratchett

Sir Terry Pratchett has died.  Somehow it falls kind of flat to simply say he was one of my favorite authors.  In fact, Terry Pratchett was one of the wisest, funniest, most insightful and compassionate writers I ever read.  I loved losing myself in his worlds, absorbing his perceptive intelligence and pithy common sense.  

His most famous series was set on the Discworld, a flat planet with waters perpetually pouring over its edge.  It rested on the backs of four elephants who stood on the shell of a great turtle swimming through space.  It was a world of magic, wizardry and witchcraft, trolls and dwarfs and humans and pixies, into which intruded from time to time some of the phenomena of our own world: telegraphs and trains, the movie industry, the banking world and the postal service.  With a cutting, satirical edge that never became cruel or bleak, that never lost sight of the beauty of the universe or the value of the human individual, Pratchett gave us some of the most enjoyable plots and best characters I've ever encountered in literature:  crotchety Granny Weatherwax, honest Commander Vimes, rascally-but-responsible Moist Von Lipwig, and the ever-polite Death with his hood and scythe, endlessly curious about what it was like to be alive.

But Pratchett also wrote a number of other really wonderful, non-Discworld books. Nation is set on an alternate earth where a young islander and a shipwrecked princess cope with the aftermath of a deadly tsunami.  Dodger is about a young entrepreneur in a Dickensian London.  Good Omens (written in tandem with the great fantasy author Neil Gaiman) is about the Apocalypse, the Anti-Christ and the end of the world.  In fact, this author was so prolific that I know there are still some of his books out there I haven't read yet-- and that I will read them someday with the bittersweet enjoyment of knowing there will never be anything quite like this written ever again. 

There are several web posts (like this one) celebrating Sir Terry by quoting some of his funniest stuff. But I'd like to give tribute to him here by quoting some of his smartest stuff: some of the things he or his characters said that has really made me think, that has opened my eyes and widened my horizons.

Sir Terry used humor and fantasy to explore almost every area of human thought, from religion and philosophy to science and invention.  He was not a Christian, but he had a deep sense of morality and a reverence for the beauty of the universe and the preciousness of life.  (The Demaris Film & Bible Blog has a good synopsis/analysis of Pratchett's beliefs if you'd like to read more about them-- but as I have explained elsewhere, I believe that God's grace is over all the world, and that there is nothing to fear from a manifestation of that grace in any person, whether they agree with my theology or not.)

Pratchett understood people as few of us ever do-- and yet despite all our self-induced blindnesses and stupidities, all the things that make us laughable or even pathetic, Pratchett really loved human beings, just for being human.  His character Death never encountered a human that he didn't treat with dignity and consideration-- even the worst of the worst.  Other authors have made Death terrible; Terry Pratchett made him lovable.  

I think that, paradoxically, this is because Sir Terry's books are filled most of all with a zest for living. When he wrote about trains, he wrote with sheer admiration of the power of the engine and the ingenuity of the engineer.  When he wrote about the postal service, that mundane institution suddenly revealed itself as a showcase of the human capacity for interconnection and mutual service. Nothing, it seemed, was mundane to Terry Pratchett.  Everything was fascinating and worth looking at with the fresh eyes of exploration. Perhaps even death was a thing that, when it came, he was curious to explore. 

So here are some of the things he has said that most capture that sense of exploration and insight. Emphases are in the original texts. The title of the source appears after each quote in italics.

On humans and storytelling:

[A]ll men are writers, journalists scribbling within their skulls the narrative of what they see and hear. - Dodger

On death:

[N]o-one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away... The span of someone's life, they say, is only the core of their actual existence. - Reaper Man

On law and order:

[Y]ou were so worried about legal and illegal that you never stopped to think about whether it was right or wrong. - Snuff

On tribalism and its antidote:

It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things. - Jingo

On evil, and how evil happens when the ideology is more important than the person:

Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things. And right now it would happen if you thought there was a thing called a father, and a thing called a mother, and a thing called a daughter, and a thing called a cottage, and told yourself that if you put them all together you had a thing called a happy family. - I Shall Wear Midnight

and

[I]t's true that some of the most terrible things in the world are done by people who think, genuinely think, that they're doing it for the best, especially if there is some god involved. - Snuff

 On fundamentalist, cultic terrorism:

. . . [E]very deviation from the norm was treated as an attack on all that was truly dwarfish. Others had already fled and died, and who could say they knew how many more were left. . . And the trouble with madness was that the mad didn't know they were mad. The grags [leaders] came down heavily on those who did not conform and seemed not to realize that this was like stamping potatoes into the mud to stop them growing. - Raising Steam

 On cognitive dissonance:

Sometimes people fools themselves into believing things that aren't true. Sometimes that can be quite dangerous for the person. They see the world in a wrong way. They won't let themselves see that what they believe is wrong. But often there is a part of the mind that does know, and the right words can let it out. - Unseen Academicals

 On parenthood and commitment:

He'd be home in time. Would a minute have mattered? No, probably not, although his young son appeared to have a very accurate internal clock. Possibly even two minutes would be ok. Three minutes, even. You could go to five, perhaps. But that was just it. If you could go to five minutes, then you'd go to ten, then half an hour, a couple of hours. . . and not see your son all evening. So that was that. Six o'clock, prompt. Every day. Read to Young Sam. No excuses. He'd promised himself that. No excuses. No excuses at all. Once you had a good excuse, you opened the door to bad excuses. - Thud!

On cultural assimilation:

"What kind of name is that, I ask you? Who’s going to take you seriously with a name like that? This is modern times, right?" 

He looked at her defiantly, and she thought: and so one at a time we all become human – human werewolves, human dwarfs, human trolls... the melting pot melts in one direction only, and so we make progress. - Unseen Academicals

 On prejudice:

She thought that being foreign was a crime, or at least some sort of illness that you could catch by being out out in the sun too much, or eating olives. - Nation

 and

Everybody knows trolls eat people and spit them out. Everybody knows dwarfs cut off your legs. But at the same time everybody knows that what everybody knows is wrong. - Unseen Academicals

On religion:

[The old man said,] "Everything I know makes me believe that [God] is in the order that is inherent, amazingly, in all things, and in the way the universe opens to our questioning. When I see the shining path over the lagoon, on an evening like this, at the end of a good day, I believe."] 

"In [God]?" asked the girl. 

This got a smile. "Perhaps I just believe. You know, in things generally. That works, too. Religion is not an exact science. Sometimes, of course, neither is science." - Nation

Finally, these two that I can't locate and don't remember what book they came from, but I have always remembered them, at least in paraphrase:

A good ruler doesn't drive; he steers.

and

Stories are how we humans tell ourselves who we are.

Anyway, if you've never read anything by Terry Pratchett, I hope you will. And I hope you'll be as amused, as intrigued-- and as deeply touched and moved-- as I have been.

Don't Blame Beauty and the Beast

I've read about this in several places on the Internet-- that the well-known fairy-tale story "Beauty and the Beast" is nothing more than a justification for women to stay with abusive men.  As the blogger on Not Language But a Map puts it in her narrative about being shown the Disney film version by a college professor:

She laid it out for us fairly neatly, because—and again, I say this as someone who loves this film—the movie Beauty and the Beast is a fairly cut-and-dried abuse-apologist narrative. It is quite literally a movie about a woman who takes a ~wild beast~ and tames him with her love. It is a movie that says, “Here is a man who is literally a beast, and here is a woman who shows him love despite that! And lo, her love changes him. Her love makes him better. Her love saves him. Her love—quite literally—transforms him from the dangerous and abusive personality he is at the beginning of the film into someone else entirely.” In short, it is a movie that says, “If you love your abuser enough, they’ll stop being abusive. You just need to love them more. It’s your job to love them, to fix them, to change them.” Which is, of course, a terrible and dangerous and very pervasive lie.

There was, naturally, backlash from the room. We’d all loved this movie since we were children, and none of us wanted to see it the way she was showing it to us. None of us wanted to have to acknowledge what she was saying, both because it made something we loved feel less worthy of loving and because it made us feel shitty for not having recognized it ourselves. Eventually, one girl raised her hand and said, “Okay, I see what you’re saying, but come on. We’re all adults here; it’s not like anybody is watching this and taking it seriously, or thinking that, like, the Beast is a good boyfriend model or whatever! I mean, for god’s sake, it’s a kid’s movie.”

My professor rounded on her heel, pointed a finger at the girl, and said, “Exactly.” Just like that, the room went silent.

The same idea is repeated in The Normalization of Partner Violence in Beauty and the Beast:

This clip brings to light the normalization and romanticization of partner abuse in Beauty and the Beast. As scholars in the documentary argue, the film teaches girls that a woman should be patient and supportive of her abusive partner in order to help him change his behavior (i.e., transform into a prince). Such messages are harmful when, in reality, women and girls should be encouraged to leave abusive relationships and seek help if their partner is mean, violent, and coercive. After screening the clip, instructors might ask some of the following questions: What are the types of partner abuse we see in this clip? How does Disney sugarcoat the Beast’s abuse as “just a short temper?” How might these messages about the normalization and romanticization of partner abuse be dangerous to children? The clip is a great segue into a broader discussion of how femininity is represented in Disney films. What desirable feminine qualities are associated with princesses (e.g., beauty, helplessness, passivity, etc)?

I can see the point they are making, but I think some of the assumptions they are taking for granted ought to be examined more closely.  Is this really essentially a story about a woman who redeems an abuser with her love?  Is it really a message to the abused that they should put up with abuse? For one thing, the Disney version was nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award, which I think is a pretty good indication that there might be some fairly deep, important themes going on in it.  And of course there is also the original fairy tale, which originally arose out of the oral folktale tradition and has been retold in many incarnations.  One of my favorite fantasy authors, Robin McKinley, has written two novels which are direct retellings of this story, and many others which are inspired by it.  As she puts it:

I’ve read every version of B&B I can lay hands on, but my Beauty and the Beast is a part of me, like an arm or a leg. Or like the ground a rose-bush is planted in: I can’t do without it, it nourishes me. I used to say—truthfully—that I was jealous of readers who ‘went’ to BEAUTY as an escape from boring ordinary life, because by writing the story I’d exorcised the BEAUTY AND THE BEAST in my head. It grew back. Then I wrote ROSE DAUGHTER. This time there wasn’t any nonsense about exorcism. My Beauty and the Beast is still in the back of my mind or the bottom of my heart, full of roses and romance. If I’m very, very, very, very, very lucky I may get to write it a third time. Or a sixth or a sixtieth. Most of my stories are more or less versions of Beauty and the Beast. In the afterword to ROSE I say that someone has declared that each author has only one story, it’s how they retell it. Yes. Mine is Beauty and the Beast.

[Emphases in original.]

Ms. McKinley obviously feels that there is something very special about this tale, just as a tale.  I have always felt so, too-- and though I can see the concern about the Beast's behavior in the movie, and I think it's a very valid concern, I would hate to see this story censored point-blank from our culture or forbidden to our children.  Maybe there are good reasons why people love this movie and this fairy tale.  Maybe there are reasons why kids love it-- and not just because they're too innocent to see the "real" message. 

Beauty and the Beast, in its essence, is a story against prejudice.  It's a story about looking past the surface of things and seeing the value underneath. And it would be such a pity if people could not apply that very principle to the story itself, and could not look past the apparent justification of domestic violence which is on the surface, to the message which is deeper, and which is the reason, I think, why this story has always resonated so with its audiences.  

Laura Beres of the University of Toronto takes a more nuanced approach to the domestic violence issue in her 1999 paper Beauty and the Beast: the Romanticization of Abuse in Popular Culture.  She does say:

[I]n [stories such as] Beauty and the Beast, the hero is initially controlling and distant, if not blatantly abusive, and has been hurt in his past by a woman, or women, which has contributed to his distant and unloving manner. By being loved by the heroine, he can heal from his past experiences and become the perfect partner for her.

but she also adds :

I think I have been clear, but want to reiterate before examining texts that I am considering the possible meanings which could be taken from these texts by women who are attempting to make sense of their context of living with an abusive partner. I am not assuming that anyone else would take these same meanings.

Perhaps one of the reasons many people tend not to see normalization of domestic violence as a message of the fairy tale or movie unless someone points it out to them, is because this is essentially, fundamentally, not what this story is about.  I think it is a potentially dangerous inference which it is possible to see-- and that, particularly for women and children who have lived with domestic violence as if it were a normal occurrence, this inference ought to be pointed out as not a healthy message to take from the story.  But to see it as the message of this story, and to jettison the story accordingly, could mean missing out on some very positive impacts that the story is capable of imparting.

Here's a portion of one version of the original fairy tale, in which the Beast gives Beauty's father hospitality but turns on him for stealing a rose from the garden, sparing his life in return for Beauty being brought to his castle:

In the beginning, Beauty was frightened of the Beast, and shuddered at the sight of it. Then she found that, in spite of the monster's awful head, her horror of it was gradually fading as time went by. She had one of the finest rooms in the Castle, and sat for hours, embroidering in front of the fire. And the Beast would sit, for hours on end, only a short distance away, silently gazing at her. Then it started to say a few kind words, till in the end, Beauty was amazed to discover that she was actually enjoying its conversation. The days passed, and Beauty and the Beast became good friends. . .

"If you swear that you will return here in seven days time, I'll let you go and visit your father!" Beauty threw herself at the Beast's feet in delight. . .

Beauty was happy at last. However, she had failed to notice that seven days had gone by.

Then one night she woke from a terrible nightmare. She had dreamt that the Beast was dying and calling for her, twisting in agony.

"Come back! Come back to me!" it was pleading. The solem [sic] promise she had made drove her to leave home immediately.

"Hurry! Hurry, good horse!" she said, whipping her steed onwards towards the castle, afraid that she might arrive too late. She rushed up the stairs, calling, but there was no reply. Her heart in her mouth, Beauty ran into the garden and there crouched the Beast, its eyes shut, as though dead. Beauty threw herself at it and hugged it tightly.

"Don't die! Don't die! I'll marry you . . ." At these words, a miracle took place. The Beast's ugly snout turned magically into the face of a handsome young man.

"How I've been longing for this moment!" he said. "I was suffering in silence, and couldn't tell my frightful secret. An evil witch turned me into a monster and only the love of a maiden willing to accept me as I was, could transform me back into my real self. My dearest! I'll be so happy if you'll marry me . . ."

According to the SurLaLune Fairy Tales website, this story is related to the Greek "Cupid and Psyche" myth and to other tales where a young woman who is forced to marry does not recognize the true nature of her husband.  The original idea behind these tales may have been to encourage girls who entered arranged marriages with older men to look beyond appearances and learn to appreciate their husbands for who they were.  This, of course, is hardly an ideal for marriage, and it is a very good thing that women are free today to choose their own partners.  But one thing that seems to be in common in most of these original stories is that the Beast is uniformly gentle with Beauty; that he never offers her violence or abuse either verbally or physically, except to require her to stay with him (which he then relents of).  The idea is not that by choosing to love a vicious creature, Beauty changes him to a gentle one.  Rather, by being willing to see him as gentle and kind as he really is despite his outward appearance, Beauty releases the Beast to become outwardly as beautiful as he has been inwardly all along.  Thus the story is about overcoming prejudice and looking past the surface to see the real human being beneath.

Robin McKinley's versions focus on this aspect, with the twist that both her Beauty characters and her Beast characters need to learn to appreciate the other.  What she calls "my Beauty and the Beast" is thus about how two beings (and sometimes, by implication, two societies) who are strange to one another, learn to see past their differences.

It's true that the Disney version changes the original tale quite a bit.  But I think seeing it as a story where a woman chooses to love an abuser and thus turns him around, misses the points the Disney authors were trying to make.  That they did succeed at some level in making these points is testified to by the Academy Award nomination.  There are actually some very important and valuable themes of this movie which I think audiences picked up on, while they tended to miss the whole "normalization of domestic violence" dynamic.

First-- and it's somewhat ironic that those who wish to champion women seem to miss this-- the Disney story actually begins with a woman pronouncing judgment, and the story is all about the unfolding repercussions of the enchantress's curse.  Isn't it a distortion of the story to ignore that first female catalyst character? The woman at the beginning of the story is the archetypical "wise woman" of the fairy tale tradition. Her judgment is wise and sound, and it is the reason for the whole rest of the plot.

The Beast is cursed. This is extremely important, and if this element is not understood as a crucial part of the story, the message of the story becomes disrupted.  The point is that the Beast is a beast. Literally, a beast-- and he has been turned into a beast as part of a judgment for his sins.  I believe it's very important not to let our modern, rationalistic mindset blind us to the central role that the supernatural plays in this tale.  In a very real sense, the original fairy tale was not about the Beast-- it was about Beauty, and what she learns about the difference between outward perception and the inner nature.  But the Disney version begins by focusing not on Beauty, but on the Beast-- and thus adds a whole new element to the the tale of overcoming prejudice.  In Disney's hands it becomes a tale of judgment, repentance and redemption.

The magic element in this story is the spell of judgment performed by the enchantress at the beginning. She sees that the young man is a beast and turns him into what he really is, in order for him to eventually see himself for who he is, which is necessary for him to take responsibility. If you take the magic element out of this story, it turns into something else-- and that something else is normalization of domestic violence. Putting it in purely human, natural terms means the story is no longer "Beauty and the Beast." It's "Beauty and the abusive man." And as "Beauty and the abusive man" it doesn't and cannot work-- because the essential theme of supernatural judgment, repentance and redemption are lost.

This theme is brought out even more clearly by the addition of Gaston to the movie version.  There was no Gaston-type character in the original fairy tale at all.  But he is there in the Disney version as a foil for the Beast, to help make the point about what the Beast is really all about.  Gaston is everything the Beast is not.  He is outwardly handsome, while the Beast is outwardly ugly.  He is confident and superficially (if arrogantly) charming-- while the Beast is surly and, let's face it, bestial.  And it is Gaston who shows us that the Beast is not actually the real abuser in this version.

The fact is that both the Beast and Gaston act abusively towards Belle.  The Beast imprisons her in a castle, roars at her and attempts to deny her food.  But Gaston stalks her, refuses to accept her plain "no" as a "no," and finally attempts to marry her against her will.  The Beast acts as he does towards Belle because the animal nature has taken him over. Gaston has no such excuse.

Belle, by her presence, shows the Beast what it is to be human again.  I think it's also important to note that Belle does not actually accept the Beast's abusive treatment of her.  She locks herself in her room at first,  and then flees.  When he rescues her, she tells him straight out that he should not have treated her that way.  She does not begin to accept him until he begins to show signs of becoming acceptable.  No woman should ever put up with such treatment from a man. But the Beast is not a man.  He has, through the wise woman's curse, become a beast-- and as a beast, the rules regarding him are different. He needs to see Belle's reaction to his beastly behavior, in order to see himself as the beast he is.  He needs to watch Belle be human, to learn what it means to be human.

In the end, the Beast shows that he has indeed learned how to be human, by turning away from killing Gaston even though it means his own death. Gaston, secure in his supposed humanity, learns nothing, and by his beastly behavior shows that he is spiritually the real beast.

I really can't see the Beast as an abuser who gets redeemed by a true woman's love-- because it's not her love that redeems him. It's his. The Beast redeems himself through learning how to love, arising out of self-awareness, acknowledgment of responsibility, and repentance.  He thus becomes inwardly a person once more: a person who can love and be loved-- and this is what breaks the curse and makes him outwardly the prince that he has finally truly become. 

Anyway, I think children watching the movie, because they still believe in magic, tend to "get" this more easily than adults.  Unless children are raised in violent homes, they really don't need to be told "it's not ok in real life for a man to treat a woman like this." They already know-- but they can't articulate it, so it's easy for experts to come along years later and explain what's wrong with the story that they never saw before. But maybe it's not that they didn't see it because no one told them. Maybe they didn't see it because that really wasn't what the story was about.

I'm not saying we should ignore the potential problem of what this movie could impart, particularly to those already in abusive situations, about domestic violence.  But I am saying that we should see the positive messages that this story-- in both its Disney and fairy-tale versions--- really does have to tell. We should combat the normalization of partner abuse wherever the temptation to see it as normal arises.  But I don't think the real message of this story, in either incarnation, is that domestic violence should be seen as normal or as something women should accept in the hope of changing the abuser.

We live in a world where women do receive messages that they should ignore their own needs, and even their own safety, and just be sweet.  We live in a world where women receive messages that abusers really don't mean it and should be lived with anyway.  We live in a world where abusers blame the abused and claim that they wouldn't act abusive if they were treated better.  And sometimes these messages get transmitted through popular stories, movies and memes.

And all of this stinks.  And it's wrong.  And it ought to be stopped.

But I don't think it's fair to blame Beauty and the Beast.  That's really not what the story, in its essence, is about.