Beauty and the Beast and The Great Gatsby

Beauty and the Beast was originally created as one of the Disney Princess movie-musicals, with music by Alan Menken and lyrics by Tim Rice in 1991. It was put on stage in 19, and ran on Broadway for 17 years (making it the 8th longest running show in Broadway history. In both shows, the title song, “Beauty and the Beast”, and “Be Our Guest” are the two most well known numbers in Disney’s history. The show is set in France circa late 1700s, right as the French Revolution is beginning.

The musical focuses on themes of love, societal values, gender roles, revolution, and the American dream. Just as it is said in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one… just remember that all the people in the world haven’t had the advantages you’ve had” (1).  Both works idealize the need to look beyond face value and view someone for whom they are, without comparing them to the values that society has deemed correct. The taboo love stories that each harbor are both endearing and interesting in similar ways: the characters aren’t allowed to be together and end up having to leave each other, though they are still very much in love. Both Belle and Daisy have to choose between true love and being accepted in their proprietary societies.

Beauty and the Beast’s “Cogsworth”, the talking, worrisome clock, has a line where he is showing Belle a hallway styled from the “Late Neo-Classic Baroque Period.” Cogsworth here resembles the part of French society that values the architecture of the past and is a part of creating the Gothic architecture of 16^th century France. The Prince’s wealth is old, but his servants aren’t used to the lavish style and are trying to keep alive as much of the castle as they can before it disappears. In the Great Gatsby, the class of New Wealth does the same by styling their houses after Gothic architecture: “it was an factual imitation of the Hotel de Ville in Normandy” (5).  The value of wealth in society is to allude to the wealth of the past, we are “borne back ceaselessly into the past,” to a place that already had establish living standards that can define who is wealthy and who is not.

In the musical, the true villain of the show is Gaston: he is overbearing and assumes that Belle will marry him without question. Before he proposes to Belle he asks of a group of blonde women, “you’re not going to let a little thing like marriage get in the way, now are you?” Gaston wants to marry Belle because she is the most beautiful in the village, as is he, and in this society the aesthetic value tops all others. However, the blonde ‘Silly Singing Girls’ are appalled at the proposal because, as the “inventor’s daughter”, Belle doesn’t come from a wealthy-enough family to be wed to Gaston. In addition, Belle is reprimanded for reading and being a female intellectual.  This idea of social acceptance, or lack thereof, is paralleled by the reaction to Gatsby and Daisy’s relationship, as well as that of Tom and Myrtle. Because Gatsby is New Wealth and Daisy is Old Wealth, Daisy has to choose Tom over Gatsby in an attempt to conform to the Old Wealth homogeneity. Tom would never actually have a relationship with Myrtle because it would be an act of social mobility, which he was taught to look down upon. In all three cases, true love is seen as invaluable when compared to relationships within socioeconomic classes.

Although Beauty and the Beast is set during the French Revolution, the revolution is not shown explicitly in the show as it doesn’t contribute to the story. However, the chord progression in “The Mob Song” mimics that of “One Day More” from Les Miserables, a musical about the French Revolution. Belle is an example of the intellectual set of the French Revolutionists as well as the large gender role reversal that started to occur at that point in time. Gaston and the Silly Singing Girls fight this with a mindset of propriety and manner. The same occurs with Tom’s white supremacist mindset in reaction to the racial revolution of the Roaring 20s. Gaston’s brutishness is a simplified version of Tom’s Anglo-Saxon dominance. In this, Belle’s progressive mindset resembles what would eventually become the American dream, as does her father. His entrepreneurial inventions exemplify how as a member of the working class, he has the dream of making his own money and living life rich: “One day we’ll go live in the castles you read about in your books.” James Gatz had the same desires of living the life of the wealthy.