Beauty and the Beast: The Original Story by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve (review)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: Beauty and the Beast: The Original Story by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve Charlotte Trinquet Du Lys Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, Beauty and the Beast: The Original Story, translated by Aurora Wolfgang (Toronto: Iter Press, 2020). Pp. 191. $41.95 paper. Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve had to wait 260 years to see the first integral English translation of her tale La Belle et la Bête. Aurora Wolfgang's 2020 English edition includes the translation of the dedication, the preface, the story frame, the tale itself, and the Story of the Lady Fairy and the Beast, removed from all previous English editions. Her translation is based on the first edition of La jeune Américaine et les contes marins, published in The Hague in 1740, and republished by Elisa Biancardi (Paris 2008). Moreover, Wolfgang reintroduces the erotic passages that are typical of the writing of fairy tales in the eighteenth century and that have been consistently eliminated since J. R. Planché's 1858 translation. Despite being the first written account of Beauty and the Beast, Villeneuve's version is not well known, because of the success of Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont's simplified version published in 1757. As Villeneuve's Beauty and the Beast was never reprinted during her lifetime and is seldom included in compilations, it has [End Page 640] been overlooked by French scholars of fairy tales, who more often concentrate their research on Leprince de Beaumont's version. Equally seldom translated in English, and even more rarely in its entirety, Villeneuve's fairy tale has not often been the subject of research on the fairy-tale canon, or on women in early modern literature. Wolfgang's edition will help remedy this absence in modern scholarship, as it shows that the tale was indeed vastly appreciated in Villeneuve's time and was the subject of several popular theatrical adaptations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (68). The integral translation is accompanied by a comprehensive introduction that is commendable for several reasons. First, Wolfgang explains the little-known life of Villeneuve within the context of her family history. Born in La Rochelle to a prominent noble Protestant family with ancestors involved with transatlantic commerce, Villeneuve was familiar with shipping and trade between the port and the colony of Saint-Domingue (today's Haiti) that is featured in the story frame (3). This knowledge allows Wolfgang to show the importance of re-including the tale within its story frame, and she makes an interesting comparison between the two as they both relate to the colonization of the island and the Atlantic slave trade. Wolfgang compares the wealth accumulated by the story frame's character Robercourt, an impoverished noble seeking fortune in the Caribbean, and Beauty's father's trading with the colonized islands, both reminiscent of Villeneuve's ancestors' commerce (57). She further explains the connection between the frame and the tale by comparing the marriage of Robercourt and that of the Beast, both being seen as a consolidation of wealth (63). Both Robercourt and the Beast have immense wealth, one derived from the forced labor of African slaves in the French colony, the other by magic and the invisible helpers of his castle. Wolfgang notes that there are only two accounts of slavery mentioned: when Robercourt mistakes the proposal of his benefactor as a position of overseer of enslaved laborers, something he refuses on the basis that nobles do not work, and when Beauty's father explains that he no longer needs to work and she translates his words: "I have slaves that relieve us of the work we were forced to endure out of necessity" (65). These two accounts not only show that enslavement existed in France, despite being illegal, but that the century recognized neither the labor of African slaves nor that of French peasantry as a source of nobility's wealth. Indeed, riches come from the natural abundance of Saint-Domingue, ordained by Fortune in the story frame, or from magic and unseen workers in Beast's castle. In both cases, the reality of wealth accumulation is covered by enchantment, "as part of the natural order of things" (67), which reveals...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".