"E a Bela dançou...": Subvertendo o belo feminino dos contos de fadas

Abstract

This paper aims to demonstrate how Barbara G. Walker and Angela Carter subvert, in a very unconventional way, from a new critical perspective, the typical concept of female beauty found in fairy tales, as they reread the canonical version of Madame Jeanne-Marie Leprince Beaumont's tale "The Beauty and the Beast", in their works "Ugly and the Beast" and "The Tiger's Bride", respectively. This discussion evaluates both the revisionist impact of the use of narrative strategies such as inversions and parodic contrasts, and the degree of disruption achieved in the re-readings, regarding the question of beauty. Furthermore, this analysis considers how revisionism elaborates the unusual in these fictions by means of the meta-empirical, or supernatural, element.