Deromancing the Beast

the false narrative we love in love

I’ve always been a lingerer, staying in relationships longer than is healthy or reasonable. In college, I dated a guy almost a year longer than I should have. To the world, he was usually hot-headed or indifferent, but I had access to a part of him that no one else knew. It felt like walking around with moonlight in my pocket sometimes, this secret side of him reserved for me—a side that had only come about because of me, I silently relished. And this dichotomy of him kept me coming back.

On weekends there was always a choice: leave Saturday night’s party with him, sneak into the campus art gallery, quote pretentious stuff we’d read back and forth, have sex. Or, stay at the party with our friends and wait for him to explode. The detonators ranged: someone stepped on his foot, someone spilled a drink on me, I’d been dancing with another guy. 

With me alone, he cried, about his raging father, his own rage and insecurities. He wanted me to be an extension of himself, and for a while, I obliged. Letting him fill me with reverence or vitriol, so this other side of himself could emerge. As one favors the dominant hand or limb, his dependency on me to give him a part of himself grew. And as he filled me, his pedestal for me grew.  We tacitly agreed to this shared fantasy: I was to be his transformation. I was to be the one to help him shed this external persona and facilitate an introduction between this gentler guy and the world. It wasn’t just a shared belief, it was the romance of us.

It did not end well. 

The relationship bled out. I didn’t leave when the injury was clear: partly out of fear of him losing all sense of that better self he was with me: my own sympathy born of arrogance. And partly to avoid the TNT that I knew would be our ending. Which indeed it was. I ended it like a coward, when I was moving overseas, putting an ocean of buffer between us. Surely protection enough? But ocean be damned, he arrived unexpectedly and uninvited on Spanish soil first to convince me, then to rage, then to insult, then to dissolve. Once it was final, my answering machine became the vessel for his emotions. Nine months of pleading and abusive voicemails followed, enough time to make a life. 

Today, the memory of that relationship is like a bell tolling. Who I was in it makes me cringe, but why I was in it makes my skin crawl. That perverse dance with violence. I was skating it, harnessing it. And being adjacent to that violence, I was both its beneficiary and the demigod who believed she could eventually stop it. The only feeling I can compare today to that allure of being in violence’s heat at age 20, is vertigo. That tantalizing desire to jump, the knowledge that you can probably control your body not to jump, and the but what if! of it. 

Now that I’ve spent a career studying story, I know I was primed for this relationship. Not just this one, but many others that were less extreme but followed a pattern of being the transformer, seeking out the person who wanted a vessel to fill with the parts of them they didn’t know where else to place or to name. We are what we consume over time: our predilections, fantasies, desires more tied up in the narratives we’ve encountered than any of us would like to admit.

Beauty and the Beast has always felt a little Stockholm Syndrome-y to me, but it’s more than just that. It’s also a fiction of transformation. That one person’s love can transform another person. Beauty’s beast of burden is being the Beast’s only one. Why do we love the idea of not only finding another’s inner beauty, but being the only one to find it? Why should it be a struggle to see the goodness? Isn’t someone hiding their goodness kind of a red flag? This is a story of being duped into the romance of transformation.

There are counter narratives, yes, but there’s a deep romance to the transformation story, the ultimate kind of love story. They’re classics: Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice, Great Expectations, all the Death and the Maiden mythologies: from Persephone to Twilight. They’re books I love like Sally Rooney’s Normal People.

A transformation romance in story can be distilled down to three desires: 

1. The desire to collar an inherent violence or cruelty or indifference for the forces of good.

2. The desire to open a person to their emotions. 

3. The desire to be the one. 

To collar, to open, to be: these verbs don’t even make sense together. There’s contradiction at the very heart of this story’s desire.

In “Man Child”, an essay about raising her son, Audre Lorde writes about the origins of beasts, how and why they are often passed from parent to partner: 

“Men who are afraid to feel must keep women around to do their feeling for them while dismissing us for the same supposedly ‘inferior’ capacity to feel deeply. But in this way also, men deny themselves their own essential humanity, becoming trapped in dependency and fear.”

Here Lorde offers us the happily-ever-after afterparty: the life-long burden of trying to change a beast by actually incapacitating them. Being everything to a person means doing the work of transformation for them so they are “trapped in dependency and fear” while you are trapped in emotional exhaustion, feeling for two.

Beauty and the Beast both lose in their story’s aftermath.

This romance paradigm is not singular to a man playing the role of beast (Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew about a headstrong woman who needs “taming” offers a counter example), but the stakes seem higher when it is. The enchanted Beast, the brooding Heathcliff, vampiric Edward Cullen, and Hades himself could each crush or claw or eat the object of their affection, and at some point, are tempted to do so. But love for her keeps them from their baser instincts. In realistic fiction, it’s often social and financial cachet: Darcy has the economic power to undo not just Elizabeth Bennet but her entire family. It’s a desire, in this sense, to see power reguided, to see feral virility charmed into gentle docility. 

So much has changed for my students socially, technologically, academically from my ‘90s adolescence, but this particular narrative still renders them starry-eyed. Even the most self-aware among them crave a transformation, crave being the one to change or the one to be changed.

Spoiler alert, I want to tell my students: Mr. Darcy doesn’t age well! He’s far less attractive, far more exhausting in middle age. By middle age, most of us have transformed, slowly, based on our own choices, our own work, our own experiences. No one I know is looking to transform a partner anymore. And the ones who did look are in the process of leaving them now, or they’ve already left. 

What does the beast look like in middle age? He looks like someone with few friends. Someone with few spaces other than you to share her emotions. Someone who will never need a therapist because they have you.

There’s a practicality in age, when true romance becomes more about the person who can articulate feelings, regulate emotions, talk to friends, wash the dishes, cook a meal. Short and long-term relationships are filled with small shifts, changes, encouragements, but those aren’t the things of story, they’re not the crises we crave in a novel or a movie. If we’re lucky, life’s plot line is filled with subtlety instead. So do we need to untangle ourselves from the myths of transformation, or just tell truer stories?

As I’m writing this essay, I’m reading Sarah J. Maas’s series, A Court of Thorns and Roses, partly because my students have nagged me, partly because it’s the season of blushing lovers, and mainly because Culture Study told me to. It’s not my usual genre (part of reading the ACOTAR series is, I’ve come to learn, disclaiming it). It’s fairy porn with a little bit of feminism. In it, Maas cleverly evades the beast trope but keeps the romantic likeness. She’s created a love interest who play-acts as a beast to the greater world, but he’s known as a good guy by his other public: his friends and his city. Fantasy often precedes us, and perhaps this fantasy faerie fiction is redefining romance for us. 

Or perhaps it’s only the first-person experience of the beast that allows us to see the romance beyond the beast.

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A big thank you to all the friends in conversation that led to this essay, to fellow Write of Passage writers

Sandra Yvonne

and

Vijay George

for the initial encouragement, and to Dara Songye,

Becky Isjwara

, and Samantha Law for their critical, loving feedback

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