Okay, this is a little different… So I remember, maybe a year or two after the Disney movie came out, reading a critique of it that said something along the lines of, “Disney likes to think it’s all feminist, but if it had really had the courage of its convictions with regards to Belle wanting to see the world and so on, it would have ended with Belle patting the Beast on the head and saying she’d look him up when she got back from university.”
I am trying to figure out now where I read this. I have the feeling it was in a fantasy book or in the foreword to one of those fairy-tale anthologies by Terri Windling, that kind of thing. I’ve tried googling for Windling, LeGuin, and Yolen, but if any of those three have made a statement like that I haven’t found it. (I did find a very interesting review of Beauty and the Beast by Windling, but it isn’t what I’m looking for.)
Has anyone else read this? Can you help me out?