Title: Beauty and the Beast

Characters
 Belle - Belle is a young girl somewhere around the age of marriage. She lives with her father who
loves her. She is always yearning for more than the life she is born into. She stands above
everyone who lives around her in moral and character.

 Father - Belle’s father is a member of the working class, sometimes a merchant. He is going
through difficult financial times. He loves Belle very much. In versions told where Belle has
siblings, Belle is his favorite child.

 Beast- The beast is a cursed prince. He has always been wealthy and in his youth he was so
spoiled by that wealth that he lost all the love in his heart. It is never known what happened to
him for this to occur and his parents never appear in the story. He is in some versions still
dealing with character struggles and in others already noble.

 Gaston - Gaston is a character in only some versions of the story. He is a foil to the character of a
beast. He represents the true beast, the man whom the beast must defeat in order to love and
be worthy of Belle. Gaston is the selfish spoiled man that the beast was in the beginning of the
story.

Point of View

The story is often told from an outside perspective, though it generally follows the story line of Belle. A
narrator tells a great deal of things until Belle enters the story and then generally follows her
perspective alone until the story ends.

Setting

The story takes place in a medieval setting going between a village and castle.

Rising Action

 Beast and Beauty fall in love

 Beast allows Beauty to leave the castle to visit her father who is sick
 Gaston locks her father and forces her to marry him.

Climax
 Gaston goes to kill the Beast. He stabs the beats butt falls off the balcony.
 Beast is dead.

Falling Action
 Beauty came and sadly whisper that she loves the beast.
 The beast revive and turn back into prince.
Resolution
 Beauty and the Prince were dancing in the ballroom.
 They live happily ever after.

Plot Outline

The story begins with a selfish prince who is cursed into the form of a beast for showing no love to a
helpless old woman. To break the spell he must fall in love with someone and make her fall in love with
him in return. When a traveling man spends the night at the castle he somehow falls under the wrath of
the beast. His daughter comes searching for him and trades her captivity for his. The beast then spends
all his time trying to woo the girl. He succeeds in winning her love but lets her go when she learns that
her father is ill and on the point of death. While Belle is away something, generally the time running out
for the curse to break, brings the beast to the point of death. Belle returns just as the beast is dying at
which point she confesses her love to him and the spell is broken.

Conflict

The story Beauty and the Beast is a mixture between man versus man and man versus self. The Beast is
fighting himself and also fighting Gaston. Depending on the version they literally fight, or the Beast
merely fights the version of himself which Gaston would otherwise portray. Belle is also clashing with
the Beast and in a struggle against him. She is fighting for more, for something that she’s always
dreamed of, and she blindly thinks that the beast is in the way.

Theme

The main theme of this story is that love is the ultimate redeemer. Love must love what is unlovable in
order to make it lovable. The only true cure for any disease is love itself. Like in all fairy tales true love is
the strongest magic of all, not only in stories, but in life itself.