The Prince’s Slave: What It’s Really About
What follows is the afterword from the last volume of my series (and omnibus edition novel), The Prince’s Slave. For those who haven’t read the series yet, be warned: there are spoilers! As I do discuss the series as a whole, framed in terms of its ending. However, as there has been so much discussion of this series, and what it is and isn’t, elsewhere on the web–is this glorifying sex trafficking, is it romanticizing Stockholm Syndrome–I thought it might be interesting, at least for some, to hear from the author herself.
AFTERWORD
When I told my husband I had writer’s block, about halfway through writing the rough draft of this manuscript, he asked me, “what? Did you run out of orifices?”
Writer’s block—a phenomenon in which I don’t even believe, by the way—is a whole different problem when you’re writing romance. Particularly erotic romance. The challenge is to balance sex and plot in such a way that neither is distracting. Too much plot and it’s not erotic, too much sex and it’s boring. The right balance is what, more than anything else, moves the plot forward.
Not to mention, makes you care what happens to the characters!
Which is its own separate challenge: how do you create characters that, while keeping the fairytale element so crucial to all successful romances, feel real? That both belong in the realm of pretend and yet also transcend it? No one wants to fantasize about the same poorly dressed, slightly smelly man who flirts with us every morning at Starbucks. But, at the same time, the ideal hero is someone who could walk into Starbucks.
There’s a lot of judgment in the world, unfortunately, about what women “should” find attractive, mostly couched in vaguely sociological-sounding theories explaining why they’re somehow misguided. And, all too often, the men in these kinds of stories are presented as abusers—or easily seen that way. Or, even when the character truly doesn’t fit the mold, he’s still squeezed into it in the interests of serving some argument about how porn is wrong or erotica is wrong.
Or, indeed, that women exploring their own sexuality is wrong.
Personally, I don’t think a woman’s sexuality is so frail that her commitment to herself should be judged according to whether others approve of her desires. Liking, for example, bondage doesn’t make a woman “battered,” or even “confused.” It makes her a woman who likes bondage. Women who spend their days as housewives like bondage, and so do women who spend their days in boardrooms.
What a woman likes, in terms of sex, says nothing about her view on feminism and everything about what gets her off.
A truth which lies, I think, at the heart of what makes Beauty and the Beast so enduringly popular.
Belle is named for the Disney character, with whom she shares many commonalities, but the story itself is in fact far older. Originally a medieval tale, it was first put down in writing by a female author, the well-regarded novelist Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, and published in 1756. The same year when the Treaty of Westminster was signed, the first candy factory in the world opened in Germany, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s father published his now-famous textbook on learning to play the violin.
Ironically, most modern versions of Beauty and the Beast focus on something that the original story did not: this notion of a superficially ugly guy being not so bad after all. And what makes him ugly is always superficial. Oh, he has a scar. Or oh, he’s not a billionaire with a gigantic, pulsing…wallet. Which…okay, just how shallow are we saying women are, here?
Moreover, what actually makes a person ugly: what’s on the outside, or what’s on the inside? As far as literary devices go, the disposable “problem,” i.e. the hypothetical scar, is a pretty cheap trick. Easily gotten over, by the heroine and everything else. Because, after all, who really cares? Beauty fades, but bitch is forever. A point that Charlotte makes well, in her last visit to Ash’s castle.
The question of what actually makes someone ugly is usually sidestepped, because the things that make us ugly are almost always a little more challenging to get past. When I was first conceiving of this story I wondered, what would make someone a beast today? What’s the modern equivalent of the wolf outside the door, that so terrified people in the middle ages? Or indeed, the man who’d be regarded as a “beast” during the reign of King George II?
In a time when disfiguring injuries were common, would physical deformity really be seen as terrible? Richard III had severe scoliosis. The whole Hapsburg line was famous for its deformities. Lesser problems like smallpox scars were also common and, indeed, not seen as terribly problematic. Lost teeth, even lost limbs were a fact of life. What were a few scars?
It’s worth noting that the original curse, laid by the mysterious visitor to the prince’s castle, was that his outside match his inside.
In other words, he was already ugly.
As our Belle observes, Beauty and the Beast was written, originally, partly as a bit of propaganda for arranged marriages. It was absolutely as relevant to women of the time, in terms of the issues it addressed, as any number of modern novels are to women today. The ultimate point of the story is that sometimes, what at first appears to be—or in fact is—the husband from Hell can actually turn out to be the perfect match.
Or become one, with a little squinting.
This isn’t an issue of “love him better,” though. Which is what modern audiences tend to miss. Beauty and the Beast was, within the framework of its time, a tale of hope: for the thousands, the hundreds of thousands of women who had no control over their destinies. Who were forced to marry whoever was expedient. The hope, you see, lay in the notion that happily ever after—their own happily ever after, not someone else’s—might still be salvaged from this situation. That a man might be revealed to be better than he first appeared or, indeed, might of his own volition change. Because the Beast, in the end, does change of his own volition. Inspired by his love for a woman.
The principle problem with most modern retellings is they keep the bones of the story but lose the part where it’s a modern story, meant to be relatable to modern women. Jokes about “Stockholm Syndrome relationships” arise from the fact that, to modern women, the story in its most-used form makes no sense. They don’t relate to Belle; she isn’t a modern woman, in any sense, and even if she’s suddenly plunked down in modern day, in some sort of vague lip service to the idea the whole “tale as old as time” bit, her problems are still nonsensical. Modern women don’t, you know, get traded by their fathers over roses.
Of course, they didn’t in the middle ages—or in the 1750’s—either. The rose is a metaphor. For any number of reasons that women were sold into what essentially amounted to indentured servitude. The rose represents something that’s perceived as perfect. To the point of lunacy, even, desired far beyond its actual worth. It doesn’t matter what the object of lust is, really; whether a rose or a chest of jewels. A thing’s value, ultimately, lies in the perception of its value.
Just as in Beauty and the Beast, the rose has greater value than Belle.
As women, today, are still undervalued in comparison with material goods—or, indeed, bought and traded like them.
The rose might be described as the One Ring of its time: the ultimate representation of commercialism, and of its overwhelming pull on even the most seemingly strong-minded. The lust for success is a different kind of lust, to be sure, but an equally powerful one. It’s Belle’s father’s lust that, in the original tale, lands her the clutches of the Beast.
Might she not have found a man who exhibited so much strength of persuasion attractive?
A man—or Beast—who, indeed, exhibited none of her father’s weaknesses?
It’s unfortunate that Belle’s tale is usually told in the context of roses and—seemingly—nonsensical bargains, when her plight continues to be so relevant today. Look anywhere on the globe, and you’ll see no shortage of injustice against women. Why do we rely on flimsy tropes when we can retell this tale in real, immediate terms?
Terms to which everyone can, on some level, relate?
Little imagination is required to envision the ways in which women continue to be used, in service to commercialism: forced marriage and forced companionship, in the form of concubinage, still exists in many countries. As does child marriage. The sex trade exists in every country and many of those who participate do so against their will.
They’re outright forced, or sometimes lured or coerced, into situations from which there is often no escape. As Belle almost is, at the start of this story. This modern Belle, like her original predecessor, finds herself the victim of a system that doesn’t value her. That doesn’t value women, at all. In this sense, she’s the same sort of everywoman that de Beaumont first described: a woman, remarkable not because she’s special but because she’s not. To whom other women, even if their lives are slightly different, can relate in their own powerlessness—and in their being compelled to complete what can feel like a futile struggle.
To not, as our Belle might say, let their situation get them down.
At heart, Beauty and the Beast isn’t about loving someone better but about forging your own “happily ever after” from an otherwise horrendous situation. About the murky gray area between changing your circumstances in order to be happy, and accepting them in order to be happy. About what it means to be an empowered woman when, as so many women do, for various reasons, you find yourself in a situation where you have no choices.
Hearing that this version of Beauty and the Beast takes place in the context of the sex trade was—no pun intended—a turn-off for some potential readers. I’ve already gotten the complaint that retelling the story in this setting ruins the romanticism of the fable. Which neatly sidesteps the point that in no version of this story was becoming the Beast’s captive romantic for Belle. For any of the Belles, in any of the versions. In order for the Beast’s transformation—or hers—to mean anything, one has to, I think, tap into that fear. That loathing. That sense of crushing, overwhelming injustice. Otherwise, there’s really no meaning to the story. The Beast is okay because he isn’t “really” bad and her being held captive against her will is okay because she isn’t “really” being held captive.
Which, if that’s the case–then who cares whether she goes or stays?
For those of you who’ve read my other work, you know that I’m not a fan of pat explanations.
I still think that this story is, at heart, a romance. It’s a story about rescue, redemption, and what it means to start again. About the transformative power of forgiveness, to both the forgiver and the person being forgiven. But Belle’s romance isn’t with her fantasy of a perfect life, or with the myriad freedoms that a cash-filled wallet supposedly brings, but with a man. A real man, with real flaws. A man whose “beast” is more than skin deep. As the original Beast’s was.
Back in the middle ages, fairy tales served a definite purpose. Stories about “the troll under the bridge” served the same purpose as warnings about strangers offering to show you the puppy in the back of the unmarked panel truck serve today. Calling an erotic romance a retelling of Beauty and the Beast isn’t stunt casting; it’s my attempt to infuse the story with the same obvious relevance, the same visceral urgency that it had in its infancy. To take “my father made me marry this man, so he could pay off his debts” and transform that idea into its modern equivalent. An equivalent that needs no translation, that’s immediately understandable, because this is a story that reflects, and has always reflected, the injustices that all women to some extent face.
Belle wasn’t a meek, “love him better” type but a crusader for justice within her own world and in her own time—and I wanted people to see that, when I gave her a modern voice.
