Hello! Sorry for the late reply; I, too, got very busy with family and such for the holidays.
I was pleased that that trope wasn't a modern invention either. Did you find anything about how commonplace it was? I find it so difficult to research stuff like that.
It's a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, which largely determined the time period. (In the 1740 Villeneuve version, the merchant father picks a rose and the beast tells him he has a month to decide whether to send his daughter to the beast or sacrifice his own life as payment. My premise is that the merchant decides to sacrifice his own life, but the beast didn't actually want to kill him and so keeps him around; they fall in love. It doesn't break the spell because the faerie who cursed him said he needed to earn the love of a woman. Beauty discovers the faerie and slays her.) I will say though that it is extremely loose in terms of both location and time period; I wanted a French Enlightenment flavor, but I also wanted enough other elements that if anyone reads it as firmly rooted in that time and place they'll hate it.
So anyway it's set in that vague era but is about a beast in a castle with faeries, so there's a somewhat Gothic feel, and I guess part of the whole point is a Gothic/Romantic view of medievalism (since the beast himself is somewhat medieval; the idea is he's hundreds of years old) vs Enlightenment pursuit of Reason (the merchant being a bourgeois, practical sort who liked to fancy himself an intellectual, when he was young) but of course since I'm writing it in the 21st century all of that is somewhat deconstructed. To me B&B has always kind of been about those themes and I've never seen anyone address them really; I think the Villeneuve version has a lot to do with French politics at the time. But anyway I'm about as far from an expert on any of these subjects as you can get; the story I'm writing isn't meant to be an intellectual story by any means. It just has some of those ideas underlying it, while hopefully being different enough that it doesn't just feel like a cheap mess of pseudo-history.
Anyway, for Gothic tone/mood I've been reading The Mysteries of Udolpho and so far it's much better than I had been led to believe (by Jane Austen, obviously).
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Date: 2019-01-02 08:11 pm (UTC)I was pleased that that trope wasn't a modern invention either. Did you find anything about how commonplace it was? I find it so difficult to research stuff like that.
It's a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, which largely determined the time period. (In the 1740 Villeneuve version, the merchant father picks a rose and the beast tells him he has a month to decide whether to send his daughter to the beast or sacrifice his own life as payment. My premise is that the merchant decides to sacrifice his own life, but the beast didn't actually want to kill him and so keeps him around; they fall in love. It doesn't break the spell because the faerie who cursed him said he needed to earn the love of a woman. Beauty discovers the faerie and slays her.) I will say though that it is extremely loose in terms of both location and time period; I wanted a French Enlightenment flavor, but I also wanted enough other elements that if anyone reads it as firmly rooted in that time and place they'll hate it.
So anyway it's set in that vague era but is about a beast in a castle with faeries, so there's a somewhat Gothic feel, and I guess part of the whole point is a Gothic/Romantic view of medievalism (since the beast himself is somewhat medieval; the idea is he's hundreds of years old) vs Enlightenment pursuit of Reason (the merchant being a bourgeois, practical sort who liked to fancy himself an intellectual, when he was young) but of course since I'm writing it in the 21st century all of that is somewhat deconstructed. To me B&B has always kind of been about those themes and I've never seen anyone address them really; I think the Villeneuve version has a lot to do with French politics at the time. But anyway I'm about as far from an expert on any of these subjects as you can get; the story I'm writing isn't meant to be an intellectual story by any means. It just has some of those ideas underlying it, while hopefully being different enough that it doesn't just feel like a cheap mess of pseudo-history.
Anyway, for Gothic tone/mood I've been reading The Mysteries of Udolpho and so far it's much better than I had been led to believe (by Jane Austen, obviously).