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The Beauty and the Beast you remember has been edited at least twice before it reached you. The familiar shape, the merchant father, the rose, the enchanted castle, the proposal refused every night, the transformation, comes from Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, who published a short version in 1756. She was a governess writing for girls, and she trimmed and moralised an older, longer, much stranger book. That book is Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve's, from 1740, novella length, and it is not really a children's story. It is closer to a manual. Behind both of them stands an ancestor two thousand years older, Apuleius's tale of Cupid and Psyche, in which a girl is married to a creature she is forbidden to look at, sabotaged by her envious sisters, and made to earn him back through ordeal. The structure was old before France got hold of it.

What the story is about, in its older and franker form, is plain once you stop hearing it as a romance. A man loses his money. He owes a debt he cannot pay. The debt is settled with a daughter, who is sent to live in the house of a being she finds frightening and physically repellent, who asks her every single night to marry him, and whom she is expected, over time, to stop refusing. It was written by women, for women, inside an economy where marriages were arranged and a young woman could in fact be handed to a frightening older stranger to settle her father's position. The animal-groom tale is not a metaphor that modern critics imposed. It is a piece of equipment. Its job was to take a girl's fear and walk it, slowly, toward consent.

Two of the sharpest readers of how desire gets manufactured arrive at this story from opposite directions and end up standing in the same place. They are usually set against each other. Here they shake hands, and what they shake hands on is that the ending is the weakest and least honest part.

Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae (1990) argues that nature is not the gentle mother of Romantic poetry but something chthonic and devouring, and that culture is the screen we build to avoid looking at it. The Apollonian, in her scheme, is the made image, the boundary, the beautiful sculpted surface. Underneath it runs the daemonic, the generative and violent force she thinks sex actually belongs to. Paglia is consistently more interested in the vampire, the femme fatale, the dangerous and the perverse than in the safe and the kind, because she thinks the dangerous figures are telling the truth about eros and the kind ones are telling a comforting story.

Read through Paglia, the Beast is the daemonic male, raw and pre-civilised, sexual energy that has not been dressed up. Beauty is the Apollonian principle, the aestheticising eye that wants to resolve him into something it can look at safely. The whole drama is the contest between those two. And then the story blinks. The Beast becomes a prince, handsome, titled, legible, exactly the thing the social order would have approved of all along. For Paglia this is not a reward. It is a defeat. The vital, frightening, interesting figure has been deleted and replaced with a greeting card. The moment the story calls its happy ending is the moment it loses its nerve and chooses the surface over the force. The Beast was the true thing in the room. The Prince is what fear puts there instead.

Butler: love is the alibi, recognition is the mechanism