Monstrous Humans and Talking Animals: Invoking the Orient in Beauties and Beasts

Edmund Dulac, “Ah! What a fright you have given me! she murmured,” from “Beauty and the Beast,” in The Sleeping Beauty and other fairy tales from the Old French (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1910). 

Between the 1880s and 1930s in Europe and North America, readers witnessed the Golden Age of Illustration, a period identified by many scholars as one of unprecedented excellence in pictorial art published in books and magazines. This flourishing of illustrated texts at the turn of the twentieth century arose from industrialization, the emergence of easy and inexpensive color printing and advertising, and a rising middle class who had the income and education to enjoy such works. However, many illustrators in the Golden Age also engaged in Orientalism to produce an imagined approximation of Near and Far Eastern cultures. While Orientalist images in the Golden Age are found across printed media of the period, their appearance in children’s illustrated fairy tale books particularly speaks to the fantasies of the cultural moment. 

The present analysis focuses on Orientalized depictions of humans and nonhuman animals in Golden Age fairy tale book illustrations. Specifically, it will look at illustrations of Beauty and the Beast-type transformation tales in context of the dominant uses of animal narratives at the turn of the twentieth century. Such illustrations construct, reflect, and at times challenge the accepted bounds between the human and the nonhuman. These images also dictate or reimagine the proper relationship between the Self and the Other, the West and the East, and the masculine and the feminine through encounters and transformations between humans and nonhuman animals, as well as interactions amongst nonhuman animals themselves. This analysis hopes to contribute to the understudied field of Golden Age illustration aimed at children, as well as offer insights into how animals — both human and nonhuman — visually represent moral, cultural, and gendered standards and their semi-radical transgressions.