What do the Parents Want?

The father in Beaumont's Beauty and the Beast and the mother in Straparola's The Pig King have very different roles when it comes to the finding of mates for their offspring. Beauty's father in the Beaumont is an unwilling match maker. When he returns home, it is simply for the opportunity to see his children one last time before he is too be killed, but Beauty reverses his fate by demanding to go in his stead. Beauty does not go seeking a mate. In fact, it is her own death which she is led to predict. The mother in the Pig King brings princesses to her son to try and satiate his sexual desire. She seems beleaguered, frustrated, with their gruesome deaths at her son's hands, though not viewing the incidents as terrible tragic, for she immediately finds another princess as soon as one has expired. The parents of the princesses are not shown, even though their fathers would presumably have to give over their hands in marriage in order for anything official to go through. The Queen loses agency in deciding her child's mate as well, so in that regard, she shares a feature with Beauty's father. The both have lost control of the fate of their children to a large extent, something a suppose is a common anxiety among those with children. Neither Beauty nor the Pig seem to have any ability to view life from the parent's perspective. The father would have willingly died for her daughters, but Beauty sees the moment as an opportunity to show her sincere love of him, It would seem, however, that the truly loving thing would have been to allow the father the opportunity to sacrifice himself for his daughters. Even if he could not provide financially after the collapse of his merchant business, he could give them the gift of life.

In this way, Beauty's martyrdom was disobedient, yet eventually benefited her. In a similar fashion, it is not until she disobeys Beast and stays at her house for more than seven days that he finally transforms back into a man. For such a conventionally self-sacrificing girl, it's interesting that the two things which must lead to her happiness are in fact, when fully dissected, selfish. Both the Pig King and Beauty are rewarded for acting against the desires of their parents.