Marvelous by Molly Greeley: Where Fairytale and History Meet
BY KATE BRAITHWAITE
It’s hard to imagine any reader opening Molly Greeley’s new novel, Marvelous (William Morrow, 2023), without some foreknowledge of “Beauty and the Beast”. These are characters we love, and a tale we think we know. But blending historical fact with imaginative flair, Greely offers up an insightful and thought-provoking origin story for the famous fairytale.
“In the original 1740 version of the fairytale by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve – and in the pared-down retelling by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, written about 16 years later – both Beauty and the Beast are good, innocent people,” Greeley explains. “The Beast is beastly in appearance only, and (aside from the problematic point that he demanded that the daughter of the man who came upon his castle come live with him, lest her father face death) is otherwise kind and generous; Beauty (particularly in Beaumont’s version) is a dutiful daughter who wants little more than to work hard and obey her father – no accident, as Beaumont’s retelling was written specifically to be an example of dutiful behavior to young girls who could expect to be married off by their fathers to much older men.”
That’s before we even start talking about Disney. In the movie reimagining, Greeley says, “the beast is self-absorbed, thoughtless, and deserving of his punishment, and Belle (Beauty) is bookish, headstrong, and brave. In Villeneuve’s version, the prince is transformed into a beast by an evil fairy – with whom he’d been living since he was a child – for refusing her romantic advances, but in Disney’s retelling, he is transformed to teach him a lesson about kindness and love.”
In Marvelous, things are different again. Greeley was sitting with a friend in a coffee shop, editing her second novel, The Heiress, when a passing reference to Sleeping Beauty led her into one of those so-called quick Google searches that lead down unexpected, time-consuming rabbit holes. In this case, she came across an article about fairytales that were, or might have been, inspired by true events, and the distraction paid off. Greeley found herself looking at a portrait of Pedro Gonzales. Gonzales, a man with hypertrichosis – a condition where hair grows profusely all over a person’s body – lived in the 16th century, was gifted to the King of France as a boy and grew up in the French court. The French queen, Greeley learned, “was rumored to have married him off to a beautiful young woman in order to breed more hairy people for her court.” She turned to her friend and said, “I think I’ve just found the subject for my next book.”
author Molly Greeley
Marvelous opens in 1618, with a woman in her sixties, Catherine, mourning the death of her husband, Pedro, before the story moves back in time to 1547 and the island of Tenerife from where, as a boy, Pedro was kidnapped and taken to the French court. When a marriage is arranged between Pedro and Catherine Raffelin, an unconventional love story unfolds, centered on two characters, very different from their fairytale counterparts. “They are, I hope,” says Greeley, “more three-dimensional than the characters in the original story, each of them capable of both kindness and thoughtlessness, each of them motivated by their private dreams and desires. Pedro is almost snobbishly proud of his education; Catherine was raised to be careful of her appearance above all else. Deep inside, Pedro is still very much a terrified, abused little boy who longs more than anything for acceptance and love, and Catherine, for all that she is an intelligent person who aches to see more of the world, is a product of her times; she finds Pedro’s appearance frightening, and has a hard time, at first, seeing the humanity under all his hair.”
Another feature that sets this story apart from the fairytale is that Pedro looks the way he does because of a genetic anomaly, not a magical curse. As Greeley points out, “Even when he and Catherine finally fall in love with one another, there is no chance that a spell will be broken, leaving him a handsome prince. He is who he is throughout, and he and Catherine, along with their children, must live at a bustling court rather than alone together in a forest castle. They have no choice but to brave society’s opinions and prejudices for the entirety of their life together.”
It’s this aspect that makes the story resonate across the centuries and for Greeley, the parallel between how Pedro was treated and how we still treat people who look different today was personally important. My oldest friend,” she explains, “was born with a bilateral cleft lip and palate and has become a voice for facial difference awareness; hearing her and others within the facial difference community describe their experiences makes it clear that we still have a long way to go when it comes to embracing the huge, beautiful diversity of our species. It wasn’t until my friend pointed it out to me that I realized how often scars are used in Hollywood to clearly mark the villain of a movie as evil (and now that I have noticed, I see it everywhere). Carnival and circus sideshows were commonplace even in the 20th century. And even on a more mundane level – though this seems to have improved slightly since I was young – our society still tends to tell us that certain types of faces, bodies, skin tones, and hair types are more desirable than others, without any acknowledgement of the complexity of human beings’ inner selves and how profoundly that might affect the way people feel about one another. What I hope more than anything is that readers see Pedro as simply human, regardless of his appearance; that they feel who he is rather than thinking constantly about the way his genetics determined he would look.”
About the contributor: Kate Braithwaite is the author of three historical novels, most recently, The Girl Puzzle, a story of Nellie Bly and is a US editor for the Historical Novels Review.
