Essay Questions

Deconstruct the resolution of “The Courtship of Mr Lyon”.

The resolution is an archetypical Fairy-tale resolution: “'Don't die, Beast! If you'll have me, I'll never leave you.' When her lips touched the meat-hook claws, they drew back into their pads and she saw how he had always kept his fists clenched but now, painfully, tentatively, at last began to stretch his fingers. Her tears fell on his face like snow and, under their soft transformation, the bones showed through the pelt, the flesh through the wide, tawny brow. And then it was no longer a lion in her arms but a man, a man with an unkempt mane of hair and, how strange, a broken nose, such as the noses of retired boxers, that gave him a distant, heroic resemblance to the handsomest of all the beasts.” Beauty transmutes Beast into an outright human! Her passionate, benevolent connection with Beast which is represented in her tears and lips consequentially personifies Beast. Had Beauty not appeared in time, it would not have been a fairy-tale culmination; it would have been a dismal tragedy. After the conversion their identities shift from ‘Beauty and Beast’ to ‘Mr. and Mrs. Lyon.’ The Beast’s viciousness exterminates categorically as a result of Beauty’s mystic affection.

Identify Carter’s ideological argument in “The Snow Child”.

Carter argues that resentment ‘bites’: “Then the girl began to melt. Soon there was nothing left of her but a feather a bird might have dropped; a bloodstain, like the trace of a fox's kill on the snow; and the rose she had pulled off the bush. Now the Countess had all her clothes on again. With her long hand, she stroked her furs. The Count picked up the rose, bowed and handed it to his wife; when she touched it, she dropped it. 'It bites!' she said.” The Countess makes certain “the snow child’s” demise due to gigantic envy. The rose bites her to validate that she cannot inherit the child’s exceptional place in the count’s heart even though ‘the Snow child’ has expired. The rose’s bite is nature’s retribution against the malevolent Countess; the unwarranted resentment she focused on the child haunts her ultimately.