Of Fairies and “Docile Daughters”: Ubisoft Montreal’s Child of Light as an Adaptation of Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve’s Beauty and the Beast

Abstract

The following article analyzes Ubisoft Montreal’s art game Child of Light (2014) as an adaptation of the eighteenth-century fairy tale Beauty and the Beast (1740) by Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve, the less famous original of Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s canonical “Beauty and the Beast” (1756). While Villeneuve drew from the late seventeenth-century French salon fairy-tale tradition, her novel-length tale represented an ideological turning point, ultimately subordinating women’s independence and freedom to act in the public sphere, propagated by older upper-class salonnières in their fairy tales, to the bliss of love and family, typical of the bourgeois private sphere. Judging by the designers’ announcements that the game was meant to concentrate on growing up to adulthood, self-sufficiency, and independence, instead of marriage, and thus did not feature the character of the Beast/Prince, Child of Light might appear to have a potential to restore the voice of the older conteuses by, again, concentrating on women empowerment and the ability to act in the public/outdoors. In particular, I focus on the game’s transposition of the tale’s chosen fragments, namely: Villeneuve’s caste of powerful, independent fairies; class division dramatized in the tale; and, somewhat surprisingly, the self-sacrificing heroine, ready to abdicate her desire, or a docile daughter. In the case of latter, Aurora may not sacrifice herself for the sake of the man, but still must sacrifice her longing for family to become an egalitarian ruler devoted to public service, which, in the end, appears to peculiarly disempower her. Thus, Child of Light may be seen to nonetheless reiterate conservative values rather than propose a tale of women empowerment.