From captivity to courtship : the representation of romance in Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Disney's beauty and the beast

• Main Author: Siti Aishah Kasman
• Other Authors: School of Humanities and Social Sciences
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2014
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities::Literature
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/59373
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The story of the captive heroine found in the likes of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela endures time and underwent a relatively similar re-telling in Disney’s 1991 animated film, Beauty and the Beast. The relationship dynamics between the main characters in both narratives involves a captive and a captor, which will eventually take a turn into a romantic affair. In the midst of the similarities between the two stories, it would be most important to note the progress made in the representation of romance found in the captivity-to-courtship narrative. However, there is a divergence in how the romantic relationships between the main characters take flight. Thus, the inter-textual reading of Pamela and Beauty and the Beast would provide a productive analysis on power dynamics found within a relationship and makes for a compelling analysis in terms of the evolution that romantic representations went through from a classic to a contemporary work.