Topic > The Courtship of Mr. Lyon, by Angela Carter - 750

Within Beauty and the Beast inspired ten pages of Angela Carter's short story "The Courtship of Mr. Lyon", the narrator exploits the contradictory nature of the house Palladian before and after the presence of Beauty to express both the mental and physical deterioration of the Beast. When Beauty first returns home after several months' hiatus, she notices a "painful groan of the hinges" as she opens the door (Carter 50). Such a noise reflects the fact that they have not been physically oiled for a long period of time, and that the Beast has stopped maintaining a smooth transition for his return due to an increasingly weak state of hope. Similar to the wail of the hinges, it is only his desolate cry that plagues the once silent tranquility of the manor. The extent of his despondency is further illustrated by the interior of the house which was now shrouded in “perfect darkness” (Carter 50). The abode no longer possessed its benevolent light, but was rather stripped of it, and in its absence only absolute darkness remained. The supreme darkness symbolizes the fact that no light has found refuge within the confines of the house, and since the light is seen as an indicator of hope, its extinction restores the fact that the Beast had been deprived of the indemnity of its return. The example in which his anguish over abandonment is connoted is when the “house [echoes] with abandonment” (Carter 50). Although the house is quite grand and well furnished, there are no reverberations of any sound that could make the house feel alive. Rather, it is just the sounds of the void that engulf the house. In comparison, the Beast's mentality is st... half of paper ......h, but now it was strangely cold, even if it remained equally desolate. Such a change of atmosphere hints at the fact that Beauty had become the warmth of the house; it had become the Beast's warmth and his life. With his departure from the manor, he had captured the heat, and so it was like slowly taking the life out of him, and as the house grew colder and colder, the beast evidently became closer and closer to death. Coincidentally, it is the lack of warmth, the coldness, which classifies the individual as a corpse, which further suggests that the Beast is about to reach the limits of his mortality. Finally, by comparing the vibrant and static house that seemed to exist in a dimension of its own at the beginning of the narrative, to its desolate condition after Beauty's departure, the extent of the suffering the Beast endures is visually revealed.