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Female Characters Of The Movie ' The Beast '

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The later Disney films, starting in the 1990s, offer the viewers a more varied choice of male characters, as well as heroes with more personality, wit, and individuality. In fact, these animated movies introduce the concept of male villains, a status that was primarily reserved for evil queens and witches in the previous fairytales. This new portrayal is shown in Beauty & The Beast with Gaston being a simple villager with grand ideas of marriage and schemes of beast-killing. Unlike the prior Princes, Gaston is a man with power, talents, and recognition in the town. Every man wants to be as strong and capable, and every woman is attracted to his ruggedly handsome good looks and charisma. Gaston is a powerful sex symbol, who happens to be arrogant, misogynistic, chauvinist man who needs to control everything, as displayed by his need to marry the reluctant Belle, imprison her father, and kill the one she loves.
Gaston is Beauty & the Beast’s evil power, but also represents the new dichotomy between male and female characters in the 1990s. They are separate from each other and both men and women grow to be less passive and unidentifiable, gaining new individual power. These new traits and “male transformation of the 90s” could be a response to the criticism of masculinity of the 1980s, as suggested by Susan Jeffords in her article (Jeffords 1963). In fact, as women were gaining more and more independence, some critics argued that men should go back to their previous

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