Gastonology

The 1991 Disney animated musical Beauty and the Beast was an instant classic. Only a few months after its theatrical release, it became the first animated film to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture. In addition, the relatively new home video market meant fans could watch the film time and again – an activity which young children seem especially inclined toward – thus ensuring that this story and its songs became ingrained into the minds and daily life of the viewers, turning it into a vital piece of many people’s common world, integral as the use of language.

It might be argued that one of the reasons that this film merited such Academy Award interest over its musical predecessor The Little Mermaid or its successor Aladdin, was its handling of an unusually complex cast of characters. One such, created especially for the movie, was the villain Gaston. It is his particular origins we shall here trace, in much the manner of an etymology.

Just like tracing any word origin, it all begins by asking: Where did that come from?

With the appropriate warning that we will give spoilers for a thirty year old film: in the 1991 movie Beauty and the Beast, Gaston is a handsome, vain, muscular, boorish hunter beloved by everyone in his small French village – all except for the girl he’s after, the town beauty appropriately named Belle. Certain that Belle just needs to come to her senses, he sets up a wedding outside her house and is shocked that when he goes in to propose she not only turns him down, but causes him to fall into a filthy pond in front of all his guests. He is evidently so traumatized by this experience that he undergoes a personality change, becoming far more dastardly in his actions. He schemes to blackmail Belle into marriage by arranging to have her father, Maurice, thrown into a mental asylum if she refuses – the legitimate excuse Gaston finds for Maurice’s incarceration is that he’s been ranting and raving that Belle is imprisoned by a Beast. However, Gaston’s plan is delayed because unbeknownst to him, Belle really has left the village and is now residing with said Beast. When she returns home, and Gaston attempts to enact his plan, he is thwarted when Belle reveals that the Beast is not Maurice’s hallucination but is actually real. Moreover, she makes it apparent that she prefers the Beast’s company to Gaston’s. Enraged, Gaston gathers the villagers and they go to the Beast’s castle, intending to kill him. Most of the villagers are fought off by enchanted furnishings, but Gaston is able to escape the brawl and locate the Beast. He tries to provoke the Beast to fight him, but Beast refuses, and Gaston prepares to simply bludgeon him to death. At last – at the sight of Belle’s return to the castle – the Beast begins to fight back, and ultimately Gaston is the loser of the battle but pleads so pathetically for his life that the Beast lets him go. When the Beast turns his back, Gaston stabs him; but doing so, he is thrown from the rooftop himself. He falls from an unsurvivable height into the castle’s moat, never to be seen again.

Unlike many fairytales, Beauty and the Beast did not originate as folklore. The oldest version of the tale was written by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve as part of a multi-volume book entitled La Jeune Américaine, ou; les Contes Marins, published in 1740. The book is of Canterbury Tales style, featuring characters who stay entertained by telling each other stories while on a voyage to America. Her version of Beauty and the Beast, told by a chambermaid character, is novella length on its own. It includes a section telling of La Belle (usually translated Beauty) and her family life, leading to her cohabitation with the mysterious Beast, and her ultimate acceptance of his marriage proposal, followed by supernatural assurances of her wise choice and eventually her discovery of his transformation to a handsome teenaged Prince, followed by a section where the newly restored Prince tells his side of the story; followed by a lengthy explanation of Beauty’s true parentage that removes any obstacles to her marrying a royal (she is not the daughter of a merchant but really the daughter of a magical king and fairy princess and she is also the first-cousin of the Prince, which in this context was considered a favorable point.) The villains of the story are various arrogant or jealous older women, whose thoughtless and malicious actions always bring the innocent Prince or the harmless Beauty to suffer. Beauty’s aunt, a good fairy, has been manipulating affairs to protect the youths and ultimately ensure their happiness. 

Sources attached to the Disney film don’t cite this version of the fairytale as its basis, but rather the adaptation by Jeanne-Marie LePrince de Beaumont published in 1756. This streamlined version only uses the first 1/3rd of Villeneuve’s tale, and hurries the action along to create a short story of about 5,000 words versus Villeneuve’s 42,000. It intensifies the malice of Beauty’s sisters, who now actively try to achieve her death, thereby turning them into the villains of the story. This is the version most often encountered in fairytale collections, and it is sometimes erroneously attributed to Charles Perrault. 

Per Beaumont: Beauty is described as a gorgeous, virtuous girl who is teased by her older sisters “because she spent the greatest part of her time in reading good books.” There are “several gentlemen [who] would have married her” but she refuses their offers, preferring to stay home with her father. Her family’s fortune is lost and they move to the country. Her father “the merchant” receives news one of his ships has been recovered, and with hopes that they will be able to return to a life of luxury the sisters ask for new dresses and jewels, but Beauty only asks for a rose. The merchant finds that the recovered ship doesn’t bring him the money he hoped for. Returning home empty handed, he becomes lost in the woods and seeks shelter. He finds a seemingly empty castle, though food and gifts are laid out for him by invisible means. He spends the night, but as he goes to depart, he spots a rose and picks it. At this, “a frightful Beast” appears and declares he will murder the merchant for the theft of his rose. The Beast agrees to spare him only if one of his daughters will suffer in his place. The merchant returns home expecting only to put his affairs in order, but Beauty insists on taking his place. Beauty’s sisters rub their eyes with onions to seem that they regret her loss. A magic horse takes Beauty and her father to the castle, and they stay the night. During the night, Beauty dreams that a “lady” comes and promises a reward for her good deed. The next morning the merchant leaves, Beauty cries a lot, but then she goes to admire the castle. She discovers an apartment has been arranged for her, and a library and a music room, and also a magic mirror that lets her see whatever she wants to look at. She meets the Beast at supper and his behavior is extremely polite and humble, but at the end of the meal he proposes marriage, which she refuses. She spends three months in the castle and every night the Beast proposes to her. Eventually she asks permission to see her family. The Beast grants it, expecting she will never return and that he’ll die of grief, but she promises to be back in a week. Beast has her transported by magical means, and to return she needs only to lay a ring on her bedside. A trunk of clothes also accompanies her, but when Beauty says she intends to give some of the dresses to her sisters, it vanishes, and reappears when she acknowledges they are meant only for her. Her sisters are sent for, both having been unhappily married in the meantime: one to a witty man and one to an attractive man (the Beast has neither wit nor attractiveness). They are so jealous that they resolve to make Beauty break her promise to the Beast, hoping he will eat her in retaliation. They make her stay longer. On the tenth night, Beauty dreams that Beast is ill, and she wakes up in realization of how much she cares for him and that she should accept his proposal. She puts the ring on the table and is transported back to the castle. She waits all day but the Beast doesn’t appear, and she finally finds him outside, dying of self-inflicted starvation. He declares he will die, but she begs him to live and to marry her. At this the castle begins to “sparkle with light; and fireworks, instruments of music, everything seemed to give notice of some great event.” She returns her gaze to the Beast and finds him transformed into a handsome prince. He briefly explains he was cursed by an evil fairy, and that he had to seem absent of beauty or wit yet win the love of a maiden despite the handicap. They find Beauty’s extended family all transported into the castle and the “lady” of her dream appears and congratulates her on her wise choice, and promises she will be queen. She also promises to curse Beauty’s sisters to become statues on the palace gate. All of them are magically transported to the Prince’s dominions and to Beauty and the Prince’s happy ending.

Disney first thought about adapting Beauty and the Beast for an animated film in the 1940s, but they were unable to make a workable story out of it. In the 1980s the studio decided to have another go, since it was the last of the commonly known classic fairytales which they hadn’t yet adapted. Several script ideas were written and discarded. A version was even selected for production, and storyboarded, before its demo reel was rejected by then-chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg. In this version, there were two villains in the story: Belle’s wicked aunt Marguerite, who looked to have Belle married off for money, and the man of Marguerite’s choosing, a wealthy fop named Gaston, the Marquis of Gauche.

It is likely that the foppish character’s forename was suggested by one of the French nobles who bore it, such as the 17th century Gaston de Bourbon, Duke of Orleans. Storyboard images shared by Andreas Deja show this version of Gaston, in his white wig and heeled court shoes, trying to challenge the Beast to a swordfight and getting punched out for his trouble. 

After the positive experience Katzenberg had had with Howard Ashman’s work on The Little Mermaid, Katzenberg “buttonholed” him into working on Beauty and the Beast as a fixer, even though Ashman was more interested in getting to work on his pet project Aladdin. 

Ashman had begun his career in the world of musical theatre. In the mid-1980s he took some work with Disney, first writing lyrics for the song “Once Upon a Time in New York City” used in the film Oliver and Company. He was then tagged to write the songs for The Little Mermaid, for which he brought in his frequent collaborator Alan Menken to write the music. Due to the nature of a Broadway-style musical, in which the songs tell the story, Ashman was given enormous influence over what went into the movie despite being credited only as a lyricist. The screenwriters and storyboard artists had to work around the material he provided.

John Musker sat in on an early development meeting for the new Beauty and the Beast and tells of what he saw:

Howard laid out his thoughts on all of it. He saw the story as a kind of King and I musical, a love story about the humanization of a bad-tempered ogre by an intelligent well-bred woman. In fact, I recall Howard referring to the Beauty and the Beast ballad, the centerpiece of their romance, as the Shall We Dance number.

He thought Gaston should not be a fop but an extremely macho hunter, with trophies up on his wall (who would naturally want to Kill the Beast.) It seems to me I heard Howard say that Gaston should be a “towel snapping jock!” He saw him as a chauvinist in the extreme.

Belle, he thought, could be a bookworm whose love of reading puts her at odds with the provincial townspeople she was surrounded by. She was an oddball.

And the objects would no longer be mute. They would sing and dance! Howard said, “You’re doing a musical! You need characters to sing!!” I remember meekly offering a comment and a concern. I wondered if it would be problematic if the objects could talk because they could tell Belle what was going on (and destroy the plot in the process.) Howard was annoyed at my raising a question and shot me a withering look. He thought that was an easily solvable problem: “All we have to do is give them one line…‘If only we could tell her…’” And Howard turned back to his pitch with his fervor undiminished. Well, I think everyone was stunned at how clearly and entertainingly thought out this version was. It was so powerful.

Producer Don Hahn recalls, “We were looking for a character who was the opposite of the beast. The beast had a big heart, he was sincere, he’d made a mistake. Gaston was incredibly handsome, the Beast ugly… [...] So, you have that contrast, and as the movie goes on, they change places. The Beast becomes more human, Gaston becomes more of an animal. And that’s why that character is so effective.”

Ashman and Menken had developed a pastiche technique for both their stories and songs, borrowing ideas from other successful movies and musicals. The pair had a knack for remixing them in a way that never came across as a “rip-off” of the original. For Beauty and the Beast, Ashman derived ideas from other musicals including The King and I and The Student Prince, and from the famous Jean Cocteau cinematic adaptation of the fairytale. Some of his song lyrics even echo lines from the Cocteau script, as for instance: “She really is a funny girl, that Belle.” vs. “You are a funny girl, Beauty… a funny girl.” (French: Vous êtes une drôle de petite fille, Belle… une drôle de petite fille.)

To have Beauty/Belle’s rival suitor as an aggressive hunter was suggested in the character of the handsome, arrow-shooting Avenant in Jean Cocteau’s 1946 film. So too was the idea of making him a “mirror image” to the Beast – in Cocteau’s movie the same actor played both Avenant and the Beast (and also the Beast’s post-transformation handsome prince, named Ardent.) 

The suggestion that Cocteau might adapt Beauty and the Beast as a film was put forward by Cocteau’s frequent collaborator and lover, Jean Marais. Marais hoped that his playing the Beast would offer him a chance to show off his fine acting rather than merely his good looks. Early ideas for his monster makeup included wearing horns or antlers; this ultimately was not carried out although the script retains a line where Beauty’s sister jokes, “Plenty of husbands have beards and horns.” (French: Il y a bien d’autres maris qui portent du poil et des cornes.)

For good or bad, Cocteau kept and published a diary about the filming of his movie, which makes it far easier to find information about the film’s shooting than about its inception. The story is acknowledged to be derived from Beaumont’s version of the fairytale. Cocteau’s unusual take on the material involved adding a best friend for Beauty’s brother; this companion, though careless, greedy and arrogant, wishes to marry the gorgeous and kindly Beauty. Says her brother, applauding her rejection of Avenant’s proposal-cum-attempted rape: “I know I’m a scoundrel, proudly so, but I couldn’t stand to see you marry one.” [French: Je suis un chenapan. Je m’en vante, mais je ne supporterais pas de t’en voir épouser d’un autre.] Avenant nevertheless demonstrates a genuine affinity for the family, standing with them even in times of hardship; but when they learn the Beast has money, Avenant and the other siblings contrive a plan to kill and rob the Beast.

Not much is documented about the reasoning for Avenant’s creation. As previously mentioned, Beaumont’s version does include a reference to Beauty’s suitors, but she gives no details of these individuals. It would seem that Cocteau seized upon these shapeless characters as an opportunity to pad out what would otherwise be too short of a story for a full-length adaptation. One might also surmise, given Cocteau’s known inclinations, that he felt a movie about beauty ought to include some attractive men on the screen – and why waste the looks of Marais when they’re available?

If Avenant’s appearance didn’t give away the contrast to the ugly Beast, any misunderstanding is clarified through his name, which can be translated as “handsome.” The Beast almost faints at the anguish of learning it. It marks Avenant as a natural partner to Belle/Beauty. Whereas the Beauty of the fairytale dismisses all her suitors, Avenant actually makes some headway with Beauty of the film. At the end of the movie she admits that she had loved him. Since Beauty has an opportunity for a desirable marriage with a better looking, familiar man, this likely helps (storywise) to instill her with more doubts about accepting the strange Beast, while giving the Beast more reason to be jealous of her return to her family home, creating tension in the story that would not otherwise exist. 

In Cocteau’s telling, like Beaumont’s, Beauty chooses the Beast when she realizes how much her absence is hurting him. But in Cocteau’s version, she is rewarded for her wise and virtuous choice by finding that when it seems he should die, he instead transforms to look exactly like Avenant. Meanwhile, Avenant is shot dead with an arrow by an enchanted statue of the goddess Diana, and at his death he transforms into the Beast. The smoking gloves of Prince Ardent suggest that he was not entirely innocent in his rival’s death. He states the message of the film: Love has the power to turn a man into a beast, and to turn an ugly man handsome.

Cocteau’s fondness and knowledge for mythology is no secret. That the statue is specifically named as the goddess Diana indicates a deliberate and intentional symbolism. The most obvious allusion seems to be to the ancient story of Actaeon. In the traditional telling, he is a handsome young hunter who is turned into a wild beast (usually a stag or some hybrid human-stag) by Diana, as punishment for intruding upon her as she bathes; though in some older versions of the myth his transgression is said to be a presumptuous marriage proposal, or a boast that he is a superior hunter to the goddess of the hunt. Cocteau was certainly familiar with the story, as he painted a scene of it at the villa Santo Sospir – and one may recall, the original idea for his Beast’s design would have included antlers. It may be a little much to say the whole character of Avenant is based upon Actaeon, but this tragic Greek hero is the likely model for his ultimate fate.

But Cocteau’s Avenant was not Howard Ashman’s only inspiration for the New Gaston. Explicitly named by Don Hahn as “the inspiration for Gaston” is the character Miles Gloriosus, from the 1962 Broadway musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. 

Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics for Miles’ introductory song include:

[MILES]

Come, bring to me my bride.

My lust for her no longer can be denied.

Convey the news!

I have no time to lose:

There are towns to plunder, temples to burn and women to abuse.

[SOLDIERS]

Look at that foot!

Look at that heel!

Mark the magnificent muscles of steel!

[MILES]

I am my ideal!

I, Miles Gloriosus,

I, slaughterer of thousands,

I, oppressor of the meek,

Subduer of the weak,

Degrader of the Greek,

Destroyer of the Turk,

Must hurry back to work.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is a Broadway remix of the plays of Titus Macchius Plautus, an ancient Roman playwright who mostly composed comedies. One of his surviving plays is Miles Gloriosus – which title is in fact the description of the character (“Braggart Soldier” – Latin miles, see military, gloriosus, see glorious) rather than his real name, which is Pyrgopolinices Pulcher (“Tower-towntaker” surnamed “Handsome.”) The play is acknowledged to be an adaptation of an ancient Greek original called Alazon (“The Braggart”), believed to have been written in the 3rd century BC and sometimes attributed to the author Menander. No text of the Greek version has survived.

In Plautus’s play, Pyrgopolinices happily takes credit for the most ridiculous and improbable military achievements, although in fact he seems less inclined to boast than to encourage others to do so on his behalf. He has a “parasite” who follows him and flatters him in exchange for meals – their exchanges almost read like Ashman’s lyrics to the song Gaston. The heroes of the play use Pyrgopolinices’ susceptibility to flattery as a means to trick him into freeing a woman he keeps as a slave (slavery being legal in ancient Rome), and when at the end he is genuinely attacked, he reveals his true cowardice and unwillingness to fight. 

It is not impossible that Howard Ashman’s theatre experience had brought him into contact with the original Plautian play, although it seems more likely that the enduring fame of this story across the centuries, and its numerous derivatives and imitators, are what suggested the almost identical traits between its villain and Gaston, which are even more alike than to the A Funny Thing Happened derivative that was said to be the inspiration.

Linda Woolverton is the credited screenwriter for Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, but many elements in the story are not her own. Already in what is labeled as the First Draft (dated 6/14/90) there are added scenes that she complained about, and which she fought to get removed; for example a sequence where Belle bakes a celebratory cake for her father. (“Belle wouldn’t know how to bake a cake!” Woolverton argues.)

To avoid being influenced, she deliberately did not watch Cocteau’s version of Beauty and the Beast, but she followed the scenario she was given with Howard Ashman’s new storyline. She says that for her writing, she based Gaston on her ex-boyfriends. “Jeffrey Katzenberg kept harping on the fact that Gaston couldn’t be a cartoon-jawed Dudley Do-right or he wouldn’t be a good villain,” she recalls. “He had to be credible, a worthy opponent, full of himself yet charming – someone you’d go out with once or twice.”

Gaston is described in his first script appearance as “The handsome hunter, GASTON [...] Gaston walks ahead with an arrogant stride, gun slung over his shoulder. He's a rude, self-centered bully with a feral look in his eye as if the whole world is his prey.” In the early drafts he attempts to give Belle gifts of antlers and unsuccessfully pretends to be interested in books so as to impress her. He also makes little effort to conceal his eventual blackmail scheme. From the First Draft (formatted for online readability):

[Belle] tries to get past. He grabs her arm and yanks her back, slamming her into the wall…hard! He looms over her. 

GASTON: Of course, if you would have married me…I might have been more understanding of your poor father’s condition.

BELLE: What are you talking about?

GASTON: And if you were to  change your mind…I might be able to convince that unpleasant fellow to go away.

The pieces fall into place. Belle stares at Gaston with shock and disbelief.

BELLE (appalled): What are you saying? This is blackmail!

GASTON: Call it what you like.

BELLE: You think you can force me to care for you?

GASTON (a sneer): I’m not asking you to care.

Gaston’s voice actor, Richard White, remarked that the early scripts for Gaston portrayed him as “totally despicable. We had to try to find some redeeming characteristics so the townsfolk weren't fools for liking him." In interviews, White has the habit of laughingly defending Gaston’s goodness and insisting that he is simply “misunderstood.” When a fangirl remarked upon Gaston trying to “murder” the Beast, White leapt in defensively: “He thought that he was hunting! He’s a great hunter. He thought the Beast was just another animal that needed to be gotten rid of.” 

He recalls that the actors were put together for recording sessions, which is unusual for voice actors, and that they were sometimes encouraged to improvise dialogue. The recording sessions were filmed so that the animators could use the actors for reference footage; White says he recognizes some of the animated Gaston’s facial expressions as his own.

Gaston’s visual appearance is the creation of animator Andreas Deja. He had worked on the early version of the film in which Gaston was a fop, but per the new script instructions he revised him into a brutish bully character influenced by the appearance of Brom Bones in the old Legend of Sleepy Hollow short. However, the producers were unhappy with this cartoonish design and told him that Gaston needed to be handsome. Deja was perturbed by such a demand: “I was thinking: Is this what you want? You can't be serious. TV soap opera looks for a Disney villain? This type of a design will only result in stiff, lifeless animation.” While Deja only admits to having in mind a “soap opera star” for Gaston’s new look, the character’s sharp cheekbones, peaked eyebrows, long eyelashes and unusual hairline are once again evocative of Jean Marais. Deja has also described Gaston as looking “like Superman.”

After a couple weeks of seeing Deja grouse and sulk over the change, Katzenberg summoned him into his office and gave him a talking-to where he explained exactly why Gaston needed to be handsome as an antithesis to the hideous Beast. Once Deja understood the necessity for it, he took on the task of drawing what he called “the most difficult character I ever animated at Disney.” Due to the new standard of realism that was required, he modeled the body after photographs from Muscle & Fitness Magazine. Some live-action reference footage was given to him, but he also acted out scenes in a mirror. He reports being told by others that Gaston’s expressions and movements resemble his own mannerisms moreso than any other character he drew. 

The character of Gaston dies at the end of the movie, less poetically than did his counterpart Avenant: he simply “tumbles from the balcony to his death” per the First Draft screenplay. Such a fate was also shared by the Evil Queen in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It makes for a fairly non-violent death and doesn’t leave a corpse to be shown on screen, thus maintaining the film’s G rating. 

If we were to write an entry for Gaston’s origins like it was an etymology, we’d probably have to say “Gaston, villain from Disney’s animated film Beauty and the Beast. Originally conceived as a silly fop, he became a handsome bully in the course of the film’s production. The screenplay ergo the character is credited to Linda Woolverton, but with influences from others including Howard Ashman, who derived ideas from Jean Cocteau’s 1946 film La belle et la bête, ultimately derived from the fairytale by Madame de Villeneuve, and also from the musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, derived from the Latin play Miles Gloriosus from the Greek play Alazon.” There’d be a lot of missing details in that, but that’s sometimes how it has to go if you want to avoid – where are we at? About 4,800 words?

As to the actual etymology of the name Gaston, it is Old French, of uncertain origin. Theories include that it is a variation of Gascon (see gascon) indicating “a person from Gascony; a person of Gascon ethnicity” or that it is from proto-Germanic *gastiz, “stranger” (cognate to guest), or that it is a variant on Latin vastus (see vast) meaning someone large or burly. -on is often a diminutive suffix in French. Gaston’s popularity as a name seems to derive from its association with a saint, who in English is usually called Saint Vedast, or sometimes Saint Foster. He was a contemporary of King Clovis (Frankish: Hluthwic). If it really is the same name as the saint’s, it makes Gaston a double-diminutive of the Frankish name Widogast, which probably translates something like “stranger who guides you through the woods.”

(Through the mist, though the woods, through the darkness and the shadows…)