The Courtship of Mr. Lyons, also known as Beauty and the Beast, brings another twist, as with Cinderella to the classic Disney tale. There are big differences, including the fact that Beauty goes through a bigger transformation in the end than Mr. Lyon. It is a story about what it means to be human, claiming there is something real that corresponds to each of the fairy tale elements of the story. The fairy tale distorts them so that you focus on it, because they can be uncomfortable to think about. The distortion is to encourage us to look at and apply the situation to any young man coming of age and facing manhood in or out of a relationship and what it means to be a woman with relationship to a man. There is also a gender discourse in this text, and an implication of the fear of men by women. For example, Beauty does not want to touch Mr. Lyon, showing a typical reaction to otherness is revulsion. Furthermore, it states that men can grow to tame there aggression, yet girls are tamed in a different way about what is acceptable for interactions with each other, a way that is culturally determined. Carter maybe feels men are afraid of their potential for violence as well, as shown through Mr. Lyons throughout the short story.
However there is more to this text than that. It is an analysis of the need for redemption in order to feel human again, to master the beast within all of us. This occurs in the short story for both Mr. Lyon and Beauty. It asks how we fight our animal instincts to get to more human behavior.
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