The story “Cupid and Psyche” bears much resemblance to the tale of “Beauty and the Beast”. In both stories the youngest daughter of three is an extraordinarily beautiful young woman who possesses the attention of everyone around them and the older two sisters are jealous of their younger sibling. This image of three sisters, the youngest being the most beautiful is a very common theme in fairy tales and can be seen in a number of stories. In both “Cupid and Psyche” and Beauty and the Beast” the beautiful young girl lives in the luxurious homes of their counterpart but go for a long period of time without seeing them. One difference here in these tales is that in Beauty and the Beast, the young girl does not think she is in love with the Beast until the end of the story and constantly rejects his marriage proposal. While in Cupid and Psyche, Psyche is almost instantly enticed by Cupid through his loving words and kind manner.
In both tales, the older sisters bring many problems for the lovers. In Beauty and the Beast, the sisters are jealous of their sister’s happiness and pretend to be very loving of their younger sister and trick her into staying more than the ten days the Beast granted, in doing so the Beast attempts to kill himself through starvation. In Cupid and Psyche, her sisters motivate her to sneak in a lamp and a knife to the dinner table to reveal her husband and to kill him if he is a monster. By doing so Psyche almost loses her husband and betrays his trust. In both of these fairy tales in the end the two mean sisters face punishment. In Beauty and the Beast the sisters are turned into statues and in Cupid and Psyche the sisters fall off a cliff and die.
The overall message in these two fairy tales are ultimately the same. That people should love for more than appearance and to “not judge a book by its cover”, and that the value of personality is greater than that of appearance. These two tales although different in details, portrays similar messages and use the same central theme.
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