The problem for a feminist, revisionist "Beauty and the Beast" is that no one character more causes us to shake our established preferences... to work toward a different finish than we were comfortably expecting, than the arrogant patriarch villain, Gaston. Belle reads as many books as she can get her hands on, but she represents the stage of moral perfection we liberals are all ostensibly at these days, so she's not about to throw any surprises our way, any new-fangled ideas on how to behave she got from reading some of her books: she'll only confirm what we know about ourselves. She'll school any number of characters on how properly to behave, implicitly school them to rise to her level, but (of course) she'll also embrace others' cultural preferences and eat and drink as they themselves would -- get dirty with them, in a sense, to help not only not shame but also bring equivalency to their relationship: "it's not only for you to learn to b...