O my Love is like a red, red rose

That’s newly sprung in June;

O my Love is like the melody

That’s sweetly played in tune.

from “A Red, Red, Rose” by Robert Burns

This month for Fun Fact Fridays, I’m featuring a series of symbols from Beauty and the Alchemist. (We’re only one week away from launch!! 😀 ) I decided to start out with one of the most recognizable symbols from Beauty and the Beast: the rose!

In folklore and popular culture, roses have been associated with love for centuries. Rose petals were sometimes used in love potions. Rose hips were used as beads in necklaces meant to attract love. The rose itself is 35 million years old, according to fossil evidence, and originally grew across the Northern Hemisphere.

In older versions of Beauty and the Beast, Beauty asks her father for a rose as he leaves home. Then, in his travels, he ends up stumbling upon the Beast’s castle. The Beast doesn’t actually mind him being there until he takes a rose from the garden for Beauty, at which point the Beast starts rampaging and imprisoning people. That’s why Beauty ends up in the Beast’s castle–because she’s the one who asked for the rose, and she feels responsible. In the Disney version, of course, there’s no rose request or rose stealing. Instead, there’s the magic rose in the West Wing that serves as an indicator of how much time the Beast has left.

As to what the rose symbolizes in the story, most people agree it’s true love, innocence, or some combination of the two. In my opinion, the rose is also used to show that Beauty values less tangible things like love rather than material items or showy appearances–her request for a rose is usually contrasted with her siblings’ requests for jewels and fancy clothes. So the rose is an indicator of how the story will play out.

In my own story, the rose is replaced by the slightly fictionalized “sweet-cherry,” which figures in local lore and in the mystery that surrounds the haunted castle. I suppose that’s fitting, since Beauty and the Alchemist isn’t technically a love story–it’s more a story of friendship and rediscovery (something often associated with cherry blossoms!). And does a rose by any other guise smell as sweet? Well, I’ll leave that up to you. 😉

Selected Sources

For a very nice history of roses, I recommend this article.

For a short, in-depth (although slightly disturbing) look at the rose in Beauty and the Beast, check out this site.

And as always, historical folklore in this post is largely based on Cunningham’s Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs!