Made with Love
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| Title: | Made with Love |
| Creator: | Jackie Paciello |
| Date(s): | December 1991 |
| Medium: | |
| Fandom: | Beauty and the Beast (TV) |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Made with Love is a Beauty and the Beast (TV) essay by Jackie Paciello.
It was printed in Beauty and the Beast Concordance.
Some Topics Discussed
- Father's relationships with Vincent Wells' and Devin Wells' mothers
- Father's bitterness towards his own failed relationships with women may have spilled over to his relationship and attitudes towards what Catherine Chandler offered
- the power struggle between Jacob and John Pater, one focused on Vincent Wells' soul
- Vincent's eternal struggle
From the Essay
One cannot possibly discuss Vincent, his motivations, the living dichotomy within him without also delving into the psyche of the single most profound influence on his life: Jacob Wells, aka Father.
It now appears that John and Anna — John's wife — may have preceded Jacob Wells in the tunnels, and there they planted the seeds of the underground society. But where John Pater enjoyed the autocratic power of his position, Jacob Wells keenly remembered the damage done by the self-serving, single-minded despotism of McCarthyism, and he was determined that this new society should have at its heart the precepts of democracy.
... Vincent was not merely another tunnel child, and the refined, serene lifestyle provided Vincent was in contrast and direct conflict with that part of the boy which was definitely not human. A part which, from the very beginning — Father emphasized by letting the boy's hair grow to mane-like length.
Was Vincent's humanity so indelibly intertwined with his ability to go above, to have Catherine as a part of his life, to experience the freedom of choice, however limited, that their absence disrupted the very balance that kept his animal side in check?
If Catherine's statement was correct, then Father had unwittingly been setting Vincent up for failure for years. On one hand, he had acknowledged the humanness in Vincent, given it the freedom to learn through literature, art, and music, given him limitless opportunity to explore and develop his mind. On the other hand, however, Father had taken every opportunity to remind Vincent that though his soul was free to roam the universe, his body—the flesh and blood reality of his existence — was bound within the confines of the tunnels. In "Siege," Father lamented that he feared Vincent's soul would someday yearn for a life that could never be. Again and again Father had attempted to restrain Vincent from trying to realize the very dreams that he had encouraged him to develop. Catherine was merely the catalyst for Vincent.
Father himself had naively helped Vincent to develop the spirit of a Renaissance man, yet refused to acknowledge that that spirit could be crushed by that same self-awareness.[...]
It is difficult to condemn Father for wanting Vincent to epitomize and symbolize aU that was good about the tunnel world. But it is even more difficult to understand how someone as erudite as Father could fail to see the enormous psychological pressure he was exerting on his adopted son.
In his defense, Father made the same kinds of decisions that all parents make — some good, some bad.
Given the tragic and heart-rending finale of ‘The Rest is Silence,” one might see the ironic similarity. Though it is obvious that Vincent was not endowed with a purely human psyche. Father had always endeavored to treat him as though he was—nurturing the scholar, the romantic and poet in him, and refining his mind to the pinnacle of self-actualization. Perhaps he did hope that in doing so he could keep his son’s dark side submerged, so highly develop his superego that Vincent’s id would be held in check. But Father could not anticipate the strength of Vincent’s bond with Catherine, or of Paracelsus’s evil.
Decisions he had made with love became deceptions in light of his son’s burgeoning self-reliance, and the fabric of his carefully constructed, safely snug world began to unravel.
Not only did Father have to accept the realization that the decisions he had made in Vincent’s youth might have been misguided, he had to acknowledge that Catherine Chandler was not Margaret Chase. She not only was willing to stand by Vincent’s love, she was willing to die for it, something totally unfathomable to Father. Only in the last scene of the last episode of the second season did he face the truth, the clarity and depth of her love for his son, and he was stunned beyond words.
Whether justified over-protectiveness or suffocating obsession, Jacob Wells claimed that he made the decisions that shaped Vincent’s life out of love. It remains to be seen whether Vincent will triumph out of his primal darkness in spite of that love, or because of it.