This was, ta-da, about the fairytale type of Beauty and the Beast. With some digressions into East of the Sun, West of the Moon type. Not to mention the Loathly Lady and other unpleasant brides.
The connections to arranged marriages. Take whatever bridegroom your father offers and make the best of him. "Bluebeard" is the opposite, but note that the heroine there did not take any advice but married on her own.
The loathly lady came up mostly in the context where the bridegroom had to let her make her own choice. (There are others. Like the frog princess. I mentioned her but it didn't come up that it's her housewifery that wins.)
That "Beauty and the Beast" is in fact a literary version of the original folklore version where the woman marries an animal bridegroom, violates a condition, and must quest to find him again, with the novelistic change that she must accept him, a psychological change. OTOH, while it gets streamlined (in the original version, Beauty dreams of a handsome man who begs for her help), that change got imported back into folklore.
the nasty edge of how the beast reacts to the theft, and the father's carelessness.
The two types of tale: one where the beast has to learn to be less beastly, and one where the beauty has to learn to look beyond. ("Bearskin" neatly encapsulates the latter; the youngest daughter accepts him because she realizes only a kind man would have bailed her father out.)
