“A” villain, of course – not “the” villain. Gaston must always retain his status for being as despicable and evil as he is. But what the Enchantress does right at the beginning, even though we never see her do anything else in the movie, is just as horrible.
A lot of this has to do with what we see of both her and Beast's characters. Honestly, I'd already be predisposed to take Beast's side here because he's one of my favourite Disney characters, but the whole reason he is one of my favourites is because of his sweet, very-far-from-heartless personality. Sure, we're told he was maybe kind of selfish and spoiled, but the thing is, we don't ever see him before he was cursed and so we have no context for this. It's “show don't tell” at its finest: if you just tell me Beast was a heartless person before, but everything we actually see of him suggests otherwise, I'm simply not going to believe it. The only unpleasant side of Beast we see is his temper, and honestly, I'd be in a bad mood too if I'd been stuck inside my home as a Beast for ten years. Other than that, he very quickly becomes kind and generous and just comes across as a total sweetheart.
And we can't credit his sudden shift in personality to Belle, either. It's important not to overestimate what she can or should be expected to do in terms of helping Beast become a better person. Yes, she can be the motivation for him to try harder to overcome his faults and yes, she can open up a new, more loving perspective on life that he hadn't seen before, but Belle couldn't give Beast a complete personality overhaul, especially not this quickly, and it wouldn't be right to ask her to try. If Beast starts acting kind and caring the morning after Belle shows up, the only explanation is that those traits were inside of him somewhere to begin with. And yet the Enchantress' excuse for cursing Beast was that he “had no love in his heart”. If Beast was really like that, I don't think Belle would ever have fallen for him. We see for ourselves that Belle knows how to spot a bad guy! So judging from everything we see of Beast in the movie, he's an absolute sweetheart who deals with anger management issues and was not in a good place when Maurice and Belle first showed up in his life. And whose fault was it that he was in such a bad place at the time? The Enchantress's.
Much as we never see what Beast was like before he was cursed and have no proof of his heartlessness, we also never see what the Enchantress is like and have no proof of her being benign and justified. And, honestly, there's a lot to suggest otherwise. What exactly gives her the right to visit random people's homes and decide after one minute what kind of person they are and whether they deserve to be cursed? How does she get that the prince is heartless just because he didn't want to let a strange woman into his home? I mean, for all we know, he had heard about what happened to Snow White when she trusted the old hag at her door offering a gift of strangely perfect plant life and was trying to avoid a similar situation... In all seriousness, though, if the Enchantress is the sort of person who goes around putting horrible curses on people when she doesn't like their personalities, it's no wonder the prince got a bad vibe off of her. What the Enchantress saw was the prince's reaction to one specific situation at one particular point in time, with no knowledge of anything he might have been going through in his life or any variables like that, which as she should have realized is not nearly enough to determine his entire character. And can we just take a moment to remember this person she thought was unquestionably worthy of horrible punishment was under twenty-one and therefore not even at full maturity? Maybe he was just rude because he was going through a teenage phase of some sort! Or maybe it was even less than that. I've talked in my last Beauty and the Beast post about my fan theory that time inside the enchanted castle moves more slowly than it does outside the walls, but what if that's not the explanation for how the Beast has been under a spell for ten years by the year of his twenty-first birthday, but looks like an adult in the stain-glass images we see? What if the artwork was just inaccurate? In that case the Enchantress would have cursed an eleven-year-old child and condemned him to a life of misery and solitude, just because he was rude to her.
I've seen characters like the Enchantress in other fairy tales before – primarily Grimm's Brothers, though Beauty and the Beast was not a Grimm's Brothers tale – and honestly I always have the same questions about them. They go around trying to teach moral lessons to the characters, rewarding or punishing them after giving them one very contrived test to see if they pass, and never considering any variables or complexities in human nature. They think they have the whole measure of a person from the result of this one test, which of course they never could, not unless all people were cardboard stereotypes in which case you probably wouldn't have to test them in order to find out these things anyway.
And even if the Enchantress was somehow right about the prince, even if she was somehow able to see inside his entire character and even if I could believe Beast used to be a bad person – how exactly is transforming him into a Beast going to help anything? She says the curse will only break if he learns to love by a certain time – meanwhile he's so hideous and miserable that he's not likely to go anywhere he might meet someone to fall in love with, he's too angry to feel much love for anything, and if he did go out and meet people looking like that they'd probably be too scared to hang around long enough to find out how sweet he really is. It was really just a lucky chance Maurice happened by the castle when he did, leading to Belle's showing up. If the Enchantress really wanted to teach Beast how to love, she came up with a pretty poor setup for actually doing it. So unless she somehow knew Belle was going to come along when she did, or just wasn't great at thinking things through, it seems far more likely that she just wanted to punish him, because, I suppose, he was rude to her and she was offended, suddenly sounding an awful lot like Maleficent when you think about it.The Enchantress accuses Beast of having no love in his heart, and meanwhile she responds to his perceived rudeness not with love, but with horrible punishment. Not exactly something a benign sorceress would do. And that is why I am convinced that if we ever met Beauty and the Beast's Enchantress, she would quickly prove herself to be a villain.
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