'Sleeping Beauty' ('Briar Rose') appears in the Catalan Frayre de Joy e Sor de Placer (14th century), as 'Troylus and Zellandine' in the French Perceforest (16th century), as 'Sole, Luna e Talia' in The Pentamerone (The Pentameron, 1634–6) by Giambattista Basile, as 'La Belle au bois dormant' in Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Stories or Tales of Times Past, 1697) by Charles Perrault, and as 'Dornröschen' in Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children's and Household Tales, 1812–15) by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm.
The story begins with a royal couple's wish for a child. When the baby is born, the parents plan a celebration but invite only 12 of the 13 wise women (godmothers, fairies) in the realm. Perrault makes the uninvited fairy a disgruntled old woman, long absent from the court, and creates a good fairy who hides so that she can counteract any harmful gift. Eleven fairies had given the baby such gifts as beauty, virtue, wealth, and wisdom when the 13th interrupts with a prophecy: the girl will die at the age of 15 when she pricks her finger with a spindle.
The 12th fairy modifies the prophecy to a sleep of 100 years. The king tries to evade fate by banning all spindles in the realm. The story deals with the futility of trying to escape one's fate, a theme familiar in Eastern literature. Despite precautions, the princess violates the interdiction by pricking a finger on a spindle belonging to an old woman in a hidden room in the castle. All the residents of the castle, both human and animal, share her sleep. Perrault's good fairy returns to ensure that the princess will return to an unchanged world, unlike the monk who followed a bird for 300 years, and returned to a strange world ('Monk Felix').
The storytellers play with the idea of halted time, describing the comic attitudes of the servants whose daily chores had been interrupted at the onset of the sleep. Although time has stopped within the castle, a briar thicket had grown around it hiding it from sight. During the 100 years, bold knights had made attempts to brave the thicket but had died in the attempt. Finally a prince was able to pass through it to the palace and to find the sleeping princess. In the early versions her discoverer rapes her, and she awakens when her baby is born. But the awakening is more chaste in the Perrault version. Just the prince's proximity arouses the sleeping princess while the Grimms have their prince bestow a kiss upon her lips, and the entire castle bustles with resumed activities that are related with comic joy. This story of an interruption in time has the strange advantage of the sleeper's being able to take her whole world with her into the lapse. More common is the situation of a sleeper who awakens to find a world empty of familiar faces. Here there is an important difference between the Perrault and the Grimms' versions, for Perrault (like Basile) extends the story by having the princess give birth to a girl ('Dawn') and a boy ('Day'). The prince is afraid to bring his bride home to his parents because his mother is an ogress. When his father dies, and he becomes king, he finally does bring his wife and children to his court. Soon, however, he must go off to do battle with his neighbour, and his mother seeks to have the cook make meals out of the prince's children and his wife. The cook uses a subterfuge to save them, and in the end it is the queen mother who dies in a vat filled with vipers, toads, and snakes.
This ending has generally been eliminated in the fairy-tale tradition of the 19th and 20th centuries, especially when the tale has been rewritten or retold for children. Generally speaking, most traditional literary versions have sanitized the tale and place great emphasis on the unfortunate plight of the helpless princess and the valour of the rescuing prince. The most sentimental version is, of course, the Disney film of 1959, but almost all of the classical picture books for children are no different. The great break in the tradition of the comatose princess and the daring prince comes in the 1970s when contemporary writers began to explore the political implications and sexual innuendoes of the tale. Thus, Olga Broumas and Emma Donoghue turn the tale into a story about lesbianism. Anne Sexton explores sexual abuse, and Jane Yolen transforms it into a novel about the Holocaust. In his novella Briar Rose (1996) Robert Coover repeats and varies the narrative ad nauseam to question the veracity of the traditional tale. Given the social changes with regard to gender roles in Western societies, it is inconceivable for the fairy-tale princess of the classical 'Sleeping-Beauty' tradition to serve as a model for female readers in contemporary fairy tales. More appropriate, it would seem, would be a tale in which the princess has nothing but sleepless nights.
Harriet Goldberg
Franci, Giovanna, and Zago, Ester, La bella addormentata. Genesi e metamorfosi di una fiaba (1984).
Romain, Alfred, 'Zur Gestalt des Grimmschen Dornröschenmärchens', Zeitschrift für Volkskunde, 42 (1933).
Vries, Jan de, 'Dornröschen', Fabula, 2 (1959).
Zago, Ester, 'Some Medieval Versions of "Sleeping Beauty": Variations on a Theme', Studi Francesci, 69 (1979).
Zipes, Jack, 'Fairy Tale as Myth/Myth as Fairy Tale' in The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World (1988).
From The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales
