Sleeping Beauty ("La Belle au Bois dormant" (The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood)) is a fairy tale classic, the first in the set published in 1697 by Charles Perrault, Contes de ma Mère l'Oye ("Mother Goose Tales").[1]
While Perrault's version is better known, an older variant, the tale Sun, Moon and Talia, was contained in
Giambattista Basile's Pentamerone (published 1634).[2] Professor J. R. R. Tolkien noted that
Perrault's cultural presence is so pervasive that, when asked to name a fairy tale, most people will cite one of the eight
stories in Perrault's collection.[3] Since Tolkien's
generation, however, the most familiar Sleeping Beauty in the English speaking world has become the Walt Disney animated film (1959), which draws as much from the
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky ballet (Saint Petersburg, 1890) as from Perrault.
Perrault's narrative
The basic elements of Perrault's narrative are in two parts. Some folklorists believe that they were originally separate tales
– as they became afterward, in Grimms' version – and were joined together by Basile, and Perrault following him.[4]
Part one
German stamp: The wicked fairy curses the princess
At the christening of a long-wished-for princess, fairies invited as godmothers offered gifts, such as beauty, wit, and musical
talent. However, a wicked fairy who had been overlooked placed the princess under
an enchantment as her gift, saying that, on reaching adulthood, she would prick her finger on a spindle and die. A good fairy, though unable to completely reverse the spell, said that the princess
would instead sleep for a hundred years, until awakened by the kiss of a prince's son.
German stamp: The princess meets the old woman, spinning
The king forbade spinning on distaff or spindle, or the possession of one, upon pain of death, throughout the kingdom, but all
in vain. When the princess was fifteen or sixteen she chanced to come upon an old woman in a tower of the castle, who was
spinning. The Princess asked to try the unfamiliar task and the inevitable happened. The wicked fairy's curse was fulfilled. The
good fairy returned and put everyone in the castle to sleep. A forest of briars srpang up around the castle, shielding it from
the oustside world: no one could try penetrate it without facing certain death in the thorns.
Illustration by
Gustave Doré: the prince finds everyone asleep at the castle.
After a hundred years had passed, a prince who had heard the story of the enchantment braved the wood, which parted at his
approach, and entered the castle. He trembled upon seeing the princess' beauty and fell on his knees before her. She woke up,
then everyone in the castle woke to continue where they had left off... and, in modern versions, starting with the
Brothers Grimm version, they all lived happily ever after.
Part two
Secretly wed by the re-awakened Royal almoner, the Prince continued to visit the Princess, who bore him two children, L'Aurore
(Dawn) and Le Jour (Day), which he kept secret from the Queen, who was of an Ogre lineage. Once he
had acceded to the throne, he brought the Princess and the children to his capital, which he then left in the regency of the
Queen Mother, while he went to make war on his neighbor the Emperor Contalabutte, ("Count of The Mount").
The Ogre Queen sent the Princess Queen and the children to a house secluded in the woods, and directed her cook there to
prepare the boy for her dinner, with a sauce Robert. The humane cook substituted a
lamb, which satisfied the Ogre Queen, who demanded the girl, but was satisfied with a young goat prepared in the same excellent
sauce. When the Ogre Queen demanded that he serve up the Princess Queen, she offered her throat to be slit, so that she might
join the children she imagined were dead. There was a tearful secret reunion in the cook's little house, while the Ogre Queen was
satisfied with a hind prepared with sauce Robert. Soon she discovered
the trick and prepared a tub in the courtyard filled with vipers and other noxious creatures. The King returned in the nick of
time and the Ogress, being discovered, threw herself into the pit she had prepared and was consumed, and everyone else lived
happily ever after.
Sources
Perrault transformed the tone of Basile's "Sole, Luna, e Talia". Basile's was an adult tale told by an aristocrat for
aristocrats, emphasizing concerns such as marital fidelity and inheritance. Perrault's is an aristocratic tale told for a
high-bourgeois audience, inculcating female patience and passivity. [citation needed]
Beside differences in tone, the most notable differences in the plot is that the sleep did not stem from a curse, but was
prophesied; that the king did not wake Talia from the sleep with a kiss, but
raped her, and when she gave birth to two children, one sucked on her finger, drawing out the piece of flax that had put her to
sleep, which woke her; and that the woman who resented her and tried to eat her and her children was not the king's mother but
his jealous wife. The mother-in-law's jealousy is less motivated, although common in fairy tales.
There are earlier elements that contributed to the tale, in the medieval courtly romance Perceforest (published in 1528), in which a princess named Zellandine
falls in love with a man named Troylus. Her father sends him to perform tasks to prove himself worthy of her, and while he is
gone, Zellandine falls into an enchanted sleep. Troylus finds her and gets her pregnant in her sleep; when their child is born,
he draws from her finger the flax that caused her sleep. She realizes from the ring he left her that the father was Troylus; he
returns after his adventures to marry her.[5]
Earlier influences come from the story of the sleeping Brynhild in the Volsunga saga and the tribulations of saintly female martyrs in early Christian hagiography conventions. It was, in fact, the existence of Brynhild that persuaded the Brothers Grimm to
include Briar Rose in latter editions of their work rather than eliminate it, as they did to other works they deemed to be
purely French, stemming from Perrault's work.
Naming the princess
The princess's name has been unstable. In Sun, Moon, and Talia, she is named Talia ("Sun" and "Moon" being her twin
children). Perrault removed this, leaving her anonymous, although naming her daughter "L'Aurore". The Brothers Grimm named her
"Briar Rose". Tchaikovsky shifted the name of the daughter, in translation, to the mother: Aurora. This transfer was taken up by
Disney in the film.[6] John Stejean named her "Rosebud" in
TeleStory Presents.
Variants
"Sleeping Beauty" by
Edward Frederick Brewtnall
This fairy tale is classified as Aarne-Thompson type
410.[7]
The Brothers Grimm included a variant, Briar Rose, in their collection (1812).
[8] It truncates the story as Perrault and Basile told it
to the ending now generally known: the arrival of the prince concludes the tale.[9] Some translations of the Grimm tale give the princess the name Rosamond. The brothers
considered rejecting the story on the grounds that it was derived from Perrault's version, but the presence of the Brynhild tale
convinced them to include it as an authentically German tale. Still, it is the only known German variant of the tale, and the
influence of Perrault is almost certain.[10]
The Brothers Grimm also included, in the first edition of their tales, a fragmentary fairy tale, The Evil
Mother-in-Law. This began with the heroine married and the mother of two children, as in the second part of Perrault's tale,
and her mother-in-law attempted to eat first the children and then the heroine. Unlike Perrault's version, the heroine herself
suggested an animal be substituted in the dish, and the fragment ends with the heroine's worry that she can not keep her children
from crying, and so from coming to the attention of the mother-in-law. Like many German tales showing French influence, it
appeared in no subsequent edition.[11]
Italo Calvino included a variant in Italian
Folktales. The cause of her sleep is an ill-advised wish by her mother: she wouldn't
care if her daughter died of pricking her finger at fifteen, if only she had a daughter. As in Pentamerone, she wakes after the prince raped her in her sleep, and her children are born and
one sucks on her finger, pulling out the prick that had put her to sleep. He preserves that the woman who tries to kill the
children is the king's mother, not his wife, but adds that she does not want to eat them herself but serves them to the
king.[12] His version came from Calabria, but he noted
that all Italian versions closely followed Basile's.[13]
Besides Sun, Moon, and Talia, Basile included another variant of this Aarne-Thompson type, The Young Slave. The Grimms also included a second, more distantly related one, The Glass Coffin.[14]
Joseph Jacobs noted the figure of the Sleeping Beauty was in common between this tale and the Gypsy tale The King of England and his Three Sons, in his More English Fairy
Tales.[15]
The hostility of the king's mother to his new bride is repeated in the fairy tale The Six
Swans,[16] and also features
The Twelve Wild Ducks, where she is modified to be the king's stepmother,
but these tales omit the cannibalism.
Myth themes
The tale has been interpreted as a myth of natural phenomena, especially in light of the names given Sleeping Beauty's
children: Sun and Moon, Dawn and Day, are easily interpreted as figurative characters.
Some folklorists have analyzed Sleeping Beauty as indicating the replacement of the lunar year (with its thirteen
months, symbolically depicted by the full thirteen fairies) by the solar year (which has twelve, symbolically the invited
fairies). This, however, founders on the issue that only in the Grimms' tale is the wicked fairy the thirteenth fairy; in
Perrault's, she is the eighth.[17]
Among familiar themes and elements in Perrault's tale:
- Further information: Saint Anne and Rapunzel
- Further information: Nessus and Deianira
- Further information: Moirae and Norn
- the Heroic Quest
- the Ogre Stepmother
- the Substituted Victim
- Further information: Isaac, Jesus, Zeus, Cronos and Iphigeneia
- See also: Weaving
(mythology)
Modern retellings
Sleeping Beauty has been popular for many fairytale fantasy retellings. This
include Mercedes Lackey's Elemental
Masters novel The Gates of Sleep; Robin
McKinley's Spindle's End, Orson Scott
Card's Enchantment, Jane Yolen's
Briar Rose, and Sophie Masson's Clementine.
The curse of the fairy godmother, by itself, has been taken from the tale and used in many context. George MacDonald used it in his Sleeping Beauty parody, The Light Princess, where the evil fairy godmother curses the princess not to death but to lack
gravity -- leaving her both lacking in physical weight and unable to take other people's suffering seriously.[18] In Andrew Lang's Prince Prigio, the queen, who does not believe in fairies, does not invite them; the fairies come
anyway and give good gifts, except for the last one, who says that he shall be "too clever" -- and the problems with such a gift
are only revealed later. In Patricia Wrede's Enchanted Forest Chronicles, a princess lamented that she wasn't cursed at her
christening; when another character points out that many princess aren't (even in the fairy tale setting they live in), she says
that that is not true when the wicked fairy comes to the christening, and the fairy had come, her family had appeased her, and
now the princess has no way to assume her proper, fairy tale role.
Sleeping Beauty in music
Michele Carafa composed La
belle au bois dormant in 1825.
Before Tchaikovsky's version, several ballet productions were based on the "sleeping beauty" theme, amongst which one from Eugène Scribe: in the winter of 1828–1829, the
French playwright furnished a four-act mimed scenario as a basis for Aumer's choreography of a four-act ballet-pantomime La Belle au bois dormant. Scribe wisely omitted the violence
of the second part of Perrault's tale for the ballet, which was set by Hérold and first
staged at the Académie Royale, Paris, April 27, 1829. Though Hérold popularized his piece with a piano Rondo
brilliant based on themes from the music, he was not successful in getting the ballet staged again.
When Ivan Vsevolozhsky, the Director of the Imperial
Theatres in Saint Petersburg, wrote to Tchaikovsky on May 25, 1888, suggesting a ballet based on Perrault's tale, he also cut the violent second half, climaxed the action with
the Awakening Kiss, and followed with a conventional festive last act, a series of bravura variations.
Although Tchaikovsky was maybe not all that eager to compose a new ballet (remembering that the reception of his
Swan Lake ballet music, staged eleven seasons earlier, had only been lukewarm), he set
to work with Vsevolovsky's scenario. The ballet, with Tchaikovsky's music (his Opus 66) and choreography by Marius Petipa, was premiered in the Saint Petersburg Mariinsky
Theatre on January 24, 1890.
Besides being Tchaikovsky's first major success in ballet composition, it set a new standard for what is now called "Classical
Ballet", and remained one of the all time favourites in the whole of the ballet repertoire. Sleeping Beauty was the first ballet that impresario Sergei Diaghilev ever saw, he later recorded in his memoirs, and also the first that ballerinas
Anna Pavlova and Galina Ulanova ever saw, and the
ballet that introduced the Russian dancer Rudolph Nureyev to European audiences.
Diaghilev staged the ballet himself in 1921 in
London with the Ballets Russes. Choreographer
George Balanchine made his stage debut as a gilded Cupid sitting on a gilded cage, in
the last act divertissements.
Mimed and danced versions of the ballet survived in the distinctly British genre of pantomime, with Carabosse, the evil fairy, a famous travesti
role.
Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty
Walt Disney's
Sleeping Beauty
-
The Walt Disney Productions animated
feature Sleeping Beauty was released on January 29, 1959 by Buena Vista
Distribution. Disney spent nearly a decade working on the film, which was produced in the Super Technirama 70 widescreen 70
mm film process with a stereophonic soundtrack. Its musical score and songs are
adapted from Tchaikovsky's ballet. This tale includes three good fairies - Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather - and one evil fairy,
Maleficent. As in most Disney films, there are considerable changes made to the plot. For
example; it is Maleficent herself that appears in the upper tower of the castle and creates the spinning wheel and spindle on
which the princess, Aurora, pricks her finger.
The film cost six million US dollars to produce, and only returned a revenue of three million dollars, nearly bankrupting the
Disney studio. The film later gained a following, and is today considered one of the best animated features ever made, due to its
unique style and authentic look along with a beautiful story and lush music. A platinum edition of the film is due in mid
2007.
Uses of Sleeping Beauty
- One of the fairy gifts is sometimes misremembered as Intelligence. No such gift was however offered in Perrault's version:
not appropriate in 1697, when a good ear for playing music appeared more essential. More modern
versions of the tale might include, apart from Intelligence, Courage and Independence as fairy gifts. This can be compared with
the gifts Moll Flanders apparently possessed, in the book with the same name that appeared
precisely a quarter of a century after Perrault's Sleeping Beauty (1722).
- Freudian psychologists, encouraged by Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of
Enchantment, have found rich materials to analyze in Sleeping Beauty as a case history of incest and latent sexuality and a prescription for the passive
socialization of those young women who were not destined for work.
- Eric Berne uses this fairy tale to illustrate "Waiting for Rigor Mortis", a one of the
life scripts [19]. After
pointing out that almost everything in this story can actually happen, he singles out the key illusion that script protagonist
fails to recognize: that the time didn't stop while she was asleep, that in reality Rose won't be fifteen years old, but thirty,
forty, or fifty. Berne uses this and other fairy tales as a convenient tool to puncture the
script armor that captivates people.
- Joan Gould's book Turning Straw into Gold reclaims the story for women's agency, arguing that Sleeping Beauty is an
example of a woman's ability to "turn off" in times of crisis. She cites a version of the story where the princess awakes when
the prince enters the room, because she knows it's time to wake up.
- The Princess's sleeping attendants, waiting to accompany her when she wakes in the other world, even to the spit-boys in the
kitchens and her pet dog, expresses one of the most ancient themes in ritual burial practices,
though Perrault was probably unaware of the Egyptian burials, and certainly unaware of the royal tombs of Queen Puabi of the Third Dynasty of Ur, the courtiers that accompanied early emperors of China in the tomb, the
horses that accompanied the noble riders in the kurgans of Scythian
Pasyryk. The King and Queen are not included in this analogue of a burial, but retire, while the protective spectral thorn
forest immediately grows up to protect the castle and its occupants, as effective as a tumulus.
[citation needed]
- Further information: Grave goods
- Sleeping Beauty appears as a character in the Fables comic book. She is one of the three ex-wives of Prince Charming, and
is one of the wealthier Fables. She is still vulnerable to pricking herself, falling back into an enchanted slumber when this
happens, along with all others in whatever building she is in.
- The second half of Sleeping Beauty appears as one of the comics in Little Lit. The comic
is written and drawn by famed comics author Daniel Clowes.
- In the book Sisters Grimm she is one of the people who
actually do not despise Relda Grimm. She is shown as a very kind person and she has cocoa colored skin.
- Sheri S. Tepper adapts the Sleeping Beauty story in her novel, Beauty. This
novel also includes references to Cinderella and The Frog Prince.
- Bruce Bennett adapted Sleeping Beauty into a Children's Musical with Lynne Warren, which made its world premiere at Riverwalk
Theatre
- The computer game Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne uses Sleeping Beauty as an allegory to the game's own ending when
Max kisses a dead Mona Sax on the lips- accoriding to Max, "...all this time we got the story of Sleeping Beauty all wrong." He
theorizes that the prince, much like Max himself, is not kissing Sleeping Beauty to wake her up, but rather to wake himself from
the hope and pain that brought him there- Max states, "No one who's slept for a hundred years is likely to wake up." Though if
one manages to beat the game on the hardest difficulty, Mona will wake up after the kiss, surviving in the alternate ending.
See also
References
Prince Florimund finds the Sleeping Beauty
- ^ Heidi Anne Heiner, "The Annotated Sleeping
Beauty"
- ^ Giambattista Basile, Pentamerone, "Sun, Moon and Talia"
- ^ J. R. R. Tolkien,
"On Fairy-Stories" , The Tolkien Reader, p 11-12
- ^ Maria Tatar, p 96, The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales, ISBN
0-393-05163-3
- ^ Jack Zipes, The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to
the Brothers Grimm, p 648, ISBN 0-393-97636-X
- ^ Heidi Anne Heiner, "The Annotated Sleeping
Beauty"
- ^ Heidi Anne Heiner, "Tales Similar to Sleeping
Beauty"
- ^ Jacob and Wilheim Grimm, Grimms' Fairy Tales, "Little
Briar-Rose"
- ^ Harry Velten, "The Influences of Charles Perrault's Contes de ma Mère L'oie
on German Folklore", p 961, Jack Zipes, ed. The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers
Grimm, ISBN 0-393-97636-X
- ^ Harry Velten, "The Influences of Charles Perrault's Contes de ma Mère L'oie
on German Folklore", p 962, Jack Zipes, ed. The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers
Grimm, ISBN 0-393-97636-X
- ^ Maria Tatar, The Annotated Brothers Grimm, p 376-7 W. W. Norton
& company, London, New York, 2004 ISBN 0-393-05848-4
- ^ Italo Calvino, Italian Folktales p 485 ISBN 0-15-645489-0
- ^ Italo Calvino, Italian Folktales p 744 ISBN 0-15-645489-0
- ^ Heidi Anne Heiner, "Tales Similar to Sleeping
Beauty"
- ^ Joseph Jacobs, More English Fairy Tales, "The King
of England and his Three Sons"
- ^ Maria Tatar, The Annotated Brothers Grimm, p 230 W. W. Norton
& company, London, New York, 2004 ISBN 0-393-05848-4
- ^ Max Lüthi, Once Upon A Time: On the Nature of Fairy Tales, p 33
Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., New York, 1970
- ^ Jack Zipes, When Dreams Came True: Classical Fairy Tales and Their
Tradition, p 124-5 ISBN 0-415-92151-1
- ^ What Do You Say After You Say Hello?; 1975; ISBN 0-552-09806-X
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