Sleeping Beauties

 As is the case with most fairy tales, there are several versions of Sleeping Beauty from several different regions. Today we're going to focus on four of them—the story of Troylus and Zellandine from Perceforest (recorded circa 1340, French), Basile's "Sun, Moon, and Talia" (recorded circa 1635. Italian), Perrault's "The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood" (recorded 1697, French again), and the Grimm's "Little Briar Rose" (recorded 1812, German).

Look, we're here because I was mad about the accusation that classic fairy tale heroines are passive losers. And I'm specifically mad about Rapunzel and Cinderella. But the thing about Sleeping Beauty is that she kind of is a passive loser.

Okay, no. We're not going to call the traumatized teenager a loser. But she is passive!

The thing is, no one else is that active either, except for the villains, in the versions that have villains.

Sleeping Beauty isn't a romance. Technically the pre-Basile version we’re going to briefly touch on is, but the Basile version is a tragedy, though I don’t think Basile actually realizes that. Later versions removed all of the elements that made it tragic, but they didn't really add much in to replace it. So what we get is a story where nothing really happens beyond certain people showing up in certain places at certain times.

Which is fine. I like Sleeping Beauty. There's not a lot of action, or romance. There's not a lot of anything. But it's magical and fun and there's nothing wrong with it. Plus Tchaikovsky wrote some great music for it.

Anyway. Let's break down our versions, from oldest to newest.

Quick pre-Basile rundown, first. Enchanted sleep is a common issue in folk stories, enough so that it features in two of the five to ten best-known fairy tales of our time. But this particular enchanted sleep seems to be a clear inspiration for Sun, Moon, and Talia, so it's worth noting.

Perceforest is a French chivalric romance. The author is anonymous, and it consists of eight volumes and over a million words. I have only read the pieces relevant to Sleeping Beauty, about twenty pages. Zelladine is a young woman who is cursed at birth by the goddess Themis to prick her finger on a piece of flax and fall into an enchanted sleep, to be woken only when the splinter is sucked out. The goddess Venus promises to look after Zelladine and arrange for the sucking.

The sleeping maiden is locked in a tower, where she is eventually found by her boyfriend, a man with whom she has already exchanged rings. He is pretty much forced by Venus to sleep with her; she tries to convince him to do it, and he refuses, so she enchants and compels him. He then has to leave, but swaps their rings back as a sign, or promise, or something.

Nine months later, still asleep, she gives birth to a baby who sucks the splinter out of her finger, so thanks, Venus, for the most convoluted solution possible. Eventually Troylus and Zelladine are reunited and live happily ever after.

So, like, this is messed up. But also it was orchestrated by the gods, Troylus had no more choice in what happened than Zelladine, and they do love each other and are able to move past it.

Now on to Basile, who removes all the elements of this story that make it vaguely okay-ish.

Talia, our sleeping beauty, falls asleep in the same way, minus the specific details of being cursed by a goddess. Some time later, a married king stumbles upon her in an abandoned manor, rapes her, then goes home and forgets all about it. Nine months later she gives birth to twins, one of whom sucks out the splinter and wakens her.

The king remembers her, goes back, finds her awake, and tells her what happened, at which time, bafflingly, “their friendship was knitted with tighter bonds.” He spends a lot of time sneaking out to visit her, until his wife gets suspicious, gets the story out of his servant, and summons them to the palace. She asks the cook to kill the children and serve them to the king for dinner, but he hides them and cooks lamb instead. The queen then tries to throw Talia into a fire, despite her attempts to explain about the rape, but the king gets there in time to stop it, throws his wife in instead, gets the kids back from the cook, marries Talia, and lives happily ever after.

Perrault. A princess is cursed to prick her finger on a spindle and die. Another fairy changes the curse to a hundred year nap, until a king’s son comes to waken her.

Note: there is no longer a splinter. The curse is now on a time limit instead.

When the princess falls asleep, the “good” fairy puts all the rest of the palace to sleep as well, except for the king and queen, who go off to another palace they can rule from instead. Which, like—I guess at least she didn’t leave the kingdom without any leadership, but the princess is going to wake up long after her parents have died, and those other sleeping people in the palace might very well have had families who weren’t in the palace at the time.

The fairy grows a thornbush around the palace to protect the sleepers. A hundred years pass. A prince hears the story of a sleeping princess and decides to investigate. The thorns pull back to clear a path for him, and she wakes up, the hundred years having passed, just as he comes upon her. He does literally nothing. He just happens to be present at the exact moment the hundred years are up.

They get married and have two kids, but she just…stays there? He keeps coming and going from his own kingdom to visit her. Which seems convoluted and unnecessary. Eventually his father dies, he becomes king, and he brings his wife and kids home. He then goes to war, leaving them in the care of his mother, who happens to be an ogre. She wants to kill and eat them, the cook switches them out and hides them. Eventually the king comes home, the family is reunited, and the evil mother-in-law is cooked in her own pot.

Grimms. A princess is cursed to prick her finger and die. Another fairy changes the curse to a hundred year sleep, no mention of a prince. The girl pricks her finger, the entire palace falls asleep, and an enchanted thorn bush grows around it.

A hundred years later a prince comes looking for the sleeping maiden he’s heard about, and the thorns, which have killed many other adventurers, clear a path for him. He finds the sleeping princess, and kisses her—just a kiss, no funny business here—and she wakes up. Based on the terms of the spell, it seems reasonable to conclude that he happened to kiss her just as the hundred years passed, and not that his kiss woke her. They get married and live happily ever after.

So. It looks like what we have here is a chivalric romance that was adapted to give the male lead more agency, which accidently turned him into the villain, and then the only way the next couple writers could think of to clean up that mess was to remove everyone’s agency entirely and make everything a matter of circumstance.

In conclusion: later versions of Sleeping Beauty feature very passive male and female protagonists. However, I will happily take these over the version where a young woman is raped, groomed by, and married to an awful, awful man. Also, Venus sucks.

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Sleeping Beauty Part II: The Other Woman

Note: This blog post is about the second half of Sun, Moon, and Talia, an Italian version of Sleeping Beauty. You can read about the first half here.

You are a queen. You have no children. And what is a queen good for, if she’s not producing heirs?

Your husband travels a lot, these days. You see him seldom. After all, what could he be expected to do with you, as useless as you’ve proven to be?

You used to love each other, you think. Things were better than this, at least. But you are too old now for children; even if you had been useful in your youth, it would all be over now.

One day your husband returns, after a journey of many months, with a young girl and two infants in tow. The children have his eyes, his nose, and the girl is a child, fifteen at most. She is small and frightened and confused, but she looks at your husband like he hangs the moon.

You could feel pity for the child. You should, perhaps. She still has baby fat of her own, as well as the lingering traces of the pregnancy. You ask her how it happened, between her and your husband. She tells you she doesn’t know, she was asleep at the time.

You should feel pity.

But you have lived too many years alone, and this is not the first time your husband has chased after children to give him what you can’t. And this one, this one he brought into your home, sat her across the dinner table like it was nothing, her own gorgeous suite of rooms, a thousand beautiful jewels and dresses. All the things he gave you when you were young, as if you were not still here to stand by his side. He leaves your marriage bed cold to visit her every night. You should feel pity. Instead you feel anger. Instead you feel fear.

Perhaps you go mad. Women in your position often do; stories of it date back to the Greek tragedies. Perhaps you go mad. Perhaps you are simply evil. Certainly you are jealous. And this is Sleeping Beauty’s story—there is no room for you as anyone but the villain.

You decide to boil the children, and feed them to their father for dinner. (All right, so you’ve probably gone mad.) The cook is kinder, saner, less invested in this drama than you are. He hides the babies away, and serves your husband lamb.

For the girl herself, sleeping little girl who stole your husband’s heart, and your whole life along with it—for the little girl you take matters into your own hands. The water boils. The child screams. Foolish, selfish girl, her children have been missing for days, but it is only now, as the heat rises around her, that she thinks to be afraid. She screams; your husband comes running.

You burn. You boil. You die. Perhaps the little girl eats you, as you intended to eat her. You don’t know; you’re dead.

You’re dead. You’re dead, and your husband marries the little girl. He raises a family with her. She’ll live happily ever after, perhaps. She doesn’t know any better.

More likely, ten years from now, her husband will bring home another pretty child to replace her.

You burn, you boil, you die. She marries the man who raped her, because what else does she know to do? At least this one can bear children to keep him happy.

You die. It isn’t fair. None of it is fair.

Sleeping Beauty

Let’s talk about Sleeping Beauty. No, let’s talk about Talia. “Sun, Moon, and Talia,” published in Giovanni Batiste Basile’s Il Pentamerone. Let’s talk about consent. Let’s talk about all the little girls who never had the chance to say no.

I could write an analytic paper about all the themes and elements in this story. I could get cute and ranty and give you a snarky list of reasons why it pisses me off. But I’m too upset, right now, for that kind of rant, so let’s skip straight to the part where the story gets interesting.

It doesn’t say how old Talia was when her story begins. Let’s assume that she’s a child. An unmarried Italian princess from a story recorded in the 1600s? Let’s go ahead and assume she’s a little girl. Let’s say fourteen. That’s how old I was, the first time I read this story. I was innocent at fourteen. Naïve. Clueless. More innocent than most fourteen year olds ever get the chance to be. I read this story three times before I realized it was about rape.

She falls asleep. Talia falls asleep, like Sleeping Beauty does, and she wakes up a mother.

Let’s talk about the kind of despicable person who does this kind of despicable thing to some defenseless girl.

He was a king. He was married. He found a comatose child in the woods and had his way with her.

He went home and forgot about her, and she woke to find herself utterly alone with two infants. It was several months before he thought to stop by and check in on his human blow up doll again, and when he found her awake, he took her home.

I could talk a lot about how this scumbag’s poor wife is the villain of the piece, but let’s save that for another day. All you need to know is that she dies in the end, and Talia marries the king and, of course, lives happily ever after.

Let’s talk about young women being manipulated by older men. Let’s talk about the number of girls who were raped while unconscious last year. Let’s talk about the number of girls who were raped, period.

Let’s talk about the number of viral videos the rapists have made about it.

Let’s talk about how children, who have been hurt in one of the worst ways imaginable, who have been violated in the cruelest possible way, are afraid to tell people what happened. Let’s talk about how many real life Talias have been blamed for waking up with two children, and let’s talk about how many of them would go home with the king because they’re afraid to do anything else.

Let’s talk about how this story, in which the rapist gets to live happily ever after with his victim, is four hundred years old. Four. Hundred. Years. Kingdoms have risen and fallen. We’ve gone through slavery, and suffrage, and we’ve done all these things that are supposed to make the world better—we have made the world better, in some ways, but something that was acceptable in fiction four hundred years ago still happens in real life, like it’s no big deal, every single day.

Lives are destroyed. People are hurt in so many ways, people lose their agency, people get pregnant and get STDs, and no one cares enough to stop it.

Newsflash: when the newspaper reads like seventeenth century Italy, you’re doing something wrong.

I will defend fairy tales to the death, but I won’t pretend they don’t have issues. So let’s take this opportunity to learn something. Forget about the monsters. Kill Prince Charming.

This isn’t a fairy tale. This is real life. And the rapist lives happily ever after in both.