Sleeping Beauty

This article is about the fairy tale. For other uses, see Sleeping Beauty (disambiguation).

"Sleeping Princess" redirects here. For the 2010 Turkish film, see Sleeping Princess (film).

"Sleeping Princess" by Viktor Vasnetsov

Sleeping Beauty (French: La Belle au bois dormant, "The Beauty sleeping in the wood") by Charles Perrault or Little Briar Rose (German: Dornröschen) by the Brothers Grimm is a classic fairytale involving a beautiful princess, enchantment, and a handsome prince. Written as an original literary tale, it was first published by Charles Perrault in Histoires ou contes du temps passé in 1697.

In 1959 the story was made into the 1959 Walt Disney animated film, which draws as much from Tchaikovsky's ballet (premiered at Saint Petersburg in 1890) as it does 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 the Grimms' version, and were joined together by Basile, and Perrault following him.

Part one

Sleeping Beauty is shown a spindle by the old woman. "Sleeping Beauty", by Alexander Zick (1845 - 1907)

At the christening of a long-wished-for princess, seven fairies invited as godmothers offer gifts: beauty, wit, musical talent and other virtues. However, as her gift, a wicked fairy who was overlooked, having been within a certain tower and thought to be either dead or enchanted, places the princess under an enchantment, saying that, on reaching adulthood, she will pierce her hand on a spindle and die. However, one last fairy has yet to give her gift. She partially reverses the wicked fairy's curse, proclaiming that the princess will instead fall into a deep sleep for 100 years and be awoken by a king's son.

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 garret of the castle, who was spinning and had not heard of the king's decree against spindles. The princess asked to try the unfamiliar task and the inevitable happened. The altered curse was fulfilled. The old woman cries for help and attempts are made to revive her with no results. The king sees that what has happened is meant to be and has the princess carried to the finest room in the castle and placed upon a bed of gold and silver embroidered fabric. The good fairy who altered the evil prophecy is summoned by a dwarf wearing seven-league boots and returns in a chariot of fire drawn by dragons. Having great powers of foresight, the good fairy sees that the princess will be distressed to find herself alone in the castle and to prevent it she puts everyone in the castle to sleep. The king and queen kiss their daughter goodbye and depart with proclamations then made that entrance is forbidden. The good fairy's magic also contrives a forest of trees, bushes and brambles that sprang up around the castle, shielding it from the outside world, so as to prevent any prying eyes from disturbing the princess.

After a hundred years had passed, a prince from another family of the sleeping princess spies the hidden castle during a hunting expedition and is told different stories that his attendants have heard about as to the happenings in the castle, until an old man recounts what his father more than fifty years ago had said that within the castle lies a beautiful princess who is doomed to sleep there for a hundred years, till a king's son is to come and awaken her. Having heard the story of the enchantment, the prince braved the wood, which parted at his approach, and entered the castle. He passes by sleeping people and comes across the room where the princess lies asleep on the bed. Trembling at the radiant beauty before him, he falls on his knees before her.

Part two

Secretly wed by the reawakened 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 his step-mother, who was of an ogre lineage. Once he had ascended the throne, he brought his wife and the talabutte ("Count of The Mount").

The Ogress Queen Mother sent the young 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 Queen Mother, who then demanded the girl, but was satisfied with a young goat prepared in the same excellent sauce. When the Ogress demanded that he serve up the young Queen, the latter 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 Queen Mother 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

An older image of the sleeping princess: Brünnhilde, surrounded by magical fire rather than roses (illustration by Arthur Rackham to Richard Wagner's Die Walküre

Perrault transformed the tone of Basile's "Sole, Luna, e Talia". Beside differences in tone, the most notable differences in the plot is that, in Basile's version, 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 impregnates her 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.

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 the story in later 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.

The second half, in which the princess and her children are almost put to death, but hidden instead, may have been influenced by St. Genevieve.

Variants

This fairy tale is classified as Aarne-Thompson type 410.

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" in their 1812 collection. This transfer was taken up by Disney in the film, which also called her Aurora. John Stejean named her "Rosebud" in TeleStory Presents.

The Brothers Grimm included a variant, Little Briar Rose, in their collection (1812). It truncates the story as Perrault and Basile told it to the ending now generally known: the arrival of the prince concludes the tale. 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.

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.

Italo Calvino included a variant in Italian Folktales. The cause of her sleep is an ill-advised wish by her mother: she would not 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 rapes 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. His version came from Calabria, but he noted that all Italian versions closely followed Basile's.

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.

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.

The hostility of the king's mother to his new bride is repeated in the fairy tale The Six Swans, 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

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. The basic elements of the story can also be interpreted as a nature myth: the Princess represents Nature, the Wicked Fairy is Winter, who puts the Court to sleep with pricks of frost until the Prince (Spring) cuts away the brambles with his sword (a sunbeam) to allow the sun to awaken sleeping Nature.

Among familiar themes and elements in Perrault's tale:

• the Wished-for Child
  Further information: Saint Anne and Rapunzel
• the Accursed Gift
  Further information: Nessus and Deianira
• the Inevitable Fate
• the Spinner
  Further information: Moirai and Norn
• the Heroic Quest
• the Ogre Stepmother
• the Salvation through a Redemptor. Slumber as metaphor for sleeping death as though by sin
• 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. These 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, Sophie Masson's Clementine, Anne Rice's (as A. N. Roquelaure) Sleeping Beauty Trilogy and Jim C. Hines Princess Series.

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 in Paris on 27 April 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 25 May 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 may not have been very 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 Vsevolovzhsky'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 24 January 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.

Maurice Ravel's Ma Mère l'Oye includes a movement entitled Pavane de la Belle au bois dormant (Pavane of the Beauty in the Sleeping Wood). This piece was also later developed into a ballet.

Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty

Main article: Sleeping Beauty (1959 film)

The Walt Disney Productions animated feature Sleeping Beauty was released on 29 January 1959 by Buena Vista Distribution. Disney spent nearly a decade working on the film, which was produced in the Super Technirama 70 wide-screen film process with a stereophonic soundtrack. The film cost six million U.S. dollars to produce. 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 on which Princess Aurora (called Briar Rose by Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather in the years before the event), pricks her finger. In the original, a drop spindle rather than a spinning wheel was specified. The princess' hair is also changed from dark brown, as in Perrault's original book, to blonde. The princess has been described as Disney's most beautiful heroine, and while it has been observed that "comparisons of this statuesque blonde to the contemporaneous Barbie doll are difficult to avoid," all the sequences of the film were first filmed in live action.

Uses of Sleeping Beauty

• 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 latent female sexuality and a prescription for the passive socialization of those young women who were not destined for work.
• Terry Pratchett refers to several fairy tales in his Discworld series, especially in reference to witches who try to control the narrative potential of their world. In Wyrd Sisters the Lancre witches draw on the influence of Black Aliss, who moved a castle and its inhabitants one hundred years into the future, when Granny Weatherwax transports her own native kingdom seventeen years ahead to allow the proper heir to the usurped throne to reach adulthood abroad without having to wait. Later, in Witches Abroad, the same coven comes across a castle that has fallen under a curse that causes everyone to slumber while the forest grows into the courtyard; Granny explains that it has happened dozens of times. The servants wake up angry and determined to chase the witches away after they rouse the princess, not with a kiss but by pitching the spinning wheel out the window.
• Anne Rice's erotic novel, The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, written under the name of A. N. Roquelaure, is loosely based on this fairy tale.
• In Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales for Every Child, Sleeping Beauty is depicted as a Hispanic princess named Rosita. She was under the spell for a century.
• Angela Carter reinterpreted the tale for her collection of short stories The Bloody Chamber.
• Caitlín R. Kiernan's "Glass Coffin" is a retelling of "Sleeping Beauty."
• The Sleeping Beauty problem is the name of a philosophical thought-experiment.
• Mattel Entertainment's (Universal Studios) Barbie as the Sleeping Beauty was launched on March 28, 2009, and features Barbie as the Princess Clarette, with music of Arnie Roth, based on Tchaikovsky's ballet, based on the story by The Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault.
• Joss Whedon's series Dollhouse uses this story as an extended metaphor in the aptly named episode "Briar Rose", equating it both to the brainwashed members of the Dollhouse and a young character dealing with the after-effects of sexual abuse.

Gallery

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  "Sleeping Beauty", by Alexander Zick (1845 - 1907)

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  "Sleeping Beauty", by Henry Meynell Rheam

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  "He stands—he stoops to gaze—he kneels—he wakes her with a kiss", woodcut by Walter Crane

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  "Sleeping Beauty" by Edward Frederick Brewtnall

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  "Sleeping Beauty", statue in Wuppertal - Germany

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  Prince Florimund finds the "Sleeping Beauty"

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  The Sleeping Beauty by Sir Edward Burne-Jones

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  Perrault's "La Belle au bois dormant" (Sleeping Beauty), illustration by Gustave Doré

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  Picture of the castle of Sleeping Beauty in The Efteling, the Netherlands

See also

• The Glass Coffin
• The Queen Bee
• The Sleeping Girl of Turville
• Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty (board game)
• Rip Van Winkle

External links

• Perrault's version discussed by Waller Hastings in "The sleeping beauty in the woods"
• Perrault's version also discussed by Waller Hastings in "Sol, Luna, e Talia"
• Sleeping beauty in the woods, by Perrault, 1870 illustrated scanned book via Internet Archive