[Reader-list] An Adult Returns to ‘Sleeping Beauty’

[Chintan Girish Modi]

From
http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/02/08/an-adult-returns-to-%E2%80%98sleeping-beauty%E2%80%99/

*An Adult Returns to ‘Sleeping Beauty’*

February 8, 2011 | by Rana Dasgupta

Recently, while visiting my parents, I came across my childhood edition of
Sleeping Beauty. As I opened the book again, the decades collapsed: the old
illustrations recalled how dire that sleeping palace had appeared to me as a
child, how thick its rooms had seemed with dark, ungraspable truths. The
story had seemed entirely indecent, and that was precisely why it was so
magnetic.

Sleeping Beauty is laced throughout with inchoate threat, which is why it
feels so bottomless. Most obviously, there is an outrageous fact that the
story passes over and that most children do not consciously note: Beauty is
a century older than the prince who kisses her and ends her sleep. When he
enters her dusty room she is one hundred and fifteen years old. As the
reader bends with him over her inert form, adoration is tinged with
something else entirely—the apprehension of death.

Earlier versions of the story, such as Charles Perrault’s (1697), make this
explicit: the prince, seeing the newly awoken princess, “took care not to
mention that she was dressed like his grandmother.” Later versions—the Grimm
brothers’, for example—got rid of such details so as to make the ending more
youthfully nuptial. But the fact of Beauty’s age still lurked in the
background as a kind of unfamiliar smell; even a child reader has the sense
that this apparently straightforward love affair is stalked by impossibility
and decay.

There is another kind of corruption buried in this story. I can’t be the
only child who bristled with excitement at the idea of walking into a palace
full of insensible adults. What an irresistible opportunity for
transgression! The situation is so ripe for exploitation that the prince’s
chaste behavior seems disingenuous—which, in historical terms, it is. In one
of the earliest written versions of this story—Giambattista Basile’s Italian
version of 1634—it is no presexual prince who finds the sleeping princess
but a fully virile king with his own wife and family. He is out hunting when
his falcon flies into the silent palace, and he follows it into the
princess’s room:

Thinking she was asleep he called out to her but she did not reply, so he
tried to wake the beautiful maiden, thinking that she had fallen sick, but
without success. Finally, inflamed by her beauty, he took her in his arms
and laid her on the bed, kissed her and gave her all his love. Then leaving
her laid out there he returned to his palace and for a good amount of time
he did not think again of what had happened.

In this altered world, far from judgment or consequence, the king realizes
our worst fears of predatory manhood. He is a powerfully menacing figure,
and it is obvious why he had to be defanged in the later version for
children. But his shadow remains, clouding the story with the threat of
another kind of death—moral collapse

Sleeping Beauty is often cited these days as the ultimate antifeminist tale:
a princess waits a hundred years for prince to rescue her, and then marries
him in helpless gratitude. This is partly because of the Disney version
(1959), which tries to recast the tale as a celebration of romance and
marriage. Here the fairy says nothing about a hundred years; it is romantic
love, not time, that will defeat the spell:

Not in death, but just in sleep
The fateful promise you will keep
And from this slumber you shall wake
When true love’s kiss the spell shall break.

The word love did not appear in the Grimms’ tale. Though the overt lust of
earlier versions was removed, what remained was still unmistakeably erotic.
To ensure their story is entirely hormone-free, however, Disney established
love at the beginning: the two are sweethearts before Beauty ever pricks her
finger. She thus cannot sleep for a hundred years, so the whole point is a
little lost. She goes to sleep, and then he wakes her up.

The enigma of a century passing without effect on a young woman is gone, as
is the mystery of a young man wandering alone through a dormant palace and
finding a beautiful object of desire. In the Disney film, he’s gone in
precisely to find her and get her out of there. He delivers his kiss like a
well-aimed grenade, then stands back and smiles with self-satisfaction. The
whole thing is a parody of itself: “off he rides on his noble steed,” it
says in fairytalese, “to wake his love with love’s first kiss and prove that
true love conquers all.” The film climaxes with a great thwack-out between
the prince and the wicked witch, a battle that is won with the prick of a
tiny sword so that you realize, in the end, there never was any true danger
to begin with.

The Disney impulse to produce a world without shadows results in a story
that is not only uninteresting but also, even to a child, completely lacking
in authentic feeling. In the Grimm story, it is as though happiness was won
improbably and even in the final celebrations there remained a surplus of
perennial terror. That's why it drew us back again and again. The amazing
attraction that fairy tales exert on us derives from this: that the feelings
they produce have nothing “fairy tale” about them.

These days I read a lot of contemporary children’s books to my
three-year-old daughter, and I’m disappointed how sanitized they are. They
restate obsessively the truth of the nuclear family. They teach kids how to
be responsible members of society, how to cure their own negative impulses,
and how to shun others who persist in negativity. It’s boring to read this
stuff as an adult, but for a kid? I don’t want my daughter shut in by
endless domesticity; I want her to think about the big world. I want her
awe-struck.

Rana Dasgupta is the author of the novel Solo.