Joelyn Annan
City College of New York
FIQWS 10105 [HA4] – Composition of WGCI Literature
Professor Kylee Pastore
16th of September 2022
Sleeping Beauty in the Modern Age: An Examination of the Fairytale’s Metamorphosis
Many fairytales are lost to the throes of time, Sleeping Beauty however is not one of them. The tale has retained its popularity even centuries after its original publication. But when compared to other tales such as Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast, it has not received as many modern adaptations or retellings. The entertainment industry loves recycling narratives and yet the story of the sleeping princess is left in the dust – why is that? Is it the passivity of our heroine, the lack of a moral, or the general advancement of society’s moral conscious? In truth, it is a combination of the three.
In “I preferred her asleep”: Gabriel Garcia Reimagines Briar Rose Kathleen McEvoy analyzes the themes in the works of Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez and offers a precursory look into why Sleeping Beauty is left behind in modern media. Garcia references the fairy tale often in his works as noticed by McEvoy, but the “Beauty” is not one would expect. And in each of these reiterations, he unravels the supposed romance of the fairytale and exposes elements that “perpetuate destructive gender-based stereotypes about the “proper” roles of men and women.” (McEvoy 101)
McEvoy references many of Garcia’s works but Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane, The Autumn of the Patriarch, and Memories of My Melancholy Whores have the most direct references to the tale. In Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane, the unnamed narrator admires the beautiful sleeping woman beside him. McEvoy describes how the narrator objectifies her and projects his fantasies of marriage, so much so that he is surprised when she leaves without acknowledging him. Clueing us into the entitlement of the narrator and how vulnerable sleep makes someone – he gave her a whole new life and personality in his mind & she could not fight back.
The Autumn of the Patriarch introduces a world frozen in time with a dictator who lays dead in a fortress. But compared to the dainty, soft descriptions of the original tale, the dictator is described with mythic language – he is larger than life and powerful enough to stop time even after his death. When his death is announced, his people celebrate – an interesting mirror to how people celebrate when Sleeping Beauty finally awakens.
Finally, The Memories of My Melancholy Whores tells the story of a ninety-year-old writer who wishes for a night of romance with a virgin. He has a madame give him a fourteen-year-old girl who is so tired from caring for her siblings that she does little more than sleep. He christens her Delgadina – the reader is never told her real name. McEvoy goes on to explain how the two main characters play out the Sleeping Beauty story and how it is framed as a happy ending, but she argues that Garcia exposes our internalization of fairy tale ideals and how dangerous they can be – passive women who go along with what they are given and men who expect everything to be handed to them because they are men. It is safe to say these are not behaviors we should pass on to our youth.
The Deconstruction of the Male-Rescuer Archetype in Contemporary Feminist Revisions of “The Sleeping Beauty” by Carolina Fernández Rodriguez is also a poignant analysis of the role of men in fairytales, how this role has been repackaged, and what it signifies when feminist retellings are put up against their original counterparts. In the section titled “The Demythologization of the Male Rescuer”, classic versions of the stories by The Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, and Giambattista Basile to are compared to versions written by Luisa Valenzuela, Angela Carter, Carolyn Swift and many others.
Fernandez Rodriguez introduces the classic versions, and the good nature of the rescuers then presents the contemporary versions that dismantle the idea of a hero entirely, claiming that these men are “deprived to a greater or lesser extent of his mythical aura…his function as a rescuing agent is seriously questioned.”
A claim well backed because the male leads of Carter’s Lady of the House of Love, Valenzuela’s Principe II, and Swift’s The Sleeping Beauty Wakes Up to the Facts of Life are anything but heroic with the solider working to turn the vampire Countess human under the guise of curing her “hysteria” [Carter]. The prince refusing to kiss Sleeping Beauty because she’ll “wake up. Too much.” Recounting the princesses he kissed before and how they went seeking out life for themselves [Valenzuela]. And Desie, the prince, regretting marrying Aurora (Sleeping Beauty) lamenting “If I’d had any sense I’d have left you to sleep for another hundred years” to which Aurora responds “At least I’d have had a little peace” [Swift].
In sections “Alternatives to the Traditional Male Rescuer” and “Female Rescuers” Fernández Rodriguez dives deeper revealing the three main ways of literary subversion – female collaboration, “self-liberation”, and sapphic relationships. The last sections “Self-Liberation” and “Homosexual Relationships as Liberating Forces” run through examples of “Sleeping Beauties” who save themselves by wrenching themselves from patriarchal ideology [McCorkle] or find freedom with love [Broumas]. But the main point she champions is the classic narrative of Sleeping Beauty is outdated and the feminist revisions offer active heroines who have agency – better role models than the passive perfect ladies of old. One can conclude that for Sleeping Beauty to thrive as a contemporary story it must change its core ideals – the “damsel in distress” and “heroic prince” are not viable options, and so it lacks pure adaptations.
Objectification Is Also in the Eye of the Beheld by A.O Scott drives this point home. Scott reviews Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty, describing the life of a struggling college student named Lucy who takes odd jobs to make ends meet until she comes across an ad to be a lingerie waitress – she is subsequently thrown into the world of sleeping sex work, where anything but penetration is permitted.
Scott pays special attention to how Lucy, played by Emily Browning is perceived by the camera, it watches “with a dreamy detachment” from its main character, it does not zoom in or focus on her but simply trails with her as the story progresses. She is not perfect, Scott states that she sleeps random men as she pleases and is “occasionally reckless” – she is not an unblemished princess. But when she is asleep, she is but a fantasy – whatever her clients want her to be. It does not matter who she is, as long as she is an object of lust – she morphs to one’s desires.
Projection is prevalent in all the sources discussed, usually in the context of a man referring to a sleeping woman. The man imagines what the woman is like, conjures up a dream and prefers the delusion of a sleeping woman compared to one who does not want them. All sources also twist the tale – it is not present in its original form. It changes, whether the princess is a dictator, a vampire countess, or a sex worker. One place they disagree however is morality of the trope at all, McEvoy and Fernandez Rodriguez criticize the assigned roles of damsel in distress and prince to the rescue and how they affect real life while Scott simply observes the pop culture osmosis – not passing judgement.
Sleeping Beauty is still popular, its motifs and themes still inspire, but the core of the story has been left behind in pursuit of more realistic narratives that modern people can relate to. But this brings new questions – what of our stories, will future generations find them outdated and prejudiced? Will they too criticize our narratives and rewrite them to fit their ideals?
Works Cited
McEvoy, Kathleen. “‘I Preferred Her Asleep’: Gabriel García Márquez Reimagines Briar Rose.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 42, no. 1, 2018, pp. 95–105, https://doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.42.1.07.
Fernandez Rodriguez, Carolina. “The Deconstruction of the Male-Rescuer Archetype in Contemporary Feminist Revisions of “The Sleeping Beauty”.” Marvels & Tales, vol. 16, no. 1, 2002, pp. 51–70, https://doi.org/10.1353/mat.2002.0007.
Scott, Anthony O. “Objectification Is Also in the Eye of the Beheld.” New York Times, 1 Dec. 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/02/movies/julia-leighs-sleeping-beauty-review.html. Accessed 20 Sept. 2022.
