Inter-gender Relationship Issues in Sleeping Beauty
The King and the Prince
Upon hearing of his daughter's cursed condition, the king often goes into despair. While his wife may become hysterical, he simply sinks into a deep melancholia from which he cannot be roused. The mother often watches the child constantly in order to prevent a disaster, while the father stays away. Traditionally, noblemen had little interest or involvement with children, especially daughters. This is not to say this king doesn't care for his daughter. He still tries to free her from her curse by enacting the nation-wide spindle destruction, but, on some level, he knows that the curse is inevitable and accepts it where his wife cannot.
One author uses the tale to explain a issue in contemporary society:
"This is certainly another problem in our society, seeing dad’s as bad guys... Father’s have been all but removed from the parenting scene. This is easily if one merely glances at Sleeping Beauty. This poor princess wakes from her long and peaceful sleep, only to find twin babies she had apparently had while still unconscious. Apparently, she is such a strong woman she does not even need to be awake for the birth of her children. This shows further why it should be okay for a man to flee the scene, this woman in completely capable of raising children on her own, she does not need the help of a mere man. With this attitude on the rise, many women have stopped trying to even have fathers in children’s lives. The trend is a sad one that is not with out consequences’ to the fatherless child" (Read the rest of the blog here).
The Prince is not without his own manly faults. As we have discussed many times, it is sometimes unwise to impose one's own values on actions perpetrated in a different time, but we must consider the actions of this story. I suppose it could come down to whether you believe in love at first sight, but I doubt that anyone sees much that is redeemable in a prince who forces himself upon a sleeping girl without permission. That said, during this time women had little opportunity to say "no," particularly when a royal was involved. Consider the idea of "jus primae noctis." Whether this is an actual phenomenon or not, I have to believe there is some grain of truth in it. Who could deny a royal without fearing for their own lives? In any case, men were the ones to decide when marriage or intercourse occurred and there was little recourse or sympathy for a woman who felt she was being abused (I almost said "felt that her rights were being abused, but then I thought, "what rights?). Although Beauty may not have wanted sex, marriage or children, she had to deal with what she was "given."
One author uses the tale to explain a issue in contemporary society:
"This is certainly another problem in our society, seeing dad’s as bad guys... Father’s have been all but removed from the parenting scene. This is easily if one merely glances at Sleeping Beauty. This poor princess wakes from her long and peaceful sleep, only to find twin babies she had apparently had while still unconscious. Apparently, she is such a strong woman she does not even need to be awake for the birth of her children. This shows further why it should be okay for a man to flee the scene, this woman in completely capable of raising children on her own, she does not need the help of a mere man. With this attitude on the rise, many women have stopped trying to even have fathers in children’s lives. The trend is a sad one that is not with out consequences’ to the fatherless child" (Read the rest of the blog here).
The Prince is not without his own manly faults. As we have discussed many times, it is sometimes unwise to impose one's own values on actions perpetrated in a different time, but we must consider the actions of this story. I suppose it could come down to whether you believe in love at first sight, but I doubt that anyone sees much that is redeemable in a prince who forces himself upon a sleeping girl without permission. That said, during this time women had little opportunity to say "no," particularly when a royal was involved. Consider the idea of "jus primae noctis." Whether this is an actual phenomenon or not, I have to believe there is some grain of truth in it. Who could deny a royal without fearing for their own lives? In any case, men were the ones to decide when marriage or intercourse occurred and there was little recourse or sympathy for a woman who felt she was being abused (I almost said "felt that her rights were being abused, but then I thought, "what rights?). Although Beauty may not have wanted sex, marriage or children, she had to deal with what she was "given."
A Creepy Combination
In Anne Sexton's poem "Briar Rose," she depicts the horrors of sexual abuse from a drunken father through the lens of the Sleeping Beauty tale. The poem suggests that the main character was habitually drugged and could not "wake up" and protest, but was conscious of what was happening. This abuse scars the woman for the rest of her life and hinders her ability to have successful relationships with men as she can only remember her first experience: that of being violated by her father in her youth. She looks for love, but find only more betrayal through sexual encounters. This is shown when she states that "I must not sleep," for when she does she is a "trance girl" and is "passed hand to hand."
Anne Sexton - Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty)
Consider a girl who keeps slipping off, arms limp as old carrots, into the hypnotist's trance, into a spirit world speaking with the gift of tongues. She is stuck in the time machine, suddenly two years old sucking her thumb, as inward as a snail, learning to talk again. She's on a voyage. She is swimming further and further back, up like a salmon, struggling into her mother's pocketbook. Little doll child, come here to Papa. Sit on my knee. I have kisses for the back of your neck. A penny for your thoughts, Princess. I will hunt them like an emerald. Come be my snooky and I will give you a root. That kind of voyage, rank as a honeysuckle. Once a king had a christening for his daughter Briar Rose and because he had only twelve gold plates he asked only twelve fairies to the grand event. The thirteenth fairy, her fingers as long and thing as straws, her eyes burnt by cigarettes, her uterus an empty teacup, arrived with an evil gift. She made this prophecy: The princess shall prick herself on a spinning wheel in her fifteenth year and then fall down dead. Kaputt! The court fell silent. The king looked like Munch's Scream Fairies' prophecies, in times like those, held water. However the twelfth fairy had a certain kind of eraser and thus she mitigated the curse changing that death into a hundred-year sleep. The king ordered every spinning wheel exterminated and exorcised. Briar Rose grew to be a goddess and each night the king bit the hem of her gown to keep her safe. He fastened the moon up with a safety pin to give her perpetual light He forced every male in the court to scour his tongue with Bab-o lest they poison the air she dwelt in. Thus she dwelt in his odor. Rank as honeysuckle. On her fifteenth birthday she pricked her finger on a charred spinning wheel and the clocks stopped. Yes indeed. She went to sleep. The king and queen went to sleep, the courtiers, the flies on the wall. The fire in the hearth grew still and the roast meat stopped crackling. The trees turned into metal |
and the dog became china.
They all lay in a trance, each a catatonic stuck in a time machine. Even the frogs were zombies. Only a bunch of briar roses grew forming a great wall of tacks around the castle. Many princes tried to get through the brambles for they had heard much of Briar Rose but they had not scoured their tongues so they were held by the thorns and thus were crucified. In due time a hundred years passed and a prince got through. The briars parted as if for Moses and the prince found the tableau intact. He kissed Briar Rose and she woke up crying: Daddy! Daddy! Presto! She's out of prison! She married the prince and all went well except for the fear -- the fear of sleep. Briar Rose was an insomniac... She could not nap or lie in sleep without the court chemist mixing her some knock-out drops and never in the prince's presence. If if is to come, she said, sleep must take me unawares while I am laughing or dancing so that I do not know that brutal place where I lie down with cattle prods, the hole in my cheek open. Further, I must not dream for when I do I see the table set and a faltering crone at my place, her eyes burnt by cigarettes as she eats betrayal like a slice of meat. I must not sleep for while I'm asleep I'm ninety and think I'm dying. Death rattles in my throat like a marble. I wear tubes like earrings. I lie as still as a bar of iron. You can stick a needle through my kneecap and I won't flinch. I'm all shot up with Novocain. This trance girl is yours to do with. You could lay her in a grave, an awful package, and shovel dirt on her face and she'd never call back: Hello there! But if you kissed her on the mouth her eyes would spring open and she'd call out: Daddy! Daddy! Presto! She's out of prison. There was a theft. That much I am told. I was abandoned. That much I know. I was forced backward. I was forced forward. I was passed hand to hand like a bowl of fruit. Each night I am nailed into place and forget who I am. Daddy? That's another kind of prison. It's not the prince at all, but my father drunkeningly bends over my bed, circling the abyss like a shark, my father thick upon me like some sleeping jellyfish. What voyage is this, little girl? This coming out of prison? God help -- this life after death? |
This theme can also be seen in Robert Coover's Briar Rose
"Her ghostly princes have come to her severally with bites and squeezes, probing fingers, slaps and tickles, have pricked her with their swords and switched her thighs with briar stems, have licked her throat and ears, sucked her toes, spilled wine on her or holy water, and with their curious lips have kissed her top to bottom, inside and out, but they have not in these false waking relieved her ever of her spindled pain... Once (or more than once: she has no memory), she has been visited by her own father, couched speculatively between her thighs, dressed in his crown and cloak and handsome boots and chewing his white beard, a puzzled expression on his kind royal face, as, with velvety thrusts, he searches out her spindle. In her waking life there may have been something wrong with this, but here in sleep... it hardly seems to matter and in some ways brings her comfort for he rests lightly on her and softens her cracked lips and nipples with tears or else his moist paternal tongue, whilst he attends her mother, standing at the bedside with cloths and lotions at hi service and offering her advice... It's that damned spindle, her mother says. Can't you do something about it? Yes, yes. I'm working on it, he gasps as his face turns red and his eyes pop open and his beard falls off."