Sleeping Beauty is a difficult story. By its very nature, it has a LOT of consent issues, and the straight up rape of a sleeping woman who then gives birth to one or two babies without waking is a commonality in the earliest versions of the tale. Even if you have a version with no rape, and discount the inherent ickiness of “kiss a random sleeping woman” aspect, it’s also a very passive tale for the princess. She lives, she is hidden away, she is never given any input into what her life should be, and then she pricks her finger and then she’s just a MacGuffin for the Prince who gets to slay the dragon.
What Braswell does here is take the story of Sleeping Beauty – specifically the Disney animated version, and ask the question first, what if True Love’s Kiss didn’t work they thought it would? What if Aurora didn’t wake up? And second, what if Aurora was an active agent in her own rescue?
I stumbled on Braswell while killing time in a physical bookstore, and found her version of Aladdin, A Whole New World. I ended up getting this book because I’m super intrigued by attempts to make Sleeping Beauty less icky, and also I started humming the Once Upon a Dream song, which is pulled from the Garland Waltz, in the Tchaikovsky ballet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mp2wWLTKwWg
We all know the Disney version of Sleeping Beauty- at her baptism, two good fairies bless the baby Princess Aurora with Beauty and Song, then Maleficent shows up, and annoyed at not being invited, she gives Aurora a curse that when she turns sixteen, she will bring her finger on a spindle and die. The final fairy modifies the curse into sleeping and being able to be woken by True Love’s Kiss, blah bah blah. The fairies end up raising Aurora until she turns sixteen, which is when she is told she’s a princess and goes home and of course finds the last spindle in the kingdom, and activates the curse.
(Really, the real villainy of Maleficent is that she destroyed an entire industry in the kingdom and probably put a lot of families into poverty, just because she wasn’t invited to a party. Fairies are fucking petty.)
So this book begins with Prince Phillip slaying the dragon. He kisses Aurora, because that is what he is supposed to do, but then he falls asleep, cursing himself for not checking to see if the dragon was actually dead. Then we enter a world where the three fairies were mean, and Aurora’s parents neglected her as she grew up, and in their desire to conquer the world they kind of destroyed it all except for their castle. It was her dear, good, kind aunt Maleficent who saved the handful of people left in the world. They can’t leave, because there’s nothing outside the fence of thorns but a hellscape.
Aurora’s life in Maleficent’s castle is monotonous and depressing, but there’s enough weirdness that eventually she finds herself breaking through the thorns and finding Phillip. They work together to figure out what is going on and how to defeat Maleficent.
Along the way, they also discuss some of the more fucked up aspects of Aurora’s story: not being told at all who she was or that she even had parents, being informed that not only is she a princess but she’s also getting married – the next day – to someone that as far as anyone involved knows she’s never met, and knowing that she has no experience in how one would rule a kingdom. It’s all but explicitly stated that her job is to look pretty and that the ruling of HER kingdom would fall to Phillip. There’s also discussion of depression and suicidal ideation, anxiety, and dream logic. There’s a lot going on, but it doesn’t feel over-stuffed.
I really liked this, and I devoured it. The story explores and targets the bullshit inherent in the Sleeping Beauty story, and it serves as main points of discussion and contention within the narrative. Aurora gets to say, “Wait a fucking second, here. Let me lay out all of this. Can you not see that this is bullshit? Why would you make this my life? COULDN’T YOU THINK OF ANYTHING BETTER?” She gets to be angry. She gets to make her own choices, even when everyone around her is trying to make them for her.
Here, Sleeping Beauty wakes up and becomes the heroine she always could be.
Here I shall leave you with the Bolshoi Ballet doing the Rose Adagio with Svetlana Zakharova as Aurora, because I can.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BTnigpQkko
This book is available from:
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
We also may use affiliate links in our posts, as well.
Thanks!
Those legs!!
Thank you for sharing those videos and for the terrific review. Definitely intrigued, Redheadedgirl!
Now I have that waltz as an earworm. Not a bad earworm to have. 🙂
Did you see the studying on the evolution as and age of fairy tales httpHome ? I encountered it via allthingslinguistic’s tumblr post.
Do you know why the author specifically chose the Disney movie as plot basis? I think I would find a complete retelling more interesting since I am not a huge Disney fan, unless it is meant as a commentary on the story as well as how it was adapted for a 20th century movie audience?
Sorry forthe hyperlink incompetence, it should be http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/some-fairy-tales-may-be-6000-years-old
@Mona — the series is commissioned by Disney. I thought that A WHOLE NEW WORLD was flat out awful, but ONCE UPON A DREAM was much more interesting. Pretty much the first half of the book was a pitch-perfect evocation of what it is like to be inside a severely depressed person’s headspace (trust me, I know), so if it wasn’t *pleasant* reading, it certainly made a biting counterpoint to the Disney movie (which I confess I love, because of the score! and the pretties!)
Once Aurora begins to question her treatment, and take hesitant steps to regain her agency — and in a way true to her character, rather than as a generic Strong Female Character — it’s hard to help cheering for her.
The review was interesting, but watching the ballet made me wince. Ever since I saw a video that details how bad ballet dancers’ feet are and how much pain they’re in every time they dance en pointe, I can’t see ballet in the same way. 🙁
My favorite rebelling of Sleeping Beauty is “Hamster Princess Harriet the Invincible” by Ursula Vernon. I believe all people especially young ones need to read this book or have it read too them! It is wonderful!!
Princess Harriet is Sleeping Beauty but is told of the curse early enough to go out and do hugely courageous things because she reasons the curse makes her invincible. Then she goes on to trick the wicked fairy. Her plan partially backfires and she has to search for a prince to kiss everyone who has fallen asleep. It is a WONDERFUL version of the story with the heroine having great agency! You’ll love it!
And yeah, she’s a hamster.
/looking up hamster princess harriet/
Thank you, Kelly S!
I have a preschooler who is way into the little golden book of Sleeping Beauty and I have been cringing at how the main character has zero agency and shit just happens to her. I’ve been reading her The Paper Bag Princess (a fave) and now i’m adding Harriet.
@SandyCo – You shouldn’t stop enjoying an art form you appreciate. I did ballet for a while in my teens, and started pointe work, though I never got beyond the beginner stage. A large amount of what makes “good” feet for ballet is genetic: high arches, and having your big toe be longer than your second toe (which mine is not). If you’re lucky enough to be born with those characteristics, and you train carefully and don’t push beyond your strength, you can end up with beautifully strong feet (though you’ll never have toenails long enough for a pedicure!). As with professional athletes, ballet dancers are prone to certain types of injuries, but (as with professional athletes) they’re also compensated by being in superb shape and having endurance and muscle tone that most of us can only dream of.
The problem with injuries in ballet is perhaps linked to my problem with watching a lot of contemporary stuff, which is that it has become so virtuosic that is more like watching athletes than like watching expressive art. A dancer like Margot Fonteyn, who was famous for her “Rose Adagio” and made the Aurora role her own wouldn’t even be allowed into the corps de ballet of a major company now, because her extension isn’t high enough. (Check out the clips of her on youtube and compare them with the one above to see the same choreography.) The focus on ever more extreme positions tends toward injury more than the mere fact of dancing en pointe, as well as (in my opinion) coming at the expense of a certain character.
Don’t mean to romanticize the world of ballet, which certainly has its problems. But it seems like they get fetishized quite a bit in popular culture (see Black Swan and the series reviewed here a while back that I can’t remember the name of), and I’m a little suspicious the of “pity” extended to one of the few activities which is BOTH traditionally feminine AND involves physical strength and endurance.
Yay @Lora! I want everyone to read the Princess Hamster Harriet book! I hope you and your kid(s) love it as much as I do!