Oh where to begin when we think of sleeping Beauty!!!
One’s mind immediately spirals into a Catherine Wheel!
Speaking of which, here is a self-indulgent musical prelude. First, this is Catherine Wheel’s majestic I want to touch you (listen from the prince’s point of view). Second, this is Buffalo Springfield’s Mr. Soul, from which the former is, well, let’s just say it’s the same song and say no more about it.
Still, enjoy those perfect guitar riffs.
Sorry for that self-indulgence but it’s not really a self-indulgence. Well, it is in the sense that I would put that song in my top ten soundtrack to my adolescence. I was eighteen when the Catherine Wheel’s debut LP ‘Furtive’ came out in 1991, and it still sounds as good on my turntable as it did the first time I played it. Notice how it fits the perfect template for a sublime pop song – verse, chorus, verse, chorus, middle-eight (guitar solo), chorus-chorus-end.
My other half suggested earlier that there was a distinct sense of musical snobbery in one of Katrina’s recent journal entries, when she is a little scoffing about 2000s indie. I said everyone’s adolescent playlists are better than whatever the kids are listening to these days.
Plus it’s proper vinyl. And vinyl sounds better.
[Perrault’s La Belle au Bois Dormant - Sixth of six engravings by Gustave Doré]
Anyway, welcome to Fairytale Sunday!
I can’t remember if I said I was going to make this series of lectures as fun as possible (pay attention at the back there – there’ll be a test), or maybe I just thought it to you. But that is my intention.
Ah – first of all, oh my faithful students, I have a useful reference for you. This is Fairytalez.com. You have to register (which is free and only requires email address and password, the usual), but once you do you will have access to over 2,300 tales from across the world, searchable by region and author. So, if you are unaware of the tales I talk about (most of them you will be familiar with, however) then I will provide you with the corresponding link to the tale on that site as the occasion arises. With regards to Sleeping Beauty, you have the Perrault version here (The Sleeping Beauty in the Woods), and the Grimm’s version here. These are the two you’ll probably know (although more likely the Grimm’s version, entitled Briar Rose, which does not contain the part two included in Perrault’s version (that’s the bit with the wicked ogress mother-in-law – maybe this is where all those smutty mother-in-law jokes come from; I don’t know).
If you don’t know the story of Sleeping Beauty then you will by the end of this lecture. I would imagine you do, though. But here’s the basic template: menarche girl falls into an enchanted sleep and then only awakes on the arrival of her prince/knight/betrothed/beloved/twin soul/Orpheus/whatever, then they have some children and live happily ever after.
Well, no, actually. That may be the template version you’ve heard, but the real version, as is so often the case, is much, much darker.
Put unspokenly, girls, she doesn’t wake up when he comes.
Like I said, the original is just a little bit darker than you thought. So pay attention.
[W.E.F. Britten - The Early Poems of Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Sleeping Beauty]
There really is so much to say about this fairytale. To begin with, is it even a fairytale? Well, not originally – but it became a fairytale. There is, arguably, some social history to that, partly involving a beautiful invention called the printing press (mid fifteenth century). Furthermore, it’s a perfect example of the romantic origin of many of these fairy and folk tales.
The original story, unlike many of the old folk tales generally thought of as ‘fairytales’, was in fact a written-down story. Specifically, it’s contained in a chivalric romance within the Arthurian canon called Le Roman de Perceforest (which marries it with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, which you’ll be aware of for the Arthurian stuff; although it embellishes this quite some extent; it’s also written in medieval French, which is interesting in itself). This link takes you to the Willypedia entry for Perceforest. And this one takes you to the Sleeping Beauty entry. I have said before that I am loathe to cite Willypedia as a reference because it’s run by the CIA & Affiliates, but for subjects which the Establishment doesn’t care about, or doesn’t mind the general public knowing about (i.e. doesn’t consider such knowledge a threat) it can be a good starting place for research (if you follow the references). So that’s my justification for giving you those links here.
This epic – and it was indeed an epic, running to eight volumes and well over a million words (which, as you can imagine, is somewhat unheard of for medieval literature) – would have been the province solely of the literate classes, even more specifically, the aristocracy (not so much the monkish literates). The traditional dating puts it at somewhere in the middle of the fourteenth century, by virtue of a reference to the English King Edward III (1327-1377). But then this was the time of a growing merchant class, the universities, the post-plague increase in peasant bargaining power, and all the rest of it. So these aristocratic romances did, indeed, filter down the so-called classes until yes, they did indeed spiral their magical way into the minds of the masses. Two hundred years later, and you have Perrault’s classic fairytale. This is, arguably, why the fairytales we know of are so infused with the imagery of the chivalric romance tradition.
But what happened in the meantime, eh? During those two-hundred years of dreaming? You’ll have to read to the end, darling reader. You’ll have to read to the end.
[Sleeping Beauty by Edward Frederick Brewtnall, late 19c]
It is indeed a shame that outside of medieval scholarship this work is largely unknown – had you ever heard of it? I’m guessing no. I hadn’t either during my schooling, which just goes to show (I agree with Bruce Springsteen on that one – ‘I learned more from a three-minute record than I ever did in school’ – one of the greatest ever lines in pop music, imo). Needless to say (so I’ll say it anyway) in Katrina’s world, I’d imagine every ten-year-old could answer that quiz question. And tell you about the psychology in it too, for that matter.
This chivalric romance, then, which contains the original European version of the Sleeping Beauty motif, is an epic mythological narrative about prehistoric (or pre-Anglo-Saxon, shall we say) history of Britain, linking the Court of King Arthur back to Alexander the Great, and even brings in some Trojans for good measure. By doing so, from our social history perspective, it reveals this nascent and literate contemporary appreciation for the classical world. For education and psychology itself, we might even say. And one little thought occurring to me now, regarding the encouragement of English culture in the fifteenth century, sparked off by Richard II, is that, well, maybe it didn’t really originate with him after all.
If I don’t tell you about this original version you’re going to get frustrated with me, so I will defer my digression and do so.
This link gives you a good précis, but here’s the basic plot. There are two lovers, a knight named Troylus, and a beautiful princess named Zellandine. Troylus hears that Zellandine has fallen into an enchanted sleep whilst spinning, and rushes to the rescue in the time-honoured chivalric manner. So far so good.
Now let’s add some lovely classical symbolism and a version of the ‘three wise women’ (or witches, if you want to go all Scottish Play on the thing). Troylus beseeches the three goddesses Venus, Lucina (goddess of childbirth), and Themis (goddess of fate – note well that one). Venus tells him, in a very innuendo-esque way (imo) that ‘when you pluck from the slit / the fruit that holds the cure / the girl will be healed’.
How deliciously sexy.
Anyway, to cut to the chaste, Troylus reaches the high tower where the girl is sleeping (naked, naturally) having been told by a mysterious messenger to ‘follow the urgings of the Goddess Venus’, who magically transports him to the tower. So he climbs in the window but he can’t wake her. He’s about to kiss her (he does actually ask permission at this point, except she’s asleep) but is reminded by Reason and Discretion that ‘no man should breach a girl’s privacy without her leave, and he certainly shouldn’t touch her whilst she sleeps!’ – I quite agree.
Troylus, however, reminds himself of the healing power of kisses, and kisses her anyway. But she doesn’t wake up. He gets a bit frustrated here and angry at Venus for not telling him clearly what to do, so she scolds and taunts him back saying ‘You’re all alone with this beautiful girl, the one you love above all others, and you don’t lie with her!’
Well, let’s just say he takes her advice, along with Zellandine’s ‘right to the name of maiden’, and is ‘startled by a sound she makes’ (work that one out yourself) and gets ready to act all innocent when she wakes up. But she doesn’t wake up.
Anyhow, he leaves the rings they had exchanged in the past (symbol of marriage there) then leaves. Nine months later the baby boy is born, whilst she is still sleeping. He suckles her finger instead of her breast and thereby sucks out the bit of flax that had enchanted her, whereupon she wakes up. The rings, at least, tell her who the father is.
Zellandine’s aunt then explains that she had prepared a feast for the three goddesses at the temple, but Themis was angry at not having been given a knife to eat, and pronounced a curse, such that ‘from the first thread of linen that she spins from her distaff a shard will pierce her finger and cast her into a sudden sleep, from which she’ll never wake until it’s sucked out’.
Venus, then, in her own way, set in motion the train of events leading to her waking. So we might call her the good fairy, in this instance.
But you can see all the elements of the later fairytale there. In this version, however, although Troylus and Zellandine do run away together, she does mourn her rape. The child, Benuic, meanwhile, is stolen from her after waking her up, although he grows up to be a great knight, as you do.
So, I’m not sure I’d really call that a happy ending.
[Henry Meynell Rheam - Sleeping Beauty, 1899]
One of the key elements here, though, or semiotics (if we’re going to go all literary theory on it) is the symbolic imagery of Themis, the spindle, and fate. You also have the classical element of ‘Tragedy’ in there, in that it’s the immutable character of the protagonist which governs his actions, and therefore the plot itself, a character he himself cannot overcome (regardless of whether he is self-aware of it). Thus you have the ‘inevitability’ aspect to his decisions there, as the Ancient Greeks would have well understood.
So from a certain, psychological point of view, one might venture that this fusion of the classical with the chivalric romance represents an incipient ‘self-awareness’ at least in the social class in which the story circulated.
Likewise, as an aside observation, many of the so-called critics of fairytales often neglect this very ‘intended readership’ of such tales. And indeed the tellers of those tales. To say, for example, that some of these stories are the ‘imposition of patriarchal values’ or ‘social control from above’ is clearly false from a socio-cultural point of view. Folk tales were not, that’s to say, told by ‘the ruling classes’ to the ‘peasant class’. Each of these two ‘classes’ (if you want to resort to those terms) lived separate lives and had their own stories. In the case of the aristocratic Sleeping Beauty story, those aristocratic listeners would have well understood any moral and philosophical message, along with all the symbolism and imagery such stories contained.
And notably, by the time it descends into the hands of the common folk (most likely via the burgeoning and increasingly literate merchant class), those ‘chivalric’ aspects have been removed. Why? Because the common folk simply wouldn’t relate to such aspects.
What these modern critiques neglect, then, is intimate social history. These tales were often told to children (of both sexes) by mothers (or, notably, grandmothers). Likewise, the original meaning of the word ‘gossip’ comes from a group of exclusively women gathered together around the occasion of childbirth, and was only given its more modern, derogatory meaning many centuries later. In other words, these stories are somewhat independent of the patriarchy, and in a distinctly subversive way. They are similarly independent of the ‘Established Church’ given their rich and distinctly pagan magical elements.
I’d call that a happy subversion.
Furthermore, the idea that mothers didn’t instruct their girl (or boy, even) children in the ‘facts of life’ is ludicrous. The same goes for fathers (or uncles, even) proudly instructing their sons on ‘how to treat a woman well’ or ‘how to please a woman’, especially in advance of the all-important wedding night. Some people seem to be of the opinion that the ‘female orgasm’ was a twentieth century discovery! How absurd. Do they not realise the word ‘clitoris’ is Ancient Greek?! Kleitoris in fact stems from a root meaning ‘to shut’ (Kleiein) and ‘key’, and was known in classical medicine as the ‘locus of female sexuality’. So that ‘sound’ emitted by Zellandine is not mysterious in the slightest.
Perhaps these feminist critics didn’t get that message. Or maybe they had a puritan upbringing? Maybe they weren’t curious about their own bodies and, ironically, were never able to find this clitoris thing on a map? Your guess is as good as mine.
And if we wish to demolish the Freudian, then we might perhaps just remind such folk that these stories were not created by children, but by mature adults. Thus, they can hardly be allegorical representations of some sexual family romance, now, can they? Aside from anything else, there are very justified taboos in small communities and families about the sexualisation of children. That kind of thing did happen in Freud’s family, but his dissociation, his repression led to his error in assuming that his experience, and that of his siblings, was somehow normal. No, Sigmund, what happened to you was not normal. You clearly had something of a blank spot during that part of your childhood.
Someone should’ve given him a hug and told him it wasn’t his fault, and that he was innocent. A lot of similarly innocent lives would have been spared as a result.
But perhaps I digress (I’m good at that, as you will have doubtless noticed).
["The Rose Bower" from the "Legend of Briar Rose" second series, c. 1885-1890), by Sir Edward Burne-Jones]
Anyway. This fusion of the chivalric with the classical is, I would venture to say, a key to understanding the Sleeping Beauty story. Because that story is, I would further venture, a direct inheritance from classical mythology.
Yeah – I gave you a big clue earlier didn’t I? Or have you dissociated that already? Orpheus, reader dear, Orpheus.
But hold that thought. I have digressions to perform.
One of the sparks which provoked me into choosing this story to burble on about was the idea of doing a sort of crossover thing. With Katrina’s story, I mean. Her story is, after all, a classic fairytale (even if blatantly postmodern). But it’s a bit more specific than that.
If you have been keeping up with her journal you will have discovered that she has a condition called ‘Dissociative Identity Disorder’ (DID), more popularly known as ‘Multiple Personality Disorder’ (MPD). DID is a more strictly psychologically accurate term, but it seems somewhat disingenuous to me, and given my penchant for conspiratorial thinking I wouldn’t be surprised if they changed the name to stop people thinking about what it really is, and how it happens. MPD emerges in early childhood as a result of extremely serious and sustained trauma, usually in the form of abuse. At that young age, there is no possibility of a fight or flight response, and so the clever human brain comes up with a creative and imaginative solution, which is to escape to the inside. A kind of copy (called an ‘alter’) of the main personality (known as ‘the core’) is created, which takes conscious control and effectively sends the main personality to sleep, meaning the copy experiences the trauma so the main personality doesn’t have to.
In other words, the entire purpose of the split is protection. This drive to protect becomes the fundamental and underlying motivation for every new personality which arises. And given we are talking about sustained trauma here, there is nearly always a lot more than just one alter.
Of course I don’t want to give you too many Katrina spoilers, like how it all happened in her case, or how much she even knows about it and what, if anything, she intends to do about it – for that, you’ll have to keep reading. What I will say (this bit is briefly touched upon in a recent journal entry) is that the story of Sleeping Beauty was used by her first split (Katyusha) to keep her safe. It makes sense, when you think about it.
Furthermore, Katyusha did not just use the enchanted sleep aspect of the fairytale. She pretty much used the entire thing. This is the reason why Katrina is multi-talented. In the fairytale version of the story, remember, all the good fairies bestow gifts or talents on the princess. And so it is with Katrina. This is why she doesn’t refer to her condition as a ‘disorder’ – in her case it’s a very ordered system (well, mostly ordered – there will be some inevitable messiness in due course). So she refers to it as a ‘syndrome’ or ‘my condition’. This, as far as Katrina is aware, was all the work of Katyusha, who styled herself as ‘the Queen Mother’ (more like a fairy godmother, though), and assigned specific roles and the acquisition of talents to all the alters who came after her (which split from her, not Katrina). In the meantime, after imagining Katrina’s safe place (the Sleeping Beauty Palace, protected by the impenetrable thorny wall), she then infused Katrina with dreaming – in the same way that, blink and you might miss that bit, the good fairy in the Sleeping Beauty fairytale sends the Princess pleasant dreams – which, interestingly, do include dreams about the prince, such that when he arrives and she wakes up to see him there, not only is she not afraid to find a strange bloke in her bedchamber, but realises that she already knows him – which lends one to thinking about ‘fate’ and ‘twin souls’ and all that kind of thing.
And as we see, this classical symbolism of ‘fate’ as depicted as a weaver, or spinstress, is clearly prominent throughout the various versions of the fairytale.
[Спящая царевна (Sleeping Princess) by Viktor Vasnetsov, sometime between 1900-1926]
So, I am suggesting here that this particular story is a very ancient and classical tale which wound its way into the European Middle Ages (via access to that classical literature), was incorporated into the Aristocracy’s literary traditions of the Chivalric Romance (as epitomised by the Arthurian legends), then filtered down the social classes, so to speak, until a few hundred years later, with gratitude to the printing press, in the seventeenth century we have the tale with which most modern readers are familiar. And it is, really, this evolved folktale version that people think of.
And this, I would further suggest, is why we’ve ended up with some of these entirely mistaken ‘analyses’ of the Sleeping Beauty story.
On the one paw we have Freud’s utterly projected and somewhat perverted sexualisation of children version, whilst on the other paw we have the equally self-serving (2nd wave) feminist critique attempting to project some kind of notion of ‘the imposition of patriarchal values and role-expectations onto young girls’ rubbish.
The story, even on cursory analysis, is neither of these things. Naturally it behooves me to demolish both of those analyses, so here goes.
First, the princess isn’t even the protagonist. The princess falling asleep is actually a prologue, a scene-setting (call it Act One if you like). Then the prince shows up. He’s the protagonist. Equally contrary to misremembered popular opinion about the story, the prince does not valiantly battle his way through the thicket then wakes up the sleeping maiden with a kiss (a ‘chaste’ kiss was clearly preferable to the original rape in later centuries, notwithstanding). That doesn’t, in fact, happen. There are other princes and such like who do attempt to get inside the palace (symbolism of uninvited penetration there), but they all get mangled by the briar rosiness and die slow and painful deaths (quite right too, the feminists should have added).
The only difference with the final prince is that he just happens to show up when the appointed waking up time is at hand. Read it again, and you’ll see that the thicket in fact opens up for him (then closes behind him), thus making a pathway. So this is where we encounter the ‘fate’ aspect again. This ‘fate’ thing, after all, is the entire set-up in the first place – pricking the finger on a spindle.
Yes, naturally you can interpret that as ‘menarche’ (first menstruation), and if that is so, then this fact alone utterly invalidates the entire Freudian projection. The princess is not a child, that’s to say. Indeed, her childhood isn’t even mentioned in the story. Her birth parents are both loving – i.e. there is no ‘dysfunctional family romance’ going on. The prince is in no way a ‘transferred’ version of the girl’s father. So, none of the elements of that perverted Freudian shit are anywhere to be seen.
She does, indeed, keep herself chaste until the ‘right bloke’ comes along. And what’s wrong with that? How many of us regret our ‘first time’? And wish we’d have waited for our true life-partner? We carry that bad memory with us for the rest of our lives, don’t we? How many girls does this happen to? How many adolescent boys, for that matter? That’s not a ‘patriarchal’ moral issue. It’s a mature, emotional and psychological issue. A real man, likewise, a gentle man, respects that loyalty and foresight of mind and heart. The prince in the story, after all, is fated in all this, that’s why he becomes instantly enamoured, the pathway opens for him, and in the fairytale at least, he does not have his wicked way with her. Now there’s a moral lesson for the chivalrous. Interesting that the peasant folktale version involves a gentleman, as opposed to a cad. You’d never get Mr. Darcy doing that, would you, eh?
So I’d say this is about love, not sex. It’s about twin souls and fate and all that wonderful Symposium-type stuff (one of my favourite Plato’s that one – if you can, get yourself a copy of Shelley’s exquisite translation, which he called ‘The Banquet of Plato’ – it’s seriously a thing of perfect beauty).
[Louis Sussmann - Dornröschen]
I will be reminded by a Freudian of part two of the story – the bit when the prince’s mother, the ogress, engages in all her shenanigans with a view to eating up the ‘rival’ for the ‘male affections’. Sorry, but that’s an entirely separate story (and was presented as such by the Brothers Grimm), and is entirely suggestive of some kind of fusion of folktales, since this part two bears similarities with many other tales about ogresses and child-eating and all that, but is not to be found in the original. I would suggest those sorts of tales are warnings about bad people.
So if you want to interpret that as a symbol of ‘child abuse’ then I won’t stop you. Freud would never admit the reality of such abuse, obviously, but I will. And if that aspect is indeed true then would this likewise relate to the dissociation of Sleeping Beauty? Quite possibly.
[Perrault’s La Belle au Bois Dormant - Second of six engravings by Gustave Doré]
Which – you will be doubtless pleased to hear, leads me onto another digression. Don’t worry – you’ll enjoy it.
In Katrina’s world, there is nearly always at least one Katrina question in any random pub quiz you might stumble upon. One of them is ‘what was Katrina’s first cryptonym/alias?’. A lot of people get that one wrong. Some people answer ‘Theresa’ (KGB), others say ‘ah, no, it was Mirabelle!’ (that was the one the BND assigned her). But no, the correct answer is ‘Marquise’ (Stasi; also her original online handle). This comes from an amazing short story by the strange and delightful early nineteenth century German writer Heinrich von Kleist, called The Marquise of O.
What I find so incredible about this story (aside from the exquisite writing) is that it contains possibly the earliest yet perfect description of dissociation, more than a century before the idea of that phenomenon even caught the attention of modern psychology. Furthermore, the fact that von Kleist’s story is, really, a modern re-telling of the (original) Sleeping Beauty story is even cooler (permit me to use the vernacular there – like I said, I’m intending to make these ‘lectures’ fun, so they’ll be more memorable).
Without spoiling the whole thing for you I just give you the set-up. A young woman finds herself pregnant and publishes an advertisement requesting whoever is the father of her child to present himself to her at an appointed time. No, she’s not a promiscuous woman. Truth is, she has no memory of any sexual encounter. Just like the original Sleeping Beauty. She has, in other words, entirely dissociated the whole thing. As it happens (this isn’t too much of a spoiler) the character of the ‘Count’ dutifully presents himself (and he is presented in a good light). And yes, there is a happy ending.
To me, then, this isn’t just a wonderful story, it’s a remarkable description of dissociation and therefore a marker for the ‘modern understanding’ of all this. It is, perhaps, an enlightenment. And this is one reason why I do strongly and emotionally object to the likes of Freudian and pseudo-feminist analysis – that kind of thing often strikes me as a deliberate destruction, or deconstruction and degeneration of these great stories. Some stories don’t need ‘analysis’ – why? Because the intended audience didn’t need analysis to help them understand. To suggest they did is patronising and – yes, infantilising. Instead of encouraging children to think for themselves it’s a very modern case of ‘telling them what they’re supposed to think’. Ironic, that, isn’t it, in view of this ‘feminist’ analysis, which purports to tell us that these stories are the patriarchy’s way of telling girl children how to think and expect and behave.
Do they get this irony? I doubt it. They don’t seem to have gotten the classical mythology thing, after all.
And so I say that to understand this story, as I have said, and to then conduct a valid analysis, we have to go way, way back.
What this story is ultimately is a classic personification of nature herself. That age old one about the changing of the seasons which all cultures have.
Switch the word ‘sleeping’ to ‘dying’ or ‘journey into the Underworld’ and now you suddenly get it, right?
The two children of the prince and princess are called ‘dawn’ and ‘day’. In some versions they are twins, in the classical manner (the gods tended to come in complementary pairs, male and female). ‘Dawn’ may as well be ‘Spring’ and ‘Day’ may as well be ‘Summer’. So who is the Princess? Clearly, Autumn and Winter. Shall we call her Persephone? Why not!
Or perhaps we could call her Eurydike, who in the most well-known version is bitten by a snake (symbol of wisdom), descends into the Underworld (falls into an enchanted sleep), then is rescued (woken up) by her other half, the noble and loyal Orpheus.
A Jungian, bless them, would suggest the Underworld is the unconscious, the female being more at home there, but lying dormant until the creative male principle arrives. I won’t object to that one. I have a soft spot for Jungians.
How about the Christian Easter story? The Sun (Jesus, or Osiris/Horus if you are an Egyptian) dies during the winter (the sun reaches its lowest point at the Winter Solstice and stays there for three days until rising again – so the Christians transferred that bit to Easter) but then rises again at the Spring Equinox, heralding the resurrection of fertility and all that.
The personification of maturity and transition to fecundity. That kind of thing.
This is yet another reason why I have no time for the feminists and the Freudians. The gender of the character representing this cycle of life is interchangeable, after all.
[Perrault’s La Belle au Bois Dormant - Third of six engravings by Gustave Doré]
Having said that, there is one observation I might make, if we’re going to get feminist about this. Although I’m going to do it in a socialist way.
You see that original knight who had his wicked way with the girl whilst she slept was a member of the aristocracy, wasn’t he?
Maybe I should just leave that one hanging there for you, reader dear, and spare you another diatribe. I’ve given you more than enough to think about, not to mention homework and the promise of a test next lesson. Write me an essay – i.e.
But perhaps more importantly, it’s Sunday.
And you have far, far better things to do than sit there listening to me burble on.
Class dismissed. Have a lovely day.