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World Languages and Cultures Theses

Sleeping beauty and her many relatives.

Dorothy Jeanine Kemptner Follow

Date of Award

Degree type, degree name.

Master of Arts (MA)

Modern & Classical Languages

First Advisor

Dr. Robin Huff - Chair

Second Advisor

Dr. Stephen Carey

The Grimm Brothers’ Little Briar-Rose is a beloved fairytale, which is more commonly known as Sleeping Beauty. What began as a Volksmärchen, is now a world famous and beloved Kunstmärchen. The Brothers collected and adapted the tale, incorporating their own literary style, helping to develop a literary Germanic cultural history. In this thesis I analyze how the tale evolves from the original oral tale to the literary story, and how various perspectives of culture and authors, with particular audiences in mind, adapt their versions. Historical background of the Grimms and their influences, an analysis of how the story was revised by the Grimms in the 1812 and 1857 editions, how American children’s versions compare to the Grimms’ version and how Jane Yolen’s version of Sleeping Beauty meets the structural and cultural expectations of the Grimms’ tale are examined.

https://doi.org/10.57709/1061416

Recommended Citation

Kemptner, Dorothy Jeanine, "Sleeping Beauty and Her Many Relatives." Thesis, Georgia State University, 2009. doi: https://doi.org/10.57709/1061416

Since February 08, 2010

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Walt Disney’s Visual Interpretation of the Fairy Tales: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty

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Figuring “Sleeping Beauty”: Metamorphosis of a Literary and Cultural Trope in European Fairy Tales and Medicine, c. 1350-1700

Sarnyai,, Lili (2016) Figuring “Sleeping Beauty”: Metamorphosis of a Literary and Cultural Trope in European Fairy Tales and Medicine, c. 1350-1700. Doctoral thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

This thesis takes an interdisciplinary approach to a recurrent cultural trope: the figure of the sleeping beauty. Sleeping beauties are young women—paradigms of femininity, paragons of virtue and physical perfection—who lose consciousness and become comatose and catatonic, for prolonged periods. In this unnatural state, these female bodies remain intact: materially incorrupt, aesthetically unblemished. Thus can the body of the sleeping beauty be defined as an enigma and a paradox: a nexus of competing and unanswered questions, uniquely worthy of investigation. This thesis examines the metamorphoses of the figure of the sleeping beauty in literature and medicine between c.1350 and 1700 in order to interrogate the enduring aesthetic and epistemological fascination that she exercises in different contexts: her potency to entrance, her capacity to charm, in both literary and philosophical realms. The widespread presence of the sleeping beauty in literature and art, as well as in the broader social sphere, over the centuries, indicates the figure’s important and ongoing cultural role. Central to this role is the figure’s dual nature and functionality. On the one hand, conceptualized as allegories, sleeping beauties act as receptacles for a complex matrix of patriarchal fears, desires and beliefs about the female body in general, and the virgin and maternal bodies in particular. On the other hand, understood as material or bodily entities, sleeping beauties make these same ideological questions incarnate. Sleeping beauties are, therefore, signs, treated as material bodies, a tension which this thesis explores. As such, they are prime subjects for cross-disciplinary correlational study and historicist analysis: vehicles for comparison and dialogue between literature, medicine, and religion on the issues of power and passivity, sexuality and gender difference, mortality and beauty, nature and the unnatural or supernatural. Sleeping beauties negotiate the boundaries of human desire for, and capacity for belief in, miracles and wonders.

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Sleeping Beauty (Essay Sample)

Sleeping beauty.

When I decided to take part in a panel discussion about the role of fairy tales in the modern literature, little did I know that I would learn to allot during the convention. My fellow panelists were editors and authors whose fairy tale work had influenced the modern storytelling context. The title for discussion was, “what does sleeping beauty means in the modern context?”. The question meant that we needed to explore the relevance of the fairy tale within the modern world and make interpretation using sleeping beauty as the primary focus.

As we discussed, the other panelists presented several arguments about why the fairy tale of sleeping beauty continues to be popular even in modern times.  We researched on the topic by digging into the archives to present an old version of the tale. During the presentation, the panelists discussed who the story was really about. During my research, I realized that sleeping beauty had much to offer in our discussion. During the discussion, we recounted some of the oldest and provocative versions of sleeping beauty.

Looking at the old version of this fairy tale, there were startling events presenting the journey of both lovers and their transformation process. Each of them experienced death as two sets of parents prepared to bury their children. Even though the Sultan’s son awakens the sleeping beauty, their relationship is not a  mature one, but the society does not sanction it. When the sultan son revives the sleeping beauty from death, they are considered equal, and their marriage is one between adults.  In our discussion, we noted that sleeping beauty had undergone several changes in the 29th century, when it was published by the  Grimm brothers targeting children. The Grimm brothers maintained some of the darker images from the story, but the sexuality and the humor disappeared.

Victorian publishers tried to  sanitize the fairy tale toning them down the violence, hence simplifying the narrative. During this period authors wanted readers to see the stories as charming by the reflection of gender roles during that time to present appropriate morality. Like other fairy tales, sleeping beauty used emotionally evocative images that were meant to engage the audience and to draw them to the morality behind the narrative. One panelist during the discussion reminded us that the underlying theme of the story is the power struggle between the young bride to be the older groom. The symbols of feminine power struggles are evident throughout the story, and everyone on the panel agreed that  figures of evil fairy were presented like the old woman spinning, the barren wife and the ogres’ mother.

As we noted sleeping beauty in the 20th century has been presented not as a collective identity,  but in several themes, the princess finds herself in many different guises. She is portrayed  as a helpless stay at home girls of the 1950s, a bold heroine,  an oppressed   holocaust survivor, a sexually abused child, among  other  themes.  As we came to the end of the discussion, we noted that sleeping beauty  the main theme has diminished  in many ways  with more civilized version being presented.

In the end, we all agreed that sleeping beauty is a  masterpiece, which present power. In our discussion, we all noted something very appealing about the figure. The princess is seemingly passive, but she is surrounded life threatening events including death.  The older version of the story presents the beauty’s original wit and strength. Even though the many versions have tried to alter her nature,   her transformation continues to shine making it a remarkable fairy tale.

Evolution and revolution within the ballet Sleeping Beauty : a choreomusical analysis of productions by the Royal Ballet (1939-2006) and Matthew Bourne (2012), including new software applications

• Elizabeth McLean

Student thesis : Doctoral Thesis

• Choreomusical
• Sleeping Beauty
• Royal Ballet
• Matthew Bourne
• Tchaikovsky

File : application/pdf, 52 MB

Type : Thesis

Embargo End Date : 24 Jul 2021

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• Marvels & Tales

• Volume 28, Number 1, 2014
• Wayne State University Press

Additional Information

• Show and Tell Sleeping Beauty as Verbal Icon and Seductive Story
• Maria Tatar (bio)

Donald Haase has described how “Sleeping Beauty” has an “underlying preoccupation with the creative power of language and storytelling,” but the story, in its various incarnations, has also become an exercise in visualization, giving us instructions on how to construct the image of a beautiful woman, one to be looked at, to use Laura Mulvey’s terminology. Over the centuries a once robust narrative with many twists and turns was edited down by the Brothers Grimm to emphasize the enraptured gaze of a rescuing prince as he beholds a woman who, through a sleight of words, becomes a verbal icon. It took Angela Carter to demythologize sleeping beauties in all their verbal and visual variety. In “The Lady of the House of Love,” she reveals the dangers of fetishizing not just sleeping beauties but fairy tales in general.

Feminists have targeted Sleeping Beauty as the most passive and repellent fairy-tale heroine of all, and many have done their best to make the story go away. Alerting us to the perils of the fairy tale, Madonna Kolbenschlag urges women to kiss Sleeping Beauty goodbye in her book of that title, and Jane Adams offers similar advice in Wake Up, Sleeping Beauty . Still, Sleeping Beauty and her German counterpart, Briar Rose, continue to turn up in locations both unlikely and obvious. Philosophers meditate on what they call the Sleeping Beauty problem in thought experiments about probability in coin tosses. In a bid to sell perfume, Lady Gaga spent twenty-four hours, immobile, in an installation called “Sleeping with Gaga.” Psychologists from Bruno Bettelheim onward find wisdom in the story and conclude that Sleeping Beauty’s passive state symbolizes a normal latency period for young girls. They recommend the story for therapeutic bedtime reading. Pornographers, hardcore and soft, have found in the story a deep well of sadomasochistic possibilities. Filmmakers, artists, writers, poets, fashionistas, and musicians alike keep responding to the call of the story, twisting and turning it, disenchanting it and restoring its magic, always managing to keep the fairy tale from disappearing.

Simone de Beauvoir was perhaps the first to alert us to the profound gender asymmetries in fairy tales: “Woman is the Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Snow White, she who receives and submits. In song and story the young man is seen departing adventurously in search of a woman; he slays the dragons and giants; she is locked in a tower, a palace, a garden, a cave, she is chained to a rock, a captive, sound asleep: she waits” (318). Women are [End Page 142] frozen, immobile, and comatose. The very name Sleeping Beauty invokes a double movement between a passive gerund ( sleeping ) and a descriptive noun ( beauty ) that invites a retinal response. Beauty may be sleeping, but we want to look at her to indulge in the pleasures of her visible charms. As Laura Mulvey has instructed us, that “we” is gendered male, although without precluding women’s narcissistic pleasure at looking. What Freud called scopophilia, or pleasure in looking at something, is something natural to all humans. As curious children we subject everything to the probing gaze, exploring what surrounds us and trying to make sense of the world. That gaze continues to operate in multiple ways in adults, most dramatically as the basis for erotic pleasure (active looking). In the visual economy of twentieth-century cinema, Mulvey argues (in views that critics—including Mulvey herself—have challenged and contested since the essay appeared), the male has become the active “bearer-of-the-look,” whereas women have been relegated to the position of objects on display (“to-be-looked-at-ness”). These categories correspond perfectly to Simone de Beauvoir’s division between adventurous, active males and passive women who receive, submit, await, and are “sound asleep.”

Had Laura Mulvey turned to fairy tales for evidence to support her thesis about the male gaze, she would surely have singled out “Sleeping Beauty” as the story that captures, with a single stroke, the notion of woman on display, to be looked at as erotic spectacle. Mulvey describes cinema as presenting “a hermetically sealed world which unwinds magically” and plays on the voyeuristic fantasies of spectators, giving them the illusion of “looking in on a private world” (9). Her phrasing could not be more relevant for the worlds of fairy tales, which were often told at nighttime, in the same dark spaces found in movie theaters. The flickering screen, with its play of light and shadow, can be seen as a modern analog of the hearth and the chiaroscuro effects created on walls and ceilings when blazing fires in dark rooms created light and shadows.

Of all fairy tales “Sleeping Beauty” is perhaps the most cinematic in its fashioning of a primal scene for visual pleasure. Curiosity and the desire to look mingle with a display that is both aesthetically and erotically charged. Our gaze is aligned with that of a prince stunned by the exquisite beauty of a woman who remains inert and on display for the enjoyment of a male viewer. Whether that gaze is ultimately voyeuristic or fetishizing depends on individual spectators, but we can say with some certainty that “Sleeping Beauty” provides us with an aesthetic program and training ground for the construction of heterosexual interactions in modern cinematic entertainments. It is no surprise that such filmmakers as Pedro Almodóvar ( Talk to Her ), [End Page 143] Julia Leigh ( Sleeping Beauty ), and Catherine Breillat ( The Sleeping Beauty ) continue to engage with the tale, taking it up covertly and also explicitly.

The scene of Sleeping Beauty in repose has been represented in many ways, but Charles Perrault captures it in its classic staging:

[The prince] traversed several apartments filled with ladies and gentlemen all asleep; some standing, others seated. Finally he entered a chamber completely covered with gold and saw the most lovely sight he had ever looked upon—on a bed with curtains open on each side was a princess who seemed to be about fifteen or sixteen. Her radiant charms gave her such a luminous, supernatural appearance that he approached, trembling and admiring, and knelt down beside her. (47)

Not only is Sleeping Beauty a woman of superlative beauty (“the most lovely sight he had ever looked upon,” “radiant,” and “luminous”), but also the chamber in which she resides appears to be a golden time capsule. The prince makes his way through the palace, “mounts” the stairs, and “pushes” on until he reaches the princess on display. In translation or not, the diction is highly charged in erotic terms, suggesting that penetrating the briars and entering the castle are forms of foreplay for the scene of beholding.

Although “Sleeping Beauty” so patently creates a gender divide between the comatose slumbering princess and the adventurous prince, Bruno Bettelheim argues that there are an equal number of tales in which the male figure sleeps and the female “marvels at the beauty she beholds” (226–27), as in “Cupid and Psyche.” Bettelheim may have a point, but our culture has worked hard to privilege sleeping beauties over handsome slumberers. Furthermore, Bettelheim’s interpretation of Beauty’s sleep makes a psychosexual claim that itself associates sleep and passivity with young women: “During the months before the first menstruation, and often also for some time immediately following it, girls are passive, seem sleepy, and withdraw into themselves” (124). The same is not true for boys, he tells us. Still, he concludes that there is no sexual stereotyping in fairy tales, short-circuiting his argument about the passivity of premenstrual girls: “Even when a girl is depicted as turning inward … and a boy as aggressively dealing with the external world, these two together symbolize the two ways in which one has to gain selfhood. … While some literal-minded parents do not realize it, children know that, whatever the sex of the hero, the story pertains to their own problems” (226). In many ways, Bettelheim, despite his efforts to rehabilitate the story, only succeeds in strengthening the case for wishing that it would just go away. [End Page 144]

Language and Storytelling

Before considering exactly how the history of “Sleeping Beauty” has enacted temporal compression to create for us a story whose words move us to construct images more than anything else, it is worth looking at how this history has unfolded in textual terms. From the medieval romance Perceforest (written down in the fifteenth century) to Perrault’s “La Belle au bois dormant,” narratives about sleeping beauties seem to have what Donald Haase refers to as “an underlying preoccupation with the power of storytelling” (293). They are self-reflexive narratives that, more than most fairy tales, display a deep concern with words, stories, and raconteurs. In Perceforest , one of the earliest recorded versions of a Sleeping Beauty tale, Troylus hears about Zellandine’s sleep from a skeptical sailor who describes the deep slumber as “une merveille sy grande qu’a paine est elle creable” (“such a great marvel that it is barely believable”) ( Bryant, 58 ). He puts together bits and pieces of the story from other informants and is thereby inspired and enabled to enter the story himself in the lead role of rescuer. Troylus engages in what Paul Ricoeur would call an act of productive invention, creating in his mind a full plot that “‘grasps together’ and integrates into one whole and complete story multiple and scattered events, thereby schematizing the intelligible signification attached to the narrative as a whole” ( Time and Narrative , x ). Putting it all together allows Troylus to become the rescuer, to awaken Zellandine, and to indulge, together with her, in an orgy of storytelling, during which they each recount their own life histories.

Sleeping Beauties from medieval times appear as single way stations set in epics and romances with multiple adventures and feats. It was no doubt from these narratives that Giambattista Basile borrowed to tell his stand-alone tale “Sun, Moon, and Talia,” included in his lively collection known as the Pentamerone , or The Tale of Tales (1634–1636), published in Naples. Sharply different from popular versions of “Sleeping Beauty” printed today, Basile’s tale recounts the story of a princess destined to come to misfortune from a small flax splinter. When the splinter slides under Talia’s nail, she falls into a deep sleep, disturbed only by a king who discovers her in a castle and finds himself “on fire with love.” Basile coyly describes the king as gathering the “first fruits of his love.” Nine months later Talia bears two children. When the king’s wife gets wind of the affair, she lures the children to the castle and prepares to serve them up to her husband for dinner. A compassionate cook saves the children, and the queen ultimately suffers the punishment she planned to inflict on Talia.

With its ornate language and baroque flourishes, Basile’s tale gives us a complexly layered narrative, one that moves in the mode of high drama, with a rape scene, a revenge plot, and theatrical punishments. Ending in a [End Page 145] lighthearted manner with verse that reads to us today as perverse (“Those whom fortune favors/Find good luck even in their sleep”), the tale quickly moves out of Talia’s bedroom, revealing almost nothing about her appearance: “The king beheld her charms” is followed by a harvesting of those fruits of love. The expansive narrative, with its breathless pacing, could easily accommodate descriptive details, but it avoids them. Noteworthy also, as Haase points out, is that the storytelling theme is situated in the frame for Basile’s Tale of Tales , a structural device for gathering stories that, like “once upon a time” or “happily ever after,” calls attention to its own constructed nature (281). The fairy tale, Jessica Tiffin reminds us—and one could make much the same case for narrative frames—shows an “awareness and encoding of itself as text , the classic opening … signaling a precise relationship with reality which makes no pretense at reality, but which is continually aware of its own status as story , as ritualized narrative enactment” (13).

It was Charles Perrault who began the process of slowing down the tale about Sleeping Beauty by displacing temporality and narrative with monumental stasis and frozen immobility. Perrault’s slumbering princess inhabits a palace in which a “frightful silence” reigns, and “Death” seems to be “everywhere,” with men and animals “apparently lifeless.” Much as there is a seductive appeal to sleeping princesses, their beauty immune to decay and corruption, the attraction mingles with dread and repulsion, for the 100-year sleep is surely also a proxy for death, which lurks at the borders of the castle in the corpses of the suitors entangled in the briars. Sleeping Beauty suddenly becomes the tale’s main feature—iconic in mingling beauty and death, desire and dread.

Still, Perrault’s story does not completely dispense with action. As Donald Haase emphasizes in his analysis of the tale, it is filled with self-reflexive meditations on the power of stories passed on from one generation to the next. The prince listens to rumors about the old castle he has discovered while hunting, a castle said to be haunted by ghosts, used as a gathering place by witches, and inhabited by a child-eating ogre. He feels himself to be “on fire” when an old peasant tells him, on the authority of his ancestors, that a beautiful princess is awaiting the arrival of a prince to awaken her from a 100-year sleep. Perrault does not hesitate to extend the time frame of the story beyond the kiss, and he includes an elaborate sequel describing the savagery of Sleeping Beauty’s cannibalistic mother-in-law and her efforts to cook her grandchildren and daughter-in-law, as well as her sensational end in a vat filled with foul creatures. Sleeping Beauty stands at the center of the tale, flanked on either side by monstrous appetites that seek to possess her, either through carnal knowledge or through physical incorporation. She is the object of all desires. [End Page 146]

Language and Living Metaphors

Tellingly, the Grimms used the title “Dornröschen,” or Briar Rose, for their version of what Perrault called “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood.” The word sleeping contains within it the possibility of an awakening fraught with danger, as in the phrase sleeping giant , that colossus who threatens to make dramatic changes once aroused. Little Briar Rose, as the Grimms’ heroine is called, yokes together in her name pain and beauty, suggesting stasis rather than the potential for action. She becomes a figure of renown, diminutive (as the -chen suffix suggests) but powerful:

Throughout the land, stories circulated about the beautiful little Briar Rose, for that was the name given to the slumbering princess. From time to time a prince would try to force his way through the hedge to get to the castle. But no one ever succeeded, because the briars clasped each other as if they were holding hands, and the young men who tried, got caught in them and couldn’t pry themselves loose. They died an agonizing death. ( Tatar, Annotated Brothers Grimm , 242 )

Her still beauty is broadcast to the world and can take a deadly turn.

By 1812, when the Brothers Grimm published “Dornröschen,” the story emerges “clean, all essence,” as Pamela Travers puts it (53). The author of the Mary Poppins books had more to say in praise of the Grimms’ retelling of the tale:

In this latest, and best known, telling of the story it is possible to see how over the centuries it has been refined and purged of dross. It is as though the tale itself, through its own energy and need, had winnowed away everything but the true whole grain. By the time it was told to the Brothers Grimm, its outer stuff, worked on by time and the folkly mind, had become transparent and complete, nothing too much nothing too little. (53)

The Grimms trim, prune, and truncate, moving quickly to the pricking of the finger on the spindle and eliminating the episode with the cannibalistic mother-in-law. When it comes to awakening Briar Rose herself, the prince is all eyes after traversing the palace, with its immobilized inhabitants, and discovering a woman “so beautiful that he could not take his eyes off her.” Time has stopped in the castle, and the narrative flow is also arrested as our productive imagination is aligned with the prince and we construct a mental image of the magnetic Sleeping Beauty. Temporality ceases to be and, for a moment, we are in the realm of pure visuality, imagining Briar Rose.

Illustrators have clearly understood how the scene of enraptured vision in “Briar Rose” produces what W. K. Wimsatt and M. Beardsley called “iconic [End Page 147] solidity,” an effect achieved through what they call a “sleight of words,” the imitation of something “headlong and impassioned, less ordered, nearer perhaps to the subrational” (115). Through the “solidity of symbol” and “sensory verbal qualities,” poetic abstractions take on the sturdiness of real-life objects and are reified and made into “enduring things.” As Suzanne Langer argues (261), poetry, like sculpture, can turn language into matter, if not an actual material representation then at the least a mental image invested with what Ricoeur has referred to as “ontological vehemence” ( Rule of Metaphor , 294). Briar Rose, at the moment when she is discovered fast asleep and frozen in time, hovers before us almost as vividly as she does for the prince. Yet the economy of means is astonishing. Often two words are all it takes—Sleeping Beauty or Briar Rose—to ignite the imagination and to see the woods, the roses, the thorns, the drapery, the hair, and the slumbering, supine body of the princess. Both the cultural matrix around the story—the profusion of hypertexts generated by Perrault’s story—and its iconic status enable us to see well, just as we have little trouble envisioning Little Red Riding Hood and Rumpelstiltskin (although those figures, I would argue, are more of a challenge to visualize because they are in constant motion).

Briar Rose is part of a fairy-tale discourse that adheres to the rule of what storytellers from many different lands use to preface their tales: “It was and it was not.” She may have an iconic solidity but she also exists only in language, thereby creating what Roman Jakobson called a “split reference,” simultaneously existing and yet also not existing (qtd. in Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor , 265 ). Belonging to the regime of metaphorical figures and tropes (her name is a figure of speech), she both does and does not produce a real-world reference. She is and yet she also is not . Ricoeur describes the paradoxical logical economy of metaphorical truths, which capture “the critical incision of the (literal) ‘is not’ within the ontological vehemence of the (metaphorical) ‘is’” ( Rule of Metaphor , 255). The iconic image of Briar Rose, like the tales told about her, takes on a self-reflexive quality—the metapictorial joins up with the metafictional—obliging us to “think more” as we use our imaginations to create Sleeping Beauty. “Metaphor is living by virtue of the fact that it introduces the spark of imagination into a ‘thinking more’ at the conceptual level. This struggle to ‘think more,’ guided by the ‘vivifying principle,’ is the ‘soul’ of interpretation” ( Rule of Metaphor , 358).

Ricoeur’s words go far toward explaining exactly why Albert Einstein recommended fairy tales to parents, advising them to read fairy tales if they wanted intelligent children, and more fairy tales if they wanted more intelligent children ( Wilson Library Bulletin , 678 ). 1 The thrifty use of poetic language in fairy tales can fill us with wonder but can also leave us wondering, challenging us to fill in all the descriptive and causal blanks—in short, as [End Page 148] Einstein recommended, to use our imaginations. With their witches and woods, roses and thorns, golden balls and slimy suitors, fairy tales create shimmering visuals, verbal icons—sleeping beauties, skulls decorated with flowers, homicidal birds with jewel-encrusted plumage—that oblige us to “think more” and “think harder.” In short, we have to interpret and backfill as well as listen and absorb.

Briars and Thorns: Edward Burne-Jones Courts Sleeping Beauty

Ever since Snow White’s body was placed in a glass coffin on top of a hill for public viewing, feminist critics have suspected that her beautiful corpse, idealized and almost literally placed on a pedestal, elicits a purely aesthetic viewing of the female body, one that replaces the notion of decay and death with permanence and plenitude ( Bronfen, 99–107 ). Seeing is privileged over touching ( Perrault’s prince too only gazes at his sleeping beauty), and the prince’s prolonged gaze creates a reassuring moment in which aesthetic pleasure appears to displace anxieties about mortality. The beautiful corpses of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty have inspired art that ensures a double immortality, for the comatose women and for the works of art representing them.

The Grimms’ “Briar Rose” gives us, as noted, a trimmed down version of the stories in Basile’s Pentamerone and Perrault’s Tales of Mother Goose . The brothers compressed the events leading up to the scene of disenchantment and eliminated the necrophiliac perversions of Basile’s tale as well as the complications of a meddling wife or mother-in-law determined to have Sleeping Beauty and her children for supper. Enshrining Briar Rose as the main attraction, the story inspired a robust visual culture, intensely focused on—what else?—the sensually stirring beauty of the slumbering princess. The proliferation of Sleeping Beauty images is a reminder of just how powerfully stasis becomes the thematic centerpiece of the narrative.

Edward Burne-Jones’s Briar Rose , completed in 1890, offers a consummate example of how aesthetic display comes to dominate depictions of sleeping beauties. The prince stands to the far left of the first painting in the series of four panels, his field of vision connecting with the last image depicting the sleeping beauty, reclining on a divan, surrounded by a trio of maidservants, all in various states of languorous repose. Ready to do battle, this prince is armed with sword and shield and is clad in armor as his gaze moves across five suitors who appear almost braided together, frozen in what appears to look more like voluptuous sleep than death throes. Pieces of armor may litter the landscape, but that landscape, with its entwined rose branches, has a quiet beauty of its own. The prince is armored, but there is [End Page 149] no dragon to slay and no villain to conquer, making his sword, shield, and helmet somewhat superfluous.

For the Briar Rose series, Burne-Jones took as his point of departure not just the Grimms’ fairy tale but also Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem The Day-Dream , which includes five sections: “The Sleeping Palace,” “The Sleeping Beauty,” “The Arrival,” “The Revival,” and “The Departure.” Burne-Jones concentrates his attention on the first half of Tennyson’s poem, focusing on the first three parts and how they capture quiet stasis and morbid tranquility. “More like a picture seemeth all,” Tennyson wrote in the early stanzas, and he sought to capture a sleeping beauty who is “a perfect form in perfect rest,” before she is disturbed by the “sudden hubbub” described in “The Revival” ( Ricks, 2: 50, 52, 54 ).

Edward Burne-Jones, The Briar Wood from The Legend of Briar Rose , 1885–1890.

Burne-Jones paints the picture Tennyson describes, first showing the prince surveying a landscape littered with bodies twisted and contorted yet also with a serene, stately beauty. Situated in branches of briars, “thick as a wrist, and with long, horrible spikes,” the suitors—Tennyson’s “silent dead”—are nearly buried by the massive overgrowth of flowers, branches, and thorns ( Wood, 110 ) ( fig. 1 ). Yet these suitors are preserved perfectly and, unlike the young men in the Grimms’ “Briar Rose,” they do not seem to have died a miserable death but appear instead destined to be revived along with the sleeping princess and all other inhabitants of the castle. Remarkably, both prince and suitors share the same facial features, each of the young men mirroring the others (even their suits of armor and clothing make it challenging to distinguish one from another). Art historians have noted the influence of Michelangelo, but Burne-Jones’s suitors are earthly and earthbound in ways that the Italian artist’s muscular male bodies rarely are ( Christian ). [End Page 150] The servant girls in the third panel, The Garden , all resemble each other as well, anticipating the features of Briar Rose and her ladies-in-waiting. Their bodies seem to form a human chain, with each physically connected to the next: the arm of one touches the toes of the other, a head rests on a knee, or two figures share a pillar.

The proliferation of bodies on Burne-Jones’s four canvases is all the more remarkable because the turbid mix of brambles and bodies distances the prince from Sleeping Beauty in profound ways, separating the two and keeping them apart as few other illustrators of the story have. Most illustrators linger on Sleeping Beauty just as the prince enters the chambers or right before the prince plants the storied kiss on her lips. Instead of a scene of reanimation, we are treated here to a tableau of suffocating aesthetic intensity, with briars and roses creating a painful bower first for the suitors and then for the king and his councilors, less so for the servant girls, and not at all for Sleeping Beauty. She slumbers peacefully in a reclining position, with roses providing little more than decorative background ( fig. 2 ). As the eye moves from the prince across to the slumbering princess, the beautiful scenes of suffering modulate into a single iconic figure, preserved and pure, the sole image in which a body is truly at rest—ironically more dead than asleep.

Edward Burne-Jones, The Rose Bower from The Legend of Briar Rose , 1885–1890.

Briar Rose offered Burne-Jones a title that signaled an opportunity to yoke beauty and suffering in ways that Oscar Wilde and other contemporaries would have appreciated. With its dark palette of smoky umbers, steely blues, and burnt sienna, the sprawling canvas gives us something monumental and [End Page 151] majestic, a tableau vivant full of figures that resemble corpses more than living beings. The inert bodies signal on a literal plane the leveling effects of death and on another plane the decorative beauty of bodies draped in settings that combine nature’s invasive beauty with the stillness of human art. On the last canvas an ornately carved bed, mirrors encrusted with gold, fabrics artfully draped, intricately woven tapestries, and carved columns all stand in the service of elevating and adorning the princess, lying in a truly regal state. Even the otherwise wildly growing roses seem to have been pruned and trained for this Sleeping Beauty. The cult of death and beauty could not be pictured more clearly than in Rose Bower , the last in the quartet of panels.

Burne-Jones’s Briar Rose reminds us, as few paintings illustrating fairy tales do, that a picture can be worth the thousand words (give or take a few) that it took Perrault and the Grimms to tell the tale. In capturing beauty and putting it on a pedestal, the British painter reveals that “Sleeping” is what can set Beauty off to the greatest advantage, showing how the story’s title stages everything critical to understanding it. Like Pamela Travers, Burne-Jones falls under the spell of the story’s core: the enchanted castle with a prince who has struggled to find a way through the briars and is captivated by the vision of a sleeping beauty. She is the Briar Rose, the woman who engages in a reciprocal metaphorical relationship with the thickets or roses and thorns encircling the castle and who incarnates in her stillness the seductive pull of beauty and death.

That the cult of beauty is entangled with suffering and despair becomes evident from Burne-Jones’s efforts to penetrate the alluring thickets of his own work. He wrote: “Only this is true: that beauty is very beautiful, and softens, and comforts, and inspires, and rouses, and lifts up, and never fails” ( Ash, n.p. ). And yet at the same time, he drew, for Katie Lewis (the daughter of a friend), a sketch of himself trying unsuccessfully to enter the painted world of “Briar Rose.” Poor Mr. Beak (Katie’s nickname for the artist) continues work on his canvas as he watches his artistic alter ego crash through the painting and land in despair on his backside. In this allegory about art as something purely to behold, the prince penetrates the briars surrounding the kingdom but ends up a laughingstock who has shattered the beauty of the illusion he has created. Moving from contemplation to action in this case means disenchantment and loss, a grim reminder of how beauty fades and collapses when subjected to the ravages of temporality and plots. For that reason perhaps, Burne-Jones did not include the prince’s disenchanting kiss: “I want it to stop with the princess asleep and to tell no more, to leave all the afterwards to the invention and imagination of the people” (qtd. in Dean, 22 ). [End Page 152]

Sleeping Beauties: Orientalized and Catatonic

Burne-Jones was not the only British painter of his time obsessed with the fairy tale canonized by Perrault and the Brothers Grimm and popularized in England by Tennyson. His contemporary, an artist with the unlikely name of William A. Breakspeare (1856–1914), gives us a Sleeping Beauty immune to the invasive power of nature. Self-contained in what appears to be a hermetic space, this fairy-tale figure rests in a state of serene voluptuousness. Reclining on a divan decorated with extravagant animal furs and artfully draped with fabrics in rainbow hues, she makes herself available to the gaze of spectators, with her right arm propping up her head to ensure full-frontal exposure. Bed, fabrics, fur, and body become one burst of color and beauty in a setting almost tomblike in its contrasting spareness.

A small bedside table with arabesque designs holds a miniaturized still life that chromatically mirrors the colors of the sleeping beauty’s attire. The article of furniture adds an artistic touch that clinches the suspicion that the title figure of the painting has not only been anesthetized and aestheticized (like the still life) but also eroticized and Orientalized. The living embodiment of seductive beauty, she retains a touch of innocence in the white fabric wrapped around her torso. Breakspeare’s painting discloses the sexual underside of the Sleeping Beauty story, taking us back to the necrophiliac charms of Basile’s Talia. Unlike her many chaste cousins in illustrations for children’s books, this beauty has been fashioned to attract the male gaze, remaining supremely removed, indifferent, and unresponsive to it.

Many contemporary observers gazing at this portrait would most likely associate it with the countless French paintings of odalisques that were all the rage in the nineteenth century. Those alluring beauties may have been draped with rich fabrics, but some were also often represented as reclining in a state of near nudity as they lounged in exotic harems. They too are the dark, obscured doubles lurking in the shadows of the chaste Sleeping Beauties found in illustrations for the fairy tales.

No artist seems more deeply invested in the nexus of beauty, sleep, and death than Maxfield Parrish, whose Sleeping Beauty of 1912 succeeds, like no other painting, in suggesting self-contained serenity in the trio of princesses and maids-in-waiting. Parrish creates an image that reveals the twin thematic engines of Sleeping Beauty images— eros and thanatos —but with classical elegance that keeps the sensual elements in check, creating an image that moves comfortably between the sphere of adult high culture and the culture of childhood.

Illustrators of “Sleeping Beauty” in editions designed for children emphatically resisted, for the most part, representing any trace of the slumbering [End Page 153] voluptuousness in the odalisque figures haunting the European imagination. Instead, their princesses are swaddled in white serenity, radiating innocence and purity even as they invite desire in the quiet beauty of their features and the soft curves of their bodies. Thomas Ralph Spence (1855–1918) painted a Sleeping Beauty that exemplifies the cocooning effect in twentieth-century portraits, and his image sets the tone for illustrators of the story in children’s books. The slumbering princess lies in a bed more like a sarcophagus than a plush divan, but her flowing locks, mingled with the vitality of the rose vines, are a reminder that she can still come back to life.

Walter Crane, John Duncan, Ann Macbeth, Henry Maynell Rheam, Herbert Cole, Margaret Tarrant, Jennie Harbour, and many other artists portray Sleeping Beauty with sepulchral splendor, laid out and ready for the tomb in her white or pastel-colored shroud. Gustave Doré’s prince is drawn to Sleeping Beauty in part because the sun’s rays guide him to the radiantly white princess enclosed in the coffinlike box that is her bed. Burne-Jones envelops Briar Rose in white gauze as well, giving us once again more of a sarcophagus scene than a seraglio.

The Afterlife of the Living Dead

It took Angela Carter to demythologize “Sleeping Beauty” and break the magic spell that has taken us all in ever since Basile, Perrault, and the Brothers Grimm codified the fairy tale. “In a faraway land long ago”: Disney’s Sleeping Beauty begins with words that remind us of the drive to preserve the mythical power of tales from times past, to perpetuate the cult of the beautiful corpse that is the fairy tale in the form told in times past. Just as Carter’s Sleeping Beauty in her story “The Lady of the House of Love” repeats “ancestral crimes,” so the fairy tale enables us to lose ourselves in a mindless cycle of repetition compulsion that reproduces and reinforces social norms (93). The house of fairy tale, like the House of Love, degenerates into ruins—“cobwebs, worm-eaten beams, crumbling plaster”—when left to its own devices, visited only by sycophantic suitors driven more by the lure of beauty than the desire to reanimate. 2 Without the right suitor, Carter’s somnambulant beauty has become “a cave full of echoes,” “a system of repetitions,” “a closed circuit.” Leading a “baleful posthumous” existence, she feeds on humans to sustain her dark existence (93).

Myths naturalize ideology, and, according to Richard Slotkin, they are “stories drawn from history” (70) to provide a cohesive sense of tradition and cultural identity. What is at stake in Carter’s rewritings is nothing less than what the author famously referred to as “demythologizing business” ( Carter, 93 ) denaturalizing myth and reframing old stories in new terms. [End Page 154] Instead of purveying false truths, the fairy tale can be repurposed to convey true lies, narratives that take us deep into ancient woods and lead us back out again, not necessarily into sunshine but into a space removed from the dark depths of a castle in ruins.

Carter introduces history into the myth of Sleeping Beauty. Her prince is a man who will learn “to shudder” in the trenches, a fellow whose regiment will “embark” for France the night after he bestows his transformative kiss. Rather than locating the story in a timeless “once upon a time,” Carter situates the tale during a “hot, ripe summer” in the early part of the twentieth century. The prince is described with a specificity unknown to most fairy tales. An officer in the British army, he is “blond, blue-eyed, heavy-muscled” and plans for himself an “adventure” on the roads of Romania. Riding a bicycle rather than a steed, he is both pragmatic, using “the most rational transport in the world,” yet also “unknowing” in ways reminiscent of the blockheads, simpletons, and dummies in fairy-tale collections. What Carter stages here is nothing less than the collision of a historical being, “rooted in change and time,” with a mythical monster, “the timeless gothic eternity of the vampires, for whom all is as it has always been and will be, whose cards always fall in the same patterns” (97). And, interestingly, it is precisely at the moment when the young officer is introduced that the text shifts into the past tense—the tense of history—moving from the (eternal) present tense used for nearly four pages to describe the Countess of the castle. 3

Once the possibility opens up of reading Carter’s tale as allegorical and metafictional, revealing that this is a fairy tale about fairy tales, it becomes evident that history’s attempt to invade and inhabit the domain of myth spells the doom of the vampiristic princess. Unlike most sleeping beauties, this “beautiful somnambulist” is also “queen of the vampires” and “mistress of … disintegration.” Her beauty, we are told, is a symptom of her “soullessness.” She has a “weird authority” and plays cards that “always” show the “same configuration.” Everything about her is “beautiful” and “ghastly,” yet she is horribly “reluctant” to play the role she has assumed. As we read the story, it dawns on us that this gothic vampire is not just a life-sapping mythical tale told to support hegemonic structures but also woman herself, destined to be without volition or identity, condemned to inhabit “a no-man’s land between life and death, sleeping and waking.” The “beastly forebears on the walls,” the ghosts of her ancestors, condemn her to lead a life dictated by their desires: “a perpetual repetition of their passions” (103).

Carter not only gives us a meditation on the cultural repetition compulsion inspired by fairy tales, she also exposes the perverse desires at the heart of the Sleeping Beauty story. Taking us back to Basile’s “Sun, Moon, and [End Page 155] Talia,” with its staging of necrophiliac desires, she moves us inside the mind of the blue-eyed British soldier invited into the bedroom of the Countess. As he crosses the threshold, the officer recalls the “jaded appetites” of a colonel in his regiment. The “old goat” had given him the visiting card for a brothel in Paris, where ten louis guaranteed “a lugubrious bedroom, with a naked girl upon a coffin … and, amidst all the perfumes of the embalming parlour, the customer took his necrophiliac pleasure of a pretended corpse” (105). The macabre scene at the castle is nothing more than the gothic staging of banal, everyday erotic practices.

Moved by pity rather than desire, the young soldier observes the “disordered” young woman as she struggles with her glasses. When the Countess drops the glasses used to block light, the “mundane” noise of shattering glass “breaks the wicked spell in the room.” But it takes more than that to exorcize the demons in the haunted castle. The soldier uses the “innocent remedies of the nursery” to stanch the flow of blood from a splinter lodged in the Countess’s thumb from her shattered glasses, and life comes back to the castle, as the Countess turns from vampire into human. The story may end happily with the exorcising of demons, but the soldier, who retains a souvenir from his adventure—a “dark, fanged rose” plucked from between the thighs of the Countess—discovers that the souvenir has turned into a “monstrous flower” just before he embarks for France. The sexual politics of the Sleeping Beauty story, in a stroke of deep irony, spill over into the combat zone, with a military machine that shares the relentlessly cruel appetites of the Countess, devouring its victims in the dark machinery of war. The same psychosexual mechanism that creates a cult of love and death in times of peace is at work in the martial ecstasies of men who throw themselves into the glories of battle.

Sleeping Beauty and Briar Rose, with their magnetic beauty and supremely passive status, remain hauntingly seductive figures in our cultural imaginary, reminding us of the pleasures of beauty but also of the attractions of morbidity. They may be immobile, but they also migrate with ease into new media as counterparts to mercurial tricksters—all the warrior women who hunt, shoot, and seek revenge in today’s cinematic refashioning of fairy-tale figures ( Tatar, “Sleeping Beauties” ). That their stories have been resurrected and are constantly reimagined is a stark reminder that the emergence of a female trickster does not necessarily signal a seismic shift in our understanding of female agency, even if trickster tales frame new perils and possibilities for postmodern heroines, challenging us to rethink the ancient archetypes. Sleeping Beauty, a true hermeneutic puzzle in her many cultural incarnations, preserves the magical, mythical elements of fairy tales, even as she cries out for disenchantment. We not only want to talk to her but also talk about her and make sense of her story. [End Page 156] As Donald Haase puts it, we are, like the prince, “driven by stories—driven to them by desire and driven by them to desire” (294). “Sleeping Beauty” not only makes us wonder—wonder how and why—but also leads us to become curiouser and curiouser.

Maria Tatar is the John L. Loeb Professor of German Studies and Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University. She is the author of The Annotated Brothers Grimm, The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen, Enchanted Hunters , and other volumes. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times and The New Yorker .

1. The full history of the story and the Einstein quotation that grew out of it can be found at http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein#Disputed (accessed November 10, 2013).

2. Katherine A. Hagopian explores how the tale inverts the relationship between Cupid and Psyche, with a monstrous bride residing in a house of love rather than a “winged serpent” residing in the “house of Eros.”

3. Jessica Tiffin points out that “from the moment he enters the village, and despite his characterization both in heroic motif and active, masculine past tense, the cyclist’s historical nature is subsumed into the unreal space of fairy tale and the Gothic” (85). The shift from the descriptions of the countess in the present tense to the narrative past begins with the words, “One hot, ripe summer day in the pubescent years of the present century, a young officer in the British army, blond, blue-eyed, heavy-muscled, visiting friends in Vienna, decided to spend the remainder of his furlough exploring the little-known uplands of Romania” ( Carter, 97 ).

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Changes in Folktales: “Snow White”, “Rapunzel”, “The Sleeping Beauty” Essay

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Introduction

Folktales are passed down from one generation to the other in different forms. The tales are passed down orally or through writing. They can also be communicated through films. There are different types of folktales. They include fairytales, trickster stories, fables, myths, and legends. The narratives are based on the culture and subculture of people in society (Boudinot 3). They reflect the oral traditions that were meant to explain various phenomena in society. They were also meant to teach morals and other life lessons.

In this paper, the author will analyze how folktales change with time. To this end, the author will focus on Snow White, Rapunzel, and The Sleeping Beauty. The common elements and variations in the tales will also be reviewed. The changes made by the Grimm Brothers to the folktales before publication will be analyzed. Finally, psychoanalysis of the storyteller behind the three tales will be provided.

Common Elements in Folktales

Most folktales share some specific characteristics. The traits are categorized into motifs and tale types (Yenika-Agbaw et al. 76).

Repeated Motifs

In traditional storytelling, some common words were used at the beginning and at the end of the tale (Yenika-Agbaw et al. 76). For example, most stories begin with “once upon a time…” and end with “…and they lived happily ever after”. The traits are similar in The Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, and Snow White. The opening and closing words in the three folktales are similar.

The Setting of the Story

Fairytales are set in the past. The stories involve characters that existed a long time ago. The three folktales analyzed in this paper talk of kings, queens, princes, and princesses (Keyser 8). All these are characters that were once in existence. The use of imagination in the three stories is another indication of the fact that the events took place in the past.

The Use of Clearly Defined Good and Evil Characters

A case in point is the use of these characters in Snow White. In the tale , the queen represents the evil character. She was jealous of Snow White and planned to kill her (Greenway 12). Other common elements in the folktales include the existence of supernatural beings. Fantasy and royalty are also common elements of the characters used in the tales. In Snow White, Rapunzel, and The Sleeping Beauty , there is a king, a prince, a queen, and a princess. In addition, there are magic objects and subjects, such as animals and people.

Changes in the Folktales over Time

With time, the narration and content of the three stories have changed significantly. It is believed that these variations are inevitable and can be caused by various factors.

Variations due to Changes in the Society and the Culture of the People

Changes among the target audience due to generational dynamics lead to evolutions in storytelling. A case in point is the change of language, time, and age of the storyteller (Raynard 34). For instance, in Snow White , the violence perpetrated against the princess in the original version is missing in the new edition of the tale (Greenway 12). Instead, the hunter became the protector of the princess. Sexuality is also evident in Rapunzel (Smallman 12). The little Rapunzel is heard singing alone in the forest by the princess. The part where she claims her clothes are smaller and cannot fit her anymore suggests pregnancy (Smallman 8). Most of these scenes are missing in the new edition.

Changes in Geography and Intentions of the Story

Most stories are told to teach a moral lesson. It is also noted that some tales targeted at the children are aimed at helping them understand their environment (Boudinot 6). In The Sleeping Beauty , the audience is taught that resilience and patience are required to overcome obstacles in life, including curses (Crane 5). Consequently, the intentions of the story and the needs of the target audience determine the packaging of the narrative. For instance, the geographical location determines how the storyteller integrates various objects and symbols into their narrative.

A Detailed Analysis of the Common Elements in The Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and Rapunzel

As already indicated in this paper, most folktales are characterized by common motifs, which define them (Raynard 8). The same case applies to the three tales analyzed in this study.

Royalty and Characters

All three tales contain characters of royal descent. In Rapunzel , for example, the princess hears Rapunzel singing in the forest from the tower (Smallman 5). The three tales are characterized by kings, queens, princes, and princesses.

The three folktales are characterized by scenes depicting violence against some of the characters. For example, in Snow White, the hunter is ordered by the queen to harm Snow White (Greenway 13). However, in the new edition of the folktale, the hunter becomes the protector of Snow White. In The Sleeping Beauty , a spell is cast on the princess. As a result, she sleeps for 400 years (Crane 3). The cruelty meted out against the characters is eliminated from most of the scenes in the latest editions of the tales. For instance, in the three tales, the stepmother is portrayed as a cruel person in the original versions of the stories (Crane 4). However, in the new editions, the cruelty is toned down.

All the three tales published by the Grimm Brothers ends with a marriage between the prince and the princess (Grimm and Grimm 8). In Rapunzel , the princess went with Rapunzel after hearing him sing from the tower (Smallman 20). However, similar to the other common elements in the tales, sexuality in Rapunzel changes between the original version and the latest edition of the folktale. For instance, the small dress that connotes Rapunzel’s pregnancy in the first edition is not mentioned in the latest version (Smallman 8). In The Sleeping Beauty , the prince comes and kisses the princess who had been sleeping for 400 years (Keyser 6). They start talking and fall in love. Such scenes are missing from the recent edition. Elimination of these scenes may be informed by the shifts in the interests of the target audience. The sex scenes may also have been eliminated to cater to the needs of the children (Cavendish 9). The three tales are popular among children. As such, the publishers felt it important to reduce the explicit sex scenes (Raynard 5).

A Detailed Analysis of the Variations between the Three Tales

The variations between the three tales are brought about by geographical differences, time overlap, culture, and the needs of the target audience. For example, the stories set on forested areas include characters drawn from the forest. A case in point is Rapunzel, which revolves around a forest setting. On its part, Snow White creates a picture of land covered in snow during winter (Greenway 8).

Omission and Addition of Elements to the Original Folktales before Publication

Originally, most folktales were preserved through oral traditions. However, with the emergence of the print media, most of these oral tales were published. A comparison between the original and the published versions of the tales indicates that some items were omitted or added before publication (Cavendish 10). There are various reasons why these changes are introduced. In the three tales analyzed in this paper, the omissions and additions were mainly made due to memetic and cultural ‘evolution’, as well as changes in the target audience (Keyser 9).

Memetic and Cultural Evolution

The desire of the storyteller is to ensure that their tales remain relevant to the society within which they are told. Examples of memes used in Snow White, Rapunzel, and The Sleeping Beauty include tunes, ideas, fashion, and expressions (Crane 7). The memes were changed to reflect the evolution of culture in society. Consequently, the Grimm Brothers made sure that the tales remained alive in modern society. For example, the idea of pregnancy is missing in the published edition of Rapunzel . The aim is to ensure that the thought of the prince making her pregnant is eliminated. As such, the Grimm Brothers ensured that they did not appear to be glorifying the thought of sex and pregnancy among teenagers.

Changes in Target Audience

In the three tales, the biological mothers in the original narratives were turned into stepmothers and their cruelty reduced in the published versions. The aim was to ensure that mothers remain sacred and the tastes of the readers are not offended (Raynard 23). In addition, the cruelty in the original tales had to be toned down in the published versions for the sake of the child reader. The same applies to the alterations made to the sex scenes. For example, in the original version of Rapunzel, Rapunzel says, “Tell me, Godmother, why my clothes are so tight and they don’t fit me any longer” (Smallman 8). The scene changes in the published version. Instead, Rapunzel says, “Tell me, Godmother, why is it that you are so much harder to pull up than the young prince?” (Smallman 8).

Psychoanalysis of the Storytellers

Most folktales are told using the voice of the third person narrative. The persona employs different techniques to tell the story. The techniques used include the use of songs, gestures, foreshadowing, dialogue, and models. The motivation behind these strategies is to make the stories more interesting (Cavendish 11).

The psychoanalysis of literary works falls under three categories. The categories include the object, the author, as well as the reader or the fictional character in the text (Grimm and Grimm 8). In the three Grimm Brothers’ tales, the storyteller uses objects with supernatural powers. The use of violence by the persona is intended to teach specific lessons to the audience. On its part, sexuality is used to make the stories more interesting to the audience. An example is in The Sleeping Beauty . The prince kisses the princess and she wakes up.

Culture, beliefs, and history about people and regions are passed down from one generation to the other through stories. The stories are told differently depending on the aim of the storyteller and the within which they are narrated. It is evident that most of them have changed significantly with time. As was made evident in the three folktales analyzed in this paper, the reason for this change is mostly due to shifts in the needs of the audience and the geographical regions within which the narratives are set.

Works Cited

Boudinot, David. “Violence and Fear in Folktales.” The Looking Glass: New Perspectives on Children’s Literature, vol. 9, no. 3, 2005. Web.

Cavendish, Richard. “The Publication of Grimm’s Fairy Tales.” History Today, vol. 62, no. 12, 2012, pp. 8-12.

Crane, Walter. The Sleeping Beauty Picture Book. Forgotten Books, 2016.

Greenway, Jennifer. Snow White. Andrews McMeel Publishing, 1991.

Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm. The Frog King or Iron Heinrich. 2005. Web.

Keyser, Hannah. “ 5 Ways Grimm’s Fairy Tales Changed After the First Edition .” Mental Floss, 2016 . Web.

Raynard, Sophie. The Teller’s Tale: Lives of the Classic Fairy Tale Writers. State University of New York Press, 2013.

Smallman, Steve. Fairytales Gone Wrong: Rapunzel, Rapunzel, Wash your Hair!. QED Publishing, 2015.

Yenika-Agbaw, Vivian, et al. Fairy Tales with a Black Consciousness: Essays on Adaptations of Familiar Stories. McFarland, 2013.

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Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Changes in Folktales: "Snow White", "Rapunzel", "The Sleeping Beauty"." November 12, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/changes-in-folktales-snow-white-rapunzel-the-sleeping-beauty/.

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Tchaikovsky’s Ballets: Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, Nutcracker

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Tchaikovsky's Ballets combines analysis of the music of Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, and Nutcracker with a description based on rare and not easily accessible documents of the first productions of these works in imperial Russia. Essential background concerning the ballet audience, the collaboration of composer and ballet-master, and Moscow in the 1860s leads into an account of the first production of Swan Lake in 1877. A discussion of the theatre reforms initiated by Ivan Vsevolozhsky, Director of the Imperial Theatres and Tchaikovsky's patron, prepares us for a study of the still-famous 1890 production of Sleeping Beauty, Tchaikovsky's first collaboration with the choreographer Marius Petipa. Professor Wiley then explains how Nutcracker, which followed two years after Sleeping Beauty, was seen by its producers and audiences in a much less favourable light in 1882 than it is now. The final chapter discusses the celebrated revival of Swan Lake in 1985 by Petipa and Leve Ivanov.

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Are your sleep habits causing wrinkles? Here’s what dermatologists want you to know

We work hard to make sure that we get enough sleep each night, not just for our overall health , but for our complexions, too. It's been well-documented that not getting enough sleep can lead to premature signs of aging, like wrinkles and sagging skin .

But did you know that certain sleeping styles can contribute to those things as well? Meaning, you may not actually be getting as much out of your beauty sleep as you could be.

"If you are a face sleeper, somebody who sleeps on their right or left side or directly on your face for a prolonged period of time, there's pressure compressing your skin," explains Dr. Erum Ilyas, a dermatologist in Pennsylvania. "So there's a crushing effect that occurs. With that element of crush that's consistently there, your skin can start to break down some collagen localized in those regions to sometimes etch in lines."

And these lines tend to show up around the base of the jawline and neck, as well as the cheek and crow's feet region, Ilyas says.

So, to make sure that your nightly ZZZs are doing as much good for your complexion as they are for your overall health , we asked the experts about how your sleeping style can impact your skin — and the things you can do to keep those sleep wrinkles at bay.

Will sleep wrinkles go away? | Does your sleeping position affect your skin? | How to prevent wrinkles while sleeping | Products to help prevent wrinkles while you sleep | How we chose | Meet our experts

Shop TODAY Snapshot: The best products to help prevent sleep wrinkles 2024

• Budget satin pillowcase: Bedsure Satin Silky Pillowcase, $7.99
• Expert recommended wrinkle patches: Frownies Forehead & Between Eyes Wrinkle Patches, $24.95
• Editor's pick pillow: "Save My Face" The Original Anti-Wrinkle Pillowette, $40.75
• Expert recommended night cream: Fresh Lotus Youth Preserve Radiance Renewal Night Cream, $58

Will sleep wrinkles go away?

For the most part, when you wake up, those lines and wrinkles that you notice (which we often consider to be the sign of a good night's rest) will start to go away as you go about your morning routine. But if you sleep in the same position night after night, eventually, they can start to become more permanent.

"Just like facial expression lines that become etched into the skin over time with repeated use of facial muscles, sleep lines get drawn into the skin because they are formed repeatedly over years," explains Dr. Brendan Camp, a double board-certified dermatologist at MDCS Dermatology in New York City.

Does your sleeping position affect your skin?

We have some bad news: The way that you sleep can contribute to these lines and wrinkles — and the most common sleeping positions tend to be the worst offenders.

“When people tend to dominate a certain side of their face, because of gravity and how the skin folds when you put your face down, it will kind of fold over and create a crease," explains Dr. Angela Lamb, a New York based dermatologist at Mount Sinai Dermatology.

That's why the best sleeping position is flat on your back. Though Ilyas adds that she doesn't know "many people who can get away with" sleeping on their back, and if you consider yourself in that group, there are some other things that you can do to help minimize sleep wrinkles.

How to prevent wrinkles while sleeping

"Some of it is just ergonomics," Ilyas says. When you side sleep, there's often a gap between your neck and your shoulder where you're not supported. "If you have something to fill that area in a little bit more uniformly, like a neck pillow or body pillow, theoretically, you won't crush all the way down and then have all those lines in your neck."

Also, if you don't typically sleep on your back, you can upgrade your pillow to help keep you in that position overnight. "Anti-aging pillows are designed to support your head on either side and keep you in a supine position as you sleep," Camp says. "This may prevent you from rubbing and compressing your face against the pillow as you sleep ." This sleeping position can also prevent your expensive skincare from absorbing into your pillow and staying on your face, which is where you want it.

You also might be familiar with the concept of using a silk pillowcase to protect your hair, and the experts say that it can be helpful for your skin, too, but in a different way. Because the material is smooth, "there's less of a friction coefficient between your skin and the pillowcase," Ilyas says. "So, theoretically, when there's less friction, there's less drag so your skin isn't pulled in one direction versus another and uniformly settles in."

Silk pillowcases can be pretty pricey, but Ilyas says that any material with a smooth texture, like sateen, will also serve the same purpose.

And if you don't want to change your sleep setup (we get it), simply maintaining a skin care routine can be super helpful for preventing wrinkles overnight. "Applying skin care products at night with anti-aging ingredients can help prevent the formation of fine lines and wrinkles. For example, retinol products encourage the formation of collagen and can minimize the features associated with aging skin."

When it comes to taking care of your skin more generally (or if you'd rather not try retinol ), Dr. Andy Goren, Professor of Dermatology at the University of Rome G. Marconi, Rome, Italy, recommends drinking water and applying lotion.

"Hydration of the skin is one thing, because if your skin is more hydrated, and it has better elasticity to it, it actually recovers much quicker," Goren adds.

Also, applying your SPF every day can help decrease that elastin breakdown during the day, Ilyas says. (Just another reason to wear sunscreen!)

With the expert's recommendations in mind, we found some top products that could help you make the most of your beauty sleep and avoid those dreaded sleep wrinkles.

Products to help prevent wrinkles while you sleep

Bedsure satin pillowcase.

Satin Pillowcase

• Prevents frizz
• Soft and comfortable feel
• Elegant look 
• Colors may differ as pictured

Colorways: 37 | Best for: Skin, hair protection | Material:  Satin

For an easy and affordable way to upgrade your beauty sleep routine, try changing your pillowcase. Look no further than this bestselling satin pillowcase, which is just $7. According to the brand, the pillowcase is made from a silk-like fabric that helps protect your hair and skin while you sleep.

Associate editor Kamari Stewart says using these pillowcases completely changed the look of her skin . "Within a few weeks, I noticed that I was breaking out less — with no change to my diet, exercise habits or  skin care routine , just using [these] satin pillowcases," she says.

Kitsch Satin Pillowcase

• Cooling effect 
• High quality and durable 
• Keeps skin and hair smooth
• Some say lighter colors can stain 

Colorways: 35 | Best for: Skin, hair protection | Material:  Satin

Another affordable and shopper-loved satin pillowcase is this option from Kitsch. The brand says the soft fabric will help prevent creasing skin and is even gentle on delicate eyelashes. It's available in tons of designs and colors starting at $19.

Zimasilk 100% Mulberry Silk Pillowcase

100% Mulberry Silk Pillowcase

• Zippers easily 
• Good value for quality 
• Aesthetically pleasing 
• Some wish they could be machine washed

Colorways: 38 | Best for: Skin, hair protection | Material:  Silk

Made from 100% mulberry silk, this pillowcase has more than 35,000 five-star ratings from shoppers who say that it's helped their skin and hair. It comes in nearly 40 colors and patterns as well as a variety of sizes to fit your bed.

Frownies Forehead & Between Eyes Wrinkle Patches

Forehead & Between Eyes Wrinkle Patches

• Helps keep forehead smooth
• Ease of application
• Some say there's an odor

Best for: Skin protection | Material:  Kraft paper, water activated starch based adhesive

According to the brand, these forehead patches hold facial muscles in place in a relaxed position, helping you avoid repeated facial expressions that can lead to wrinkles. When it comes to sleep wrinkles in particular, they can also act as a barrier against the pillows or blankets that we often rub our faces on overnight.

“They’re basically almost like a sticker that keeps wrinkles up," Lamb explains.

"Save My Face" Le Petite Pillow

Le Petite Pillow

• Helps decrease facial creases
• Great to add on top of other pillows
• Some say it sometimes slides from underneath you

Colorways: Three | Best for: Limiting side sleeping | Material:  Down alternative fill, satin lining

This Shop TODAY-loved pillow is made of 100% cotton and has a unique shape that can help facial creases for side sleepers. According to the brand, you can use it alone or place it on top of your normal pillow to keep your face elevated throughout the night.

Famedio Adjustable Cervical Pillow

Adjustable Cervical Pillow

• Combats neck pain
• Holds head in comfortable position
• Some say it takes some getting used to

Colorways: Five | Best for: Limiting side sleeping | Material:  Memory foam fill, mesh lining

This is another option that’s designed to provide support for your neck and head to prevent any gaps. If you find that it’s not the right size for your sleeping style, it has a removable memory foam insert that you can take out for a more comfortable feel.

Osteo Cervical Pillow

Cervical Pillow

• Provides neck and back support
• Not too stiff or too soft
• Breathable cover
• Some say the pillow is a little high for their liking

Best for: Neck support, limiting side sleeping | Material:  Memory foam, polyurethane (PU) foam

Without proper neck support, you may notice some lines popping up in the area. Upgrade your pillow with this bestselling ( and editor-approved ) product that features a hollow center that cradles your head and creates proper neck alignment, the brand says, to keep you comfortable. The ergonomic design is said to work for back, side and neck sleepers.

Fresh Lotus Youth Preserve Radiance Renewal Night Cream

Lotus Youth Preserve Radiance Renewal Night Cream

• Moisturizes skin overnight
• Smooths skin
• Doesn't feel heavy or greasy
• Some don't love the scent

Best for: Skin hydration | Ingredients: Super lotus, peach leaf extract, vitamin E, polyglutamic acid

Keeping your skin hydrated helps it recover faster from the pressure that causes sleep wrinkles and creases overnight. One way to improve skin hydration is through the application of a night cream before bed.

"Lotus, peach leaf extract, and vitamin E provide antioxidant protection from oxidative stress, and polyglutamic acid helps retain moisture in this rich, hydrating overnight cream," Camp shares.

Osea Hyaluronic Body Serum

Hyaluronic Acid Body Serum

• Boosts skin hydration by 161%
• Visibly plumps skin
• Sustainably packaged

Best for: Skin hydration | Ingredients: Hyaluronic acid, niacinamide, vegan peptides, green microalgae, blue-green algae, aloe

Another great skin care product that promises an improvement to your natural moisture barrier is this body serum that promises 24-hour non-stop moisture. "I have been a long-time fan of this brand because it really hydrates my skin without leaving it irritated," says social editorial assistant Annie Shigo , adding that she's seen a noticeable difference.

YourFacePillow Beauty Pillow

Beauty Pillow

• Allows you to comfortably sleep on back
• Can prevent sleep wrinkles
• Stacks on other pillows
• May feel tight upon first use 

Best for: Limiting side sleeping | Material:  Memory foam fill

If you’re not a back sleeper but want to become one, this pillow could help. Its ergonomic design is made to cradle your head and support your neck, so you can sleep comfortably on your back.

Slip Pure Silk Pillowcase

Pure Silk Pillowcase

• Machine washable 
• Soft and comfortable against hair and skin
• Some say certain colors do not match picture 

Colorways: Eight | Best for: Skin, hair protection | Material:  Mulberry silk

If you're looking for true silk fabric, Slip pillowcases are made of 100% mulberry silk. While it may be more on the expensive side, the brand says it's dermatologist-loved and went through a clinical-grade testing process where users saw a decrease in creases and lines.

Dosaze Contoured Orthopedic Pillow

Contoured Orthopedic Pillow

• Provides neck support
• Limits side sleeping
• Some say it's a little flat

Best for: Limiting side sleeping | Material: Polyester, recycled bamboo, memory foam fill

"Contoured to cradle your neck, this memory foam pillow is designed to reduce neck and back pain and may help limit side sleeping and wrinkle formation," Camp says.

Editor-loved sleep essentials

Loop Quiet Ear Plugs

PureRelief XL Heating Pad for Back & Neck

Nodpod Sleep Mask

Hatch Restore 2

LuxClub Queen Sheet Set

Sealy Molded Bed Pillow

Real Simple voted this the "Best Memory Foam Pillow" in their Sleep Awards.

Vanilla and Lavender Nourishing Lotion

Frequently asked questions.

Sun damage is one factor that can affect how much your skin recovers.

"The sun directly breaks down elastic fibers in the skin, that elasticity actually decreases over time, and we also start to lose collagen [as we get older]," Ilyas says. "So essentially, when you have that crush that occurs and you get up in the morning, that elasticity is no longer there to get [your skin] back into shape."

According to experts, sleeping on your back is best for preventing sleep wrinkles.

"Theoretically, then gravity is pulling your face in the right way, everything is uniformly distributed and you don't have any vectors pulling it in different directions, right or left," Ilyas says.

Lamb shares what ingredients to look for when shopping for products to prevent sleep wrinkles.

“Any products that help build collagen or kind of fill in. So things that have collagen ingredients or things that have hyaluronic acid that will absorb water and kind of plump you up. All of those are helpful," explains Lamb.

Although sleep wrinkles don't look ideal, Goren explains that there's no serious risk.

“These are really mechanical wrinkles. They’re not necessarily something that’s permanent or have some sort of risk associated with it," Goren says.

How we chose

The Shop TODAY team spoke to four dermatologists to better understand what sleep wrinkles are, what causes them and how to prevent them. Using their recommendations, we searched for the best products to help avoid the formation of overnight creases and wrinkles.

Meet our experts

• Dr. Erum Ilyas , MD, is a dermatologist at Schweiger Dermatology Group in Pennsylvania. She focuses on adult and pediatric medical dermatology, cosmetic dermatology and skin cancer treatment.
• Dr. Brendan Camp , MD, is a double board-certified dermatologist at MDCS Dermatology in New York City. His expertise lies in managing medical conditions like acne, rosacea, eczema, and psoriasis, as well as performing cosmetic treatments, including Botox, fillers, lasers and more.
• Dr. Angela Lamb , MD is a New York based dermatologist at Mount Sinai Dermatology. In addition to working as the Director of the Westside Mount Sinai Dermatology Faculty Practice, she's also an Associate Professor of Dermatology and the Medical Director of the Mount Sinai Doctors Patient Access Center.
• Dr. Andy Goren , MD is a Professor of Dermatology at the University of Rome G. Marconi, Rome, Italy. He has over two decades of experience in research, developing clinical genetic tests for a number of skin and hair related diseases.

Emma Stessman is a writer for Shop TODAY.