Content area
Full text
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. Pomographers, 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 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 maybe 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...