Sleeping Beauty
When Catulle Mendès retold the fairytale of Sleeping Beauty in his
collection of Spinning Wheel Tales
published in the middle of the nineteenth cnetury, he has the Prince Charming
kiss the young princess awake from her enchanted sleep after a hundred
years. As she comes out of her trance,
he tells her all the wonderful things she will have if she marries him and comes
to his kingdom; she will have all kinds of pretty and dainty things, and above
all she will have his love. She looks at
him through her still sleepy eyes. Then
she says that perhaps she doesn’t want to go off with him. Instead, she tells him she has been having a
wonderful dream, wherein everything he said seems a bit shoddy compared to the
riches he has described, and above all she will be a queen and have a king for
a husband who has already proved his loyalty for a whole century. So turning her face away from the
disappointed young man, she shuts her eyes and drifts back off into her
trance.
As I was reading this precious little tale, my own thoughts kept going
in another direction, showing just how different we are from France in the
1860s. Mendès accepts along with Madame
D’Aulney, Perrault and even the Grimm Brother, that there is no change between
the time when Sleeping Beauty fell asleep under the Bad Fairy’s curse and the
moment the handsome young Prince Charming made his way through the twisted
trees and prickly vines that had grown up over the original palace where the
young girl of fifteen or sixteen years drafted off into slumber. As a child of the twentieth century, this is
something that cannot be accepted: time is time. Though she may have been in some sort of
suspended animation for a hundred years, it is not possible for me to imagine
that she has not aged at all, and that when she is awoken she would not, as one
can read in the story of The Portrait of Vivien
Grey (written perhaps only a generation later), immediately start to age
and very quickly turn into Mrs Haversham from Great Expectations and then crumble into ancient dust.
But maybe we can force ourselves to accept some kind of preservation of
the princess’s looks and bodily organs during that century of suspended
animation. Can we entertain as a
possibility that nothing else in the world has changed? After all, the fancy gardens of her palace
have grown up into a jungle and a few generations have passed during which the
story has been retold and the young aristocratic youth has heard her
mentioned—and fallen in love with the legend.
She will be close to a hundred years older than him and completely out
of touch with all the developments that have occurred. Anyone who has studied history closely knows
that, even assuming a somewhat slower pace of change, styles, tastes, and ideas
do change and develop over the years, as does language and modes of
perception.
When Sleeping beauty opens her eyes, rubs the century’s worth of sand
away, and blinks herself into a focus on the young man, can she recognize his
hairstyle, cut of clothes, and manner of speaking to her? Do his words make any
sense to her? Wouldn’t she be frightened
and look about desperately for her parents, her courtiers, her servants—anyone
and anything that she was familiar with?
Lying stiff for a hundred years, she would surely want to stretch
herself, stand up, walk about a little—even quickly find a privy to relieve
herself—and then ask for a bit to eat.
In Mendès’ text, Sleeping Beauty says t hat she has been enjoying such wonderful
dreams she never wants to return to normal waking life again. That means, too, that she has a certain
consciousness of the years that have passed bhy. When she looks at the Prince Charming who has
come to rescue her, she feels not only contempt for him as a spoilsport and a
callow youth who has no idea of the better vision she has enjoyed, but she
realizes she has grown mature and he will never catch up with her. It wouldn’t take long either for this boy to see
that what he fell in love with was something unreal and the woman he has
dragged out of the idyll of her own dreams is an irritable old hag. And should they have both attempted to depart
from the Princess’s castle, the world around them would have no sympathy for
such a grotesque couple.
So much for fairy tales.
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