She was thirteen years of age, my stepdaughter, and nothing marred the perfect whiteness of her skin save for the livid scar on her left breast, where her heart had been cut from her long since.
The insides of her thighs were stained with wet black filth.
She peered at me, hidden, as I was, in my cloak. She looked at me hungrily. “Ribbons, goodwife,” I croaked. “Pretty ribbons for your hair.…”
She smiled and beckoned to me. A tug; the scar on my hand was pulling me towards her. I did what I had planned to do, but I did it more readily than I had planned: I dropped my basket, and screeched like the bloodless old peddler woman I was pretending to be, and I ran.
My grey cloak was the color of the forest, and I was fast; she did not catch me.
I made my way back to the palace.
I did not see it. Let us imagine, though, the girl returning, frustrated and hungry, to her cave, and finding my fallen basket on the ground.
What did she do?
I like to think she played first with the ribbons, twined them into her raven hair, looped them around her pale neck or her tiny waist.
And then, curious, she moved the cloth to see what else was in the basket; and she saw the red, red apples.
They smelled like fresh apples, of course; and they also smelled of blood. And she was hungry. I imagine her picking up an apple, pressing it against her cheek, feeling the cold smoothness of it against her skin.
And she opened her mouth and bit deep into it.…
By the time I reached my chambers, the heart that hung from the roof-beam, with the apples and hams and the dried sausages, had ceased to beat. It hung there, quietly, without motion or life, and I felt safe once more.
That winter the snows were high and deep, and were late melting. We were all hungry come the spring.
The Spring Fair was slightly improved that year. The forest folk were few, but they were there, and there were travelers from the lands beyond the forest.
I saw the little hairy men of the forest-cave buying and bargaining for pieces of glass, and lumps of crystal and of quartz-rock. They paid for the glass with silver coins—the spoils of my stepdaughter’s depredations, I had no doubt. When it got about what they were buying, townsfolk rushed back to their homes, came back with their lucky crystals, and, in a few cases, with whole sheets of glass.
I thought, briefly, about having them killed, but I did not. As long as the heart hung, silent and immobile and cold, from the beam of my chamber, I was safe, and so were the folk of the forest, and, thus, eventually, the folk of the town.
My twenty-fifth year came, and my stepdaughter had eaten the poisoned fruit two winters’ back, when the Prince came to my Palace. He was tall, very tall, with cold green eyes and the swarthy skin of those from beyond the mountains.
He rode with a small retinue: large enough to defend him, small enough that another monarch—myself, for instance—would not view him as a potential threat. I was practical: I thought of the alliance of our lands, thought of the Kingdom running from the forests all the way south to the sea; I thought of my golden-haired bearded love, dead these eight years; and, in the night, I went to the Prince’s room.
I am no innocent, although my late husband, who was once my king, was truly my first lover, no matter what they say.
At first the prince seemed excited. He bade me remove my shift, and made me stand in front of the opened window, far from the fire, until my skin was chilled stone-cold. Then he asked me to lie upon my back, with my hands folded across my breasts, my eyes wide open—but staring only at the beams above. He told me not to move, and to breathe as little as possible. He implored me to say nothing. He spread my legs apart. It was then that he entered me.
As he began to thrust inside me, I felt my hips raise, felt myself begin to match him, grind for grind, push for push. I moaned. I could not help myself.
His manhood slid out of me. I reached out and touched it, a tiny, slippery thing. “Please,” he said, softly. “You must neither move, nor speak. Just lie there on the stones, so cold and so fair.”
I tried, but he had lost whatever force it was that had made him virile; and, some short while later, I left the Prince’s room, his curses and tears still resounding in my ears. He left early the next morning, with all his men, and they rode off into the forest.
I imagine his loins, now, as he rode, a knot of frustration at the base of his manhood. I imagine his pale lips pressed so tightly together. Then I imagine his little troupe riding through the forest, finally coming upon the glass-and-crystal cairn of my stepdaughter. So pale. So cold. Naked, beneath the glass, and little more than a girl, and dead.
In my fancy, I can almost feel the sudden hardness of his manhood inside his britches, envision the lust that took him then, the prayers he muttered beneath his breath in thanks for his good fortune. I imagine him negotiating with the little hairy men—offering them gold and spices for the lovely corpse under the crystal mound.
Did they take his gold willingly? Or did they look up to see his men on their horses, with their sharp swords and their spears, and realize they had no alternative? I do not know. I was not there; I was not scrying. I can only imagine …
Hands, pulling off the lumps of glass and quartz from her cold body. Hands, gently caressing her cold cheek, moving her cold arm, rejoicing to find the corpse still fresh and pliable.
Did he take her there, in front of them all? Or did he have her carried to a secluded nook before he mounted her?
I cannot say.
Did he shake the apple from her throat? Or did her eyes slowly open as he pounded into her cold body; did her mouth open, those red lips part, those sharp yellow teeth close on his swarthy neck, as the blood, which is the life, trickled down her throat, washing down and away the lump of apple, my own, my poison?
I imagine; I do not know.
This I do know: I was woken in the night by her heart pulsing and beating once more. Salt blood dripped onto my face from above. I sat up. My hand burned and pounded as if I had hit the base of my thumb with a rock.
There was a hammering on the door. I felt afraid, but I am a queen, and I would not show fear. I opened the door.
First his men walked in to my chamber, and stood around me, with their sharp swords, and their long spears.
Then he came in; and he spat in my face.
Finally, she walked into my chamber, as she had when I was first a queen, and she was a child of six. She had not changed. Not really.
She pulled down the twine on which her heart was hanging. She pulled off the dried rowan berries, one by one; pulled off the garlic bulb—now a dried thing, after all these years; then she took up her own, her pumping heart—a small thing, no larger than that of a nanny-goat or a she-bear—as it brimmed and pumped its blood into her hand. Her fingernails must have been as sharp as glass: she opened her breast with them, running them over the purple scar. Her chest gaped, suddenly, open and bloodless. She licked her heart, once, as the blood ran over her hands, and she pushed the heart deep into her breast.
I saw her do it. I saw her close the flesh of her breast once more. I saw the purple scar begin to fade.
Her prince looked briefly concerned, but he put his arm around her nonetheless, and they stood, side by side, and they waited.
And she stayed cold, and the bloom of death remained on her lips, and his lust was not diminished in any way.
They told me they would marry, and the kingdoms would indeed be joined. They told me that I would be with them on their wedding day.
It is starting to get hot in here.
They have told the people bad things about me; a little truth to add savor to the dish, but mixed with many lies.
I was bound and kept in a tiny stone cell beneath the palace, and I remained there through the autumn. Today they fetched me out of the cell; they stripped the rags from me, and washed the filth from me, and then they shaved my head and my loins, and they rubbed my skin with goose grease.
My stepdaughter stood there with her prince. She watched me, in my indignity, but she said nothing.
As they thrust me inside, jeering and chaffing as they did so, I saw one snowflake land upon her white cheek, and remain there without melting.
They closed the kiln-door behind me. It is getting hotter in here, and outside they are singing and cheering and banging on the sides of the kiln.
She was not laughing, or jeering, or talking. She did not sneer at me or turn away. She looked at me, though; and for a moment I saw myself reflected in her eyes.
I will not scream. I will not give them that satisfaction. They will have my body, but my soul and my story are my own, and will die with me.
The goose-grease begins to melt and glisten upon my skin. I shall make no sound at all. I shall think no more on this.
I shall think instead of the snowflake on her cheek.
I think of her hair as black as coal, her lips as red as blood, her skin, snow-white.
* * *
† Neil Gaiman, Snow, Glass, Apples (Northampton, MA: Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, 1994). Copyright © 1994 Neil Gaiman. Reprinted by permission.
1. A heap or pile of shards or stones, used as a trail marker or to commemorate a place; here it marks a grave.
2. Foretelling the future, using a crystal ball or some kind of reflective surface.
INTRODUCTION: Sleeping Beauty
Many have targeted Sleeping Beauty as the most passive and repellent fairy-tale heroine of all, and they have done their best to make her story go away. Alerting us to the perils of that tale, Madonna Kolbenschlag urged women to “kiss Sleeping Beauty good-bye,” in her book of that title, and Jane Adams offered similar advice in Wake Up, Sleeping Beauty.1 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.”2 Women are frozen, immobile, and comatose. The very name Sleeping Beauty invokes a double movement between a passive state (“sleeping”) and a contemplative response (“beauty”) that invites a retinal reflex. 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.3 What Freud called scopophilia, or pleasure in looking at something, is 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,” while women have been relegated to the position of objects on display (“to-be-looked-at-ness”). These categories correspond perfectly to de Beauvoir’s division between adventurous, active males and passive women, who receive, submit, await, and are “sound asleep.”
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 puts herself on display for the enjoyment of a male viewer. It is no surprise that filmmakers from Pedro Almodóvar (Talk to Her, 2002) and Julia Leigh (Sleeping Beauty, 2011) continue to engage with the tale, taking it up covertly and also explicitly. Nor that artists ranging from Edward Burne-Jones to Maxfield Parrish have been inspired to create a rich visual culture of women, somnolent and seductive.
Although “Sleeping Beauty” so patently creates a gender divide between the comatose slumbering princess and the adventurous prince, there are also many stories in which, as in “Cupid and Psyche,” the male figure sleeps and the female “marvels at the beauty she beholds.” There is the entrancing Endymion, sleeping soundly after Zeus grants the wish of the moon goddess, Selene, and places him in an eternal sleep. “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: / Its loveliness increases; it will never / Pass into nothingness,” Keats wrote in his poem about the handsome youth. In Greek mythology, sleep was personified in the form of a comatose boy (Hypnos), lying next to his half-brother Death (Thanatos). And the folklore of some regions includes tales like “Fairer Than a Fairy,” in which the heroine must rescue a sleeping prince. Pretty Women (1990) could belong to that category, with Vivian, the character played by Julia Roberts, “rescuing” a man who has been sleepwalking his way through life, with senses deadened by corporate cultures and their single-minded focus on accumulating capital at any cost.
Sleeping Beauties from medieval times all seem to appear as a single way-station 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 (1634–36), published in Naples.4 Sharply different from popular versions of “Sleeping Beauty” printed today, Basile’s foundational literary account tells 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 light-hearted 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.
It is Charles Perrault who begins 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” (see here). 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 one-hundred-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. It is filled with self-reflexive meditations on the power of stories passed on from one generation to the next. Narratives about sleeping beauties seem to have what Donald Haase refers to as “an underlying preoccupation with the creative power of language and storytelling,”5 displaying a deep concern with words, stories, and raconteurs. Paradoxically but perhaps with some logic, a story that enshrines the pleasures of seeing and creates a figure of iconic visual delight (through words, to be sure) also extols the power of the word. 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 one-hundred-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.
Tellingly, the Grimms used the title “Dornröschen,” or “Briar Rose,” for their version of what Perrault called “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood”:
The Classic Fairy Tales (Second Edition) (Norton Critical Editions) Page 19