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Sleeping Beauty

Since I’ve been teaching a class on fairy tales, I’ve been asked, by students and by people
who are simply interested in the subject, what fairy tales “mean.” And I have to say that in my
personal opinion, they don’t “mean” anything. Bruno Bettelheim thought they did: he thought
he could use Freudian analysis to explain their psychological significance, which would be
timeless and universal, since human beings were always the same everywhere. Except they’re
not. They differ because of the times or cultures in which they live, because of race or gender
or age. They differ even as individuals. Fairy tales have lasted so long precisely because
different versions have meant different things to different people at different times.

So I think it makes as much sense for me to talk about what a fairy tale means to me
personally as to try to find some sort of universal meaning. To me, fairy tales are about the
journey of the soul, and the one I’ve been thinking about lately, because I’ve been teaching it,
is “Sleeping Beauty.” So what does “Sleeping Beauty” mean to me?

The fairy tale falls into three parts: the gifts of the fairies, the hundred-year sleep, the
awakening.

I. The Gifts of the Fairies

We are all given gifts by the fairies, and I think it’s useful to be honest about what they are.
After all, they are gifts — we did nothing to deserve them, we can only be grateful for them.
Seven good fairies came to my christening. (But be careful: it’s difficult to tell a good fairy
from a bad fairy. Gifts come with a price, and what may seem like a curse can turn out to be a
gift in disguise.)

The first fairy said, “I give her intelligence. She will always do well on standardized tests, and
so she will be able to get into some of the best schools in the country. However, she will also
be smart enough to see that the value systems she is is expected to live by are meaningless.
This will make her try to live a different kind of life, which will cause her difficulty and
heartache.” I told you, didn’t I? Gifts come with a price. Nevertheless, they are gifts, and we
have to be grateful for them.

The second fairy said, “I give her strength. She will not always feel strong, but she will
always be able to do what she needs to. She will always get through.” I’m grateful to that
fairy.

The third fairy said, “I give her grace. She will be physically graceful, and will love to dance.
But more than that, she will be able to accept defeat, and when it comes, she will be able to
say, oh well, what next? She will have to do this more often than she would like.”

The fourth fairy said, “I give her empathy. She will feel what others are feeling, without
wishing or trying to. She will not be able to stop doing so, and sometimes she will have to
hide in a small room, or in a corner of her mind, simply to get away from other people.”
The fifth fairy said, “I give her beauty. However, she will never be able to see it herself, or
believe in it, not when she looks into the mirror. She will, on the other hand, be able to see the
beauty in the world, and in others.”

The sixth fairy said, “I give her poetry: the ability to hear the rhythms of language, and to
write in language as though words were her natural element. This will be the most important
gift she receives, and what will save her.”

That was, of course, when the bad fairy stepped in and said, “I curse the child. While she is
still a child, she will lose her home: her country, her family. And she will never again find a
place where she belongs.”

Of course, the seventh good fairy was hiding out (I think they’d been through this routine
before). She stepped forward and said, “I can’t change the curse, but I can give her a gift that
will help her bear it. She will always be a good traveler, able to pack efficiently and create
temporary homes for herself wherever she goes.” I think that fairy was supposed to give me
either humility or self-confidence, either of which would have been useful gifts. But she had
to mitigate the bad fairy’s curse, you see.

We are all given gifts, we are all cursed in our own ways. That is the first way in which we
are like the Sleeping Beauty.

II. The Hundred-Year Sleep

The sleep doesn’t always last for a hundred years, and it doesn’t necessarily happen once. It’s
the state in which we fall asleep metaphorically, in which we forget who we are. I think I fell
asleep for a while in my own life, during the years I was trying to finish the PhD. There’s one
thing I can tell you about that experience. Awakening? Is so. Incredibly. Painful.

III. The Awakening

In different versions of “Sleeping Beauty,” the princess awakens in a variety of ways.
Awakening to the prince’s kiss is actually a fairly modern development. In some of the
earliest versions, the princess sleeps right through two pregnancies.

The thing about fairy tales is, we can always rewrite them. There are always new versions to
be written. In my version, at some point the princess realizes she’s asleep, and she tries to
wake up. She tries several times, each time thinking she is awake, but eventually she
succeeds. She sits up in bed, and instead of a prince, sees a sign on the wall. I’m pretty sure it
was left by the bad fairy. (I mentioned, didn’t I, that you can’t actually tell whether fairies are
good or bad? They are both, and neither, and either at different times.) The sign says,

YOU MUST SAVE YOURSELF

Which, I’m pretty sure, is the beginning of a new fairy tale.