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Sleeping Beauty ("La Belle aux bois dormant") is a fairy tale classic, the first in the set
published in 1697 by Charles
Perrault, Contes de ma Mere l'Oye ("Mother Goose Tales"). Professor J. R. R. Tolkien noted that Perrault's cultural presence is so pervasive that, when asked to name a fairy
tale, most people will cite one of the eight stories in Perrault's collection. Since Tolkien's generation, however, the most
familiar Sleeping Beauty has become the Walt Disney animated film
(1959), which draws as much from the Tchaikovsky ballet (St Petersburg, 1890)
as from Perrault. More than many fairy tales, Sleeping Beauty partakes of many deep European myths, both pagan and Christian.
The 15th-century Chateau d'Ussé, an inspiration for Perrault:
"nothing could be seen but the very top of the towers of the palace"
Perrault's narrative
The basic elements of Perrault's narrative are in two parts.
Part one
At the christening of a long-wished-for princess, fairies invited as godmothers offered gifts of beauty, wit, grace,
and musical talents. However, a wicked fairy who had been overlooked placed the princess under an enchantment as her gift, saying
that, on reaching adulthood, she would prick her finger on a spindle and die.
A good fairy, though unable to reverse the spell, altered its effect so that the princess, instead of dying, would fall sleep
for a hundred years, until awakened by the kiss of a prince's son.
The king forbade spinning on distaff or spindle, or the possession of one, upon pain of death, throughout the kingdom, but all
in vain. When the princess was fifteen or sixteen she chanced to come upon an old woman in a tower of the castle, who was
spinning. The Princess asked to try the unfamiliar task and the inevitable happened. The witch's curse was fulfilled. The
goodfairy returned and put everyone in the castle to sleep:
Eventually, a prince arrived, and, hearing the story of the enchantment, braved the wood, which parted at his approach, and
entered the castle. He kissed the princess, everyone in the castle woke to continue where they had left off... and, in modern
versions, they all lived happily ever after.
Part two
Secretly wed by the reawakened Royal almoner, the Prince continued to visit the Princess, who bore him two children, L'Aurore and Le Jour, which he kept secret from the Queen
his mother, who was of an Ogre lineage. Once he had acceded to the throne, he brought the
Princess and the children to his capital, which he then left in the regency of the Queen Mother, while he went to make war on his
neighbor the Emperor Contalabutte, ("Count of The Mount").
The Ogre Queen sent the Princess Queen and the children to a house secluded in the woods, and directed her cook there to
prepare the boy for her dinner, with a sauce Robert. The humane
cook substituted a lamb, which satisfied the Ogre Queen, who demanded the girl, but was satisfied with a kid prepared in the same
excellent sauce. When the Ogre Queen demanded that he serve up the Princess Queen, she offered her throat to be slit, so that she
might join the children she imagined were dead. There was a tearful secret reunion in the cook's little house, while the Ogre
Queen was satsfied with a hind prepared with sauce Robert. Soon she discovered the
trick and prepared a tub in the courtyard filled with vipers and other noxious creatures. The King returned in the nick of time
and the Ogress, being discovered, threw herself into the pit she had prepared and was consumed, and everyone else lived happily
ever after.
Sleeping Beauty opera
Composer Michele Carafa's
Belle au Bois Dormant, with the famous tenor Adolphe Nourrit— more famous for his late Rossini
and early Meyerbeer roles— creating the role of the Prince Lindor, opened
March 2, 1825, at the Théâtre de l'Opéra, Paris. ("Lindoro" was the name assumed by the amorous Count Almaviva in Rossini's
Barber of Seville.)
Sleeping Beauty ballets
There was already a "Sleeping Beauty" ballet before Tchaikovsky. Among the shapers of the Sleeping Beauty we know, Eugène Scribe is always overlooked. In the winter of 1828-9, the French
playwright furnished a four-act mimed scenario as a basis for Aumer's choreography of a four-act ballet-pantomime La Belle au bois dormant. Scribe wisely omitted the violence of the second part of
Perrault's tale for the ballet, which was set by Hérold and first staged at the Académie Royale, Paris, April 27, 1829.
Though Hérold popularized his piece with a piano Rondo brilliant based on themes from the music, the ballet has not been
seen since.
When Ivan Vsevolozhsky, the Director of the Imperial Theatres in St Petersburg, wrote to Tchaikovsky 25 May 25, 1888,
suggesting a ballet based on Perrault´s tale, he also cut the violent second half, climaxed the action with the Awakening Kiss,
and followed with a conventional festive last act, a series of bravura variations. The first reception of Swan Lake eleven
seasons previously had been lukewarm, but Tchaikovsky set to work with Vsevolovsky's scenario. The ballet, with Tchaikovsky's
music (his Opus 6) and choreography by Marius Petipa, premiered in St Petersburg, January 24, 1890, and set a new standard for what
is now called "Classical Ballet."
Though Tchaikovsky is associated with ballet music more than any other composer beside Stravinsky, Sleeping Beauty was his first resounding success at writing a ballet score, and he was
dead less than four years later. Sleeping Beauty was the first ballet that impresario Sergei Diaghilev ever saw, he later recorded in his memoirs, and also the first that ballerinas
Anna Pavlova and Galina Ulanova ever saw, and the
ballet that introduced the Russian dancer Rudolph Nureyev to European
audiences. Choreographer George Balanchine made his stage debut
as a gilded Cupid sitting on a gilded cage, in the last act divertissements.
Mimed and danced versions of the ballet survived in the distinctly British genre of pantomime, with Carabosse, the evil fairy, a famous travesti role.
Disney's Sleeping Beauty
text is needed
Sources
Perrault so transformed the tale of a sleeping beauty, "Sole, Luna, e Talia" in Giambattista Basile's
collection of tales, Il Pentamerone, that she is scarcely recognizable in the first part of the tale, the only part that
is still current. Shared themes of violence, rape, rivalry and cannibalism appear
in the second parts. Basile's was an adult tale told by an aristocrat for aristocrats, emphasizing concerns such as marital
fidelity and inheritance. Perrault's is an aristocratic tale told for a high-bourgeois audience, inculcating female patience and
passivity. There are earlier elements that contributed to the tale, in the medieval courtly romance Perceforest (published in 1528), in
which a princess named Zellandine falls into an enchanted sleep and is raped by a wandering prince, resulting in the birth of
their child. Earlier influences come from the story of the sleeping Brynhild in the
Volsunga Saga and the tribulations of saintly female martyrs in
early Christian hagiography conventions.
Mythemes
Among familiar themes and elements in Perrault's tale: the Wished-for Child (see Saint Anne, and Rapunzel); the Accursed Gift (see Nessus with Deianira); the Inevitable Fate; the Spinner (see Moirae, Norns); the Heroic Quest; the Ogre Stepmother; the Substituted Victim (see Isaac, Zeus with Cronos, Iphigeneia).
See also Weaving (mythology). coming soon
Uses of "Sleeping Beauty"
An early contributor to this entry misremembered as a fairy gift, Intelligence. Tellingly, no such gift was offered: not
appropriate in 1697, though a good ear for playing the lute was quite essential. Fairy
gifts for the 21st century might include Courage and Independence as well as Intelligence. Just a quarter of a century after
"Sleeping Beauty," the reading world first met Moll Flanders
(1722).
Freudian psychologists, encouraged by Bruno Bettelheim's The
Uses of Enchantment, have found rich materials to analyze in Sleeping Beauty as a case history of incest and latent sexuality and a prescription
for the passive socializaion of those young women who were not destined for work.
The Princess's sleeping attendants, waiting to accompany her when she wakes in the other world, even to the spit-boys in the
kitchens and her pet dog, expresses one of the most ancient themes in ritual burial
practices, though Perrault was probably unaware of the Egyptian burials, and certainly unaware of the royal tombs of Queen Puabi of the Third Dynasty of Ur, the courtiers that accompanied early emperors of China in
the tomb, the horses that accompanied the noble riders in the kurgans of Scythian Pasyryk. (See grave goods). It
is noteworthy that the King and Queen are not included in this analogue of a burial, but retire, while the protective spectral
thorn forest immediately grows up to protect the castle and its occupants, as effective as a tumulus.
The story of the sleeping beauty was loosely the basis for the erotic novel The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty by
Anne Rice.
External links
Perrault
Tchaikovsky
Disney
This entry is begging for more illustrations. Just insert them.
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