Sleeping Beauty must die: the plots of Perrault's "La belle au bois dormant".(Charles Perrault's The Sleeping Beauty in the Woods)(Critical essay)

The cannibalism storyline in Charles Perrault's "La belle au bois dormant" ("The Sleeping Beauty in the Woods") is both disturbing and fascinating, eliciting a wide range of critical response, even as the entire plot has been dropped from most children's editions and many subsequent adaptations. (1) Readers of Perrault's 1697 tale know that after her long sleep the princess is threatened by her ogress mother-in-law, who wants to eat her and her two children. Thanks to the intervention of the ogress's steward, Sleeping Beauty and her children manage to avoid being eaten; however, when the ogress discovers them all alive, she prepares to throw the whole lot--grandchildren, daughter-in-law, steward, and his family--into a vat of snakes, vipers, and toads. At that moment, Sleeping Beauty's husband, now king, returns from war. Rather than face her angry son, the ogress throws herself into the vat and is devoured by her own creatures. Thus a story about sleep ends as a tale of forbidden appetite, prompting Marc Soriano to assert that "La belle au bois dormant" is not one tale but two (125). Indeed, the cannibalism plot raises many questions about the narrative coherence and structure of the tale. The prince hides his family from his mother for two years, because he fears her appetite for young flesh. Why, then, does he place the whole family under her protection when he becomes king? Furthermore, as the son of an ogress, would the prince not also be subject to ogrelike tendencies? (2) Why did Perrault include the cannibalism plot when his own moral alludes only to the sleep plot? Many critics account for the ogress story line through source study, noting the similarities between the character and the spurned wife in Giambattista Basile's "Sole, Luna, e Talia" ("Sun, Moon, and Talia"). (3) Jeanne Morgan maintains that the narrative incongruities in the tale result from Perrault's twin desire to remain true to his source and to adhere to the literary rules of bienseances (85-86). Psychoanalytic treatments of "La belle au bois dormant" often read the ogress as a necessary foil for Sleeping Beauty. (4) Two recent sociocultural analyses of the tale treat the ogress plot as integral to the text's overarching themes: Jean-Pierre van Elslande suggests that the ambivalent behavior of the prince/king toward his mother betrays a kind of powerlessness, which reflects Perrault's own ambivalence toward "les Grands" (453-54). In his study of food, visual spectacle, and the processes of acculturation in "La belle au bois dormant," Philip Lewis reads the cannibalism plot as central to Perrault's exploration of the tensions between the civilizing process and nature (133). Moreover, Lewis argues that the tale achieves symmetry through repetition: in each story line the princess is threatened by death and saved by her Prince Charming (150).

Although the narrative structure of the tale does seem guided by repetition--or what Tzvetan Todorov calls the ideological organization, where different adventures are linked through the application of a higher, abstract rule (42)--the two plots diverge in their treatment of Sleeping Beauty's would-be assassins. Although the ogress, who serves as the agent of evil in the cannibalism plot, meets a horrible death, the old fairy who curses the baby princess with death in the sleep plot goes unpunished and fades from the story. For Bruno Bettelheim, this missing punishment is reason enough for the story line of the ogress, whose gruesome death ensures that "fairy-story justice" is accomplished (230). (5) The purpose of the cannibalism plot, then, would be to punish the ogress in the place of the old fairy, substituting one woman, one death, for another. This suggests that the relationship between the two plots is more complicated, and that they are bound together by more than repetition. Reading Bettelheim's comment back through Lewis's observation about the repetitive structure of the tale opens up a slightly different question about this dual-plot tale. Instead of "Why did Perrault include the cannibalism plot?" we may ask, "How does a tale of a sleeping princess become that of a hungry ogress?" In other words, what are the narrative processes that transform one plot into another, and what do these processes reveal about "La belle au bois dormant" as a whole?

This essay will trace the narrative progression of "La belle au bois dormant," showing that substitution is the organizing principle of the tale. Substitution underlies many of the repetitions in the story, but more significantly, it operates as the motor of the narrative, drawing the story out, through both metaphor and metonymy, the "master tropes" of story in Peter Brooks's words (338). By following the metaphoric and metonymic substitutions that drive the tale, I will elucidate not only the transformation of the sleep plot into the cannibalism plot, but also the transformation of the central character: from sleeping princess to devouring mother-in-law. Each serves as a substitute for the other. The narratological reading of "La belle au bois dormant" allows us to understand the crucial role of the ogress and the function of her death in the tale's imagination. It also exposes the tale's underlying preoccupation: women who would withdraw from the societal and the narrative order must die.

A Detour from Death

It is Sleeping Beauty, of course, who is supposed to die. The king and queen, who had long prayed for her birth, throw a lavish christening party, followed by a banquet for her seven fairy godmothers. Each of the godmothers is given a magnificent golden case filled with jewel-encrusted cutlery. However, an eighth fairy shows up unexpectedly. She had not been invited, because no one had seen her for the last fifty years. Miffed that the royal family had neither invited her nor given her one of the golden cases of cutlery, the old fairy curses the baby princess: she will prick her hand on a distaff and die. Luckily, a younger fairy, who had not yet bestowed a gift on the princess, is able to mitigate the curse, changing death to a hundred years' sleep.

The first half of "La belle au bois dormant" hinges upon the substitution of sleep for death. Before examining the effect of this substitution, let us consider how it works. Sleep and death have a long association with each other in Western culture, a relationship crystallized in their personification in Greek mythology as the identical twin brothers Hypnos and Thanatos. The brothering of sleep and death suggests that there is something other than mere resemblance that connects them. Montaigne, for example, writes that sleep serves to instruct and prepare us for death. While death is unknowable by the living, sleep is the next closest state: "Si nous ne la pouvons joindre [la mort], nous la pouvons approcher, nous la pouvons reconnoistre.... Ce n'est pas sans raison qu'on nous fait regarder a nostre sommeil mesme, pour la ressemblance qu'il a de la mort" ("If we cannot contact death, we can approach it, we can recognize it.... It is not without reason that we see a resemblance to death in our own sleep" [351]). (6) For Montaigne, sleep and death are related on both metaphorical and metonymical registers. Sleep's immobility and passivity make it an apt metaphor for death, which in turn reinforces the metonymical relationship between them. Metonymy is a figure of substitution based not on analogy but on contiguity. In Montaigne's model sleep and death are related practically, separated only by degrees.

Moreover, Montaigne makes it clear that ...