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The Dreams of Sleeping Beauty: Experimental Literature Retelling the Classic Fairy Tale in a Postmodern World college conference paper: part two
Sophie Masson's Clementine uses the story of "Sleeping Beauty" in order to say diverse and powerful things about the modern world and modern thinking. It questions what we have lost in the name of progress and where that progress will lead us. In her book, there is not one, but two "Sleeping Beauties" - Aurora, a Count's daughter, and Clementine, a woodcutter's daughter. Aurora serves as representation of the old ways of life. She is part of the aristocracy, a beautiful, passive girl blessed by fairies. Clementine represents the future and modern ways of thinking. She is a poor child that has been taken up to the same level as Aurora in the name of equality. She is clever and logical. "Aurora has the ancient fairy gifts of aristocracy; but Clementine will hold the new gifts of science and revolution" (Masson 43). Regardless of their differences, they are bound by a shared curse. In an attempt to protect them, the two girls from very different backgrounds grow up together, isolated from the rest of the world. In their solitude and disconnection they are able to weave the modern world with the ancient; science and magic become one and the same. When they sleep for 100 years, as they must, they awaken into a new world where this is no longer possible (Masson 180). Both girls are forced to examine their place in this new world. The style of the book uses an unconventional method of story telling, using letters, quotes, poetry selections, and song lyrics to portray a picture of a past that has been lost and now only exists in fragments. In this way, many different perspectives are presented. Additionally, it serves to show the reader the way in which the past plays a part in shaping the present and how one cannot completely turn away from either. To pose further questions about the eventual triumph in most ways of modern culture over the past, Masson looks at ideas such as technology and reason replacing magic and the feminist battle for equality and power. In the modern world, it is not necessarily a woman's only duty to wait to be awakened by a prince (Zipes, Spells 25). However, as is stated clearly in the story, "... for every gain, there is a loss; and the loss here [is] great Ð the destruction of the old ways of life, the loss of a bond with nature, the drift away from the countryside, the loss, for many, of the enchanted world" (Masson 180). Masson's two sleeping beauties awaken to find themselves in the position of a link between the old world and the new and thus infuse the strange new world they find with things from the past that it desperately needs, for "what does it profit to gain the world if you lose your soul?" (Masson 181). Once awakened, it is Sleeping Beauty who is the knowing one (Zipes, Brothers 153). The Creative Force and "Sleeping Beauty" as Metafiction in Coover's Briar Rose: Robert Coover's Briar Rose is the most specifically postmodern adaptation of "Sleeping Beauty." In a series of "short scenes similar to film cuts" (Redies 14) his novella alternates between three different perspectives - the sleeping girl in the castle, here given the name of Rose, the prince in the briars outside, and Rose's fairy companion in dreams. "Waking and dreaming, experience and hallucination blur into one another" (Redies 14) and we are left confused as to what is real, if anything, and what is only dream. Over and over again, Sleeping Beauty dreams of her rescue, imagines it to the fullest, often not so pleasant, detail, only to discover that it is once again not reality and that she is still trapped in sleep. "She awakens to repeated awakenings as through trapped in some strange mechanism, and she longs to bring it to a standstill, to put an end once and for all to all disquiet, even if it means to sleep again and sleep a dreamless sleep" (Coover 78). Coover leaves the story unfinished Ð there is no real rescue and no awakening by the end of the novella. One of postmodernisms most central ideas revolves around addressing "certain semiotic concerns about the relationship between language and things, between word and world" (Redies 9). Coover's Briar Rose is a metafiction, it tells a story, but is also a commentary on story telling itself (Redies 9). Coover is interested in the metaphor of the sleeping beauty as a symbol of creative potential, waiting to awaken (Snyder, Endicott Studio). She is inspiration itself, though she does not know it. She constantly asks her fairy companion "Who am I?" or "What am I? Why this curse of an endless stupor and its plague of kissing suitors?" (Coover 12). To this, the fairy only replies that she is a concealed "door that is not a door", "accessible only to the adept" and "a secret passageway to nowhere but itself" (Coover 12). "You are she about whom the poets have written" (Coover 13). Despite this, Coover does not ever allow Sleeping Beauty to truly wake up, but instead only presents the potential she has while sleeping over and over again. In his version, Sleeping Beauty's dreams become reality; she is the ultimate keeper of stories, though she does not make them up on her own. "If the notion of separate realms of the imaginary and the real is dispensed with, if one is the other, than stories are life, not the representations of life" (Redies 20). The prince outside, desperately trying to reach the sleeping girl represents the writer aching to burst through the brambles and find true creative inspiration. At first he is confident in his role, repeating over and over to himself "I am he who will awaken Beauty" (Coover 14), but as the novella progresses and he only becomes more and more tangled in the thorns, it quickly becomes clear that the prince-writer looses faith in himself - "Perhaps, he thinks with a shudder, I have not been chosen after all. Perhaps... Perhaps I am not the one" (Coover 22). The last perspective we are given is that of the fairy who keeps Rose company in her dreams. Much of their time together involves the fairy retelling the story of the sleeping beauty again and again in thousands of different ways, incorporating all the previous versions and inspirations for the fairy tale as we know it today and more. Within the metafiction, therefore, the fairy represents the story itself Ð she is "... spinning in the tower, entangled in her storied strands, joining thread to thread" (Coover 55). Because of this, Rose is constantly arguing with her, convinced that she is never telling the story in exactly the "right" way. Rose is not amused by the story. It was nothing like that, she complains. What do you know about it you silly creature? demands the fairy. It is not easy, keeping this going for a hundred years, and she does not appreciate her charge's dismissive attitude. It just doesn't sound right, Rose says. Real stories aren't like that. Real princes aren't (Coover 51). Though Rose is essentially representative of all inspiration behind stories and therefore will know the correct version when she hears it, she is incapable of imagining the story on her own. So also is the fairy incapable of finding the true story to tell without the presence of the prince, the writer. As fairy tales are of the kind of story that no one can truly claim credit for, they are ideal for examining ideas of stories within stories and the story underneath fiction (Travers 51). "Postmodern fiction, then, holds mirrors to the magic mirror of the fairy tale, playing with its framed images out of a desire to multiply its refractions and to expose its artifices" (Bacchilega 23). Coover uses this idea to propel his strange and unsettling vision of the "Sleeping Beauty" tale, where there is no awakening from dreaming and no story ever really ends. The Sleep of Adolescence and the Blossoming of Sexuality in Bynum's Madeleine is Sleeping: Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum's Madeleine is Sleeping is the least direct adaptation of "Sleeping Beauty" discussed here. The novel draws on various sources and uses many different inspirations, "Sleeping Beauty" being only one of them. However, the story is certainly a main inspiration for the book, as is clear from this scene Ð
A handsome man appears at the door [...] He is asking for Madeleine.
Other glimpses of "Sleeping Beauty" can be seen throughout the text as well. The novel Ð if it can be called a novel Ð is a very disjointed and poetic story of a girl named Madeleine who inexplicably falls asleep. It relies heavily on the postmodern ideas of the fragmentation of the subject. As in Coover's novel, the story jumps back and forth between her dreams and what is, assumingly though questionably, reality. Madeleine goes on many different adventures in her dreams, filled with strange people and fantastic occurrences. Much of the underlying nature of the dreams is very sexual. Bynum's story is about the sleep of adolescence and the discovery of one's sexuality. Madeleine goes to sleep as a girl and wakes as a woman. The various odd encounters, many sexual, in her dreams are symbolic of this transition. Madeleine is confused, sacred, and curious during these encounters, mirroring the strange state of a girl going through her teenage years - "... to flush this way, for his sake- as though it could spread like Roman fever through the night air- it alarms her. She does not understand what is happening" (Bynum 85). Additionally, questions are raised about the place that this sexual awakening forces women to take. As Jack Zipes states in his book The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World, it is often the case that the "salvation of the princess [...] is secondary to the fulfillment of male sexual passion and power" (Zipes, Brothers 152). Male characters take advantage of Madeleine's curiosity and naivety. She is often subjected to the carnal pleasures of men. It is also true that, when Madeleine awakes from her sleep, she will have fully entered into a male dominated society where, as a woman, it is likely that she will no longer be able to dream as she once did. Madeleine's mother serves as a different, older perspective on this point as well, reflecting on where her own sexual maturation has brought her Ð "To marry, to rear her children, these things were on the surface good, Mother thinks [...] Perhaps, beguiled by custom and order, one's sense of evil goes numb" (Bynum 165). It is also interesting to note that the heading of the section in which these lines take place is "House of the Sleeping Beauties" (Bynum 165), implying that all women are somehow "sleeping beauties" as they must all go through similar experiences of adolescence. Though Bynum is certainly not the first to explore the inherent sexual nature of the awakening of the sleeping beauty, her novel is certainly the most interesting tackling of the subject. She presents adolescence as the upsetting, wonderful, horrible time it is and does it in a wholly original way, using the themes of "Sleeping Beauty" as her foundation. The appeal of the sleeper in postmodern society stems from all of these ideas, and what better way to explore them than to access them through a story that has been engrained in our culture for centuries. This new kind of "sleep-centered work incorporates typical postmodern goals" (Wallace, Comparative Literature). "Sleeping Beauty" is a powerful tale, full of meaning and significance, and is therefore ideal for postmodern writers looking to explore the subject. Jane Yolan, Sophie Masson, Robert Coover, and Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum have all not been "fooled by the apparent simplicity" (Travers 61) of fairy tales and have been able to use the story to say so much more about our world now than most would have thought possible. As folklorist, P.L. Travers states, "... we find ourselves compelled to ask: what is it within us that at a certain moment suddenly falls asleep? Who lies hidden deep within us? And who will come at last to wake us, what aspect of ourselves?" (Travers 62). She sleeps but is not dead, she is only waiting, a symbol of everything that could be.
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