Myth Themes
Some folklorists have analyzed Sleeping Beauty as indicating the replacement of the lunar year (with its thirteen months, symbolically depicted by the full thirteen fairies) by the solar year (which has twelve, symbolically the invited fairies). This, however, founders on the issue that only in the Grimms' tale is the wicked fairy the thirteenth fairy; in Perrault's, she is the eighth. The basic elements of the story can also be interpreted as a nature allegory: the Princess represents Nature, the Wicked Fairy is Winter, who puts the Court to sleep with pricks of frost until the Prince (Spring) cuts away the brambles with his sword (a sunbeam) to allow the sun to awaken sleeping Nature.
Among familiar themes and elements in Perrault's tale:
- the Wished-for Child Further information: Saint Anne and Rapunzel
- the Accursed Gift Further information: Nessus and Deianira
- the Inevitable Fate
- the Spinner Further information: Moirai and Norn
- the Heroic Quest
- the Ogre Stepmother
- the Salvation through a Redemptor. Slumber as metaphor for sleeping death as though by sin
- the Substituted Victim Further information: Isaac, Jesus, Zeus, Cronos and Iphigeneia
Read more about this topic: Sleeping Beauty
Famous quotes containing the words myth and/or themes:
“That, of course, was the thing about the fifties with all their patina of familial bliss: A lot of the memories were not happy, not mine, not my friends’. That’s probably why the myth so endures, because of the dissonance in our lives between what actually went on at home and what went on up there on those TV screens where we were allegedly seeing ourselves reflected back.”
—Anne Taylor Fleming (20th century)
“I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)