Sleeping Beauty - Uses of Sleeping Beauty

Uses of Sleeping Beauty

• 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 latent female sexuality and a prescription for the passive socialization of those young women who were not destined for work.
• Terry Pratchett refers to several fairy tales in his Discworld series, especially in reference to witches who try to control the narrative potential of their world. In Wyrd Sisters the Lancre witches draw on the influence of Black Aliss, who moved a castle and its inhabitants one hundred years into the future, when Granny Weatherwax transports her own native kingdom seventeen years ahead to allow the proper heir to the usurped throne to reach adulthood abroad without having to wait. Later, in Witches Abroad, the same coven comes across a castle that has fallen under a curse that causes everyone to slumber while the forest grows into the courtyard; Granny explains that it has happened dozens of times. The servants wake up angry and determined to chase the witches away after they rouse the princess, not with a kiss but by pitching the spinning wheel out the window.
• Anne Rice's erotic novel, The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, written under the name of A. N. Roquelaure, is loosely based on this fairy tale.
• In the Mike, Lu & Og episode Sleeping Ugly Queeks accidentally awakens an ugly hag named Miss Hortense with a kiss.
• In Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales for Every Child, Sleeping Beauty is depicted as a Hispanic princess named Rosita. She was under the spell for a century.
• Caitlín R. Kiernan's "Glass Coffin" is a retelling of "Sleeping Beauty."
• The Sleeping Beauty problem is the name of a philosophical thought-experiment.
• Joss Whedon's series Dollhouse uses this story as an extended metaphor in the aptly named episode "Briar Rose", equating it both to the brainwashed members of the Dollhouse and a young character dealing with the after-effects of sexual abuse.