The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty
In the first chapter of the story, Beauty is awakened from her hundred-year sleep by the Prince, not with a simple kiss, but with a fervent deflowering, initiating her into a Satyricon-like world of sexual adventures. After stripping her naked he takes her to his kingdom, ruled by his mother Queen Eleanor, where Beauty is trained as a slave and a plaything. The rest of the naked slaves, dozens of them, in the Queen's castle are princes and princesses sent by their royal parents from the surrounding kingdoms as tributes. In this castle they spend several years learning to become obedient and submissive sexual property, accepting being spanked and forced to have sex with nobles and slaves of both sexes, being publicly displayed and humiliated, and crawling around on their hands and knees like animals until they return to their own lands "being enhanced in wisdom."
In the castle Beauty meets another slave, Prince Alexi, with whom she copulates passionately. After that he tells her about the long adventurous journey he had in the castle. Alexi previously had been a stubborn prince who fought back all the attempts to break him, until the Queen sent him to the kitchen to have him tortured by crude kitchen servants. Alexi received such a savage and merciless punishment there that he began to lose his senses and, after some particularly humiliating training at the hands of a strong stable boy, Alexi became a totally surrendered slave, playing various sexual games at the Queen's commands.
The moral of Alexi's story notwithstanding, Beauty willfully disobeys, and the book closes with her being sentenced to brutal slavery in the neighboring village along while her master weeps.
Read more about this topic: The Sleeping Beauty Trilogy, Plot Summary
Famous quotes containing the words claiming and/or sleeping:
“Bit by bit ... she had claimed herself. Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”
—Toni Morrison (b. 1931)
“A novel is what you dream in your night sleep. A novel is
not waking thoughts although it is written and thought
with waking thoughts. But really a novel goes as
dreams go in sleeping at night and some dreams are like
anything and some dreams are like something and some
dreams change and some dreams are quiet and some dreams
are not. And some dreams are just what any one would
do only a little different always just a little
different and that is what a novel is.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)