The Sleeping Beauty Trilogy - Theme

Theme

The fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty has been analyzed by folklorists and other scholars of various types, and many of them have noticed prominent erotic elements of the story. Some versions of the tale have Beauty raped and pregnant while sleeping, and only waking up after childbirth. The child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim commented that the tale "abounds with Freudian symbolism" and that the princes who try to reach Sleeping Beauty before the appropriate time only to perish in the thorns surrounding her castle serves as a warning that premature sexual encounters are destructive. Feminist theorists have focused on Sleeping Beauty's extreme passivity and the sexual nature of her awakening in the fairy tale. Anne Rice literalized these symbolic sexual elements—particularly, the passive sexual awakening or rape of Beauty that has been denounced by feminists—in the story by rewriting it into an explicit sadomasochistic erotica. However, Rice's cross-gender identification with the submissive male characters with receptive capacity in the trilogy—Alexi, Tristan and Laurent—enabled her to circumvent the equation of the female gender and masochism and, via their homoerotic interactions with the dominant male characters, she could exploit the erotic potential of phallic power while at the same time going beyond its boundary and "turning it against itself".

Another foremost difference in Rice's rewriting is that the story takes Beauty to a series of far harsher trials after her period of extreme passivity in a coma-like sleep. In the beginning of the first book, the Prince takes Beauty with her parents' consent, having persuaded them that, after completing the sexual servitude in his castle, the slaves emerge with "wisdom, patience, and self-discipline," as well as a full acceptance of their innermost desires and an understanding of the suffering of the humankind. Her royal parents, although saddened by the absence of their daughter, are promised that she will return "greatly enhanced in wisdom and beauty." However, this unconventional education in sexual hardship and liberation ends in a monogamous, patriarchal marriage between Beauty and Laurent. In the 1994 issue of Feminist Review, Professor Amalia Ziv of Ben-Gurion University described the trilogy as "definitely more of a comedy" when compared to darker BDSM novels such as Story of O, and commented that "like all comedies, it ends in marriage".