Content area
Full Text
In 1983, Anne Rice, under the pseudonym A. N. Roquelaure, published the first of aseries of erotic novels about Sleeping Beauty. Her 1983 The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty was followed by Beauty's Punishment in 1984, and Beauty's Release in 1985. Since then the trilogy has been a "classic" of erotica, and has accumulated a sizable cult following. Anne Rice's tale does not rely heavily on the tale's familiar plot - she could easily have written these books without using the Sleeping Beauty framework. She could instead have followed the pattern of her other work, playing off traditional material and motifs to create her own story. So why did Rice choose to use Sleeping Beauty? What connotations does this tale evoke for Rice's readers? And what comments is Rice making in her use of the tale to construct her novels?
I submit two possible answers to those questions. The first directly addresses the connotations that Sleeping Beauty brings to the minds of Rice's readers, and posits that these connotations are keys to understanding how and why Rice makes use of this particular tale. Implicit in oral and literary versions of the tale is a paradigm of female passivity and submission. Rice makes the power play explicit by using Beauty to tell a tale of sexual dominance and submission. However, the power dynamics of the Sleeping Beauty story are not enough to explain another aspect of Rice's engagement with the tale - throughout the trilogy, her language shifts from a pure rhetoric of sexual domination to turns of phrase that seem to speak to a much larger issue. I will argue that Rice's language belies her outlook not only on sexual domination, but also on the fairy-tale tradition itself. In addition to reflecting and subverting the passive Sleeping Beauty of the tale type, in some passages Rice's Beauty comes to embody a sort of "every tale." Through this recasting of Beauty, Rice projects her culturally conceived notions of storytelling, which no doubt resonate with her cocultural audience.
Sleeping Beauty (ATU 4 JO) is a tale with a long history. This tale is found in written accounts as early as the fourteenth century, in Catalan (Goldberg 467). Better known are the versions in Giambattista Basile's Penatmerone, Charles Perrault's...