Save our Sleeping Beauty
LIKE everyone else I rolled my eyes when I read about the mother of a six-year-old boy who wants her son’s school to ban Sleeping Beauty. For why? Because the prince’s kiss that wakens the princess from her enchanted sleep is (you know what’s coming, don’t you?) “inappropriate”.
“I think it’s a specific issue in the Sleeping Beauty story about sexual behaviour and consent,” said Sarah Hall, who one notes is a PR executive. And very adept at getting herself some publicity, it has to be said.
“I don’t think taking Sleeping Beauty books out of circulation completely would be right,” Ms Hall concedes, adding “I actually think it would be a great resource for older children. You could have a conversation around it, you could talk about consent and how the princess might feel.”
Yup, that’d be fascinating. Wake me up when it’s over. As the Sleeping Beauty might have put it.
The Brothers Grimm version of Sleeping Beauty can be traced back to a 14th-century prose poem called Perceforest. In this account (brace yourself Ms Hall) the Prince who is named Troilus doesn’t simply kiss the comatose princess called Zellandine. He rapes her and she gives birth to his child while still unconscious.
Fairy stories are full of inexplicably evil and vengeful characters preying on the young and innocent. Child abuse is rife – think Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella and Rapunzel. Those under enchantments must perform all manner of tasks in order to cast them aside. There is always a price to pay: the Little Mermaid can become human and lose her tail only if she feels the pain of knives in her feet when she walks on land. We are in dark forests, lonely woodcutters’ cottages and remote castles where there is incest, cannibalism, murder, torture, starvation.
But I don’t need to tell you because you know all these stories. They are part of our mental fixtures and fittings. Bluebeard, Cinderella – the words alone are shorthand for so much. In retelling them we are, as the poet and Nobel prizewinner Derek Walcott put it, “keeping the memory of the tribe”.
Their roots can never be quite pinpointed because they are so ancient. And mysteriously the same stories appear across many different cultures.
They are changed and tweaked of course. They can be both cosy bedtime stories and blockbuster movies. Frozen, Disney’s reboot of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen is the biggest grossing animation film of all time.
This is all fine. These stories are so strong and so fundamental that they are unassailable. But what is not fine is to talk about banning
DEAFENING piano music, screaming anachronisms. I can handle all of this. But the only really important issue is: why is there no apostrophe in Howards End? What was EM Forster thinking?
them as Sarah Hall has done. Ban them and you shut off the air supply to a child’s imagination, mistakenly protecting them from an expression of their unconscious desires and fantasies that will find an outlet one way or another. Personally I think that doing this is tantamount to child abuse.
And imagine going through life without having any concept of being awakened by a kiss…