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Charles Perrault’s “La Belle au bois dormant” (literal translation “the Beauty sleeping in the wood”) is a bizarre little tale. Some people might find Walt Disney’s adaptation of the story as soporific as the curse upon Aurora, but at least it has narrative consistency. So many of the things that happen in Perrault’s story leave (modern) readers scratching their heads, and that’s on top of the hefty dose of terrible messages for women, something that didn’t come as a surprise after I read the 17th century Frenchman’s take on Cinderella.
Up until the point of the teenage princess’ pricking of her finger on a spindle and the activation of the curse, the two versions of the story follow the same track, more or less (aside from one deviation I’ll get to later). In Perrault’s original (for it is generally accepted as the original version of the story; unlike Cinderella, the general structure of which appears to be a worldwide mythos), the entire castle slumbers with the princess: all, save for the King and Queen themselves. They kiss their unknowing daughter goodbye and depart, forever. For the princess must sleep for 100 years until she can be awakened, which means the family will never see each other again.
It’s not made clear why the entire servant staff of the castle is put to sleep with the princess, so that she won’t be alone when she wakes up in the future, but why her parents don’t go with her. Presumably they still have a kingdom to run? That’s not spelled out, so that explanation is only guesswork.
The story only gets more bizarre once the prince shows up. He rescues the princess and they immediately get married, but then the prince goes back to his kingdom without her. He tells his parents that he was gone for a couple days because he got lost in the woods. For the next two years he disappears every few days to visit the princess, making up excuses for his absences each time. He has two children with her, but he only brings his family back home when his father dies.
He’d been keeping them secret because his mother is an ogre, and he doesn’t want her to eat his family. Except that the moment he brings his family home his mother almost does eat them, and then kills herself when she’s discovered. The prince is sad, because she was his mother, but he’s comforted by his beautiful family. That’s the end, followed by a “lovely” little moral on how a woman should focus all her spare time on making herself perfect as she waits for a husband.
Disney’s best improvement on the Sleeping Beauty story, however, is Maleficent. She’s the only Disney villain fabulous enough to headline her own live-action movie. In Perrault’s version, she’s just an old fairy. The only reason she didn’t receive an invitation to the party was because no one had heard from her in years and they thought she was dead.
Not only is Maleficent such a cool and wicked villain, she’s clearly a villain. In Perrault’s version the fairy’s curse makes even less sense; presumably no one would even have considered inviting her if they thought she was the sort of fairy to curse an infant to death over a misunderstanding. So her overreaction to the accidental snub kind of comes out of nowhere, as opposed to being believable from the obviously evil Maleficent.
The character development, beautiful soundtrack and artistry, and fantastic villain all make Disney’s “Sleeping Beauty” stand head and shoulders over its predecessor. It may not be one of my favorite Disney films, but like many of the princess adaptations, it vastly improves upon the original.
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*(The above image by backkratze is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.)