Sleeping Beauty I
Next up in the fairytale commentary series: Charles, again! We cut to his Sleeping Beauty, or La Belle Au Bois Dormant (literally, "The Woman Sleeping In The Wood.") Let's dive in to some absurd Perrault Sleeping Beauty funny quips, shall we?
We open by meeting our grieving couple who wish to have a child. I’m not going to say anything snarky about people with fertility issues…at least, not when that’s literally the only thing I know about them. Best of luck to the king and queen!
I’ll reserve my snark for Chaz. Hey, CP. Hey, buddy. You’re a writer. It’s a little bit of a cop-out to describe a sadness which defines two main characters, a sadness which is dropped within the first twenty words of your story, as simply “more [grief] than words can tell”. You’re a writer. I get that it was real bad and a fluffy simile might have cheapened it, but you’re a writer. Paint an evocative picture. (See also: “Unimaginable,” from Hamilton. GAH.)
Things that they did to try to … reverse their infertility: “trying the waters of every country” (sure that Fiji water was doing you good, sure), “made vows and pilgrimages”, and “everything else”. Again, CP. No snark for the grieving couple. Plenty for you. I suppose this is a children’s tale and we don’t need to go into the mechanics of making a kid, but some inventiveness or more research or at least a viable Third Thing would have been good.
After a bit, the queen gave birth to a daughter. Sidebar: Aren’t there, like, several fairytales in which the trope is “grieving non-parents become joyful parents, but then the child is not what it seemed/they had to promise something devilish to achieve parentage/someone jealous cursed them”? I mean, it’s not a terrible trope. IS THIS THE ONE THAT STARTED IT ALL THO?
Anyway, because first kid, there was a huge party thrown. (This entire story wouldn’t have happened if Sleeping Beauty had been a middle child.) The art for the OG Disney animated film for this part is incredible. Because the king and queen (oh damn, is this another Charles “No Names for My Characters, Except Maybe One Insignificant One” Perrault tale? Geez. He hasn’t learned anything since my helpful comments for Cinderella, has he?) … the king and queen were polite, they decided to invite the seven fairies who happened to live within the bounds of their kingdom.
Why isn’t England called a queendom? Nevermind.
Not only were the seven fairies invited, they were each asked to be godmothers. Q: Did Sleeping Beauty have any godfathers? Seems like that could have come in handy. Also, this seems like the type of flex a couple who had 1,324 people in their bridal party would do, but what do I know? I’m not royalty (yet).
Turns out that the king and queen were a bit opportunistic in their designees for godmother status: the (Expected? Required? Promised?) gifts from the seven fairy godmothers would basically make the baby girl perfect. If I remember correctly from the movie, it’s because the gifts were things like love and wisdom and presumably humor and a clutch sense of balance, but those details aren’t in CP’s version. The seven gifts combined would just make the baby a perfect human. OH SHOOT: There are seven perfect virtues, right? Seven gifts of the Holy Spirit? Something like that? CP was an academic philosopher, he’d know that….
Okay, already, alarm bells should be going off in someone’s head. Humans aren’t perfect. Try to make a perfect human, and something always goes south. But perhaps they didn’t know that in ”Before 1690”, when this story took place. They should have been aiming for like, elevated imperfection; and then everything would have been fine.
The christening happened. We do not learn the baby girl’s name, which is … big. I know her name in the Disney movie, but this piece is centered on the OG Perrault story. This is going to be very annoying, Charles. We’ve talked about this.
Post-christening banquet is in honor of the 7 fairies, which seems odd, because the whole celebration itself is for the christening of the baby? But I guess the baby doesn’t care, and that’s a very polite thing to do for 7 fairies who have just given your baby supernatural virtues, so, good for you, king/queen. (And with that excess of niceness, I now get to snark on both of you as much as I like. Ha!) Each of the 7 got very ornate place-settings, including a box of solid gold in which a golden silverware (goldware) set was placed. The pieces were set with diamonds and rubies, which I can only assume made it heavy and dangerous to eat with them, and a fraught nightmare to clean.
Everyone was sitting down to attempt to eat their meal when the. Doors. Slammed. Open.
A very old fairy walked in. A lot of force behind that doorslam from an old lady. Magique!
Weirdly, no-one had thought to invite her. I know CP’s about to give a reason, but – was she overlooked because there are 7 virtues and an eighth would have messed everything up? Did she live in a place where the boundaries of the kingdom were poorly defined? Seems like a little bit of caution/research/flexibility could have stopped this whole tragedy in its tracks.
Okay, she wasn’t invited because she’d been holed up in her tower for fifty years and everyone thought she was dead. Fair. Because the king and queen are still of babymaking age, I’m going to go ahead and assume that the last time she’d been around, the king (for sure) was either a very little boy, or neither of them were alive. And perhaps in this remote kingdom of ____ (I’m assuming, somewhere in France) they don’t have very good history books or notetaking systems, or at least, not in Before 1690. Fine.
It still seems like someone could have thought to challenge the “We Will Invite All Fairies, And There Are Only Seven, And We Know That” logical process. I’ll be looking LIKE A HAWK for any indication that anyone knew anything; and that person will be the true villain of this story.
With that sweeping declaration, we out.