Sleeping Beauty Part VI

Welcome back! We’re going through Charles Perrault’s OG Sleeping Beauty tale with some initial thoughts before later delving in for deeper analysis. If it helps, his text is here. For some reason, he isn’t really taking my advice as he writes his stuff, though, so reader beware: it gets weird.

We left off when the prince and Sleeping Beauty became the new king and queen after the king's death. They move into the castle with their children, Dawn and Day.

The (new) king and princess and their kids are installed in the castle and everyone’s happy for a bit. Then, the king decided, for reasons unclear, to declare war on his neighbor, a guy named Emperor Cantalabutte. Note: This is the ONE NAME (well, aside from Dawn and Day, which are not names) we’ve gotten in this story. And this is the name. Anyway, he’s going down, presumably.

In a wild, wild, horrible, rash decision, the king decides to appoint the queen mother the regent while he’s gone…which includes entrusting his wife and his children to her care. I know, I know, I went all Ogres Are People Too in the last piece, but it was clearly established that the prince/now king was very afraid that his mom was going to eat his kids. I know some time has maybe passed, but this does not seem like a calculated or wise choice. 

Especially when considering that “he expected to be away at war for the whole of the summer.” Great. Did you leave any protections in place for your kids? 

Neauxp. The second he rode off into the sunset, the Queen Mother relocated the princess and the kiddos to a remote forest home…for some reason. Note to Queen Mother: There’s a kitchen downstairs. But I suppose she wanted to conduct her murders in some semblance of privacy…which does makes sense. 

She followed them after a few days, and rang up the butler, and said: “For my dinner tomorrow, I will eat little Dawn.” 

The butler is justifiably horrified. (Is she going to have to kill the butler as well? So much for secrecy.) (OR! Is she bringing the butler on board as an accomplice, meaning later to throw him under the bus, trusting the fact that her word will carry more weight than his? If so, guys, this is really all just the origin story for the phrase “the butler did it”. I’m so happy!)

Anyway. To the consternation of the hapless butler, the queen assures him that she does indeed want to eat her grandchild, and, to our consternation, CP says that “she spoke in the tones of an ogre who longs for raw meat.” Chaz: I feel like we went from not enough description to way, way too much description. Huzzah for growth as an author! Now, stop it, you’re scaring the kids. 

But wait -- the Queen Mother isn’t done ordering her dinner. “You will serve her with piquant sauce,” she adds. Mama Ogre likes her kids spicy (…is a sentence I regret typing). 

The butler quickly saw that he wasn’t going to win an argument with an ogress. (But I thought she was only planning on eating kids? I suppose that doesn’t mean she wouldn’t kill older people, nvm.) He unsheathed his helpfully proximate machete and went up to Dawn’s bedroom. So. Wait. What. The Queen Mother’s going to eat the kid, but make another guy do the nasty work? Come on. Boo, Mama Ogre. Boo. 

Fortunately, Dawn is real cute, no matter what her favoritist parents might say about her brother’s levels of attractiveness. She runs happily over to the butler when he enters her room and flings her arms around his neck. This proves to be too much for the guy, and he started sobbing. The knife falls to the ground. (I’m getting Snow White vibes?) 

Then he goes outside and kills a lamb instead. (Definitely Snow White vibes). He then heads to the kitchen and makes so very piquant of a sauce that, later, after a fantastic dinner, the Queen Mother declares that she’s never had so nice a human child. (Noted: the best defense against getting eaten is a solid hot sauce and diversionary meat. We’re all learning so very much here.) 

The butler heads up after dinner and smuggles Dawn to his own wife, and they decide to keep the child in the servant’s quarters. Fine. Where’s Day? (We’re probably about to find out, aren’t we?) Also: Where’s the princess through all of this? Is she just reading in a corner or taking another nap while her children get murdered by her mother-in-law? 

Eight days later, and the Queen Mom is hungry again. She calls over the traumatized butler and tells him to murder her other grandchild for her, no big. He goes and finds the kid, who is pretending to fight a monkey with a practice sword, and hides Day away with his sister. He then goes and finds a young goat and cooks it up real nice and Mama Ogre is apparently none the wiser. But that wouldn’t make for a great story, so I imagine things are about to go south. 

Eaux neaux! Some days later, the Queen Mom got hungry again, and she weighed her options. She realized that she was going to have to get rid of the butler at some point, and she also knew that she wasn’t ready to go back to her less bloodthirsty ways as of yet. What to do, what to do…

She summoned the butler and informed him that she wanted to eat him with the sauce that he had served the children in. I’ve never heard a worse compliment. 

But then, she realized something. The butler was likely to be old and tough—and there was still a younger specimen she could eat. The princess! She’s only twenty, if you don’t count the century-long nap; and somehow, we never do. She’d do nicely for a meal, thought Mama Ogre. 

The butler swallowed and left the room and thought very graphically about the challenge before him. The draw of younger children, so thought he, was the tenderness of the meat—easily replicated in a lamb or young goat. But at twenty the princess’s flesh “had become a little tough; and what animal could he possibly find that would correspond to her?” Happy happy children’s tale, la la la la la!

Poor guy decides that he’s got to save his own life. After all, he’s got his wife and the two hidden royal toddlers to think about. If he has to kill the princess, at least he and his newly enlarged family will be okay—Mama Ogre’s gotta be satisfied at some point, right? Poor, poor guy tries to goad himself up into a frenzy outside the princess’s bedroom so that he’ll be able to rage-murder the princess without having to think too much about it. This is horrifyingly sad. Also, what does the princess think is going on outside in the hall while this is happening? 

He goes in to kill her, but decides at the last moment that she needs to have the traditional Last Minute Alive To Pray For Her Soul, so he tells her that he’s been ordered to kill her by her MIL, and it’s time to make her peace with God. 

The princess is having none of this. The butler hadn’t thought to tell her that he had saved her two children, so she’s pretty much gone out of her mind with despair already. Communication, guys. (PSA!) 

The butler listens to her last words, which are all about how happy she’ll be to see her children again post-murder, and breaks down. He decides to take her to her very living children, and goes and kills some hopefully-right-level-of-toughness animal in her stead. His success as a wily chef continues, and Mama Ogre continues to be hoodwinked and normally fed. 

Mama Ogre decides at this point that she’s had enough human for a while. She puts together her cover story: “savage wolves devoured the king’s consort and children.” Fine. 

Perrault decides now, at the 92% mark of the story, to unveil another unnerving character trait for Mama Ogre: “It was her habit…to prowl often about the courts and alleys of the mansion, in the hope of scenting raw meat.” Holy frick, okay. Shape it up, Mama Ogre, if you act like that then I think the humans are kinda justified in hating you. On one of her nonscary evening prowls, then, she heard Day crying. Immediately, two voices began to hush Day: the very recognizable voices of the princess and Dawn. (Why hadn’t the butler or the princess arranged for their IMMEDIATE transport to a different/safer location???) 

Mama Ogre = mad. Her previous resolutions to lay off the human meat for a while instantly disappear. The next morning, she got a few servants to set up a gigantic cauldron in the front yard of the forest-mansion. Into the cauldron she threw “vipers and toads…snakes and serpents of every kind.” Her devious plan was to throw the queen, the kids, the butler, his wife, and (unfairly, I believe) an unconnected servant girl into it. Well, okay. You didn’t specifically mention that any of the snakes/etc were poisonous, and you also didn’t say that you were filling the cauldron with water or setting it over a flame, but sure. Points for creativity, Mama Ogre, and this likely wouldn’t be a particularly pleasant experience for your six victims. 

Her “minions” (? Where were these all along, and why was she making the butler do her dirty work if she had minions?) are about to throw the six people in the cauldron, when…the king rides into the yard! Yay! The war is over? I guess? 

He immediately asks what on earth is happening. 

No one has any idea what to say. 

Mama Ogre knows that she doesn’t have a good story, either, and that she’ll likely be killed for what she has done (which, thus far, is actually nothing other than scaring a bunch of people. I mean, she meant to eat people, and she would have if it wasn’t for the butler, so. Obvi that’s bad. But if she apologized now, like, nothing horrifying actually happened?) (Also: the butler is the hero of this story.) 

Mama Ogre does not seek redemption. Mama Ogre decides to cast herself into the cauldron, where she is instantly devoured by the snakes and such. Great! Lovely. 

The end: “The king could not but be sorry, for after all she was his mother; but it was not long before he found ample consolation in his beautiful wife and children.”

Are we ready for the moral of the story? Let’s go. It’s in verse, and you can read it here, but Imma do what I usually do and just distill the actionable points: 

“Lots of girls wait for brave, strong husbands. I’ve never met one who waited a century, certainly without fretting about it! Butactually, time doesn’t matter. “True love comes by fairy-lot”—and it comes when it comes, y’know? There’s even an argument to be made that the longer you wait, the stronger your love will be, when it’s time. This is good advice: listen to me. But hey, it’s hard to wait, if you’re young and in love, go for it.”

Um. 

Well, there you go, Perrault. (If I’m paraphrasing this wrong, which, you know, there’s a chance, I heartily welcome all arguments.) This was NOT the moral I was expecting from him, esp after his very very very moralistic moral at the end of Cinderella, but hey…it’s…well. It’s really something. (Did he get married or something between Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty?) Anyway. 

Assessment: This was SIGNIFICANTLY WEIRDER than Cinderella, and it makes me really jazzed for Bluebeard, which is next. After that, I’m going to take a break from Perrault and do something totally different (Scheherazade? Folk tales around the world? Hero’s Journey analogues? Grimm? Random news stories and essays I find online?)

Stay tuned.