“Wabi sabi. It had found it during those bad times when Rea had been only getting worse, and it had come to mean a lot [to] me. The thought that everything that we were going through, the things that time was doing to her and she was doing to me, that they weren’t bad, but that they were beautiful in their own way.
–gabriel blessing, Wabi Sabi (Part Nine)
I looked at the scars on Rea, and now on myself, and I was comfortable with them. No, I like them. They were natural, the result of the choices we made, and I don’t regret a single choice that left one on me. We were breaking down, bit by bit. We were dying slowly.
But everyone is dying slowly.”
In “A Desire for Death,” Lau analyses the sleeping beauties of fairytale stories, concluding that there’s an eroticisation of the deathlike state of women within. A necrophiliac appeal. I agree that there is an eroticism to these women. But I argue that it is not a necrophiliac desire.
All things which are ‘alive’ in any sense of the word eventually decay. But it is that very decay that draws the necrophiliac. It is not the pristine, timeless beauty of Briar Rose, unchanging as she was when she first closed her eyes. The eternal beauty of the sleeping beauties is the draw of vampires and their ilk.
As Wabi Sabi expresses, the beautiful part of the dead and dying, the draw of necrophilia, is a sense of universality. The main character—a necrophiliac himself—expresses the appeal to be the “scars on Rea, and. . .on [him]self. . . .everyone is dying slowly.” That is to say, the imperfections and decay of men, women, and anything else (crows, for instance) are natural, “beautiful in their own way.”
Through the lens of Gender Studies, the universal sameness of gender to the necrophiliac gaze can be understood, Formalism giving us the tools to extract meaning from the text.
I appreciate your introduction of Wabi Sabi into Briar Rose, as I think it brought such beautiful perspective that we have not yet talked about!
I have a question regarding this, as I do not have much understanding of Wabi Sabi from my own knowledge, or its application to Sleeping Beauty. Is a part of the universality you mentioned a sense of impermanence? And what makes Sleeping Beauty so striking and erotic in the story is the sense that her beauty is not forever yet she is trapped in time, so her sleep represents a complicated existence that will end once she is woken up?
I think this is a super interesting topic and I appreciate you bringing in a new perspective with Wabi Sabi. I think the reading about Sleeping Beauty in Tatar also could fit into this conversation. Specifically, where it mentions that the attraction of Sleeping Beauty comes from her passivity. Here she is seen as an object on display for the pleasure of man. Do you think that a sense of “decay” can also come from age? Would this be a conversation if the woman was old and not beautiful by typical patrairachal standards?