After reading the numerous adaptations of Sleeping Beauty, I’ve become increasingly curious about how we could interpret Charles Perrault’s: The Sleeping Beauty in The Wood from a gender studies perspective.

Undoubtedly, the general theme of Sleeping Beauty has played into the nature of the female curiosity invoking disasters, such as The Little Mermaid wanting to explore new waters or Little Red Riding Hood taking a different path/playing along with the wolf. However, the most thought-provoking subject I would be interested in exploring is how the characters of the fairies highlight “appropriate” gender roles and conduct. More specifically, how the king exonerated responsibility in all of the adaptations for forgetting about the last fairy foreshadowing the curse on his only child. In Perrault’s telling of the tale, the older fairy was forgotten because she was never spotted leaving her tower, assumed to have died or been cursed(123).

The character of the older fairy should be considered a powerful and wise being, but she is old, without beauty, a social outcast, irrational, and non-confrontational.

 Instead of the Grimm’s fairy that “cried out in a loud voice,” she “mutters threats” and curses the princess when her turn to bestow a gift arrives. The other fairies are humanized and domesticated and seem prone to childish competition. Furthermore, the gifts they give her make her suited for a construct of the perfect wife and woman at the time. Similar to what the little mermaid had, the fairies gave her beauty, the disposition of an angel, gracefulness, great dancing ability, and for her to sing like a nightingale.

It is up for debate why the “good” fairy in Perrault’s telling hid and waited for the older fairy to curse the child instead of calling her out, placing some protection magic, or simply just waiting behind her. 

(Creative Approach)

  I could stare at numbers all day.

Their tiny structure ornately fills out the corner of every other page, except the title page, where it rests at the bottom. Unquestionably, my adolescent mind becomes synonymous with numbers. When my mother turned each page, I inherently understood I was the kind of person who didn’t want to take up space or cover the whole page in gaudy brush strokes. However, as with the nature of time, my eyes lingered on the stories whose words spoke louder than the images themselves. The writing was no longer scribbles on a page and rushed pen strokes: it was the unleashing of inner provocations, the words of the people, the passion for processing, the method of preserving a culture, and the study your parents believe is a dying profession. Where meaning finds itself in the spacing between the lines and through the curved paths of every brain.  

 For a long time, It felt as if everyone looked at my loose threads, mangled and uneven, stepping on the longest strands, watching bits of my being unravel.

My insides are on display for all to see, while others were protected by plastic encasings, free from Criticism, seemingly liberated. While I had become a quivering flame the world steadily blew on, I eventually found solace through my writing. It was peace of mind for all the thoughts to immerse themselves into a page. The stress became poems, and my social anxiety became free verses unshackling my irrational worries. I latch onto words because they are as tangible as emotion can be. Literature has no confinements in content, and the requirements to fit into the structure are limited. I pursue Literature because it is the structure of ever-evolving people like me representing the fractals of the American mosaic.