Sleeping Beauties

This week our assignment was to read 2 versions of the fairy tale “Sleeping Beauty” by The Grimm Brothers and Charles Perrault. Then we were to read an interpretation of the story as written by Bruno Bettelheim.The 2 stories have the same plot but each was written in a different way and a different time. This can be contributed to cultural shifts, which have caused the stories to be remade to suit new expectations.

“Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm”

The Grimm brothers version of sleeping beauty is the oldest of the 2 stories. The story is very straight forward, describing the major plot points, like how sleeping beauty falls asleep, but it fails to elaborate on the story. You can see in the other versions  that there is more detail and entertainment to the story. A reason for this may be because most stories told around the Grimm brothers time were passed down by oral tradition instead of being published in books. The shortened story may serve to lack detail so people could remember the story and retell it.

“Charles Perrault”

Charles Perrault’s version sleeping beauty is undeniablly more elaborate than that of the Grimm brothers. First, the story has more dialogue, starting with “oh, if only we had a child!”, which changes the story from  narrators point of view to the actual characters in the story. The story also changes the crab that tells the queen about the baby into a frog, as well as adding detail about the process of how sleeping beauty is put to sleep. This process enriches the story, giving sleeping beauty a reason for sleeping for 100 years. Perrault also added the aspect of the mother that wanted to kill the child of sleeping beauty, thus adding an evil aspect to the story. This leads the story to end with two exact results; the evil is punished and the good live happily ever after. You can see that this version is one that was meant to be printed; the dialouge and added details make for a more interesting story to read.

“Bruno Bettelheim”

Bettelheim was a child pyschologist and beleived that many folktales actually told a lot about the inner-workings of humans. He relies heavily on Freud’s theories to try and interpret the story of sleeping beauty. Bettelheim argues that story of sleeping beauty symbolizes the time of menstration for young girls, describing that the girls sometimes feel sleepy or withdrawn. Some believe that such fairy tales as sleeping beauty imply gender stereotypes, but Bettelheim does not agree.The long period of sleep is said to be the begining of puberty, which can apply to both girls and boys. As the girl goes through the process of menstration and inward focus the boys focus on agressively dealing with external problems. Both of these situations combined symbolize what humans have to go through in order to gain a sense of one’s self. We as humans have to learn to successfully master our inner and outer worlds at the same time. His main interpretation of the moral of “Sleeping Beauty” is that no matter how hard parents try to delay their child’s passage into puberty it will happen nonetheless.