Angela Carter's Sleeping Beauty

In the late 20th century, English novelist Angela Carter published a short vampire fiction version of Sleeping Beauty that once again reflects society’s perception and expectation of women. In this story, an immortal vampire queen long lives in her mansion in Romania and feeds on the blood of young men. When a World War I soldier travels by on his bicycle, she lures him in and intends to eat him. However, the queen instead is “awakened” by the young man’s purity and virginity: after receiving a kiss from the soldier, she emotionally commits suicide so that she can never kill again. In Carter’s tale, the beauty is asleep not in the physical sense, but in the sense that she is unable to reach and comprehend the outside world of reason. In the …show more content…
Nevertheless, theses fluid changes to the perception of women is one aspect that I consider in my analysis, and they add on to the overall theme of the story. For instance, Maria Tatar argued in her book Classic Fairy Tales that “…the story of Briar Rose has been thought to map a female sexual maturation, with the touching of the spindle representing the onset of puberty, a kind of sexual awakening that leads to passive, introspective period of latency” (236). While I agree with Tatar’s psychoanalytic view on the tale, I also think that the beauty of folktales is that they encompass many different aspects of human nature and can be interpreted differently by different people. The approach to analyze the gradual empowerment of women offers a holistic view and is one of the many lenses to analyze Sleeping Beauty. Even Darton states in his book that “… we can never form more than an approximate idea of how tales were told in the past,” and “… we can get cultures wrong just as we can make mistakes in speech” (261). Thus, as long as we are enjoying folktales as they are, and viewing them from interesting angles, we have achieved our goal of bringing them to life, and perhaps more importantly, reimagining them in new