Sleeping Beauty Must Die: The Plots of Perrault’s “La belle au bois dormant”

Charles Perrault’s “Sleeping Beauty” does not end with a kiss, but with an ogress throwing herself into a vat of slimy creatures after a botched attempt at eating her family. Rather than account for the ogress story line through source study, this essay examines the narrative processes that connect the sleep plot and the ogress plot, demonstrating that substitution is the organizing principle of the tale. Reading the princess and the ogress as substitutes for each other elucidates the tale’s underlying anxiety: the woman who withdraws from the world, whether in sleep or appetite, is a danger to society and to narrative.