Six Beauties Sleeping

"The proper METHOD of studying poetry and good letters is the method of contemporary biologists, that is careful first-hand examination of the matter, and continual COMPARISON of one 'slide' or specimen with another." This sentence, from the first chapter of Ezra Pound's ABC of Reading, gives a good description of the procedure of P. L. Travers in the book at hand.¹ Drawing upon various tongues and times and cultures she has assembled six versions of a matter distinguishable as being "about the Sleeping Beauty." Part One (a little over half the book) presents Miss Travers' own reworking of the materials, plus a sixteen-page afterword composed of her reflections—from the double view of devoted reader and thoughtful storyteller—on the fairy tale in general and the tale of Sleeping Beauty in particular. Part Two gathers, in translation, five earlier metamorphoses of the same tale: the "Dornroschen" "Briar-Rose" set down by the Brothers Grimm in the early 19th century; Perrault's "La Belle au bois dormant" of 1697; Basile's "Sole, Luna e Talia" of 1636; and two anonymous tellings, from Ireland ("The Queen of Tubber Tintye") and Bengal ("The Petrified Mansion"), published at the close of the last century.

Such are the slides proffered. They are not intended to be exhaustive; in the course of a single paragraph of her afterword the author lists fifteen alternative instances of the figure of the hidden sleeper "waiting until the time shall ripen." Nor is there here any question of a lost, inferred, or recovered "one story only" or original. "'The Authors,'" Miss Travers quotes, "'are in Eternity,' and we must be content to leave them there." Like any good teller she trusts the tales.

I think that About the Sleeping Beauty is an absorbing experiment in definition on Pound's model and that it sheds lights on both subject and genre. But the author has chosen to go further and to join herself—on the line—in the telling and for this reason I am touched and call her venture gallant. "To be in jeopardy is a proper fairy-tale situation," she says, and I shall leave it at that. What follows is no "review" but notes in response to the stimulus provided. I begin with Part Two.

Plus ca change plus c'est la même chose . . . but is it so? Metamorphosis—my term, after all, not the author's—means not change but conversion, or change-into-equivalence (in Hugh Kenner's phrase: "[an] identity persisting through change,")² What are the persistent items threading these exhibits?

1. 1. There is a sleeper, female, unmarried, of royal blood and beautiful, whose sleep—like the torpor of the Fisher King—infects the realm (i.e., either extends over the entire court and palace or—as in Basile—causes the palace to be abandoned by a grieving king who believes his daughter dead). The sleep is abnormally long and measured in years not hours; Perrault and the Grimms call it an even century. The effect is to approximate Basilean abandonment and to create in time an oblivion; the remote island of Tubber Tintye and Perrault's thorny bois dormant, absent from the earlier versions, provide spatial images for this perfectly natural (under the circumstances) general neglect. In these several senses the sleeper is "hidden."³

2. 2. There is a male, of royal blood and—except in the case of Basile, where he has a monstrously jealous wife—unmarried, who is variously, but crucially, associated with her wakening. In "The Petrified Mansion" and "Sole, Luna e Talia" the prince has no prior inkling of the princess but "happens" upon her and is instrumental in returning her to waking life: in the first case by luckily touching her with the life-giving stick of gold he has found by her pillow, in the second by seeding her in her sleep with twins—one of whom, confusing the princesses' finger with her breast, sucks forth the sleep-inducing...