La Bella Durmiente a través de la historia by Carolina Fernández Rodríguez (review)

Carolina Fernández Rodríguez’s book, which analyzes the story of “The Sleeping Beauty,” is a valuable contribution to the scarce work in existence internationally in the field of children and adolescent’s literature written in Spanish. La Bella Durmiente a través de la historia’s intention to offer an in-depth study of this canonical folktale is laudable. Nevertheless, for the scholars of Spanish children’s and adolescent’s literature, the book has a number of flaws both in content and scope.

In the introduction, Fernández Rodríguez claims that ideology is “ingrained” (11) in any critical work and explains that her theoretical framework is based on Hélène Cixous’s concept of “rewriting.” In Coming to Writing and Other Essays (1992), Cixous affirms that “rewriting” implies the reconstruction and rejection of societally construed “feminine” gender roles and paradigms reinforced and projected by phallocentrism. On the topic of ideology in children’s and adolescent’s literature, John Stephens is one of the international leading voices; in particular, his brilliant chapter in New World Orders in Contemporary Children’s Literature (2008) is foundational. In this article, Stephens defines “social ideology” and how it influences this literary genre in particular. Another compilation edited by Stephens, Retelling Stories, Framing Cultures (1998), examines the ideological effects in a retold text, and the influence of metanarrative and what he calls “metaethics” evident in these retellings. Fernández-Rodríguez study could have benefited from these critical studies, because they are central to the current international theoretical debate in this field.

In chapter 2, the author lists a number of versions of “The Sleeping Beauty” from the canonical Basile’s “Sun, Moon and Talia” to an original Spanish version “El príncipe durmiente” (“The Sleeping Prince”) (1984). The inclusion of “The Sleeping Beauty” adaptations in the Iberian prose and poetry of the one by Catalonian author Frayre Joy is remarkable. However, the critical approaches that are discussed in this chapter are somewhat narrow in scope. The psychoanalytic approach is limited to Bruno Bettelheim’s study on fairy tales, and the Jungian approach is studied as if it were a separate field. The feminist approach is based on authors who have exemplified “The Sleeping Beauty” as the paradigmatic woman created by society as dormant, inactive, passive, and comatose. The inclusion of María Soliño’s study on women representation in Spanish children’s literature could have reinforced this chapter as well.

In chapter 3, the attempt to classify the various rewritings of “The Sleeping Beauty” presents a major confusion in terminology. The author conflates “rewritings” with “adaptations,” including parodies of “The Sleeping Beauty” as adaptations. The difference between adaptations and rewritings rely on the fact that mocking or parodying a text deflates and destroys the original one, and cannot be labeled as an adaptation. She also confuses “symbolic” with the actual interrelationship between texts, which is commonly labeled as intertextuality. Symbols are conceptual values identified with certain ideas but are not intertexts per se. It would have been relevant to include recent shifts in adaptation studies, led by scholars such as Linda Hutcheon, Robert Stem, James Ardmore, among others. This theoretical framework would have strengthened this chapter.

Chapter 4 intends to analyze the rewritings of “The Sleeping Beauty” and the “deconstruction of patriarchal archetypes” (125). But once again, there is a confusion of terminology. The author mistakenly labels heterosexual marriage and its inherent “happiness” as her first “archetype”; the “male rescuer” as the second “archetype,” and the third, as “the graces of femininity.” In the first case, while heterosexual marriage is the traditional societal norm, it is not an actual “archetype”. In the second, the allusion made to the “male rescuer” is what Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell call the hero archetype. The third axis of Fernández-Rodríguez’s classification is the stereotypical and socially construed characteristics...