Re-awakening the Sleeping Beauty: P. L. Travers' Literary Folktale

RE-AWAKENING THE SLEEPING BEAUTY: P. L. TRAVERS' LITERARY FOLKTALE Kay F . Stone Once upon a time, a time that never was and is always, there lived in Arabia a sultan and his wife . With these words P. L. Travers begins her reworking of the familiar tale, "The Sleeping Beauty," the centerpiece in her book About the Sleeping Beauty. In her own comments on the tale Travers asks herself and her readers if it is even possible to rework such an ancient and well-polished tale in a meaningful manner: ... love of the fairy tales, you may argue, need not require the lover to refashion them. Do they need retelling, you may ask. Does it not smack of arrogance for any writer to imagine he can put a gloss on a familiar theme? This is a finely pointed question, and the manner in which Travers answers it in both her own story and her Afterword comments is the central focus of this paper. About the Sleeping Beauty includes Travers' lengthy tale and Afterword, supplemented by three other versions by the Grimms, Perrault, and Basile and two related literary tales by Jeremiah Curtin and F. Bradley-Birt. In providing several versions on the same theme, Travers offers the reader greater perspective in comparing and contrasting differing approaches to similar stories. Her Afterword comments begin with a compelling description of her early understanding of fairy tale and myth as a child "before Eve's apple had been eaten." For me, the nods and becks of my mother's friends walking under parasols or presiding over tinkling tea-tables were preparatory exercises to my study of the myths. The scandals, the tight corners, the flights into the face of fate! When eventually I read of Zeus visiting Danaë in a shower of gold, Perseus encountering the Gorgon, or the hair-breadth escapes of the Argonauts, such adventures caused me no surprise. I had heard their modern parallels over tea and caraway cake. While many children have no doubt experienced the Edenic feeling of unity Travers describes, and have understood the relevant core of wonder tales, her special gift was an ability to hold onto these feelings into adulthood without sentiment or nostalgia: I am glad to have kept my terror whole and thus retained a strong link with the child's things-as-thev-are, where all things relate to one another and all are congruous. Thus Travers unabashedly denies that it is necessary for a mature adult to entirely deny the fantastic imagination of childhood as merely a dream because, in her estimation, such imagination allows one to keep constant and hard-headed connections with the unifying forces of the universe. Of course, we have already heard her words in the mouth of Mary Poppins, who constantly reminds the Banks children that adults make foolishly hard distinctions between the worlds of fantasy and reality, the worlds of child and adult, the worlds of dreaming and waking. In her defense of myth and fairy tale, Travers does not limit herself to the uses of enchantment, as does Bruno Bettelheim, nor does she feel that enchantment is useful only to children or primitive adults . One might wonder at this point who Travers attempts to reach in her book, an odd combination of literature and analysis. It would certainly seem that much of this book is aimed at interested adults if we take her at her word that children need no proof that fantasy and reality are equally real in their own terms. It is the skeptical adults of contemporary western society who need to be convinced of this. It is adults to whom Travers displays the other reworkings of "Sleeping Beauty" and to whom she details the literary excesses of these tales in contrast to the starker Grimms' version. In comparison with the later Grimms' tale, she tells us: Bradley-Birt' s stark narrative has been elaborated; Jeremiah Curtin' s over-wordiness has been curbed; Basile's gross justification for his gross events is seen for the graceless thing it is and dropped accordingly; Perrault' s, sophistries fall away, and the story emerges clear, all essence. Travers returns to the Grimms' version as her...