Fairy tales often have a chaste veneer, but underneath, they read like bawdy tales told by seamen and other immoralites. In Little Brier-Rose by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, one finds suggestive images such as “When the prince approached the thorn hedge, it was nothing but large, beautiful flowers that separated by themselves, allowing him to pass through without harm.” From an adult perspective, Sleeping Beauty is a tale of puberty, transformation and sexual awakening.
Victorian readers wanted these stories to be charming, to reflect the gender roles of the time, and above all to instruct proper upper– and middle–class children in appropriate morality. Innuendo replaced the overt and troubling activity of carnal sex and violence but… these underlying themes are tenacious.
Quotation from Midori Snyder, Sleeping Beauty
If you see the magic in a fairy tale, you can face the future.
Quotation from Danielle Steel
I hope you are able to sleep again soon. I never got any underlying sexuality from Fairy Tales … at least, not as a child reading them. But I look back at them now and see a much more sinister conditioning of girls going on. Wait for the Handsome Prince to come and rescue you, get married. Be subservient in the kitchen (Cinders) etc, etc. I wouldn’t feed that mush to any little girl nowadays.
Take a full speed face first run into a wall.
That should help.
You’re welcome.
Eh, people read what they want into just about any story. How you interpret a story says a great deal about you
I love Danielle Steel’s quote. It is so true.
I’m an insomniac, but not by choice.
You could try counting sheep
but
it may be a fairy tale
We just got Shelley Duvall’s ‘Fairy Tale Theater’ – 26 episodes directed by people like Francis Ford Coppola and Tim Burton. I’m looking forward to seeing Mick Jagger as the Emperor in ‘the Nightingale’ but ‘Sleeping Beauty’ starring Bernadette Peters and Christopher Reeve should be pretty fun too.
I still have my leather bound 1909 edition of Grimm. It informed my childhood and continues to inspire.
I love the Brothers Grimm
I always thought Sleeping Beauty was about date rape.
How interesting (as always here). As a Psychology undergrad, I was one of the few men in a course called “The Psychology of Women”. Abigail’s comment reminded me of that class-a very good one. As far as insomnia, I hope you get a Stage IV sleep and feel like a million dollars in the morning, Seraphine!
I have always told my boys, when they say they can’t sleep, that as long as they are laying there with their eyes closed, they are still resting and that it’s fine if they don’t sleep.
Just one more fairy tale…
I guess there is a double-meaming in all these old tales!
Hope you can sleep tonight, I hate staying awake all night, turning in my bed and looking for sleep.
I used to love fairy tales, and I read them now to G. I never really thought about the underlying themes of them, though. But now that you’ve pointed them out, I’m having second thoughts about continuing to read them to G.
My favorite kiss-whilst-sleeping story isn’t a fairy tail. It’s way more romantic than that.
An old man in a magazine interview, the subject of which I have forgotten, told of a girl he had sat next to on a long bus trip when he was young. He had, he confessed, loved her at first sight, waited till she fell asleep, then kissed her, without telling her. He never saw her again, but he never forgot her.
All these years later, the woman, now a mother and grandmother, wrote the magazine to confess, “I wasn’t sleeping.”
I spelled “tale” wrong.
fairy tales – a whole other universe. i used to live there. i didn’t like tera firma. there are some great ‘fairy tales’ for kids now that aren’t full of innuendo and stereotype. i love Robert Munsch’s Paper Bag Princess. …on insomnia…. i always take a book to bed and read till i’m sleepy. occasionally the sleepy part doesn’t happen, but i try to make sure they’re good books, so the time’s not wasted.
Maybe try taking off the Converse before bed. ;-D