Sleeping Beauty is pretty much the worst fairy tale, any way you slice it.
It's aimless and amoral and chauvinist as shit. It's the fairy tale that feminist scholars cite when they want to talk about women's passivity in historical narratives. ("She literally sleeps through her own climax," as my favorite gender studies professor used to say. "Double entendre fully intended.") Jezebel ranked it as the "least woke" Disney movie of all time, which, in a world where The Little Mermaid exists, is really saying something. Ariel might have given up her voice for a dude, but Aurora barely uses hers: she has a grand total of eighteen (18) lines in her own movie, fewer than the prince, the villain, or any of the individual fairy godmothers.
Even among the other nerds who majored in folklore, Sleeping Beauty is nobody's favorite. Romantic girls like Beauty and the Beast; vanilla girls like Cinderella; goth girls like Snow White. Only dying girls like Sleeping Beauty.
I don't remember the first time I saw Sleeping Beauty—probably in some waiting room or hospital bed, interrupted by flipping machines and chirpy nurses—but I remember the first time I saw Arthur Rackham's illustrations. It was my sixth birthday, after cake but before my evening pills. The second-to-last gift was a cloth-bound copy of Grimm's fairy tales from Dad. I was flipping through it (pretending to be a little more excited than I actually was because even at six I knew my parents needed a lot of protecting) when I saw her: a woman in palest watercolor lying artfully across her bed. Eyes closed, one hand dangling white and limp, throat arched. Black-ink shadows looming like crows around her.
She looked beautiful. She looked dead. Later I'd find out that's how every Sleeping Beauty looks—hot and blond and dead, lying in a bed that might be a bier. I touched the curve of her cheek, the white of her palm, half hypnotized.
But I wasn't really a goner until I turned the page. She was still hot and blond but no longer dead. Her eyes were wide open, blue as June, defiantly alive.
And it was like—I don't know. A beacon being lit, a flint being struck in my chest. Charm (Charmaine Baldwin, best/only friend) says Sleeping Beauty was my first crush and she's not totally wrong, but it was more than that. It was like looking into a mirror and seeing my face reflected brighter and better. It was my own shitty story made mythic and grand and beautiful. A princess cursed at birth. A sleep that never ends. A dying girl who refused to die.
