Sleeping Beauty is a Fairy Tale MacGuffin

A witch’s curse, an endless sleep and the hidden meanings in it all

Why do people keep telling this story? Sleeping Beauty is so ho-hum, as to put even eight year olds to sleep. She’s the least heroic Fairy Tale character in the entire canon. Everything is done for her, to her and about her, but never by her. She’s a pawn in some pretty intense power games and adds nothing to the outcome or to the struggle. Even with all that, knowing that there was nothing there, they still named the story after her!

As a kid, I easily skipped over her chapter in my beloved books, eager to read about a character of consequence, who mattered, who did something. But I was caught, even then by a peculiar sense that there was something to be learned in her story. Something I was missing. Something that needed some thought for which I did not have the words.

When you’re eight years old, you’ve begun to try and find your place in the world. I don’t mean the Big questions like “Who am I?” and “What am I supposed to do?” The Baltimore Catechism took care of that. But more like the thoughts that would crop up as I looked around me and saw a sea of faces just like mine. The obvious question was “What’s so special about me?”

In the natural stinginess of my fourth grade teacher, Sister Mary Christopher announced one day that God had given us all one talent, just one. We were to use this gift from God to “honor him in this life and the next.” In fact, it was imperative that we discover our talent, so we could fulfill our life’s purpose. It was our job.

Needless to say, there never was any further discussion. She was probably concerned that she had said too much, that we might develop swelled heads, or become giddy and distracted while she was trying to teach. But there was this momentous announcement sitting in the middle of the room. And none of us knew what to do.

A lot of kid’s talents seemed obvious. Charlie was great at drawing. He doodled on everything. But now he would have to learn how to harness his artistic skills for God’s purpose. Mary Ellen’s gift was less clear. She was our champion double-dutch jumper. How was she going to parlay that into a more spiritual life? These kinds of thoughts were with me all that day and for many days to come.

I struggled with what my one talent could be. So reading about Sleeping Beauty’s excess of gifts was a little hard to take. The Fairies gave her everything and all she did was sleep. Yeesh! How was this God’s plan?

It was a conundrum that a young child can’t solve. It took many years and a lot of experience to begin to crack this puzzle. Luckily for me, I was always convinced that fairy tales contained all I needed to know about life and how it could be lived. So the mystery of the multiple gifts was finally revealed when I was quite a bit older.

My eight year old self thought that the one and only talent defined the life. But, it’s the other way around. It’s the evil fairy’s wish, the curse, that does that. Sleeping Beauty was supposed to die. Another fairy modified it to be a hundred year sleep, which isn’t very far from death.  The curse in our world is different but no less destructive: a life of addiction, or the self-sabotage that comes from feeling endlessly unloved. Perhaps we can’t make an emotional commitment or need to hoard our way through life because we never feel secure.

Sister Mary Christopher was wrong. We all enter adulthood with an abundance of gifts. We use them, or abuse them in some cases, but they are ancillary to the work of living our life. If you watch any celebrated person, you’ll easily see the multitude of talents they have received. But the human struggle so highly visible in their lives, the actions and lapses, the terrible words and deeds so painful to watch, all that comes from their one and only curse.

If God really wants us to become our more perfect selves, it won’t be through all the gifts, the easy stuff. It’ll be through the struggle to overcome our weakness or our deficiency or whatever other form our curse may take. That’s what wakes us up, that’s what brings us to life.

Sleeping Beauty, the story, isn’t about Sleeping Beauty, the girl. She’s just a prop, the means to set the story in motion. This fairy tale has more important things to say. It asks us to see just what happens when the curse is allowed to prevail: a life unlived is a life of endless sleep.

To be continued…