by CC Michele

Created on: May 18, 2009   Last Updated: May 19, 2009

My three year old daughter, to my chagrin, is positively enchanted by Merryweather, the bustling motherhen fairy in Disney's Sleeping Beauty. That pestilent gnat refuses to die despite my swats as it bites my babygirl again and again, injecting her veins with the noxious tale of Princess Aurora, a tale of deception, brutality, rape, adultery, infanticide, and cannibalism. Not to mention happilyeverafterism, a fate to unbearable to describe.

To truly understand the depths of the story's depravity, we must examine the monster's DNA. Its strands are woven by two threads, reality and perception. As regards the latter, we watch a story that asks us to accept an impossible representation of the foundations upon which true, lasting love must be built; namely, the underdevelopment of the female self as the yin to the naive nobility of the male yang. Though such a balance may have been a few less steps removed from reality than where we now stand as a society, the reduction of the feminine ideal into nothing more than a stunning body encasing a fragile soul makes it impossible for the film to succeed as a story that encapsulates the true human experience as we truly understand it, and so the story's danger is nullified by its own understanding of existence to the point that anyone over the age of seven has swam in the world's waters long enough to know that it's better to start swimming for shore than to wait around for the coastguard.

The pity of consciousness is that it is permeable and always seems to retain the faintest whisps of innocence. When they drift through our minds every now and again, they force us to reexamine our original loss. They force us to imagine what life could have been like, if only the fairy tale were true. Cinderella, Belle, Ariel... these are the spectres that taunt me from the shores of long ago and far away, from the castle beyond the clouds in the land of N'er To Be. And though these sprites now fill my daughter's world with giggles and joy, soon enough they will abandon her to herself, only to be resurrected by some English teacher ten years hence, revealed in their original form as Basile's "The Sun, the Moon, and Talia." I know this because I was that teacher.

In my English nine class, my students and I explored the discrepancies between popular Disney films and their corresponding source text, Sleeping Beauty's source story topping the list as scandalous story of the century. The tale begins much the smae way, with Talia's splinter-induced coma and subsequent imprisonment. The point of departure occurs when the sex-starved prince happens upon the slumbering sweetie and decides to avail himself of the opportunity to relieve the pent-up stress of living with an overbearing stepmonster. He escapes undetected and nine narcoleptic moths later, Talia awakens as the splinter finally dislodges itself from her capillary after the ravenous sucking upon her finger of one of two children that she had unconsciously borne as a result of the rape. When the prince's stepmother is appraised of the situation, she orders the children, Sun and Moon, put to death ala Hansel and Gretel and attempts to punish her son with a deep dish of You Got Served. Fortunately, the cook's budget is underfunded and so such a dish becomes impossible to prepare. Instead, an impromptu barbecue pit is thrown together and the reunited Price and Talia share their just desserts. Don't choke on gramma, kids!

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