Tag Archive: sleeping beauty
By Molly Caldwell Crosby
Sleeping Beauty falls into a deep slumber. Rip van Winkle awakens after twenty years to find life dramatically changed. What if they were more than tales inspired by colorful imaginations? What if sleep could be dangerous ¬ even deadly?
From 1916 through the 1920s, people around the world faced that question as a pandemic of sleeping sickness affected as many as 5 million people. My grandmother was one of them. She had a fever, sore throat, and then she fell asleep. Her sleep lasted for 180 days with a slow recovery. Never could I have imagined that she was one of the luckier ones ¬ but she was. Thousands of others died while still in that deep sleep. Or worse, thousands more awoke to find themselves horribly damaged by the sleeping sickness, also known as encephalitis lethargica ¬ literally, the swelling in the brain that makes you sleepy.
They awoke to find themselves physically crippled by Parkinsonism, actually imprisoned within their own bodies. Or they awoke to damaged minds, depression, suicide, even violent insanity. Many survivors were condemned to a life in mental institutions.
My grandmother felt the doctors search for her pulse, heard them declare her dead three different times, and listened to her parents weep and plan her burial. She could not even tell them they were wrong. For my grandmother and other Sleeping Beauties and Rip van Winkles like her, their story of sleep was never a fairytale, but a nightmare from which they never truly awakened.
Molly Caldwell Crosby holds an MFA in nonfiction and science writing from Johns Hopkins University and previously worked for National Geographic magazine. She is the author of The American Plague, which received great critical acclaim. Her writing has appeared in Newsweek, Health, and USA Today. Read more about sleeping sickness, a disease that still exists today, in Molly’s ASLEEP: The Forgotten Epidemic that Remains One of Medicine’s Greatest Mysteries.
IMAGE: Virginia, the author’s grandmother
By Holly Tucker
The all-so-familiar Tales of Mother Goose have decidedly unfamiliar origins. The fairy tale as a genre dates back to sixteenth-century Italy and late seventeenth-century France. The author of Mother Goose, Charles Perrault, would like us to believe that the tales were collected from rustic old ladies and wetnurses. But really, nothing could be farther from the truth. The first fairy tales were written by adults, decidedly for adults.
Let me just say this: I certainly wouldn’t read some of these stories to my young daughter.
Basile’s early Italian tale, “Sun and Moon and Talia,” is one of the earliest versions of “Sleeping Beauty.” The problem is that Sleeping Beauty (Talia) gives birth to twins shortly after she wakes up. That’s right, the Prince does a lot more than kiss her while she’s sleeping.
And how about Perrault’s later French tale? After Sleeping Beauty is awakened and hops into bed with her Prince, she also gives birth to two children. The narrator tells us that Sleeping Beauty is beginning to show her age; her face is not is taut as it used to be.
But this is the very least of her troubles. It turns out that Prince Charming’s mother is a ogre, who would like nothing more than to eat her daughter-in-law and grandchildren while the Prince is away being Princely. To our relief and some horror, the mother-in-law meets her fate in a pit of snakes.
I have the Mother Goose tales on the highest shelves of my study–out of my daughter’s reach, for now. As much as I cringe at my daughter’s recent fascination with the Captain Underpants series, I do think that it’s the safer bet!
[Illustration: Gustave Dore, "Blue Beard." 19th century. By far, my favorite illustration for the early tales.]
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