While beauty sleeps: The poetics of male violence in perceforest and almodóvar’s talk to her

A constant identifying feature links the numerous variants listed under "Sleeping Beauty" (ATU 410) in Hans-Jörg Uther’s Types of International Folktales: a long sleep and its constitutive opposite, an awakening. Yet another feature singles out this tale type, even while affiliating it with others: the gender-inflected dichotomy of stasis (indoors) versus mobility (outdoors). Movement typically characterizes male heroes: "If a young girl is kidnapped, and disappears from the horizon of her father… and if Iván goes off in search of her, then the hero of the tale is Iván and not the kidnapped girl. Heroes of this type may be termed seekers." Women outdoors are either endangered - as is Snow White during her terrified flight through the woods in Walt Disney’s animated film - or dangerous and even deadly - as is the Wicked Queen with poisoned apple in hand. Both sleeping/awakening and stasis/mobility have structured the tale ever since its literary inception in the middle ages. Herbert Cole’s 1906 illustration encapsulates the dynamic function of the hero. As the prince strides toward the castle where the princess sleeps, less fortunate contenders for the role of seeker-savior lie fallen among the brambles. That he will succeed in penetrating her maidenly enclosure is nicely signaled by the reach of his upraised sword (Figure 3.1). Edward Burne-Jones’s 1871 painting, by contrast, displays Sleeping Beauty inside a box or coffin-like setting. Figuratively dead to the outside world, were she to stretch out the hand behind her head, it would encounter the framework that circumscribes her. These images capture the fairy tale’s value-laden binary components. As motion is to immobility, as pursuit to passivity, so the daring prince is to the dormant princess.