Sleeping Beauty
Sleeping Beauty Literature Review
The story of Sleeping Beauty has evolved over time and has been changed slightly throughout the different versions. It has changed in order to fit social norms for the time and context has been altered to appeal to the current audiences. The three main versions of Sleeping Beauty are the Charles Perrault in 1697, which was adapted from the original fairy tale Sun, Moon, and Talia by Giambattistas Basile in 1634. Perraults version was a tale of rape, adultery and cannibalism. The Brothers Grimm interpretation, from 1812 that made the story more tame and the Walt Disney version from 1959 that was drawn mainly from the St. Petersburg Ballet version of 1890 and the Grimm Brothers version, obviously this version was cleaned up a lot from the predecessors in order to appeal to a younger and more moralistic audience. Most Fairytales hold a kind of formulae that can be seen in Vladimir Propp’s morphology of the folk tale. His theory suggests that most stories just use the same formulae however in different contexts. Sleeping beauty is a typical example of how mostly all of the characteristics used in storytelling are used in this narrative. Such characteristics used in Sleeping Beauty are the character types. The hero, the villain, the donor, the dispatcher, the helper, the princess and the father or in this case the parents. The fairy godmothers play a huge part in the storyline of sleeping beauty, you could say they act as the donors who provide an object with magical properties, such as the sword given to prince charming that defeats the villain. They are also the dispatchers and the helpers who send the hero in the right direction to save the princess. Although these don't seem like the main characters in the story, they hold together the narrative and fill in the gaps that link the events in the story, also without the fairy godmothers we would be missing out on our fix of magic that is needed in
The story of Sleeping Beauty has evolved over time and has been changed slightly throughout the different versions. It has changed in order to fit social norms for the time and context has been altered to appeal to the current audiences. The three main versions of Sleeping Beauty are the Charles Perrault in 1697, which was adapted from the original fairy tale Sun, Moon, and Talia by Giambattistas Basile in 1634. Perraults version was a tale of rape, adultery and cannibalism. The Brothers Grimm interpretation, from 1812 that made the story more tame and the Walt Disney version from 1959 that was drawn mainly from the St. Petersburg Ballet version of 1890 and the Grimm Brothers version, obviously this version was cleaned up a lot from the predecessors in order to appeal to a younger and more moralistic audience. Most Fairytales hold a kind of formulae that can be seen in Vladimir Propp’s morphology of the folk tale. His theory suggests that most stories just use the same formulae however in different contexts. Sleeping beauty is a typical example of how mostly all of the characteristics used in storytelling are used in this narrative. Such characteristics used in Sleeping Beauty are the character types. The hero, the villain, the donor, the dispatcher, the helper, the princess and the father or in this case the parents. The fairy godmothers play a huge part in the storyline of sleeping beauty, you could say they act as the donors who provide an object with magical properties, such as the sword given to prince charming that defeats the villain. They are also the dispatchers and the helpers who send the hero in the right direction to save the princess. Although these don't seem like the main characters in the story, they hold together the narrative and fill in the gaps that link the events in the story, also without the fairy godmothers we would be missing out on our fix of magic that is needed in
Bibliography: Perrault 's Fairy Tales (New York: Dover Publications, Inc, 1969), pp. 3-21 Vladimir Propp (1968) Morphology of the Folktale. University of Texas Press.. http://www.scribd.com/doc/37368054/Fairy-Tales. Date Accessed 25/02/11