Even with my Sleeping Beauty obsession, I didn’t read Zellandine’s version until the fifth week of FOLK 344—Dr. Bastille’s Fairy Tales and Identity course. I guess it’s such an ugly story that we prefer to leave it untold, moldering in the unswept corners of our past like something gone to rot in the back of the pantry.
“I was born with a disorder of the heart.” Zellandine speaks to the steady heat of the coals. “If I overexerted myself or if I suffered a shock, I might fall into a faint from which no one could rouse me for a spell. It was no great matter when I was a child. But by the time I was older…”
She trails away and I look sideways at Primrose to see if she understands what’s coming, hears the dark promise in that ellipsis. Apparently a princess’s life is not so sheltered that she doesn’t know what sorts of things might befall a woman who can’t cry out, can’t run. Her fingers curl around the white line of her bandage. “Surely your father protected you, or your mother.”
“I was a maid in a king’s castle, far beyond my family’s protection.” In the version we read in Dr. Bastille’s class, a translation from medieval French, Zellandine is a princess who falls into an endless sleep when her finger is pierced by a splinter of flax. I wonder how many tiny variations there are of the same story, how many different beauties are sleeping in how many different worlds.
Zellandine lifts the pot from the fire with a fold of her apron and fills our teacups. I’ve read enough fantasy books and spy novels to know better than to drink anything offered to me by an enemy, especially if it smells sweet and inviting, like bruised lavender, but I no longer think Zellandine is our enemy. I curl my fingers around the cup and let the heat of it soak through skin and tendon, right down to the bone.
“Soon enough I caught the eye of the king’s son. I was careful and quiet; I was sure never to tend his rooms when he was present. But one day he returned unexpectedly while I was shoveling the ashes from his hearth. He startled me when he spoke my name, and my heart betrayed me. The last thing I remember is the crack of my skull against the stones.” Zellandine is seated again at the table but she still isn’t looking at us. “When I woke, I was in a bed far grander than any I’d seen before. So wide my hands couldn’t find the edges, so soft I felt I was drowning, suffocated by silk.” Her nostrils flare wide, white-rimmed. “I can still smell it, if I’m not careful. Lye from the castle laundry, rose oil from his skin.”
Right now you’re thinking: this isn’t how the story goes. You might not have a degree in this shit but you’ve seen enough Disney movies and picture books to know there’s supposed to be a handsome prince and true love and a kiss, which can’t be consensual because unconscious people can’t consent, but at least it breaks the curse and the princess wakes up.
But in the very oldest versions of this story—before the Grimms, before Perrault—the prince does far worse than kiss her, and the princess never wakes up.
I make myself keep listening to Zellandine, unflinching. I always hate it when people flinch from me, as if my wounds are weapons.
“I did not tend the prince’s hearth after that. I hoped—if I were quiet and careful enough—I might be safe. That it might be over.” Zellandine’s fingers spread against the softness of her own stomach. “Soon it became clear that it wasn’t.”
In that oldest story the still-sleeping princess gives birth nine months after the prince visits her in the tower. Her hungry child suckles at her fingertips and removes the splinter of flax, and only then does she wake from her poisoned sleep.
I felt sick the first time I read it, betrayed by a story that I loved, that belonged to me. I slouched into class the next day, arms crossed and hoodie pulled up, scowling while Dr. Bastille lectured about women’s bodies and women’s choices in premodern Europe, about history translated into mythology and passivity into power. “You are accustomed to thinking of fairy tales as make-believe.” Dr. Bastille looked straight at me as she said it, her face somehow both searing and compassionate. “But they have only ever been mirrors.”
I reread the story when I got home, sitting cross-legged on my rose-patterned sheets, and felt a terrible, grown-up sort of melancholy descending over me. I used to see Sleeping Beauty as my wildest, most aspirational fantasy—a dying girl who didn’t die, a tragedy turned into a romance. But suddenly I saw her as my mere reflection: a girl with a shitty story. A girl whose choices were stolen from her.