Resilience, or, the thirteenth fairy
That classic fairytale, The Sleeping Beauty is a different story when you dwell on the fairy gifts at the beginning, and don’t rush ahead to the bit where a foolhardy Prince takes a look at a century of thorny weed-growth and says: 'I’m not afraid of that […] I shall penetrate the hedge and free the beautiful Brier-Rose.'*
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​Though there's nothing more attractive than an unsqueamish Prince, today we're staying with the fairies and their offerings. At the christening of their long-awaited daughter, the King and Queen set out twelve golden plates, for the twelve young, pretty fairies in the land, in the hope that they’ll cast their wishes on the baby princess. The first eleven fairies fall over themselves to deliver beauty, nimbleness and even the voice of a nightingale. To me, the first eleven gifts represent the primary virtues of childhood and youth. When someone is still new to the world and inexperienced in it, seemingly natural charms, such as straight teeth, musicality and a thirst for knowledge, have the aura of divine blessings. The dreams of first youth, such as the wish to be an astronaut, a rock star, or a parent of six, are auguries of untried potential, and so also go in with the first eleven gifts.
​However, ‘bad’ gifts – like that hair-trigger temper of yours – also get thrown into the mix. In The Sleeping Beauty, the giver of the unwanted gift, is an obscure, haggard fairy, who is not invited to the christening because she is suspected bewitched or dead, and they don’t have an extra golden plate, anyway. This is poor judgement on the royal couple’s part, because she storms in as soon as the first eleven fairies have bestowed their boons, and says 'because you did not invite me, I tell you that in her fifteenth year, your daughter will prick herself with a spindle and fall over dead.'
​This harshly-worded curse wipes out the previous eleven gifts before they can fully come to fruition. But there’s one good fairy still, who hasn’t rushed to make her wish, because she takes one look at the uninvited fairy and 'guessing that some mischievous gift might be bestowed upon the little princess, hid behind the tapestry […] Her intention was to be the last to speak, and so to have the power of counteracting, as far as possible, any evil which the old fairy might do.' Already, the new fairy senses trouble brewing ; that our Beauty will need more than the glamorous trinkets of the first excited fairies to survive whatever’s coming to her.
In the Grimm Brothers’ version of the fairytale, this redeemer is known as the twelfth fairy, but I think of her as thirteenth, because she’s the last to speak, after the mean enchantress. She also merits an odd number because she’s exceptional, in that her magic is responsive, rather than immediate. She promises that the princess shall not die, but fall into a deep one-hundred-year sleep (and then be woken by a prince, in Perrault’s version of the story). Importantly, the thirteenth fairy can’t take away the curse – not completely – but she can soften it, so it is a temporary, premature death and not the final one. The thirteenth fairy’s gifts are ultimately resilience and hope.
​The fatal prick is inevitable, for Beauty, as it is for all of us, sooner or later. You cannot remain full of untried potential, and your gifts and dreams must come into contact with the imperfect world. On her fifteenth birthday, Beauty’s exploring an undiscovered part of the castle and encounters an old woman who is spinning flax. The spindle, a novelty (phallic) object, which has been officially banned from the castle, enchants Beauty and she approaches it with curiosity. What could it be? Could she have a go on it? And then, according to Perrault, 'partly because she was too hasty, partly because she was a little heedless, but also because the fairy decree had ordained it, no sooner had she seized the spindle than she pricked her hand and fell down in a swoon.'
​It’s hard to know from this passage if the 'mischievous gift', is the spindle, or, Beauty’s desire for it. As with the ills that befall you and me, is it our fault or the fault of some external, beyond our control? In most cases, it’s difficult to point the finger at either. The Grimm Brothers even write that Beauty 'was attracted to the old woman, and joked with her'; which makes me think that the witch was the only one in the castle who was any craic… Anyway, after Beauty’s fall, as with Pandora and Eve, and all the other heroines that are punished for their curiosity in a patriarchal society, chaos ensues and all that’s left, is hope for a new beginning, or, just another chance to make things right.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about The Sleeping Beauty, the eleven precocious gifts, their extinguishment in a kind of death, and the redemption on awakening. These motifs have been in the air for me and the people I grew up with, (or am still growing up with, depending on how you look at it). Some of our early gifts, some of the dreams and commitments of our first youth, are being taken away. Things that once looked inevitable, are no longer possible, or at least not in the original way. There is waiting; new ways that must be found around thorny obstacles. One image of latter day Beauty has stayed with me in particular: a still-young woman, who lost her life as she knew it, stroking her loyal, remaining cat and talking about the books on the shelf of her new house. They’re not her books, nor ones she’s chosen, but she can see herself wanting to read them. This is resilience; this is waking up into a different reality and going along with it, as though it’s the original plan.
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The pandemic has given many of our dreams a sleep-inducing injection, that at times could be mistaken for a lethal one. We won't be able to fulfil the potential of some projects, at least for what feels like a hundred years, when we'll all be dead. And yet, in my view, those who take the thirteenth fairy approach and see that their dreams have been arrested by a mysterious sleep, will find ways to recover them. Sleep, as a natural process that aids creativity and transformation, is nothing to be afraid of, not this side of paradise, anyway. I listened to a podcast by The Pisces author, Melissa Broder, where from minute 1.25 she talks about a goldfinch that inexplicably crashed onto her lawn and when she turned her back, just as inexplicably, flew away. Was it 'practicing for death?', Broder wondered. Trying to make sense of the event, she took on the bird's voice, saying: 'I've had enough of this shit. I have to fly around all day. I'm tired of being beautiful. I'm tired of being admired. Like, there's more to me than my beautiful yellow feathers. This is exhausting for me, flying from place to place. I just need a moment with my cheek pressed against the dirt and my eye blinking, and, kind of gently, in moments, flitting my feathers, which to a human being looks like death's door.' What if Broder's bird could be a metaphor for our hopes and dreams? What if their flighty, golden state wore them out? What if they needed to rest, make contact with the earth that will eventually bury them, before picking up again when they have the capacity? Like the bird's or Beauty's reawakening, this will happen on the dreams' own timeline, and not on ours. We will have to be patient, and hopeful, and extremely lucky.
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​Going back to Beauty, mid-twentieth-century psychoanalyst, Bruno Bettelheim found a parallel between the fairytale sleep and female puberty. Teenage girls, he observed, were introverted and even sleepy, as they underwent a time of 'quiet concentration', while they learned how their changing bodies functioned. Bettelheim’s ideas have an outdated ring to them, especially as he juxtaposes female passivity with active pubertal 'manhood', vis à vis the hedge-whacking prince. Anyone who is familiar with how raucous teenage girls can be, and how much sleep teenage boys need, will be sceptical of Bettleheim's generalisation. These complementary forms of resilience are present in all of us, regardless of gender. In rescuing our dreams from the pandemic, we'll draw on the distancing perspective afforded by a sleep-like pause, and on bold ruses that will enable us to tackle the thorniest obstacles.
​I wrote an earlier version of this article on my blog andthepea.com in July 2019. Spot the difference! The illustrations are by Errol Le Cain's Thorn Rose .
​FOOTNOTE
​* There are innumerable versions of The Sleeping Beauty legend, but my interpretation of the story comes from a mix of Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm versions. Seventeenth-century, French court fabulist Perrault’s version features a palatial castle, elegant manners and noble rhetoric. On the other hand, in the German authenticity-grubbing Grimm Brothers’ version, speech is cruder, and the natural world features more prominently. Best of all, at the beginning of the Grimms' tale, the Queen finds out that she is pregnant through a talking crab.