Many have targeted Sleeping Beauty as the most passive and repellent fairy-tale heroine of all, and they have done their best to make her story go away. Alerting us to the perils of that tale, Madonna Kolbenschlag urged women to "kiss Sleeping Beauty good-bye,” in her book of that title, and Jane Adams offered similar advice in Wake Up, Sleeping Beauty.1 Still, Sleeping Beauty and her German counterpart, Briar Rose, continue to turn up, in locations both unlikely and obvious. Philosophers meditate on what they call the Sleeping Beauty Problem in thought experiments about probability in coin tosses. In a bid to sell perfume, Lady Gaga spent twenty-four hours, immobile, in an installation called "Sleeping with Gaga." Psychologists from Bruno Bettelheim onward find wisdom in the story and conclude that Sleeping Beauty's passive state symbolizes a normal latency period for young girls. They recommend the story for therapeutic bedtime reading. Pornographers, hardcore and soft, have found in the story a deep well of sadomasochistic possibilities. Filmmakers, artists, writers, poets, fashionistas, and musicians alike keep responding to the call of the story, twisting and turning it, disenchanting it and restoring its magic, always managing to keep the fairy tale from disappearing. Simone de Beauvoir was perhaps the first to alert us to the profound gender asymmetries in fairy tales. "Woman is the Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Snow White, she who receives and submits. In song and story the young man is seen departing adventurously in search of a woman; he slays the dragons and giants; she is locked in a tower, a palace, a garden, a cave, she is chained to a rock, a captive, sound asleep: she waits.”2 Women are frozen, immobile, and comatose. The very name Sleeping Beauty invokes a double movement between a passive state (“sleeping”) and a contemplative response ("beauty") that invites a retinal reflex. Beauty may be sleeping, but we want to look at her to indulge in the pleasures of her visible charms. As Laura Mulvey has instructed us, that “we” is gendered male, although without precluding women's narcissistic pleasure at looking.3 What Freud called scopophilia, or pleasure in looking at something, is natural to all humans. As curious children, we subject everything to the probing gaze, exploring what surrounds us and trying to make sense of the world. That gaze continues to operate in multiple ways in adults, most dramatically as the basis for erotic pleasure (active looking). In the visual economy of twentieth-century cinema, Mulvey argues (in views that critics—including Mulvey herself—have challenged and contested since the essay appeared), the male has become the active "bearer-of-the-look," while women have been relegated to the position of objects on display (“to-be-looked-at-ness”). These categories correspond perfectly to de Beauvoir's division between adventurous, active males and passive women, who receive, submit, await, and are "sound asleep." Of all fairy tales, "Sleeping Beauty" is perhaps the most cinematic in its fashioning of a primal scene for visual pleasure. Curiosity and the desire to look mingle with a display that is both aesthetically and erotically charged. Our gaze is aligned with that of a prince stunned by the exquisite beauty of a woman who remains inert and puts herself on display for the enjoyment of a male viewer. It is no surprise that filmmakers from Pedro Almodóvar (Talk to Her, 2002) and Julia Leigh (Sleeping Beauty, 2011) continue to engage with the tale, taking it up covertly and also explicitly. Nor that artists ranging from Edward Burne-Jones to Maxfield Parrish have been inspired to create a rich visual culture of women, somnolent and seductive. Although "Sleeping Beauty" so patently creates a gender divide between the comatose slumbering princess and the adventurous prince, there are also many stories in which, as in "Cupid and Psyche,” the male figure sleeps and the female "marvels at the beauty she beholds." There is the entrancing Endymion, sleeping soundly after Zeus grants the wish of the moon goddess, Selene, and places him in an eternal sleep. “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: / Its loveliness increases; it will never / Pass into nothingness," Keats wrote in his poem about the handsome youth. In Greek mythology, sleep was personified in the form of a comatose boy (Hypnos), lying next to his half-brother Death (Thanatos). And the folklore of some regions includes tales like "Fairer Than a Fairy," in which the heroine must rescue a sleeping prince. Pretty Women (1990) could belong to that category, with Vivian, the character played by Julia Roberts, “rescuing" a man who has been sleepwalking his way through life, with senses deadened by corporate cultures and their single-minded focus on accumulating capital at any cost. Sleeping Beauties from medieval times all seem to appear as a single way-station set in epics and romances with multiple adventures and feats. It was no doubt from these narratives that Giambattista Basile borrowed to tell his stand-alone tale, "Sun, Moon, and Talia,” included in his lively collection known as the Pentamerone, or The Tale of Tales (1634–36), published in Naples.a Sharply different from popular versions of “Sleeping Beauty” printed today, Basile's foundational literary account tells the story of a princess destined to come to misfortune from a small flax splinter. When the splinter slides under Talia's nail, she falls into a deep sleep, disturbed only by a king who discovers her in a castle and finds himself "on fire with love." Basile coyly describes the king as gathering the "first fruits of his love." Nine months later Talia bears two children. When the king's wife gets wind of the affair, she lures the children to the castle and prepares to serve them up to her husband for dinner. A compassionate cook saves the children, and the queen ultimately suffers the punishment she planned to inflict on Talia. With its ornate language and baroque flourishes, Basile's tale gives us a complexly layered narrative, one that moves in the mode of high drama, with a rape scene, a revenge plot, and theatrical punishments. Ending in a light-hearted manner with verse that reads to us today as perverse (“Those whom fortune favors / Find good luck even in their sleep"), the tale quickly moves out of Talia's bedroom, revealing almost nothing about her appearance: "the king beheld her charms" is followed by a harvesting of those "fruits of love." The expansive narrative, with its breathless pacing, could easily accommodate descriptive details, but it avoids them. It is Charles Perrault who begins the process of slowing down the tale about Sleeping Beauty by displacing temporality and narrative with monumental stasis and frozen immobility. Perrault's slumbering princess inhabits a palace in which a "frightful silence" reigns, and "Death" seems to be "everywhere," with men and animals "apparently lifeless" (see here). Much as there is a seductive appeal to sleeping princesses, their beauty immune to decay and corruption, the attraction mingles with dread and repulsion, for the one-hundred-year sleep is surely also a proxy for death, which lurks at the borders of the castle in the corpses of the suitors entangled in the briars. Sleeping Beauty suddenly becomes the tale's main feature-iconic in mingling beauty and death, desire and dread. Still, Perrault's story does not completely dispense with action. It is filled with self-reflexive meditations on the power of stories passed on from one generation to the next. Narratives about sleeping beauties seem to have what Donald Haase refers to as “an underlying preoccupation with the creative power of language and storytelling,”1⁄2 displaying a deep concern with words, stories, and raconteurs. Paradoxically but perhaps with some logic, a story that enshrines the pleasures of seeing and creates a figure of iconic visual delight (through words, to be sure) also extols the power of the word. The prince listens to rumors about the old castle he has discovered while hunting, a castle said to be haunted by ghosts, used as a gathering place by witches, and inhabited by a child-eating ogre. He feels himself to be “on fire” when an old peasant tells him, on the authority of his ancestors, that a beautiful princess is awaiting the arrival of a prince to awaken her from a one-hundred-year sleep. Perrault does not hesitate to extend the time frame of the story beyond the kiss, and he includes an elaborate sequel describing the savagery of Sleeping Beauty's cannibalistic mother-in-law and her efforts to cook her grandchildren and daughter-in-law, as well as her sensational end in a vat filled with foul creatures. Sleeping Beauty stands at the center of the tale, flanked on either side by monstrous appetites that seek to possess her, either through carnal knowledge or through physical incorporation. She is the object of all desires. Tellingly, the Grimms used the title "Dornröschen," or "Briar Rose," for their version of what Perrault called "The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood": Throughout the land, stories circulated about the beautiful little Briar Rose, for that was the name given to the slumbering princess. From time to time a prince would try to force his way through the hedge to get to the castle. But no one ever succeeded, because the briars clasped each other as if they were holding hands, and the young men who tried, got caught in them and couldn't pry themselves loose. They died an agonizing death. The Grimms trim, prune, and truncate, moving quickly to the pricking of the finger on the spindle and eliminating the episode with the cannibalistic mother-in-law. When it comes to awakening Briar Rose herself, the prince is all eyes after traversing the palace, with its immobilized inhabitants, and discovering a woman "so beautiful that he could not take his eyes off her” (see here) Time has stopped in the castle, and the narrative flow is also arrested as our productive imagination is aligned with the prince, and we construct a mental image of the magnetic Sleeping Beauty. Temporality ceases to be and, for a moment, we are in the realm of pure visuality, imagining Briar Rose. Illustrators have clearly understood how the scene of enraptured vision in "Briar Rose" produces "iconic solidity," an effect achieved through what W. K. Wimsatt and M. Beardsley call a "sleight of words," the imitation of something "headlong and impassioned, less ordered, nearer perhaps to the subrational."7 Through the "solidity of symbol" and "sensory verbal qualities," poetic abstractions take on the sturdiness of real-life objects and are reified and made into "enduring things." Poetry may not be able to turn language into matter but it can create a mental image invested with what Paul Ricoeur has referred to as "ontological vehemence." Briar Rose, at the moment when she is discovered fast asleep and frozen in time, hovers before us almost as vividly as she does for the prince. Yet the economy of means is astonishing. Often two words are all it takes-Sleeping Beauty or Briar Rose—to ignite the imagination and to see the woods, the roses, the thorns, the drapery, the hair, and the slumbering, supine body of the princess. The thrifty use of poetic language in fairy tales can fill us with wonder but also leave us wondering, challenging us to fill in all the descriptive and causal blanks, in short, to use our imaginations. With their witches and woods, roses and thorns, golden balls and slimy suitors, fairy tales create shimmering visuals, verbal icons—sleeping beauties, skulls decorated with flowers, homicidal birds with jewel-encrusted plumage—that oblige us to "think more” and “think harder." In short we have to interpret and backfill as well as listen and absorb. Ever since Snow White's body was placed in a glass coffin on top of a hill for public viewing, feminist critics have suspected that her beautiful corpse, idealized and almost literally placed on a pedestal, elicits a purely aesthetic viewing of the female body, one that replaces the notion of decay and death with permanence and plenitude.2 Seeing is privileged over touching (Perrault's prince too only gazes at his sleeping beauty), and the prince's prolonged gaze creates a reassuring moment in which aesthetic pleasure appears to displace anxieties about mortality. The beautiful corpses of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty have inspired art that ensures a double immortality, for the comatose women and the works of art representing them. It took Angela Carter to demythologize "Sleeping Beauty" and break the magic spell that has taken us all in ever since Basile, Perrault, and the Brothers Grimm codified the fairy tale. "In a faraway land long ago": Disney's Sleeping Beauty begins with words that remind us of the drive to preserve the mythical power of tales from times past, to perpetuate the cult of the beautiful corpse that is the fairy tale in the form told in times past. Just as Carter's Sleeping Beauty in her story "The Lady of the House of Love” repeats “ancestral crimes," so the fairy tale enables us to lose ourselves in a mindless cycle of repetition compulsion that reproduces and reinforces social norms.10 The house of fairy tale, like the House of Love, degenerates into ruins—“cobwebs, worm-eaten beams, crumbling plaster”—when left to its own devices, visited only by sycophantic suitors driven more by the lure of beauty than the desire to reanimate.11 Without the right suitor, Carter's somnambulant beauty has become "a cave full of echoes," "a system of repetitions," "a closed circuit." Leading a "baleful posthumous" existence, she feeds on humans to sustain her. It is from this dark tradition that Neil Gaiman constructs his breathtakingly compelling "Snow, Glass, Apples” (see here). Sleeping Beauty and Briar Rose, with their magnetic beauty and supremely passive status, remain hauntingly seductive figures in our cultural imagination, reminding us of the pleasures of beauty but also of the attractions of morbidity. They may be immobile, but they also migrate with ease into new media as counterparts to mercurial tricksters—all the warrior women who hunt, shoot, and seek revenge in today's cinematic refashioning of fairy-tale figures. That their stories have been resurrected and are constantly reimagined is a stark reminder that the emergence of a female trickster-feisty and ferocious heroines like Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games and Lisbeth Salander in The Millennium Trilogy— does not necessarily signal a seismic shift in our understanding of female agency, even if trickster tales frame new perils and possibilities for postmodern heroines.12 Sleeping Beauty, a true hermeneutic puzzle in her many cultural incarnations, preserves the magical, mythical elements of fairy tales, even as she cries out for disenchantment.