About

The trad wives of TikTok, the bombastic Andrew Tate, and the incel movement are offering popular, trending, contemporary ideas of the ‘perfect’ woman, skewing and narrowing ideas of consent and of a woman’s role, privately and publicly. They are celebrating what can be termed ‘the passive-feminine’. This project seeks to problematise a seemingly settled figure in literary history, the passive-feminine character of Princess Aurora in ‘Sleeping Beauty’. Through both creative and critical writing, this project pursues the extent to which Princess Aurora embodies, instead, the monstrous-feminine.

The monstrous-feminine has seven ‘faces’ (according to scholar Barbara Creed): the archaic mother, the monstrous womb, the vampire, the witch, the possessed body, the monstrous mother and the castrator. These faces correspond with different representations of Aurora in unexpected ways, drawing on moments where she can talk to the dead and even when she comes back from the dead herself, using close readings of several versions of the ‘Sleeping Beauty’ fairy tale that span centuries. Analysing Aurora’s monstrous behaviour will reorient the thinking around the figure of Aurora, and thus reorient the thinking around ‘ideal’ femininity, due largely to the influential cultural presence that fairy tales continue to occupy in our society.

The creative response to the research around Aurora will imagine the untold story of her 100 years of sleep that appears in “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood” by Charles Perrault and “Little Brier Rose” by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. These years account for an entire lifetime that’s never been considered, where her monstrousness can be emphasised, where her unaging body, trapped in the dreamscape, can be a moment of horror. 

Together, these creative imaginings and critical re-readings will provoke new thinking around the literary representations and social constructions of the passive-feminine, the monstrous-feminine and the relations between the two.