The Multiplicity of Sleeping Beauty: Science, Technology, and Female Subjectivity in Twentieth and Twenty-First- Century Literature and Cinema

Abstract

Within the framework of third-wave feminist philosophy, this dissertation explores female subjectivity in twentieth and twenty-first century literary and cinematic representations of Sleeping Beauty in which the magic typical of the classical versions of the fairy tale has been substituted by science and technology. We reveal the complexities of female subjectivity in the different versions of the fairy tale and reject the universalistic notion of Sleeping Beauty as passive. While contextualizing Sleeping Beauty in the historical, oral, and literary traditions from which she derived, we first explore female subjectivity through a close reading of the tale’s classical versions, that is: Giambattista Basile’s “Sole, Luna e Talia” (1634), Charles Perrault’s “La Belle au bois dormant” (1697), and the Brothers Grimms’ “Dornroschen” (1812-1857). This study serves as the foundation for our subsequent investigation of Sleeping Beauty in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Since the middle of the twentieth century when a new “vogue” in fairy tale studies merged with the rising interest in the compatibility of science and the humanities, Sleeping Beauty has appeared at the crossroads of science and fiction in: Primo Levi’s “La bella addormentata nel frigo” (1966), Angela Carter’s “The Lady of the House of Love” (1979), Harold Pinter’s A Kind of Alaska (1982), Pedro Almodovar’s Hable con ella (2002), Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), and Marco Bellocchio’s Bella Addormentata (2012). Each work, or hypertext as Gerard Genette calls a work deriving from a previous work, uniquely builds on the Sleeping Beauty topos in a scientific and technological framework. In analyzing Sleeping Beauty in her new context, we analyze the relationship between science, technology, and female subjectivity.