Alma Mater Studiorum Alma Mater Studiorum

261 Pages·2016·26.13 MB·English

by  Mihaila Petricic

AAllmmaa MMaatteerr SSttuuddiioorruumm –– UUnniivveerrssiittàà ddii BBoollooggnnaa

DOTTORATO DI RICERCA IN

LES LITTERATURES DE L'EUROPE UNIE - EUROPEAN
LITERATURES - LETTERATURE DELL'EUROPA UNITA

DOCTORAT D’ÉTUDES SUPÉRIEURES EUROPÉENNES

Ciclo XXVIII

Settore Concorsuale di afferenza: 10/L1

Settore Scientifico disciplinare: L-LIN/10

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

Presentata da: Mihaila Petričić

Coordinatore Dottorato Relatore

Prof.ssa Anna Paola Soncini Prof.ssa Lilla Maria Crisafulli

Esame finale anno 2016
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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.
In the 1970s, second-wave feminist scholars focused their attention on the role
of fairy tales in female acculturation. Second-wave feminist methodology aims to
identify sexual differences and affirm oppositions, like active/passive and
subject/object. Owing to her comatose and paralyzed body, Sleeping Beauty emerged as
a fragile, passive object in opposition to a dominant and active male subject.
Beginning in the 1980s and 90s, however, third-wave feminism rejected the
binary model inherent to second-wave methodology and introduced a new theory of
subjectivity. Instead of considering the subject in terms of opposition, third-wave
feminists endorsed a “melting of boundaries” whereby the new, non-unitary subject was
conceived in terms of hybridization. This new approach prioritized the individual
experience of each woman rather than universalistic statements about all women. By
applying a third-wave feminist framework to analyses of Sleeping Beauty, 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. We argue this position through
both a classical and a contemporary corpus.
While contextualizing Sleeping Beauty in the historical, oral, and literary
traditions from which she derived, we 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’ “Dornröschen” (1812-1857). Drawing from third-wave feminist philosophy,
we challenge univocal conceptions of the fairy tale princess as passive by arguing how
each individual version of the fairy tale supports female activity in a distinctive way.
This study serves as the foundation for our subsequent investigation of Sleeping
Beauty in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The advanced tools of third-wave
feminism do not only allow us to revisit the problems arisen by previous feminist
studies, they also provide us with a method to interpret the new subjectivities that are
shaped by the contemporary age, that is, who we are in the process of becoming. Today,
we cannot talk about subjectivities without addressing the varied and controversial ways
in which science and technology influence them. The contemporary figure of Sleeping
Beauty invites such an investigation. 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 Almodóvar’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 Gérard Genette calls a work deriving from a previous work, uniquely
builds on the Sleeping Beauty topos in a scientific and technological framework,
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revealing the metaphorical richness of the subject. In this new framework, Sleeping
Beauty is no longer a princess, but a patient in a medical context. We are thus invited to
investigate how science and technology in the domain of medicine have influenced the
subjectivity of a figure whose catatonic body has for centuries epitomized the notion of
female objectification. In analyzing Sleeping Beauty in her new context, we analyze the
relationship between science, technology, and the body. Third-wave feminism, with its
reflection precisely on the interconnectedness between these three domains, was the
obvious theoretical framework for such an endeavour. In the 1990s, feminist scholars
turned their attention to the complex and contradictory ways in which science and
technology have been affecting gender relations. While some warned against the risk
that they could further polarize the binary model of gender, others conceived them as
powerful instruments in the elimination of discriminatory dichotomies. The diverse
kinds of interactions between science, technology, and the female body that we
encounter in contemporary literary and cinematic representations of Sleeping Beauty –
namely, through medical technology, the medical figure, and medical discourse –
provide us with an ideal platform on which to address the influence of scientific and
technological advances on female subjectivity.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My
  most
  sincere
  thanks
  go
  to
  my
  dissertation
  mentor,
  Professor
  Lilla
  Maria

Crisafulli,
 whose
 guidance
 and
 support
 were
 indispensible
 throughout
 the
 writing

process.

I
 am
 also
 grateful
 to
 Professor
 Anna
 Paola
 Soncini
 and
 all
 of
 the
 DESE
 faculty

members
 for
 the
 opportunity
 to
 be
 part
 of
 such
 a
 dynamic
 program.

To
 Professor
 Gonzalo
 Pontón
 Gijon:
 I
 cannot
 thank
 you
 enough
 for
 your
 time
 and

encouragement
 during
 my
 stay
 at
 the
 Autonomous
 University
 of
 Barcelona.

Finally,
 I
 owe
 my
 gratitude
 to
 friends
 and
 family
 who,
 directly
 or
 indirectly,
 in

person
 or
 on
 Skype,
 at
 respectable
 times
 of
 the
 day
 or
 questionable
 hours
 of
 the

night,
 helped
 create
 this
 dissertation.

Grazie.
 Merci.
 Gracias.
 Hvala.

Thank
 you.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………..3
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………………..5
INTRODUCTION ………………………………………………………………………9

PART I Weaving the Components Together: Gender, Science, Technology, and
the Fairy Tale …………………………………………………………………………19

1.1 The Mind/Body Dichotomy………………………………………………………..21
1.2 Feminist Theories of Subjectivity………………………………………………….24
1.3 Science, Technology, and Gender………………………………………………….29
1.4 The Fairy Tale, the Princess, and the Cyborg……………………………………...38

PART II Putting Absolute Judgments to Sleep: Female Passivity and Activity in
Sleeping Beauty Hypotexts …………………………………………………………..51

2.1 The Historical Roots of Female Passivity in Sleeping Beauty Hypotexts…………56
2.1.1 A Historical Reading of Giambattista Basile’s “Sole, Luna e Talia”………….56
2.1.2 A Historical Reading of Charles Perrault’s “La Belle au bois dormant”……...74
2.1.3 A Historical Reading of the Brothers Grimms’ “Dornröschen”………………85
2.2 Changing the Subject: Identifying Female Activity in Sleeping Beauty
Hypotexts……………………………………………………………………………….94
2.2.1 The Female-to-Female Nutritional System in Giambattista Basile’s “Sole, Luna
e Talia” ……………………………………………………………………………..96
2.2.2 Female Pleasure and Desire in Charles Perrault’s “La Belle au bois dormant” …
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……………………………………………………………………………………...103
2.2.3 Girlhood to Womanhood: The Feminine Life Cycle in The Brothers Grimms’
“Dornröschen”……………………………………………………………………..110

PART III Waking Up to a New Era: The Influence of Science and Technology on
Female Subjectivity in Contemporary Sleeping Beauty Hypertexts……………..127

3.1 From Magical to Medical: Identifying the Contemporary Sleeping Beauty ……..129
3.2 Medical Technology and the Body: The Impact of Vaccines, Devices, and
Procedures on Female Agency ……………………………………………………….156
3.3 The Medical Figure and the Patient: Examining Fairy Tale Gender Roles in the
Contemporary Medical Context………………………………………………………186
3.4 Medical Discourse vs. Patient Discourse: Creativity and the Reconceptualization of
Mental Illness ………………………………………………………………………...205

CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………………….239
BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………….247
INDEX………………………………………………………………………………...259

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INTRODUCTION

In the 1970s, feminist scholars focused their attention on the role of fairy tales in
female acculturation. While the issue was framed as a debate, it was not a balanced one;
the majority of feminist critics condemned the fairy tale for endorsing a world in which
men are active and women are passive. Today, the debate over fairy tales is anything
but exhausted. In October 2015 the French Minister of Education, Najat Vallaud-
Belkacem, declared her intent to eliminate fairy tales from the primary school
curriculum because of their sexist content.1 Indeed, fairy tales are increasingly seen as
the site of gender discrimination and sexism. One of the most frequently cited tales in
the service of this argument is Sleeping Beauty – the story of the young princess cursed
to prick her finger on a spindle, fall into a long slumber, and wait for a prince to wake
her up.
Sleeping Beauty has come to be synonymous with female passivity. This has
been the case since Simone de Beauvoir pre-empted feminist concern with fairy tales in
her 1949 book The Second Sex in which she states,

Woman is Sleeping Beauty, Donkey Skin, Cinderella, Snow White, the
one who receives and endures. In songs and tales, the young man sets off
to seek the woman; he fights against dragons, he combats giants; she is
locked up in a tower, a palace, a garden, a cave, chained to a rock, captive,
put to sleep: she is waiting.2

1 Paolo Levi, “Da Cenerentola a Cappuccetto Rosso, la Francia dice no alle favole sessiste”, La
Stampa, October 8, 2015, accessed November 14, 2015, http://www.lastampa.it/2015/10/08/
societa/da-cenerentola-a-cainppuccetto-rosso-la-francia-dice-no-alle-favole-sessiste-
jDwwNV55
L8y3ZFyBG1SJ2J/pagina.html.
2 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-
Chevallier, New York: Vintage Books, 2010, p. 352-353. Ebook.
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For De Beauvoir and many others, Sleeping Beauty’s comatose and paralyzed body
reified her status as a fragile, passive object in opposition to a dominant and active male
subject. The fact that at the centre of each version of the Sleeping Beauty tale is a
comatose princess brings the judgment woman as object to the forefront of the
narrative, making it the central problem. While an inanimate female body is not a
prerequisite for addressing female passivity and objectification, it does render the issue
explicit.
Feminist readings of fairy tales in the 1970s set themselves apart from earlier
approaches in that they shed light on gender politics within these stories – an aspect that
previous structuralist interpretations of fairy tales did not address. Second-wave
feminists, those who first turned their attention to the fairy tale, propagated a binary
framework. Their aim was to identify sexual differences and affirm oppositions, like
active/passive, subject/object, hero/princess.
Beginning in the 1980s and 90s, however, third-wave feminism rejected the
binary model inherent to second-wave methodology and introduced a new theory of
subjectivity. Instead of considering the subject in terms of opposition, third-wave
feminists endorsed a “melting of boundaries”3 whereby the new, non-unitary subject
was conceived in terms of hybridization. This new approach prioritized the individual
experience of each woman rather than universalistic statements about all women.4 In
feminist theory, the binary model ceased to be considered an adequate methodological
approach.
It is our conviction that this binary framework should be replaced in fairy tale
scholarship, as well. In the domain of fairy tale studies, the application of third-wave
methodology has been limited; for the most part, it has served to shed light on female
fairy tale authors from the seventeenth-century onwards that had previously been
unknown, and to introduce contemporary feminist authors and their subversive
rewritings of classical tales. However, analyses of gender politics in the classical male-
authored versions of the Sleeping Beauty tale have generally heralded the same
interpretations as over sixty years ago: Sleeping Beauty has critically remained passive.

3 Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2002, p. 129. Kindle edition.
4 Ibid., Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist
Theory, New York: Columbia University Press, 2011, p. 156.
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