Have you ever
stopped to wonder why is a spindle used to put the sleeping curse on the
princess in the Sleeping Beauty stories? It is a bit curious, since knowing how
to spin wool into yarn is not a skill that is required of a princess, so her
interactions with the spinning wheel and spindle would have been minimal in her
lifetime. For the time period that this story is deeply rooted in, this
practical skill would have been beneath someone of royal blood. Even current
adaptations of these stories show that a princess’s important attributed are
more frivolous. Rika Tóth states although these high-born “heroines are not
without talent – they play musical instrument, compose poetry, and draw – these
talents do not have the slightest practical use.” So why does the spindle
become the object of choice? Could it be that it is a critique of the noble
woman’s lack of practicality other than producing an heir?
The association
of the spindle with domesticity comes from early traditions where families would
sit by the hearth and listen to the grandmother's tale, which is spun like the
fibers of the very yarn she is making. However, this association with the happy
family is lost when one puts it in context of Sleeping Beauty, who is subjugated
by this weapon. Not only is this an intrusion on the domestic space, but it is also
an imposition on the female identity. Domesticity and the identity of a mother
are seen as confinement that trap women into a mold and rob them of any other
way of life, reducing them to mere productive or reproductive units. This is
especially true of the noblewomen who had no practical skills to sustain an
independent lifestyle.
One only needs
to stop and look at the phallic shape of the spindle to further associate the
creation of a forced domestic identity with an encroachment on a woman’s right
to choose what she wishes to do with her body and with her life. The ignorant
princess is unaware of the dangers the spindle possesses and is tricked into
pricking her finger. This pricking and the bleeding that ensues can be read as
a figurative rape of the naïve girl. In an allegorical reading, it can also
represent the forced conformity to a domestic identity for women. While this
type of violation on the female body is often associated with patriarchal
power, it a woman who instigates the “rape” of the princess in this story.
But why would a
woman choose to subjugate a young girl?
The fairy or
witch who curses the princess does so, in most retellings, because she is insulted
that she did not receive an invitation to the celebration of the baby’s birth
while the other fairies did. In more recent retellings, there is some attempt
at justifying the reason for this exclusion. The Grimm Brothers wrote that the
King chose to invite 12 out of the 12 “Wise Women” in the kingdom because “he
had only twelve golden plates for them to eat out of.” Charles Perrault writes
that for the baby’s christening “all the fairies that could be found in the
realm (they numbered seven in all) were invited to be godmothers to the little
princess,” but then during the ceremony an aged fairy enters, “whom no one had
thought to invite—the reason being that for more than fifty years she had never
quitted the tower in which she lives, and the people had supposed her to be
dead or bewitched.” Disney’s adaptation of Sleeping
Beauty implies Maleficent was not invited because she was evil and in their
latest movie release, Maleficent has a dark history with the king. In each of
these cases, the exclusion that the uninvited guest experiences implies she
does not belong at the celebration of new life and new family.
Deemed unfit to
join the family celebration, the dark fairy/witch is excluded from having a
domestic relationship with the rest of the kingdom. So it makes sense that she
chooses a spindle to carry out her curse: Not only is it a symbol of the
domestic identity of women, but it also represents a tradition of
disempowerment that is passed down from mother to daughter through the simple
act of storytelling. Repeated tales of passive women who fulfill their gender
roles provide no real value to women who wish for a life other than the
domestic. Instead, these women are marked as abject and deemed unfit to join
society due to their non-normativity. With this frame of mind, we can see that the
fairy/witch is actually cursing the princess for her inclusion in the domestic space with the item that is used in reference to the domesticated woman.
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