The Sleeping Beauty Metaphor in The Marriage Plot

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The Sleeping Beauty Metaphor in The Marriage Plot

“She was frightened to ask Leonard what his secret fantasy was. But in a spirit of reciprocity, a day or so later, she did ask. Leonard’s fantasy was the inverse of hers. He wanted a sleeping girl, a sleeping beauty. He wanted her to pretend to be asleep when he snuck in her room and climbed into bed. He wanted her to be limp and bed-warmed while he pulled off her nightclothes and to not even fully come to consciousness until he was inside her, at which point he was so excited he didn't seem to care what she did” (Eugenides 349).

This passage comes from The Marriage Plot, written by Jeffrey Eugenides. The protagonist, Madeleine Hanna, takes on a very passive role throughout the novel and achieves a poor character arc because of her codependent personality. Instead of being an individual in and of herself she waits and thinks about the men in her life never taking on an active role. She identifies with the heroines of the 19^th century and loves Victorian literature, but other than that we don’t learn much about her as a character because her development doesn’t seem important. I will argue that this book is phallocentric and that the use of the sleeping beauty trope is meant to signify not only Madeleine and Leonard’s negative relationship, but also the way fairy tales highlight traits of passivity, vulnerability, and beauty on young girls.

I selected the passage above principally because of the sleeping beauty reference. The first thing I want to point out is that fairy tales stress women's passiveness and beauty as highly important and they are “gendered scripts” that serve to legitimize and “support the dominant gender system” (Baker-Sperry and Grauerholz) which is in fact phallocentric.

There are many versions of Sleeping Beauty, and no one knows which was the original one, however, the version by Giambattista Basile – an Italian author of the sixteen-hundreds – seems to be the earliest written version I could identify. The story was titled Sole, Luna, e Talia. In this telling, the princess – Talia – pricks her finger and falls in a death-like slumber, and a passing-by king (who through time and retellings becomes the young Prince Philip in the Disney movie kids love) takes advantage of the young sleeping beauty by “having gathered the fruits of love” (Travers 86) and then leaves and forgets of the affair. Nine months later, Talia gives birth to two children but doesn’t wake up until one of them, whilst searching for her breast, begins to suckle on her finger thus removing the splinter lodged under her nail that made her sleep. She wakes to discover she’s had two kids and doesn’t know how (Travers). The story continues, but this is the part that I found to be the most important.

Through some research on the various sleeping beauties over time, I’ve come to realize that Madeleine is The Marriage Plot’s version of sleeping beauty. Like Briar Rose, Madeleine is barely worthy of the protagonist title. Comparing the Aurora character to Madeleine, they both have no character other than being the ideal type of girl all men pine for (Madeleine is in a love triangle, and Aurora is a princess in need of saving). They both are considered to be a prize – an object if we may – that other characters fight over (Madeleine has Leonard and Mitchell; Aurora has the prince and Maleficent or evil fairy). They also don’t have any agency in the story, they go with what happens to them, not what they do for themselves (Briar Rose sleeps the whole time, and Madeleine allows Leonard, and her love for him, to control her life to the point where she misses her own graduation).

Roots of prejudice against women are embedded in Western culture as we can see with the sleeping beauty story dating back to the seventeenth century (Bressler). Rape is not about the act of pleasure; it is about achieving power and control over the other. I believe that Leonard’s lack of control in his mental health causes him to feel more aroused through the act of being with someone who is sleeping because he is in control of what he can do to them without them fighting back. Thus, Leonard is already dating a version of the sleeping beauty he is aroused by. The simple difference is that Madeleine is physically awake, although her unconscious state isn’t much different from her conscious one since her passivity causes her not to live for herself but for the whims of the man in her life.

Western culture has always had a phallocentric and patriarchal approach to literature by preferring male writers over female – to the point where women had to go under male pseudonyms to be published – and by creating female characters to satisfy the male’s imagination. This recurring theme is found in The Marriage Plot through the way Madeleine is developed and described as a character. She is described as being intelligent and ambivalent, however, her character depth only goes as far as the love triangle’s boundaries. There is no depth in her character compared to Leonard’s or Mitchell’s. Even in the description of her sexual encounters we can see that her character isn’t all that important; we have the males jerk off with strong imageries multiple times throughout the novel:

“He imagined going to her apartment and finding her alone, and soon she was on her knees in front of him, taking him into her mouth. Mitchell felt guilty for fantasizing about his friend’s girlfriend but not guilty enough to stop. He didn't like what his fantasy of Claire on her knees in front of him said about him, so next he imagined himself generously going down on her, making her come like she'd never come before. At this point he came himself. He turned on to his side, dripping onto the hotel carpet.

Almost immediately, the tip of his penis felt cold and he shook it one last time and fell back into bed, desolate” (Eugenides 162).

While even Madeleine’s description of her genitals is lacking the sexual tension that we see in the male’s:

“He started with her shoulders, moved to her feet and calves, came up her thighs, stopping just short of her you-know-what, and started on her arms”;

“When Leonard, naked now himself, undid the belt of her robe and opened it, when he pushed into her slowly, he was himself and not himself. He was a strange man taking possession of her and her familiar safety-safe boyfriend, all in one.” (Eugenides 349).

What I’d like to do is identify all the non-consensual acts and the poor female character arc developments in literature through the use of Digital Humanities to have a visual view of the sleeping beauty trope’s use and the amount of phallocentrism in literature through time. However, what I did find is the number of times the words "beauty and beautiful" was repeated through three versions of Sleeping Beauty thus proving my point of it being phallocentric. In conclusion, the continuous concentration around the male characters rather than the female protagonist, the lacking character development, and poor female descriptions makes me believe that The Marriage Plot is a phallocentric novel. While the sleeping beauty trope, on the other hand, stands for Madeleine and Leonard’s negative relationship to each other and their sexual lives, as well as the novel’s connection to the fairy tale’s forceful highlighting of the passivity of the female’s character.

References

Baker-Sperry, Lori and Liz Grauerholz. "The Pervasiveness and Persistence of the Feminine Beauty Ideal in Children's Fairy Tales." Gender and Society Vol. 17.No. 5 (2003): pp. 711-726. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/3594706>.

Bressler, Charles E. Literary Criticism, An Introduction to Theory and Practice. 5th. Pearson, 2003. print.

Chen, Vivien. "Cinderella, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty not the “Fairest” Anymore: The Role of the Feminine Beauty Ideal in Fairy Tales." (2011). <https://serendipstudio.org/exchange/vivien-chen/cinderella-snow-white-and-sleeping-beauty-not-%E2%80%9Cfairest%E2%80%9D-anymore-role-feminine-beauty-ide>.

Eugenides, Jeffrey. The Marriage Plot. 1st. New York: Picador Press, 2011. Paperback. <www.picadorusa.com/themarriageplot>.

Travers, Pamela L. About the Sleeping Beauty. McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1975. Hardcover.

Yue, Genevieve. "Two Sleeping Beauties." Film Quarterly Vol. 65.No. 3 (2012): pp. 33-37. PDF. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/fq.2012.65.3.33>.