#it could be something that appears frequently perhaps? Just like many spies have code names related to the different times of day 🤔

[allgirlsareprincesses]

More Quest for the Lost Bride: Sleeping Beauty in Star Wars

For my (hopefully) final installment in my series on Aarne-Thompson-Uther folktale types in Star Wars, I’d like to talk about ATU-410: The Sleeping Beauty. This is a subtype of ATU-400: The Quest for the Lost Bride, and includes both the popular European stories of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, and dozens of similar tales from around the world. Whereas the typical Lost Bride story ends with the tragic and permanent loss of the fairy wife, this variation usually has a happy ending by way of a simple twist: the bride is not actually dead, but in a death-like sleep, from which she can be awakened after a certain time by her true and faithful husband. This fairy tale has frequently been interpreted as a story of feminine sexual maturation as much as one of masculine conquest.

**Trigger warning for mention of sexual assault in next paragraph**

The features of the story are familiar enough: a good and pure princess (as beauty is used to indicate goodness) is cursed or pursued by an evil, jealous character. A father figure in her life often tries to protect her, either by hiding her away or by attempting to remove the threat, but his efforts fail and the princess eventually falls into a death-like sleep. This often occurs after distinctive sexual initiation imagery such as the pricking with a spindle, or the biting of a poisoned apple (the forbidden fruit, or Persephone’s fruit of the Underworld). As she slumbers, the heroine is arrayed as a bride, surrounded by flowers and sometimes placed in a glass coffin to display her pure beauty. The princess then sleeps for a time: often years, sometimes centuries, until a hero appears to awaken her. Though it is famously a kiss which revives the princess, sometimes all that is required is for the right man (her soulmate) to appear, and sometimes.... her savior is not a very good person at first, and he rapes her while she sleeps and then leaves her, as in Sun, Moon, and Talia.

This prince or peasant usually finds the sleeping beauty in a castle buried in a dense forest, or sometimes in a deep cavern. Often, the story ends with a marriage feast after the awakening of the mythical bride, but sometimes there is another enemy to contend with. The hero may have a cruel wife or an ogress mother who jealously tries to have the princess and her children murdered and prepared for her to eat them, and the husband must recognize the villain for what she is and rescue his family. Similarly, the husband must acknowledge his own transgressions, which often occurs in the moment when he believes his family is dead and that this tragedy is his fault. In these stories, the hero proves himself worthy of his bride well after he has awakened her from her slumber.

In Star Wars, Anakin and Padme’s marriage is forbidden, but they pursue their hidden passion anyway. As it aligns with the myth, it seems that sexual initiation has doomed this new bride. When a prophetic dream of his wife’s death haunts Anakin’s sleep, he turns to the Dark Side to protect her. Though Obi-Wan Kenobi tries to save her, Padme dies, and is mourned in a massive state funeral where she is arrayed with delicate flowers in her hair, looking every bit the sleeping princess. Anakin, now Darth Vader, then spends the rest of his life attempting to reunite with his wife or revive her from death. Alas, he does not succeed, but his quest has perhaps been carried on by his grandson....

The Sequel Trilogy is MUCH more heavy-handed with the fairy tale imagery, courtesy of JJ Abrams, at first. The first hint of Sleeping Beauty is really to be found in the title of Episode VII: The Force Awakens. As many have pointed out before, much of both TFA and The Last Jedi can be read as Rey’s sexual awakening, beginning with her finding the phallic symbol of the Skywalker legacy, Anakin’s lightsaber. When she touches it, visions of past and future doom assail her, and she is next under apparent threat as Han and Finn try to protect her.

If you subscribe to the reincarnation theory that Rey is some version of Padme, then this can be viewed as the Sleeping Beauty’s awakening. All the features are there: Rey’s power has remained dormant for most of her life, and she has been living in a literal graveyard on a dead planet and is therefore metaphorically dead or sleeping. Then, the hero approaches her at a castle in a wood, and carries her away bridal-style in the first of several “marriage” scenes. As I mentioned in my original Search for the Lost Husband post, the witch-mother in these stories is the Dark Side in Star Wars, and those dark-siders who exert an evil influence on the hero, Ben Solo.

However, this sequence could also be viewed as the beginning of Rey’s own Sleeping Beauty narrative, independent of Padme. Here, rather than the lightsaber-phallus awakening Rey from her slumber, it is the sexual initiation that causes her to fall asleep in the first place. This is even more direct when Kylo Ren places his own lightsaber in her face, then uses the Force to put her to sleep immediately after. Whereas it was the monster who put her to sleep, when Rey wakes on Starkiller Base, it is Ben Solo’s face she sees, leaning in close as if for a kiss. Again, her sexual desire is awakened, just as happens to Sleeping Beauty when she wakes to her true bridegroom.

Now the cycle of the princess sleeping and being awakened by the prince starts to repeat. In stories, sleep is often used as a metaphor for lying to oneself or refusing to acknowledge the truth, and this is something we know Rey does because Ben calls her on it repeatedly in The Last Jedi. Her power and desire might be awakened, but Rey’s mind and heart continue to sleep. A second time in the story, Rey wakes up from sleep to see Ben Solo, and promptly tries to shoot him (which interestingly has its origin in the Grimm tale The Glass Coffin, where the princess shot her captor with a pistol before falling into an enchanted sleep). After several more encounters with him, she descends into a cavern where she is forced to confront the truth, or at least part of it. Emerging from the cave with her newfound understanding, she has yet another sexually-coded encounter with the one who awakened her.

The cycle repeats once again, with even more distinctive imagery: After touching a man skin-to-skin and wielding that family phallus again in his defense, Rey ships herself to her prince in a glass coffin, referencing the tale of the same name linked above, and the more famous Snow White. When the pod opens, signifying her “waking,” she again sees Ben Solo’s face, and has another sexually-charged interaction with him in the elevator. Each of these sleeping and waking episodes can also be viewed as a death and rebirth, or perhaps the death of the old childish way and the birth of the mature adult. However, this time, when she awakens to the full truth about her family, there is no going back. Rey has almost fully matured and will not fall asleep again.

So, will this folktale type continue to appear in The Rise of Skywalker, or have we seen the last of it? The answer, I believe, lies in the tale that is thought to be the first of the Sleeping Beauty stories: The Ninth Captain’s Tale, from One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. As I mentioned in my previous post, some stories begin as The Quest for the Lost Bride, and then when the bride is found, the perspective shifts from husband to wife and the story becomes The Search for the Lost Husband. The Ninth Captain’s Tale is a perfect example of this. Early in the story, the fair Sittukhan falls in love with a sultan’s son, who then falls dangerously ill from love. A wise old woman offers to form a “bond” between him and his ladylove, causing Sittukhan to prick herself with a splinter of flax and fall into a deathlike sleep. Her family places her on an ivory bed in the middle of a river, and it is there that the lovesick sultan’s son finds her and draws out the flax splinter, waking her. They make love for forty days and forty nights and live happily ever after.

NO, NOPE, WAIT! That might be the end of the Quest for the Lost Bride but there’s still the Search for the Lost Husband. Sittukhan, like Psyche, decides she wants to see her husband’s true self, so she follows and spies on him. Feeling betrayed, the sultan’s son flees, and his bride is left weeping over her loss. Fortunately, she finds a magical ring, and wishes for a palace next to that of her prince, and a disguise of great beauty. Her wish is granted, and the sultan’s son does not recognize her, but still desires her and begs her to be his bride. Sittukhan tells him that if he would have her, he must feign death, be wrapped in burial cloths, and paraded in a funeral procession to a place of rest. The prince does all these things, and then the heroine finds him and unwraps him, waking him and revealing herself as his true bride. The sultan’s son recognizes her, and THEN they live happily ever after.

The lovely thing about this story is that it ends with the lovers as equals. Having died herself, Sittukhan demands that her lover die as well. Not because she wishes him ill, of course, but because it is an act of supreme humility. As we say in Catholic theology, this is “dying to self” so that one might live for another. Both husband and wife experience their own death and rebirth, both fail and betray but are forgiven, and their happiness in the end is completely earned. The heroine is not the passive character so often derided in these stories, but the equal of the hero. He awakened her, and then she awakened him. So, will the last Skywalker “rise” from his slumber into the arms of his beloved? Well DUH We shall see!