The headline: In The Original Sleeping Beauty, The King Is A Sexual Harasser Who Forces Himself On The Princess
My thoughts:
I guess this brings up the question of what constitutes the “original” of a fairy tale. Most people would say the Brothers Grimm versions are the original, but the Grimms were editors (at times quite heavy-handed editors) of stories, some of which had been in circulation hundreds of year prior. The versions cited in the article above predate the Grimm’s collection by 150 years. And that is just he written variants available to scholars. And yes, the early 1800’s versions by the Grimms are pretty sanitized. The Grimm’s were essentially moralists, and their works, while first published for adults, quickly found their audience among children. Subsequent editions were shaped specifically for that audience. Meanwhile the 1600’s and 1700’s variants of the tales are a lot coarser in every dimension – more violent, more frank about sexuality altogether, and unshy about sexual violence. Clearly the audience for those tales was not children. Disney was not the first re-teller to soften the edges.
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