About the Sleeping Beauty: P.L. Travers
Pamela Travers muses on six different versions of “Sleeping Beauty” (from The Nation)
By P. L. Travers. Illustrated by Charles Keeping
McGraw-Hill Book Co. 128 pp.
P.L. Travers, the author of Mary Poppins, has turned again to the figure of the wise woman in About the Sleeping Beauty. Like the myth of Persephone to which it can be linked, the story of the Sleeping Beauty is about spring and all that follows after the dormancy of winter, when the sun begins to ascend and all creatures and events are brought to fruition. Travers offers six versions of the tale (including her own) and each is a little different, each adjusts its particular message to what the Sufis call Zaman, Makhan, Ikhwan (the time, the place, and the people).
Travers’s own version is set in Gurdjieffan opulence and cast in terms of sultans, seneschals and suites. This tale of ascendancy begins with the long-wished-for birth of the Princess Rose, rises to the great day when the twelve fairies bless her and reaches a hiatus when the curse of the Thirteenth Fairy leads Rose to the spindle and the whole castle to The Deep Sleep: The tale rallies once more when the Prince joins it, finds his way to the Sufic center (qutub) of the castle, kisses the Princess and breaks the spell, and finally makes a husband for the Princess beyond her family’s highest hopes. The peripaties of the tale are so happy — and…
