Perrault’s “Sleeping Beauty”

The phenomenology of historical thinking

Charles Perrault was fascinated by the twin topics of time and story. He was a French writer who lived in the Seventeenth Century. He was also member of the French Academy who played a central role in “The Debate Between the Ancients and the Moderns”; while some members of the Academy argued that the ancient Greek and Roman classics were better than anything written by later writers, Perrault took the side of the Moderns and said recent literature was just as good as the classics. Out of this controversy came Perrault’s four-volume work Parallels Between the Ancients and Moderns (Parallèle des anciens et des Modernes).

Perrault’s fairy tale “Sleeping Beauty” (“La Belle au Bois Dormant”) first appeared in Perrault’s Histories, or Stories of Times Past, with Morals (Histoires ou contes du temps passé) and published in 1697. The title is significant. Perrault not only offers “Stories of Times Past,” but “Histories with Morals.” The implication is that we look into the…