Author | Anne Rice |
---|---|
Language | English |
Genre | Erotic novel |
Publisher | E. P. Dutton/Plume, New York, NY, U.S.A. |
Publication date | The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty: 1 March 1983 Beauty's Punishment: 26 March 1984 Beauty's Release: 3 June 1985 Beauty's Kingdom: 21 April 2015 |
Publication place | United States |
Media type | Print, audiobook |
Pages | The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty: 253 |
ISBN | 0-452-26656-4 (The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, 1983 hardcover and trade paper editions) ISBN 0-525-48458-2 (Beauty's Punishment) ISBN 0-452-26663-7 (Beauty's Release) ISBN 978-0-525-42799-5 (Beauty's Kingdom) |
OCLC | 22915205 |
The Sleeping Beauty Quartet is a series of four novels written by American author Anne Rice under the pseudonym of A. N. Roquelaure. The quartet comprises The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, Beauty's Punishment, Beauty's Release, and Beauty's Kingdom, first published individually in 1983, 1984, 1985, and 2015, respectively, in the United States. They are erotic BDSM novels set in a medieval fantasy world, loosely based on the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty . The novels describe explicit sexual adventures of the female protagonist Beauty and the male characters Alexi, Tristan, and Laurent, featuring both maledom and femdom scenarios amid vivid imageries of bisexuality, homosexuality, ephebophilia, and pony play. [1]
In 1994, the abridged audio versions of the first three books were published in cassette form. The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty was read by actress Amy Brenneman. Beauty's Punishment was read by Elizabeth Montgomery (known for her role in the ABC situation comedy Bewitched ) as Beauty with Michael Diamond as Tristan, and Beauty's Release was read by Montgomery with actor Christian Keiber reading as Laurent. [2] A compact disc version of the audiobooks was read by Genviere Bevier and Winthrop Eliot. [3]
After the success of Interview with the Vampire (1976), Anne Rice wrote two extensively researched historical novels, The Feast of All Saints (1979) and Cry to Heaven (1982). Neither of them gave her the critical acclaim or the commercial success of her first novel; the main complaints about The Feast of All Saints were that it was too heavy and dense to read easily, [4] and most of the reviews for Cry to Heaven were so savagely negative that Rice felt devastated. [5] She had been thinking about a story set during the time of Oscar Wilde for the next novel, but decided to abandon it and go back to the erotic writing she had explored in the 1960s. [6] Her idea was "to create a book where you didn't have to mark the hot pages" and "to take away everything extraneous, as much as could be done in a narrative". [6] To gain a creative freedom for the new work, Rice adopted the pen name A.N. Roquelaure from the French word roquelaure , referring to a cloak worn by men in the 18th-century Europe. [6] [7] Rice only finally came out as the author of the trilogy during the later 1990s.
The trilogy was written in the 1980s when many feminists denounced pornography as violation of women's rights, but Rice firmly believed that women should have the freedom to read and write whatever they pleased, and considered the trilogy her political statement. [8]
A fourth book in the series, Beauty's Kingdom , was published in April 2015. [9]
In the first chapter of the story, Beauty is awakened from her hundred-year sleep by the Prince, not with a kiss, but through copulation, initiating her into a Satyricon -like world of sexual adventures. After stripping her naked he takes her to his kingdom, ruled by his mother Queen Eleanor, where Beauty is trained as a slave and a plaything. The rest of the naked slaves, dozens of them, in the Queen's castle are princes and princesses sent by their royal parents from the surrounding kingdoms as tributes. In this castle they spend several years learning to become obedient and submissive sexual property, accepting being spanked and forced to have sex with nobles and slaves of both sexes, being publicly displayed and humiliated, and crawling around on their hands and knees like animals until they return to their own lands "being enhanced in wisdom."
In the castle Beauty meets another slave, Prince Alexi, with whom she copulates passionately. After that he tells her about the long rigorous journey he had in the castle. Alexi previously had been a stubborn prince who fought back all the attempts to break him, until the Queen sent him to the kitchen to have him tortured by crude kitchen servants. Alexi received such a savage and merciless punishment there that he began to lose his senses and, after some particularly humiliating training at the hands of a strong stable boy, Alexi became a totally surrendered slave, playing various sexual games at the Queen's commands.
The moral of Alexi's story notwithstanding, Beauty willfully disobeys, and the book closes with her being sentenced to brutal slavery in the neighboring village while her master weeps.
The second book starts as Beauty and another naked slave from the castle, Prince Tristan, are sold at auction in the village square. Beauty is purchased by the inn keeper Mistress Lockely while Tristan is bought by Nicholas, the Queen's chronicler. At Lockely's inn Beauty meets the Captain of the Guard, who forces her to pleasure him and then takes her to a drunken orgy with his soldiers. Tristan is bound and harnessed as a pony with a tail plugged in his rear, and made to pull Nicholas' cart while being whipped. When the cart arrives at an orchard, he is ordered to collect apples with his mouth, and trained to "satisfy" other human ponies in the stable. Afterward, Nicholas has Tristan paddled at the Public Turntable, which devastates the prince, and forcibly copulates with him in the bed.
The next day, after having made Tristan march through the crowded streets, which included a short but intense meeting with the Captain of the Guard, Nicholas asks Tristan a series of questions as to what makes a strong, highborn prince obey with such a complete submission. Tristan answers, after some hesitation, that he loves anyone who punishes him no matter how crude or lowly they are and desires the loss of his self amid all the punishments, eventually "becoming" the punishments himself. Nicholas is moved by the answer and, after a frantic intercourse, confesses to him that he is in love with Tristan.
Beauty witnesses the harsh punishment of a runaway slave, Prince Laurent, as he is bound to a wooden cross and the Captain whips him all over his muscular body, and later sees Tristan pulling a cart carrying Laurent in a penitential procession. Tristan begs Nicholas to be allowed to meet Beauty and they reunite in Nicholas' house. Beauty and Tristan copulate as Nicholas watches behind a one-way mirror. Suddenly, Arab soldiers raid the village and several naked slaves, including Beauty, Tristan, and Laurent, are kidnapped. The book closes as they are sent across the sea to serve in the palace of the Sultan.
The third book begins with the captured slaves' journey on the ship to the Sultan's realm. While being imprisoned in a cage, Laurent contemplates the recent punishments he received as a runaway on a wooden cross, recalling its pain, degradation and undeniable pleasure. After their arrival at the exotic land of the Sultan, the captured slaves are groomed by a group of young boys and examined by Lexius, the Sultan's steward. Beauty is taken to the harem and is mounted on the phallus of a bronze statue. She is then greeted by Inanna, one of the Sultan's wives, with whom she copulates and is shocked to discover that Inanna's clitoris has been surgically removed.
Laurent and Tristan are taken to an all-male sadomasochistic orgy, being mounted on a cross and whipped. However, in private, Laurent overpowers Lexius and rapes him. Afterward Laurent and Tristan are taken to the Sultan, made to perform a mutual fellatio on each other in his presence, and then the Sultan anally copulates with Laurent. Laurent and Tristan retire from the Sultan's bedroom and when they are beginning to train Lexius as their secret slave, a rescue team led by the Captain of the Guard arrives and Laurent takes Lexius with him to their ship along with Beauty and Tristan. During the last leg of the voyage, the Captain tells Beauty that she is to be released from her servitude because of her parents' demands and, to her great dismay, sent back home to get married: she hysterically protests, but to no avail.
Back at the castle, the Queen takes Lexius as her slave and sends him to the merciless kitchen servants who trained Prince Alexi earlier in the first book. She then sentences both Laurent and Tristan to the village stable for Laurent's rebelliousness and Tristan's failure to become a good slave. They are made to live and work as ponies, pulling all sorts of carts and drawing plows in the fields during the daytime, and having homosexual orgies with other human ponies at night. Tristan, as a pony, reunites with his former owner Nicholas on a temporary basis. However, Laurent's father unexpectedly dies and he is summoned back to his own kingdom against his wish, to become the new ruler. The book ends as Laurent marries Beauty, saying that they shall live happily ever after, or perhaps "a good deal happier" than anyone else could ever guess— thus hinting that they will continue the pleasure of dominance and submission with each other.
Twenty years after the events of Beauty's Release, Beauty and Laurent take over the throne following the death of Queen Eleanor and strive to continue the sensual surrender legacy of the kingdom, albeit now in a state of voluntary servitude.
The fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty has been analyzed by folklorists and other scholars of various types, and many of them have noticed prominent erotic elements of the story. Some versions of the tale have Beauty raped and pregnant while sleeping, and only waking up after childbirth. [10] The child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim commented that the tale "abounds with Freudian symbolism" [11] and that the princes who try to reach Sleeping Beauty before the appropriate time only to perish in the thorns surrounding her castle serves as a warning that premature sexual encounters are destructive. [12] Feminist theorists have focused on Sleeping Beauty's extreme passivity and the sexual nature of her awakening in the fairy tale. Anne Rice literalized these symbolic sexual elements—particularly, the passive sexual awakening or rape of Beauty that has been denounced by feminists—in the story by rewriting it into an explicit sadomasochistic erotica. However, Rice's cross-gender identification with the submissive male characters with receptive capacity in the trilogy—Alexi, Tristan and Laurent—enabled her to circumvent the equation of the female gender and masochism and, via their homoerotic interactions with the dominant male characters, she could exploit the erotic potential of phallic power while at the same time going beyond its boundary and "turning it against itself". [13]
Another foremost difference in Rice's rewriting is that the story takes Beauty to a series of far harsher trials after her period of extreme passivity in a coma-like sleep. [14] In the beginning of the first book, the Prince takes Beauty with her parents' consent, having persuaded them that, after completing the sexual servitude in his castle, the slaves emerge with "wisdom, patience, and self-discipline", as well as a full acceptance of their innermost desires and an understanding of the suffering of humankind. [14] Her royal parents, although saddened by the absence of their daughter, are promised that she will return "greatly enhanced in wisdom and beauty". However, this unconventional education in sexual hardship and liberation ends in a monogamous, patriarchal marriage between Beauty and Laurent. In the 1994 issue of Feminist Review , Professor Amalia Ziv of Ben-Gurion University described the trilogy as "definitely more of a comedy" when compared to darker BDSM novels such as Story of O , and commented that "like all comedies, it ends in marriage". [13]
The trilogy was a commercial success and gained a significant cult following. Rice was able to secure the publishing contract for her next erotic novel Exit to Eden (1985) with an advance of $35,000 (equivalent to $103,000in 2023) from Arbor House. [15] There were allegations that Rice was a dominatrix in real life since the trilogy deals with the BDSM practice so exclusively, but her husband, Stan Rice, replied that "she's no more sadomasochistic than she's a vampire". [16] When the director of the Columbus Metropolitan Library declared the trilogy "hardcore pornography" and removed all print and audiocassette copies from the library shelves in 1996, [17] Rice objected, arguing that the trilogy was "elegantly sensual" and harmless to readers. [17] The trilogy is included in the American Library Association's list of "100 most frequently challenged books" of the 1990s, with the term "challenge" defined in American literature as "an attempt to remove or restrict materials, based upon the objections of a person or group". [18]
Professor Linda Badley of Middle Tennessee State University wrote in her 1996 book Writing Horror and the Body on the trilogy, that rewriting the myth of Sleeping Beauty as sadomasochistic fantasies enabled Anne Rice to explore "liminal areas of experience that could not be articulated in conventional literature, extant pornography, or politically correct discourse". [19]
It was announced in September 2014 that Televisa U.S.A had obtained the rights to adapt the trilogy into a television series. Rice was to serve as executive producer alongside Rachel Winter, producer of the film Dallas Buyers Club . Winter had previously approached Rice in 2012 regarding such plans that did not materialize at the time. [20] As of 2016 [update] , the series was still in early development.
Bondage, in the BDSM subculture, is the practice of consensually tying, binding, or restraining a partner for erotic, aesthetic, or somatosensory stimulation. A partner may be physically restrained in a variety of ways, including the use of rope, cuffs, bondage tape, or self-adhering bandage.
"Snow White" is a German fairy tale, first written down in the early 19th century. The Brothers Grimm published it in 1812 in the first edition of their collection Grimms' Fairy Tales, numbered as Tale 53. The original German title was Sneewittchen; the modern spelling is Schneewittchen. The Grimms completed their final revision of the story in 1854, which can be found in the 1857 version of Grimms' Fairy Tales.
"Sleeping Beauty", also titled in English as The Sleeping Beauty in the Woods, is a fairy tale about a princess cursed by an evil fairy to sleep for a hundred years before being awakened by a handsome prince. A good fairy, knowing the princess would be frightened if alone when she wakes, uses her wand to put every living person and animal in the palace and forest asleep, to awaken when the princess does.
The role of sadism and masochism in fiction has attracted serious scholarly attention. Anthony Storr has commented that the volume of sadomasochist pornography shows that sadomasochistic interest is widespread in Western society; John Kucich has noted the importance of masochism in late-19th-century British colonial fiction. This article presents appearances of sadomasochism in literature and works of fiction in the various media.
"Bluebeard" is a French folktale, the most famous surviving version of which was written by Charles Perrault and first published by Barbin in Paris in 1697 in Histoires ou contes du temps passé. The tale tells the story of a wealthy man in the habit of murdering his wives and the attempts of the present one to avoid the fate of her predecessors. "The White Dove", "The Robber Bridegroom", and "Fitcher's Bird" are tales similar to "Bluebeard". The notoriety of the tale is such that Merriam-Webster gives the word Bluebeard the definition of "a man who marries and kills one wife after another". The verb bluebearding has even appeared as a way to describe the crime of either killing a series of women, or seducing and abandoning a series of women.
The Evil Queen, also called the Wicked Queen or just the Queen, is a fictional character and the main antagonist of "Snow White", a German fairy tale recorded by the Brothers Grimm; similar stories exist worldwide. Other versions of the Queen appear in subsequent adaptations and continuations of the fairy tale, including novels and films. A particularly notable version is Disney's depiction, sometimes known as Queen Grimhilde. The character has also become an archetype that has inspired unrelated works.
Princess and dragon is an archetypical premise common to many legends, fairy tales, and chivalric romances. Northrop Frye identified it as a central form of the quest romance.
In fairy tales, a fairy godmother is a fairy with magical powers who acts as a mentor or parent to someone, in the role that an actual godparent was expected to play in many societies. In Perrault's "Cinderella", he concludes the tale with the moral that no personal advantages will suffice without proper connections.
"The Frog Prince; or, Iron Henry" is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm and published in 1812 in Grimm's Fairy Tales. Traditionally, it is the first story in their folktale collection. The tale is classified as Aarne-Thompson type 440.
Sleeping Beauty is a classic fairy tale.
The Wicked fairy is the antagonist of Sleeping Beauty. In some adaptations, she is known as Carabosse. The most notable adaptation of the character is Maleficent, a Disney villain who appeared in various Disney media, beginning with the 1959 Walt Disney film Sleeping Beauty.
The Young Slave is an Italian literary fairy tale written by Giambattista Basile in his 1634 work, the Pentamerone.
BDSM is a frequent theme in culture and media, including in books, films, television, music, magazines, public performances and online media.
Anne Rice was an American author of gothic fiction, erotic literature, and Bible fiction. She is best known for writing The Vampire Chronicles. She later adapted the first volume in the series into a commercially successful eponymous film, Interview with the Vampire (1994).
Fairy Tales, released in the UK as Adult Fairy Tales, is a 1978 sex comedy directed by Harry Hurwitz, the plot of which revolves around the stereotypical fairy tale.
Sleeping Beauty is a 1987 American/Israeli fantasy film, part of the 1980 film series Cannon Movie Tales. It is directed by David Irving and stars Tahnee Welch, Morgan Fairchild, Nicholas Clay and Sylvia Miles. It is a contemporary version of the classic tale of Sleeping Beauty of the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault. Like the other Cannon Movie Tales, the film was filmed entirely in Israel.
Beauty and the Beast is a 2014 romantic fantasy film based on the traditional fairy tale of the same name by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve. Written by Christophe Gans and Sandra Vo-Anh and directed by Gans, the film stars Léa Seydoux as Belle and Vincent Cassel as the Beast.
The New Adventures of Snow White is a 1969 West German sex comedy film directed by Rolf Thiele and starring Marie Liljedahl, Eva Reuber-Staier, and Ingrid van Bergen. The film puts an erotic spin on three classic fairy tales Snow White, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. It exemplified the downturn in the career of Thiele who earlier in the decade had still been a mainstream director, but increasingly found himself making lower-budget sex comedies.