1. Briar Rose
Briar Rose by Jane Yolen is a heart-wrenching story of Sleeping Beauty intertwined with the horrors of World War II. The novel contains all the elements of the classic Sleeping Beauty: the castle, thorns, princess, and a tale of death and awakening from eternal sleep. Yolen compared a story that fictitiously occurred during World War II with Sleeping Beauty, which allowed one of the main characters, Gitl Mandelstein, to indirectly tell her horrifying experiences during the war. .
The story beings with Gitl, or Gemma (as she is referred to by her granddaughters), in a nursing home. Her granddaughters Silvia, Shauna, and Becca went to visit her, for she was on her deathbed. She began telling them the story of Sleeping Beauty, a story which she had told them throughout their childhood, although this time was different. She told her grandchildren that she was in fact Briar Rose. Gemma did not go into detail, but made her granddaughter Becca promise to discover everything about her past. This is shown in the following quote: ""Promise me you will find the castle. Promise me you will find the prince. Promise me you will find the maker of the spells"" (Yolen 20). Soon after, Gitl died. .
Throughout Briar Rose Yolen depicts Becca's struggles to uncover the truth about her Gemma's connection to Sleeping Beauty. She had so many unanswered questions. Was her Gemma a princess? Did she live in a castle? Who was her prince? The only thing Gitl had left behind was a small box of papers with very few answers. Becca did end up finding all her answers from a man named Josef, who had actually known and interacted with Gitl. .
After a trip to Poland to speak with Josef, Becca figured out that the fairy tale her grandmother told was in fact a tale of horror. The castle Gitl described to her grandchildren was in fact an extermination camp, Chelmno. The thicket of thorns which surrounded the castle in which the princess slept represented the barbed wire that surrounded the camp.
*Briar Rose is the story of the Holocaust intertwined with the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty. This story takes place in the present time. *The story begins with the death of the Gemma, the grandmother of Becca. Throughout Becca*s life Gemma told the story of Sleeping Beauty many times to her. Now,...
... any society, than from any other type of story within a child's comprehension" (Bettelheim, 5). For instance, in the Grimm Brother's fairy tale, "Briar Rose," one can visualize the implications within the story in regards to how they relate to reality. Such as, the common trend of a young girl's ... sleeping princess whom he awakened with his kiss. Along with the sleeping princess, the whole kingdom awoke and preparations for the marriage began. Within "Briar Rose" many classic symbols exist. Symbols or symbolism, according to the Hindu philosopher Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, is "the art of ...
... Holocaust mystery - within a romance - within a compelling fairy tale - within a novel which will fascinate young as well as adult readers of all ages. Briar Rose is an unusual and poignant novel. It uses the fairy tale motif as both a thematic underpinning and as transitional material. But it is also said the ... the prince that woke the sleeping beauty, and Josef's mouth-to-mouth resuscitation of Gemma. All "kisses" represent a potentially happy future. Briar Rose resembles the original fairytales in that it is not merely a fantasy, but also an exploration of the dark side of human nat...
... , but runs away from home to escape the incestuous intentions of her own father, which is no doubt why the story is little-known today. Sleeping Beauty Sleeping Beauty, or Briar Rose in the Grimms' telling, endures more hardships than a pleasant hundred years' sleep in her earlier incarnations. The version told by the Brothers Grimm, ending with the Princess being awakened by ... in Perrault's version seems less explicable than Basile's, even if more moral. It is not really surprising that the Grimms chose to cut out this element altogether, and concerntrate on Briar Rose's enchantment, ...
... the pain and sorrow of the spoiled blackberries that comes near the end of the poem. Heaney uses elegant words such as briar, byre, and cache. Briar is a bush that has a thorny or prickly, woody stem. The blackberry and the wild rose are often briars. Brye is a barn. Cache is a hiding place for food. All these words seem to be rather formal. The ... ...
... , there is an innocent woman in some random castle, who didn't know spindles were outlawed, and in Perrault there is some ambiguously evil mother-in-law, who tries to eat Briar-Rose's baby while her husband is off at war. In fact, Disney leaves out the whole aftermath of Prince Charming and Sleeping Beauty's marriage, so the movie can end on a "happily ... ...