The Sleeping Beauty Trilogy is a series of three novels written by American author Anne Rice under the pseudonym of A. N. Roquelaure. The trilogy comprises The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, Beauty's Punishment and Beauty's Release, first published individually in 1983, 1984 and 1985 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. The trilogy was a bestseller, outearning the author's commercially successful first novel Interview with the Vampire.[1]
In 1994, the abridged audio versions of the 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, well known for her role in the ABC situation comedy Bewitched, as Beauty and Michael Diamond as Tristan, and Beauty's Release was 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][4]
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,[5] and most of the reviews for Cry to Heaven were so savagely negative that Rice felt devastated.[6] 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.[7] 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".[7] To gain a creative freedom for the new work, Rice adopted the nom de plume A.N. Roquelaure from the French word Roquelaure, referring to a cloak worn by men in the 18th-century Europe.[7][8] Rice came out as the author of the trilogy only sometime during the 1990s.[9]
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.[10]
The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty
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 adventurous 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 along while her master weeps.
Theme
See also: Sleeping Beauty
Sleeping Beauty by Edward Frederick Brewtnall
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.[11] Some versions of the tale have Beauty raped and pregnant while sleeping, and only waking up after childbirth.[12] The child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim commented that the tale "abounds with Freudian symbolism"[13] 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.[14] Feminist theorists have focused on Sleeping Beauty's extreme passivity and the sexual nature of her awakening in the fairy tale.[11][15] 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.[11] 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".[16]
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.[17] 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 the humankind.[17] 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".[16]
Author Anne Rice
Country United States
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
Media type Print, audiobook
Pages The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty: 253 pp
ISBN The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty: ISBN 0-452-26656-4 (1983 hardcover and trade paper editions)
Beauty's Punishment: ISBN 0-525-48458-2
Beauty's Release: ISBN 0-452-26663-7
OCLC Number 22915205
other 2 books will follow in next 2 days,thanx and enjoy!