In Sleeping Beauty's Bed Read online




  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  PREFACE

  Introduction

  CINDERELLA

  THE MAGIC MUNTR

  THE GOBLIN OF ADACHIGAHARA

  RAPUNZEL

  THE SWINEHERD

  THE SHOES THAT WERE DANCED TO PIECES

  THE EBONY HORSE

  MICHEL MICHELKLEINER’S GOOD LUCK

  PUNISHED PRIDE

  A TALE OF THE PARROT

  LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD

  THE TRAVELING COMPANION

  THE TURNIP

  THE SLEEPING BEAUTY

  THE TWELVE MONTHS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Copyright Page

  Praise for In Sleeping Beauty’s Bed

  “Making their way into the spotlight again, classic fairy tale characters like Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty, just to name a few, are brought back to life in Mitzi Szereto’s delightful collection of erotic fairy tales. Mitzi takes these stories back to their roots and re-creates them with an intriguing mixture of humor, satire, and wit. I particularly like the way she preserved the tale’s original disposition, giving a mysterious, Eastern flair to stories like ‘The Goblin of Adachigahara’ and ‘The Magic Muntr.’ Deserving a write up all their own, the bonus introductions written for each story were a brilliant touch. Mitzi relates the history of her fairy tales in fascinating detail. As with her stories, this background information is delivered in Mitzi’s clever and humorous, tongue-in-cheek manner, which is a real pleasure to experience. In her romp through the classics, Mitzi Szereto breathes life into even the most ancient tales dating back to a time before recorded history. Fairy tale lovers will definitely want to add her rousingly fun and entertaining book to their collection.

  —Nancy Madore, author of Enchanted:

  Erotic Bedtime Stories for Women

  “Opens whole new perspectives into the lands and lusts of fairy tales. After reading this enchanting book, you might wish to read bedside tales to adults, rather than mere children…”

  —Maxim Jakubowski, editor of The Mammoth Book of New Erotica

  “Szereto explains that the sexual content of most fairy tales was deleted by the likes of the Brothers Grimm to make them more family-friendly. Instead of researching and restoring the original erotic elements of each tale, however, the author chose to work from the clean versions and eroticize them as she saw fit, making the stories her own. The writing is sometimes uneven, as she attempts to maintain an antiquated fairy-tale narration but includes some modern phrases. While some of her rewrites take the obvious route (the above-mentioned shoe fetishism of ‘Cinderella’), each story contains some surprising new aspects, and none seems clichéd or unoriginal. The results, in fact, are sexy and often quite humorous. Rapunzel, for example, becomes a ‘rapstress,’ enticing a horseman with her rhymes. The tales chosen by Szereto, who has published four volumes of erotica under the pen name M.S. Valentine, are quite diverse, and she includes an introduction explaining the origin and history of each. Enthusiastically recommended.”

  —Library Journal

  PREFACE

  TOBSHA LEARNER

  If you were one of those children who always suspected there was something else lurking beneath the bedcovers of Red Riding Hood’s grandmother’s bed after the Wolf had eaten her, or that Sleeping Beauty’s kiss might be just a little bit naughtier than mom described, or that Cinderella’s shoe isn’t simply a shoe or that it isn’t just a magic wand extends when rubbed—this is the book for you.

  Mitzi Szereto has put together a wonderfully salacious and extremely well-researched collection of fairy tales we will all recognize—however, her scintillating interpretations we will find far more exciting than the censored Grimm’s versions.

  Szereto’s introductions to each fairy tale are not only very well researched but also trace both the cultural and literary evolutions of these stories which have now taken their places as Jungian archetypes in the global zeitgeist. Because of this I would also be audacious enough to argue that the book has its place on academic shelves as well as the drawer in the bedside table (and would make very entertaining reading for the bored research student!).

  Who would have guessed that Cinderella was originally based on a Chinese fable dating from the ninth century and is as much an ode to small foot fetishists as a warning about abusive stepmothers? Or that Sleeping Beauty was a medieval metaphor about sexual awakening? I particularly liked the way Szereto has mixed very well known fairy tales with lesser known ones—some of which have more exotic heritages like “The Goblin of Adachigahara,” a Japanese morality tale about the misadventures of a traveling preacher who encounters a kind of female Bluebeard with a penchant for S/M and beautiful, young religiously earnest men. Or the very naughty “Ebony Horse,” which is a version of one of the stories from The Arabian Nights that puts a whole new spin on the veil.

  There are tantalizing literary echoes for the book reader as well as the seeker of pleasure, such as the echoes of Chaucer in the story entitled “The Twelve Months.” (In “The Merchant’s Tale” from The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer has a particular reference to a marriage between the old blind knight January and his young wife May, who eventually cuckolds him in the branches of a pear tree with a young squire until Pluto, God of the underworld, takes pity and blesses the old man with sight—just as the infidelity is reaching a climax). Szereto’s use of the months and their appendages is somewhat perverted by comparison! And for the lovers of large vegetables we have “The Turnip”—a fable in which a humble man is both blessed and cursed by an ever-growing member; Jack and his beanstalk never had it so good. And how can one resist the echoes of Voltaire’s Candide in the hapless but highly eroticized debauchery of the simple, orphaned youth in “Michel Michelkleiner’s Good Luck”—a fairy tale based on an obscure folktale from Luxembourg?

  As for the prose itself, Szereto manages to balance an innocent bawdiness with an erotic implicitness. She has also created a kind of delightful sexual naivety for her protagonists that allows the reader to suspend disbelief and for the protagonists themselves to fall unwittingly into all sorts of sexual misadventures—both magical and literal.

  Overall, In Sleeping Beauty’s Bed there is a particular attraction for the reader inclined towards any “disciplinary” action and for those whose propensities include oral gratification. Yet the range and voice for each story changes according to the narrative’s cultural context with a wicked understanding of the sexual play of status—those who brandish the whip and those who don’t.

  Tobsha Learner

  INTRODUCTION

  The fairy tale has no landlord…or so say the Greeks. One has only to initiate a cursory investigation into the origins of any common fairy tale to discover the truth of this. Fairy tales that at first glance appear easily identifiable to the reader may in actuality have roots reaching back to the Middle Ages and even into antiquity. Such tales are believed to have originated in oral form (the word tale deriving from the Anglo-Saxon talu, meaning speech) as folktales of the common people, taking on the character and imagination of the storyteller in accordance with the culture in which they were told—only to undergo further development and refinement as they came to be written down. Indeed, traces of what we consider the “classic” fairy tale have been discovered in written form in Egyptian records dating from 1600 B.C. as well as in Indian, Persian, Greek, and Hebrew writings and inscriptions more than two thousand years old.

  Of these known and lesser-known tales, variants exist throughout the world. In fact, it would seem that there is rarely a story for which a parallel cannot be found in the folklore of another people. Scholars r
emain convinced that these folktales originated in Asia and were brought west by the Crusaders, the Gypsies, the Judaic peoples, and Mongol missionaries. In the nineteenth century, Sanskrit scholar Theodor Benfey provided evidence that a significant portion of what has been widely considered traditional European folklore came from India via Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin translations. However, many anthropologists are likewise adamant that this folklore has its true grounding in the “savage superstition” of the primitive cultures. Regardless of where they began, all folktales deal with the basic motifs of human existence: good and evil, life and death, weakness and innocence, temptation and intrigue. Such themes know no boundaries of culture or time.

  By the tenth century, much of the material attributed to the Late Classical period would be imported from the Mediterranean by traveling entertainers and missionaries following pilgrim routes. During the time of the Crusades, folktales from places as widely dispersed as Ireland and India managed to make their way onto the fields of Europe and, hence, into the ears of those who tilled them. (Around this same period the Hindu Panchatantra would for the first time be translated into a major European language, offering readers a glimpse into the exotic East—a glimpse that would later turn into a grand passion.) As the Crusades reached an end, the lusty prose of the late medieval towns came into popularity. This signified the first major flourishing of a literature of the common people in Europe, and perhaps the first appearance of material of a sexual nature. Since these stories were relayed at adult gatherings after the children had been tucked safely into bed, their peasant narrators could take considerable liberties, thus indulging their natural penchant for sexual innuendo. It would not be long before such erotically charged folktales insinuated themselves into the literary works of the late Middle Ages, the Reformation, and the Renaissance.

  Only in the late seventeenth century did a conscious literary interest in the folktale begin in earnest. Around this time it had become the fashion for the upper classes of France to seek out their entertainment from the ways and amusements of the common people, whose folktales were often markedly unpretentious in manner. Up until the late 1600s, the oral folktale was not even deemed worthy of being transcribed, let alone transformed into literature. The aristocracy and intelligentsia of Europe had banished it to the realm of the peasant, associating such material with pagan beliefs and superstitions no longer relevant in a Christian Europe. If acknowledged at all, the stories were at best considered a crude form of entertainment, anecdote, or homily passed on by peasants, merchants, clergy, and servants—and, as such, something to be chuckled at or clucked over by the upper classes.

  From the late Middle Ages up through the Renaissance, the oral tradition of telling tales proved popular with many groups. Nonliterate peasants told them among themselves at hearthside or in the fields. Nevertheless, these folk narratives were not relegated exclusively to the illiterate. Priests quickly discovered their value, utilizing them in sermons in an attempt to reach out to the peasantry. The tales eventually received an even wider hearing by the members of all classes, as literate merchants and travelers relayed them at taverns and inns, while in the nursery wet nurses and governesses told them to the children in their charge. As the stories of the common folk spread from place to place and from person to person in their many variants, they grew to be more cultivated, eventually entering the French salon by the middle of the seventeenth century—and, in the process, losing much of the unpretentious quality that made them so appealing and entertaining in the first place.

  In what can be seen as the rise of the literary fairy tale such as those attributed to Charles Perrault in his Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passé (Tales of Past Times), one must look to the Paris salons formed in the 1600s by women of the French aristocracy. Because they lacked access to institutions of higher learning, these ladies of the boudoir organized gatherings in their homes, inviting other women and eventually even a few men to discuss art and literature. Narratives based on oral folktales would be introduced and continually improved on, thereby setting the standard for the conte de fée, or literary fairy tale. As a consequence, the peasant settings and content of the tales would be restructured to appeal to a more aristocratic and bourgeois audience, including that of King Louis XIV himself.

  By the close of the seventeenth century, the salon fairy tale had become so acceptable that women as well as some men (including Monsieur Perrault) wrote down their tales. Eventually these tales made their way into the public arena in the form of publication. Yet such elegant reworkings of what had once been the folktale of the peasant were not always intended as an innocent form of entertainment. A crisis was brewing in France; living conditions had deteriorated at every level of society, leaving neither aristocrat nor peasant immune. With Louis XIV waging costly wars and annexing more and more land, it had become a time of high taxes and poor crops, not to mention a time of rigidity caused by the king’s ever-increasing piousness. Ergo, these salon tales eventually began to be utilized as a means of criticism, prompting many writers to fall into the king’s disfavor.

  By the 1700s, the lure of the exotic rather than the common had captured the fancy of the French, with The Arabian Nights and the Hindu Panchatantra. The diminishing grandeur of the court of Versailles and the continuing decline of France further fueled this intense interest in the Orient, and by 1720 the once-irresistible appeal of the literary fairy tale had all but diminished, resulting in a conventionalized form suited more for pedagogical purposes than the sophisticated entertainment of the aristocracy. Colporteurs (peddlers) took these tales into the villages in the form of the Bibliothéque Bleue, which contained abbreviated versions of literary tales adapted for use in oral presentations. With this continuing institutionalization of the literary fairy tale, people of all ages and classes could have access to them, thereby creating still more diffusion of the tales throughout the Western world.

  In the Germany of the early 1800s, former law students Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm collected more than two hundred tales in their Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Nursery and Household Tales), of which seven editions were published during their lifetimes. The project initially began as a scholarly enterprise, their goal being to capture the German folk tradition in print before it died out. Since the brothers believed that the idiom in which a story was told had as much value as the content, they were extremely devoted to the oral folk tradition. Indeed, early-nineteenth-century Europe was possessed with a romantic admiration for the simple folk—an admiration that encompassed a decidedly nationalistic concern with local traditions. Although it has generally been assumed that the Grimms collected their folktales directly from the peasants who heard and retold them in the oral tradition, in fact they took them from nonpeasants (often the brothers’ own relatives) on whose memories the Grimms had come to rely.

  Up until the Franco-Prussian War, the art of composing the narrative folktale remained popular with adults in many parts of Germany. As the Industrial Age took hold, the necessity for the types of collective household and harvesting activities that had once provided a perfect forum for the oral narrative began to be eliminated, thereby bringing an end to the folktale as a form of public entertainment for adults. Fairy tales soon fell out of favor worldwide as more and more young people became educated. The household arts would all but vanish, as would local dialects, which were usurped by the use of a widespread language. With the arrival of the newspaper, the reading of serious material had supplanted the more frivolous entertainments of the past. Wars and issues related to government captured the attention of the reader, not the romantic awakening of a beautiful princess.

  By the twentieth century, adults had turned away from fairy tales altogether, leaving them to the domain of the nursery. Because so many of these tales had been written down in literary earnest during the time of the Grimms, it had become the norm to expurgate fiction, especially with regard to sexual matters, thus further relegating the fairy tale to the only audience apparently remaining to
enjoy them: children. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that despite the brothers’ efforts to sanitize elements of the tales they found objectionable—or believed their audience would find objectionable—the Grimms appeared to have no qualms about perpetuating the unwholesome themes of cannibalism, murder, mutilation, and incest.

  Although expunged in more modern times by various authors and collectors, eroticism was alive and well and, indeed, flourishing in the oral tales of the peasant and in the literary works of such authors as Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Straparola. Yet no matter how cleanly excised from the stories of our childhood, elements of sexuality still remain even today—if only in subtle form. Perhaps our normal human interest in matters of the flesh inspires the fairy tale to live on and on. For whether curious child or curious adult, we all have the desire to know The Forbidden.

  No matter where they came from or who has had a hand in their retelling, fairy tales have captured the imagination of the world and the imaginations of writers such as Charles Dickens, C. S. Lewis, and George Bernard Shaw. It is in this very same creative spirit that I continue the age-old tale-telling tradition by offering my own variations on these fairy tales, choosing to rely not on the unexpurgated versions of the past, but rather on those considered suitable for all eyes—including the eyes of children. By working in this way, I can remove myself from all previous erotic influences and make these tales my own.

  Mitzi Szereto

  CINDERELLA

  Scholars and lovers of fairy tales will no doubt agree that “Cinderella” is one of the most popular and widely known stories of all time. Nearly a thousand versions from Europe and Asia have been collected—a number that indicates that “Cinderella” has probably undergone more versions than any tale known to us today. For whether appearing during times of famine or in the elegant salons of Paris, the lowly hearth dweller who has lost her shoe can always be recognized.