The Sleeper and the Spindle

Neil Gaiman

Fiction | Graphic Novel/Book | YA | Published in 2014

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Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Pages 1-19

Pages 20-51

Pages 52-69

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

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Themes

Inversion of Gender Dynamics

In The Sleeper and the Spindle, Gaiman’s intentional upending of traditional gender-based stereotypes shifts traditional elements of the Sleeping Beauty and Snow White fairytales, centering the concerns and desires of the women in the story. He begins the tale with a classic, archetypal story known to most readers: that of the sleeping beauty in a castle behind a wall of thorns, and her ultimate rescue by the kiss of a courageous prince. When the dwarves first learn about the sleeping sickness, the townspeople reinforce the familiarity of the tale by alluding to “the usual method […] or so the tales have it” (16). The fairy tale setting of time and place also helps to ground the reader in familiar territory.

By beginning the story with the queen’s dubious feelings about her upcoming wedding, Gaiman signals an exploration of traditional social expectations for women through a subversion of them. As she thinks on her impending wedding the queen feels that “it seem[s] both unlikely and extremely final” (14). The queen is mature and realistic enough to understand her place in the established social order, and knows that even though she is in a position of authority, she’s still bound by these unspoken laws. Despite what she has faced in her own Snow White-inspired journey, she will be limited to an inevitable, preordained life. These two combined gender expectations open the story’s first act, allowing Gaiman room to play with them in unexpected ways.

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The first major inversion of this traditional dynamic comes at the transition between Act 2 and Act 3 when the Snow White character kisses Sleeping Beauty awake, a queer-coded reimagining of the archetypal moment in which the princess is kissed awake by the prince. Here, Gaiman invests the queen with the power not only to fulfill this heroic role on her own, but to choose who and how to love. However, this plot point quickly gives way to further complexity and examinations of power: The sleeper is revealed to be not a passive maiden awaiting a prince’s rescue, but a strong and merciless leader. Contemporary feminist discourse often criticizes the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale because of the passivity of its titular heroine; in this reimagining, Sleeping Beauty is given her own agency and formidable strength. Even though she has been vilified, she makes active choices based on her own wants and needs, exercising that power over others. In the end, what begins as one very specific type of traditional love story instead becomes a study of the power dynamic between two strong, self-assured female leaders. This inversion, in turn, gives the queen the strength to finally upend gender expectations in her own life during the story’s denouement. Over the course of the story, the queen’s arc moves her from a place of feeling trapped and lacking agency toward a place of freedom and adventure.

Preconceptions of Beauty and Youth

Traditional fairy tales—in particular the ones that inspired this retelling—invest the female protagonist's value in their perceived beauty. In contrast to Gaiman’s title The Sleeper and the Spindle, both the traditional fairy tales it references are named for its heroines: Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. Sleeping Beauty, a title that reveals two things about the heroine—she’s beautiful, and she’s asleep—immediately sets up an expectation for the kind of story it is. In this version, those preconceptions are immediately turned around by focusing the title instead on the character and her weapon.

When the sleeper and the old woman are introduced, both the narrative and the illustrations evoke these more traditional preconceptions and obscure the truth about the characters that will be revealed later in the story. The very first illustration of the sleeper features her looking flawless and very young—the age of someone only entering their teenage years, despite the townspeople’s belief that the princess fell asleep once she turned 18. In this image, the sleeper’s purity and innocence is juxtaposed against the horrors surrounding her. On the opposite facing page, the old woman is drawn in sharp lines as a hunched, bitter witch: “She hobbled, angrily, through the castle, leaning on her stick, as if she were driven only by hatred” (33). By contrast, the sleeping girl’s “hair was the golden yellow of meadow flowers. Her lips were the pink of the roses that climbed the palace walls” (38).

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When the queen arrives on the scene, she makes a snap decision based on her own preconceptions of the two people in the room. It’s not until the two women reveal their shared story that the queen understands the extent to which she was misled by appearance. Once the sleeper wakes, she begins to display her true nature: “the golden-haired girl, all childlike and innocent (ah, but her eyes! Her eyes were so old)” (56). This moment parallels the old woman’s return to her inner self: “Her nose was long, and her eyelids drooped, but there was a look in her eyes in that moment that was the look of someone young” (62). These moments complicate the distinctions between inner and outer beauty, as well as inner and outer youth—for example, what it means to be old in years, but young at heart, or possessing an enchanted youth, but carrying the wisdom and malevolence of centuries. By the end of the story, both the characters have recalibrated their understanding of what youth and beauty represent, subverting the message of the traditional tales.

Freedom and Constraint

Gaiman’s story uses both its characters and its setting to explore the various ways that people can entrap and become entrapped in their circumstances. The clearest early example is of the sleeping princess who is literally trapped not only in an impenetrable castle, but in a state of stasis. It initially appears that the perpetual sleep of the princess—as the people in Dorimar know her—holds her back from the experiences of growing up, coming of age, and experiencing life beyond her bedroom walls. This, of course, turns out to be an illusion, yet it is still worth considering the implications of this timeless fairy tale: As the sleeping sickness spreads, those around her succumb to that same imprisonment in a single moment in time.

Elsewhere, the queen emerges from one imprisonment and faces another. Although the narrative does not directly address her story, there are hints to her past laid through the dialogue between the queen and the sleeper: “‘I slept for a year in a glass coffin,’ said the queen. ‘And the woman who put me there was much more powerful and dangerous than you will ever be’” (56). The story also briefly addresses this history through the queen’s conversation with the dwarves, suggesting that the queen faced physical, bodily captivity at the hands of someone stronger than herself. From this captivity, the queen emerged victorious, only to find herself immediately bound by the social constraints of her world. At the start of this story, the queen is preparing for her upcoming wedding—an event that she sees as the conclusion to her free, independent life. Even before the wedding takes place, she is already held captive by the expectations of those around her. When she leaves on her quest to the neighboring kingdom, it is a brief respite of freedom from what she sees as an inevitable fate.

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Gaiman once again subverts expectations through the reveal that the old woman who watches over the sleeper is actually the true princess, who has been held captive alongside the sleeping enchantress. Although she remains awake, she too is held in a state of stasis. When she successfully defeats the enchantress by reversing her magic, she falls into the first sleep she has experienced in decades—a different kind of freedom. By the end of the story, the queen has learned more about the nature of freedom, enslavement, and personal agency, allowing her to choose a different path ahead. For the queen, freedom looks like infinite possibility, whereas for the elderly princess, freedom looks like safety and comfort. The story validates both paths, encouraging the reader to consider what forms freedom and constraint may take in their own lives.