The Paris Review

Fairy tales were reviled in the first stirrings of post-war liberation movements as part and parcel of the propaganda that kept women down. The American poet Anne Sexton, in a caustic sequence of poems called Transformations, scathingly evokes the corpselike helplessness of Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, and scorns, with fine irony, the Cinderella dream of bourgeois marriage and living happily ever after: boredom, torment, incest, death to the soul followed. Literary and social theorists joined in the battle against the Disney vision of female virtue (and desirability); Cinderella became a darker villain than her sisters, and for Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in their landmark study The Madwoman in the Attic, the evil stepmother in “Snow White” at least possesses mobility, will, and power—for which she is loathed and condemned. In the late sixties and early seventies, it wasn’t enough to rebel, and young writers and artists were dreaming of reshaping the world in the image of their desires. Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan had done the work of analysis and exposure, but action—creative energy—was as necessary to build on the demolition site of the traditional values and definitions of gender.

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My first shift at the candy store was on the first day of October, my last just before New Year’s, but when I talk about it now, what I say is, “Last Christmas, when I worked at the candy store.”

In the world of candy stores, and this candy store in particular, Christmas is a perpetual condition that just happens to spike at the end of the year. A red-and-green decorating scheme carried throughout the shop—I could not escape it, even when I retreated, as I sometimes did, to the store’s one bathroom, also tinged with red and green, just to shut out the world for a minute or two. On the sales floor, the shelves were heavy with saltwater taffy and boxes of truffles and delightfully analog toys—balsa gliders, pick-up sticks, chunky wooden puzzles. The general effect was that of being buried inside the holiday stocking of a child who’d been very, very good that year—along with the child himself, and a hoard of his less well-mannered friends and their overstressed, oblivious parents.

I took the gig shortly after finding myself laid off from the job I’d had for the last four years as an editor at a music magazine. I felt adrift and thought tending to a candy store, such a bastion of simple pleasures, might anchor me more firmly to the world, and also I thought that money might be a thing I’d might want to have again. But in my vague desperation I had forgotten about humans’ terrific knack for rendering even the most ostensibly pleasant pursuits completely soul crushing, and how that tendency increases as the winter days darken.

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Recently, while visiting my parents, I came across my childhood edition of Sleeping Beauty. As I opened the book again, the decades collapsed: the old illustrations recalled how dire that sleeping palace had appeared to me as a child, how thick its rooms had seemed with dark, ungraspable truths. The story had seemed entirely indecent, and that was precisely why it was so magnetic.

Sleeping Beauty is laced throughout with inchoate threat, which is why it feels so bottomless. Most obviously, there is an outrageous fact that the story passes over and that most children do not consciously note: Beauty is a century older than the prince who kisses her and ends her sleep. When he enters her dusty room she is one hundred and fifteen years old. As the reader bends with him over her inert form, adoration is tinged with something else entirely—the apprehension of death.

Earlier versions of the story, such as Charles Perrault’s (1697), make this explicit: the prince, seeing the newly awoken princess, “took care not to mention that she was dressed like his grandmother.” Later versions—the Grimm brothers’, for example—got rid of such details so as to make the ending more youthfully nuptial. But the fact of Beauty’s age still lurked in the background as a kind of unfamiliar smell; even a child reader has the sense that this apparently straightforward love affair is stalked by impossibility and decay.

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