The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty
Encyclopedia
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
, ephebophilia
and pony play. The trilogy was a bestseller, outearning the author's commercially successful first novel Interview with the Vampire
.
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. A compact disc version of the audiobooks was read by Genviere Bevier and Winthrop Eliot.
(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, and most of the reviews for Cry to Heaven were so savagely negative that Rice felt devastated. 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. 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". 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. Rice came out as the author of the trilogy only sometime during the 1990s.
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.
-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 tribute
s. 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 fails to become an obedient plaything, and the book closes with her being sentenced to brutal slavery in the neighboring village along with other failed slaves.
Next day, after having made Tristan march through the crowded streets, which included a short but intense meeting with the Captain of the Guard, Nicholas asks Tristan a series of questions as to what makes a strong, highborn prince obey with such a complete submission. Tristan answers, after some hesitation, that he loves anyone who punishes him no matter how crude or lowly they are and desires the loss of his self amid all the punishments, eventually "becoming" the punishments himself. Nicholas is moved by the answer and, after a frantic intercourse, confesses to him that he is in love with Tristan.
Beauty witnesses the harsh punishment of a runaway slave, Prince Laurent, as he is bound to a wooden cross and the Captain whips him all over his muscular body, and later sees Tristan pulling a cart carrying Laurent in a penitential procession. Tristan begs Nicholas to be allowed to meet Beauty and they reunite in Nicholas' house. Beauty and Tristan copulate as Nicholas watches behind a one-way mirror. Suddenly, Arab soldiers raid the village and several naked slaves, including Beauty, Tristan and Laurent, are kidnapped. The book closes as they are sent across the sea to serve in the palace of the Sultan.
and gets mounted on the phallus
of a bronze statue. She is then greeted by Innana, one of the Sultan's wives, with whom she copulates and is shocked to discover that Innana's clitoris
has been surgically removed
.
Laurent and Tristan are taken to an all-male sadomasochistic orgy, being mounted on a cross and whipped. However, in private, Laurent overpowers Lexius and rapes him. Afterward Laurent and Tristan are taken to the Sultan, made to perform a mutual fellatio
on each other in his presence, and then the Sultan anally copulates with Laurent. Laurent and Tristan retire from the Sultan's bedroom and when they are beginning to train Lexius as their secret slave, a rescue team led by the Captain of the Guard arrives and Laurent takes Lexius with him to their ship along with Beauty and Tristan. During the last leg of the voyage, the Captain tells Beauty that she is to be released from the servitude because of her parents' demands and, to her great dismay, sent back home to get married—she hysterically protests, but to no avail.
Back at the castle, the Queen takes Lexius as her slave and sends him to the merciless kitchen servants who trained Prince Alexi earlier in the first book. She then sentences both Laurent and Tristan to the village stable for Laurent's rebelliousness and Tristan's failure to become a good slave. They are made to live and work as ponies, pulling all sorts of carts and drawing plows in the fields during the daytime, and having homosexual orgies with other human ponies at night. Tristan, as a pony, renuites with his former owner Nicholas on a temporary basis. However, Laurent's father unexpectedly dies and he is summoned back to his own kingdom against his wish, to become the new ruler. The book ends as Laurent marries Beauty, saying that they shall live happily ever after, or perhaps "a good deal happier" than anyone else could ever guess—hinting that they will continue the pleasure of dominance and submission with each other.
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. Some versions of the tale have Beauty raped and pregnant while sleeping, and only waking up after childbirth. The child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim
commented that the tale "abounds with Freudian symbolism" 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. Feminist theorists have focused on Sleeping Beauty's extreme passivity and the sexual nature of her awakening in the fairy tale. 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. 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".
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. 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. 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".
and gaining a significant cult following. Anne Rice was able to secure the publishing contract for her next erotic novel Exit to Eden
(1985) with an advance of US$35,000 from Arbor House
. There have been allegations that Rice is a dominatrix
in real life since the trilogy deals with the BDSM practice so exclusively, but her husband Stan Rice
replied that "she's no more sadomasochistic than she's a vampire." The trilogy is read by many among those involved in the BDSM community, but Anne Rice told her biographer that she refused the offer to meet with its practitioners face-to-face, and in fact her brief encounters with "those people" resulted in the discontinuation of the Sleeping Beauty series after the third book, because of moral revulsion she felt when she was confronted with the actuality of the practice. However, when the director of the Columbus Metropolitan Library
declared the trilogy "hardcore pornography" and removed all print and audiocassette copies from the library shelves in 1996, Rice intervened to object the director's accusations, arguing that the trilogy was "elegantly sensual" and harmless to readers. The trilogy is included in the American Library Association
's list of "100 most frequently challenged books" of the 1990s, with the term "challenge
" defined in American literature as "an attempt to remove or restrict materials, based upon the objections of a person or group".
Professor Linda Badley of Middle Tennessee State University
wrote in her 1996 book Writing Horror and the Body on the trilogy that rewriting the myth of Sleeping Beauty as sadomasochistic fantasies enabled Anne Rice to explore "liminal areas of experience that could not be articulated in conventional literature, extant pornography, or politically correct discourse." Sandra Michaelson, the author of Love Smart: Transforming the Emotional Patterns That Sabotage Relationships, claimed that while the trilogy may provide erotic stimulation, it is "extraordinarily unhealthy" as a model for everyday living.
Trilogy
A trilogy is a set of three works of art that are connected, and that can be seen either as a single work or as three individual works. They are commonly found in literature, film, or video games...
written by American author Anne Rice
Anne Rice
Anne Rice is a best-selling Southern American author of metaphysical gothic fiction, Christian literature and erotica from New Orleans, Louisiana. Her books have sold nearly 100 million copies, making her one of the most widely read authors in modern history...
under the pseudonym
Pseudonym
A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...
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
BDSM
BDSM is an erotic preference and a form of sexual expression involving the consensual use of restraint, intense sensory stimulation, and fantasy power role-play. The compound acronym BDSM is derived from the terms bondage and discipline , dominance and submission , and sadism and masochism...
novels set in a medieval fantasy
Medieval fantasy
Medieval fantasy is a subgenre of fantasy that encompasses medieval era high fantasy and sometimes simply represents fictitious versions of historic events. This subgenre is common among role-playing games, text-based roleplaying, and high-fantasy literature....
world, loosely based on the fairy tale
Fairy tale
A fairy tale is a type of short story that typically features such folkloric characters, such as fairies, goblins, elves, trolls, dwarves, giants or gnomes, and usually magic or enchantments. However, only a small number of the stories refer to fairies...
of Sleeping Beauty
Sleeping Beauty
Sleeping Beauty by Charles Perrault or Little Briar Rose by the Brothers Grimm is a classic fairytale involving a beautiful princess, enchantment, and a handsome prince...
. The novels describe explicit sexual adventures of the female protagonist Beauty and the male characters Alexi, Tristan and Laurent, featuring both maledom and femdom
Female dominance
Female dominance is those BDSM relationships and BDSM scenes in which the dominant partner is female. Often a dominant woman, she may prefer to be called a Domme , Femdomme, Domina, or Dominatrix, depending on context or personal preference...
scenarios amid vivid imageries of bisexuality
Bisexuality
Bisexuality is sexual behavior or an orientation involving physical or romantic attraction to both males and females, especially with regard to men and women. It is one of the three main classifications of sexual orientation, along with a heterosexual and a homosexual orientation, all a part of the...
, ephebophilia
Ephebophilia
Ephebophilia is the sexual preference of adults for mid-to-late adolescents, generally ages 15 to 19. The term was originally used in the late 19th to mid 20th century, and has been more recently revisited by Ray Blanchard. It is one of a number of sexual preferences across age groups subsumed...
and pony play. The trilogy was a bestseller, outearning the author's commercially successful first novel Interview with the Vampire
Interview with the Vampire
Interview with the Vampire is a vampire novel by Anne Rice written in 1973 and published in 1976. It was the first novel to feature the enigmatic vampire Lestat, and was followed by several sequels, collectively known as The Vampire Chronicles...
.
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
Amy Brenneman
Amy Frederica Brenneman is an American actress, perhaps best known for her roles in the television series NYPD Blue, Judging Amy and Private Practice...
. Beauty's Punishment was read by Elizabeth Montgomery
Elizabeth Montgomery
Elizabeth Victoria Montgomery was an American film and television actress whose career spanned five decades. She is perhaps best remembered for her roles as Samantha Stephens in Bewitched, as Ellen Harrod in A Case of Rape and as Lizzie Borden in The Legend of Lizzie Borden.-Early life:Born in Los...
, well-known for her role in the ABC
American Broadcasting Company
The American Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network. Created in 1943 from the former NBC Blue radio network, ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Company and is part of Disney-ABC Television Group. Its first broadcast on television was in 1948...
situation comedy
Situation comedy
A situation comedy, often shortened to sitcom, is a genre of comedy that features characters sharing the same common environment, such as a home or workplace, accompanied with jokes as part of the dialogue...
Bewitched
Bewitched
Bewitched is an American situation comedy originally broadcast for eight seasons on ABC from 1964 to 1972, starring Elizabeth Montgomery, Dick York and Dick Sargent , Agnes Moorehead, and David White. The show is about a witch who marries a mortal and tries to lead the life of a typical suburban...
, as Beauty and Michael Diamond as Tristan, and Beauty's Release was by Montgomery with actor Christian Keiber
Christian Keiber
Christian Keiber is an actor, writer, producer and musician living in Los Angeles, California.Keiber was born in Wilmington, North Carolina. He is the first born of three boys, Cameron and Clayton, to Robert John Keiber, an artist and theater actor and Sharon Verner, a pharmaceutical representative...
reading as Laurent. A compact disc version of the audiobooks was read by Genviere Bevier and Winthrop Eliot.
Background
After the success of Interview with the VampireInterview with the Vampire
Interview with the Vampire is a vampire novel by Anne Rice written in 1973 and published in 1976. It was the first novel to feature the enigmatic vampire Lestat, and was followed by several sequels, collectively known as The Vampire Chronicles...
(1976), Anne Rice wrote two extensively researched historical novels, The Feast of All Saints (1979) and Cry to Heaven
Cry to Heaven
Cry to Heaven is a standalone historical novel by Anne Rice, first published in 1982. Taking place in Italy during the eighteenth century, it follows the paths of two unlikely collaborators: a Venetian noble and a maestro from Calabria, both trying to succeed in the world of the opera.-Plot...
(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, and most of the reviews for Cry to Heaven were so savagely negative that Rice felt devastated. She had been thinking about a story set during the time of Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...
for the next novel, but decided to abandon it and go back to the erotic writing she had explored in the 1960s. 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". 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. Rice came out as the author of the trilogy only sometime during the 1990s.
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.
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 simple kiss, but with a fervent deflowering, initiating her into a SatyriconSatyricon
Satyricon is a Latin work of fiction in a mixture of prose and poetry. It is believed to have been written by Gaius Petronius, though the manuscript tradition identifies the author as a certain Titus Petronius...
-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 tribute
Tribute
A tribute is wealth, often in kind, that one party gives to another as a sign of respect or, as was often the case in historical contexts, of submission or allegiance. Various ancient states, which could be called suzerains, exacted tribute from areas they had conquered or threatened to conquer...
s. 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 fails to become an obedient plaything, and the book closes with her being sentenced to brutal slavery in the neighboring village along with other failed slaves.
Beauty's Punishment
The second book starts as Beauty and another naked slave from the castle, Prince Tristan, are sold at auction in the village square. Beauty is purchased by the inn keeper Mistress Lockely while Tristan is bought by Nicholas, the Queen's chronicler. At Lockely's inn Beauty meets the Captain of the Guard, who forces her to pleasure him and then takes her to a drunken orgy with his soldiers. Tristan is bound and harnessed as a pony with a tail plugged in his rear, and made to pull Nicholas' cart while being whipped. When the cart arrives at an orchard, he is ordered to collect apples with his mouth, and trained to "satisfy" other human ponies in the stable. Afterward, Nicholas has Tristan paddled at the Public Turntable, which devastates the prince, and forcibly copulates with him in the bed.Next day, after having made Tristan march through the crowded streets, which included a short but intense meeting with the Captain of the Guard, Nicholas asks Tristan a series of questions as to what makes a strong, highborn prince obey with such a complete submission. Tristan answers, after some hesitation, that he loves anyone who punishes him no matter how crude or lowly they are and desires the loss of his self amid all the punishments, eventually "becoming" the punishments himself. Nicholas is moved by the answer and, after a frantic intercourse, confesses to him that he is in love with Tristan.
Beauty witnesses the harsh punishment of a runaway slave, Prince Laurent, as he is bound to a wooden cross and the Captain whips him all over his muscular body, and later sees Tristan pulling a cart carrying Laurent in a penitential procession. Tristan begs Nicholas to be allowed to meet Beauty and they reunite in Nicholas' house. Beauty and Tristan copulate as Nicholas watches behind a one-way mirror. Suddenly, Arab soldiers raid the village and several naked slaves, including Beauty, Tristan and Laurent, are kidnapped. The book closes as they are sent across the sea to serve in the palace of the Sultan.
Beauty's Release
The third book begins with the captured slaves' journey on the ship to the Sultan's realm. While being imprisoned in a cage, Laurent contemplates the recent punishments he received as a runaway on a wooden cross, recalling its pain, degradation and undeniable pleasure. After their arrival at the exotic land of the Sultan, the captured slaves are groomed by a group of young boys and examined by Lexius, the Sultan's steward. Beauty is taken to the haremHarem
Harem refers to the sphere of women in what is usually a polygynous household and their enclosed quarters which are forbidden to men...
and gets mounted on the phallus
Phallus
A phallus is an erect penis, a penis-shaped object such as a dildo, or a mimetic image of an erect penis. Any object that symbolically resembles a penis may also be referred to as a phallus; however, such objects are more often referred to as being phallic...
of a bronze statue. She is then greeted by Innana, one of the Sultan's wives, with whom she copulates and is shocked to discover that Innana's clitoris
Clitoris
The clitoris is a sexual organ that is present only in female mammals. In humans, the visible button-like portion is located near the anterior junction of the labia minora, above the opening of the urethra and vagina. Unlike the penis, which is homologous to the clitoris, the clitoris does not...
has been surgically removed
Female genital cutting
Female genital mutilation , also known as female genital cutting and female circumcision, is defined by the World Health Organization as "all procedures that involve partial or total removal of the external female genitalia, or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons."FGM...
.
Laurent and Tristan are taken to an all-male sadomasochistic orgy, being mounted on a cross and whipped. However, in private, Laurent overpowers Lexius and rapes him. Afterward Laurent and Tristan are taken to the Sultan, made to perform a mutual fellatio
Fellatio
Fellatio is an act of oral stimulation of a male's penis by a sexual partner. It involves the stimulation of the penis by the use of the mouth, tongue, or throat. The person who performs fellatio can be referred to as the giving partner, and the other person is the receiving partner...
on each other in his presence, and then the Sultan anally copulates with Laurent. Laurent and Tristan retire from the Sultan's bedroom and when they are beginning to train Lexius as their secret slave, a rescue team led by the Captain of the Guard arrives and Laurent takes Lexius with him to their ship along with Beauty and Tristan. During the last leg of the voyage, the Captain tells Beauty that she is to be released from the servitude because of her parents' demands and, to her great dismay, sent back home to get married—she hysterically protests, but to no avail.
Back at the castle, the Queen takes Lexius as her slave and sends him to the merciless kitchen servants who trained Prince Alexi earlier in the first book. She then sentences both Laurent and Tristan to the village stable for Laurent's rebelliousness and Tristan's failure to become a good slave. They are made to live and work as ponies, pulling all sorts of carts and drawing plows in the fields during the daytime, and having homosexual orgies with other human ponies at night. Tristan, as a pony, renuites with his former owner Nicholas on a temporary basis. However, Laurent's father unexpectedly dies and he is summoned back to his own kingdom against his wish, to become the new ruler. The book ends as Laurent marries Beauty, saying that they shall live happily ever after, or perhaps "a good deal happier" than anyone else could ever guess—hinting that they will continue the pleasure of dominance and submission with each other.
Theme
Bruno Bettelheim
Bruno Bettelheim was an Austrian-born American child psychologist and writer. He gained an international reputation for his work on Freud, psychoanalysis, and emotionally disturbed children.-Background:...
commented that the tale "abounds with Freudian symbolism" 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. Feminist theorists have focused on Sleeping Beauty's extreme passivity and the sexual nature of her awakening in the fairy tale. 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. 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
Phallus
A phallus is an erect penis, a penis-shaped object such as a dildo, or a mimetic image of an erect penis. Any object that symbolically resembles a penis may also be referred to as a phallus; however, such objects are more often referred to as being phallic...
while at the same time going beyond its boundary and "turning it against itself".
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. 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. 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
Comedy
Comedy , as a popular meaning, is any humorous discourse or work generally intended to amuse by creating laughter, especially in television, film, and stand-up comedy. This must be carefully distinguished from its academic definition, namely the comic theatre, whose Western origins are found in...
" when compared to darker BDSM novels such as Story of O
Story of O
Story of O is an erotic novel published in 1954 about love, dominance and submission by French author Anne Desclos under the pen name Pauline Réage.Desclos did not reveal herself as the author for forty years after the initial publication...
, and commented that "like all comedies, it ends in marriage".
Reception
The trilogy was a commercial success, outearning Interview with the VampireInterview with the Vampire
Interview with the Vampire is a vampire novel by Anne Rice written in 1973 and published in 1976. It was the first novel to feature the enigmatic vampire Lestat, and was followed by several sequels, collectively known as The Vampire Chronicles...
and gaining a significant cult following. Anne Rice was able to secure the publishing contract for her next erotic novel Exit to Eden
Exit to Eden
Exit to Eden is a novel by Anne Rice, initially published in 1985 under the pen name Anne Rampling, but subsequently under Rice's name.The novel explores the subject of BDSM in romance novel form. The novel also brought attention to Rice's published works that differed from the type of writing she...
(1985) with an advance of US$35,000 from Arbor House
Arbor House
Arbor House was an independent publishing house founded by Donald Fine in 1969. Specialising in hard cover publications, Arbor House published works by Hortense Calisher, Ken Follett, Cynthia Freeman, Elmore Leonard and Irwin Shaw before being acquired by the Hearst Corporation in 1979 to move into...
. There have been allegations that Rice is a dominatrix
Dominatrix
Dominatrix or mistress is a woman or women who takes the dominant role in bondage, discipline and sadomasochism, or BDSM. A common form of address for a submissive to a dominatrix is "mistress", "ma'am", "domina" or "maîtresse"...
in real life since the trilogy deals with the BDSM practice so exclusively, but her husband Stan Rice
Stan Rice
Stan Rice was an American poet and artist. He was the husband of author Anne Rice.-Biography:Stan Rice was born in Dallas, Texas 1942. He met his future wife in a high school journalism class in Richardson, Texas, and they married in Denton, Texas on October 14, 1961...
replied that "she's no more sadomasochistic than she's a vampire." The trilogy is read by many among those involved in the BDSM community, but Anne Rice told her biographer that she refused the offer to meet with its practitioners face-to-face, and in fact her brief encounters with "those people" resulted in the discontinuation of the Sleeping Beauty series after the third book, because of moral revulsion she felt when she was confronted with the actuality of the practice. However, when the director of the Columbus Metropolitan Library
Columbus Metropolitan Library
The Columbus Metropolitan Library , located in the capital city of Ohio, opened its doors in 1873 in the New City Hall in downtown Columbus. This library is one of the most-used library systems in the country and is consistently among the top-ranked large city libraries according to "Hennen’s...
declared the trilogy "hardcore pornography" and removed all print and audiocassette copies from the library shelves in 1996, Rice intervened to object the director's accusations, arguing that the trilogy was "elegantly sensual" and harmless to readers. The trilogy is included in the American Library Association
American Library Association
The American Library Association is a non-profit organization based in the United States that promotes libraries and library education internationally. It is the oldest and largest library association in the world, with more than 62,000 members....
's list of "100 most frequently challenged books" of the 1990s, with the term "challenge
Challenge (literature)
The American Library Association defines a challenge to literature as an attempt by a person or group of people to have materials, such as books, removed from a library or school curriculum, or otherwise restricted. Merely objecting to material is not a challenge without the attempt to remove or...
" defined in American literature as "an attempt to remove or restrict materials, based upon the objections of a person or group".
Professor Linda Badley of Middle Tennessee State University
Middle Tennessee State University
Middle Tennessee State University, commonly abbreviated as MTSU, is a public university located in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, United States....
wrote in her 1996 book Writing Horror and the Body on the trilogy that rewriting the myth of Sleeping Beauty as sadomasochistic fantasies enabled Anne Rice to explore "liminal areas of experience that could not be articulated in conventional literature, extant pornography, or politically correct discourse." Sandra Michaelson, the author of Love Smart: Transforming the Emotional Patterns That Sabotage Relationships, claimed that while the trilogy may provide erotic stimulation, it is "extraordinarily unhealthy" as a model for everyday living.
See also
- List of BDSM fiction
- List of most-commonly challenged books in the United States