Bettelheim notes that the king, Talia's father, disappears soon into the story and is apparently replaced by another king both in the country and in her life: “the father king is replaced by the lover king.  Might not these two kings not be substitutes for each other at different periods in the girl’s life, in different roles, in different disguises?” (228)  Thus, there appears, in this reading, another case of incest underlying the story.  However, more compelling to many psychoanalytic critics is the prolonged sleep the girl undergoes (as in the cognate stories, "The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood" and "Brier Rose").  The sleep, which typically begins at about the age of puberty and is ended when the child is mature enough to enter into an adult sexual relationship (as is clearly demonstrated here by her conceiving and bearing children before she awakens, may represent a period of latent sexuality in the girl's life.
         The queen’s horrible demand that the children be cooked and eaten reflects her desire to punish her husband, unlike the personal hunger for the children in Perrault's version of this tale (Bettelheim 229).  Warner calls her “a Medea, a Lady Macbeth, a murderous and unnatural, unsexed anomaly” (220), and the story itself compares her to Medea – but note that Medea was actually killing her own children as a means of acquiring vengeance on her husband, whereas the queen in this story is destroying her rival’s children.  Her crime may not be any less heinous, but her motivation seems more clear.  The concern with her ability to bear children (in contrast to the legitimate queen's failure to conceive) reflects in part the more adult and aristocratic audience for Basile's work - as questions of familial inheritance, infertility, and marital infidelity are issues for adults, not child readers.

Return to Fairy Tale Page