Molly Clark Hillard

Bio: Molly Clark Hillard is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Aristocracy (class) & Beauty. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 3 citations.

"A Perfect Form in Perfect Rest": Spellbinding Narratives and Tennyson's "Day Dream"

Abstract: Victorian reflections upon temporality often conjure up metaphors of enchant ment, of beguilement, of charmed sleep that threatens progress. In Past and Present, Thomas Carlyle distinguishes between "a virtual Industrial Aristocracy, as yet only half alive?spell-bound amid money-bags and ledgers; and an actual idle aristocracy seemingly near dead in somnolent delusions" (1117). He implores his "Princes of In dustry" to wake: "[i]t is you who are already half-alive, whom I will welcome into life; whom I conjure in God's name to shake off your enchanted sleep and live wholly!" (1118) In casting himself as author-prince, giving the kiss of life to the capitalists, Carlyle refers overtly to the narrative of "Sleeping Beauty," a fairy tale that, this essay will argue, not only inhabited, but also shaped the diverse Victorian discourses of political economy, architecture, philosophy, and poetry. In Stones of Venice, for ex ample, John Ruskin posits: "[i]t is that strange disquietude of the gothic spirit that is its greatness, that restlessness of the dreaming mind ... and it can neither rest in, nor from, its labour, but must pass on, sleeplessly, until its love of change shall be paci fied forever in the change that must come alike on the them that wake and them that sleep" (181). Ruskin imagines an historical age as a mind that dreams but paradoxi cally must not sleep if it is to enact change, and thus, like Carlyle, renders "sleep" as a narcotic "quietude" that must be shaken off. Still later in the century, the narrator of

Old Men and Comatose Virgins : Nobel Prize Winners rewrite “ Sleeping Beauty ”

Abstract: The ancient story of “ Sleeping Beauty ” revolves around the awakening of a young princess whose long sleep is the result of a fairy’s curse. In some recent versions of the tale, however – notably by Yasunari Kawabata in House of the Sleeping Beauties (1961) and Gabriel Garcia Marquez in Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004) – the girls never wake up. Rather they give new life to the old men who watch and fondle them in their drugged state. In these novels young women continue to be represented as desirable ciphers. They also continue to be manipulated by older women (brothel keepers, replacing the traditional fairies) who determine their fate. But the central focus has become the old men themselves, their fear of aging, and their obsession with the comatose girls.