Sleeping Beauties by Stephen KingThank you to Montgomery County Public Libraries for making Sleeping Beauties, a collaboration between Stephen King and Owen King, free and readily available to the public.
In Sleeping Beauties, a powerful feminine force has created an epidemic in which women form a cocoon around themselves when they fall asleep. Once they form the cocoon, they don’t wake up.
As women around the world fight to stay awake, the men do not know what to do. Some try to cut away the cocoon, which makes the women respond violently and to often kill the male who woke her up. As more women fall asleep, the men try desperately to find an answer to wake the women. But maybe they don’t want to be woken up.
One of the themes of this book is the violent behavior of men. Men abuse, fight each other, harm animals. Women, however, work together and create new opportunities. While there is some violence amongst the women, it is rare. And while men do work together, it always brings violence, even when they’re getting along.
As an allegory, the book presents an extreme view of the cruel behavior of most men. The criticism of men within the book is frighteningly harsh. I am surprised by how extremely bad the men are painted. One of the focal points is a women’s penitentiary, and nearly every woman has been lead to incarceration as a result of being treated abominably by men.
The plot is interesting and while the characters are pretty flat, it is still fascinating to see where they lead and to learn the fate of the women—and the men. I just can’t wrap my head around the hard headedness of the male characters in this book.
Would I teach Sleeping Beauties? Probably not. The starkly negative look at men’s behavior is so extreme that it would need to be discussed and I am not sure it could be explained in a satisfying way, even as an allegory. Discussing a gendered epidemic in our post Covid world would certainly spark conversation, especially since Sleeping Beauties was published pre-Covid.
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