Briar Rose

"Ah, the beautiful: what a deadly illusion! Yet, still he is drawn to it."

It seems like the theme of beauty being something "deadly" is common in a lot of the types of stories I like to read. Many times if a character is described as strikingly beautiful, they would use that to their advantage to get what they wanted or to manipulate others. I agree that beauty can be a "deadly illusion." Isn't it a reoccurring life lesson that true beauty comes from within? Or that just because someone is lovely on the outside, there is no guarantee that this stays true for the inside?

Confusion and Briar Rose

“Yes, yes, I can see him! No, you can’t, he was completely swallowed up by the briars. A pity, but it was too late. No! Hurry! Here I am! It’s not too late!” (24)

My favorite element of Briar Rose thus far has been Coover’s ever-confusing discourse. This passage is just one rapid-fire example of the book’s fascinating contradiction and ambivalence. The omniscient third person narrator switches perspectives quite often, so even though the narrator remains a constant, he offers splitting views of his story-views far removed from each other and so somewhat jarring and disorienting to the reader. The speakers are also at times difficult to differentiate and follow, so much so that the reader could wonder whether the narrator or one of two of the other characters is speaking. This style of confusion emphasizes the uncertainty and ambiguity of the story and seems to challenge the discrepancies between dream and reality, sleep and awake, story and prophecy. He offers no clear guideline for what to take literally, so every word is in question—every sentiment is malleable, every moment a lifetime yet still no time at all, every wakening a dream or a story or a memory. I have a hard time deciding what to make of it all, but I feel it speaks to a look at the ‘what we’re supposed to be.’ The sleeper asks, “Who am I? she demands. What am I?” (17). Her struggle might be with expectations of living up to sexual expectations and motherly expectations, symbolized in the many dead and living children she has while comatose. The adventurer sees her with lust, then in a friendly sense, as he also struggles with how to see his quest and himself as a hero. His struggle may lie in wanting to be “the one” while beginning to see those very efforts to make him just like the failed men whose shells he sees on his path.

Briar Rose- Alex

"And they lived happily ever after? How could they, the dragon was dead. No, I mean the princess and the--Oh, who can say? The prince had other tasks and maidens to attend to, making a name for himself as he was, for all I know, my dear, that one's chained there still."

I think one of the main messages in the story is the dissonance between reality and the happenings of fairy tales. Each time the princess wanders in and the crone tells a tale in which the ending isn't happy, she insists that that's not how the story is supposed to end. However, the princess is living in a 'dream,' and not just her 100 year enchantment. Most young girls grow up on the idea of the ideal male figure; something that is impossible to reach and hopeless to look for. Like the prince can never truly make it to the spires of her castle, the romantic ideals set in fairy tales are unrealistic hopes of idealistic dreamers. The repetition of lines is also a metaphor for the passing down of the tale, of the unreachable ideal, from generation to generation. No generation really remembers the reality of love, identity, and sexual intimacy, and so the lie is perpetuated for even longer than the 100 year fictional enchantment.

Briar Rose - Tom

"Caught in the briars , but still slashing away valiantly, driven more by fear now than by vocation..." (Coover 28).

The hero's quest for Beauty is driven by his desire and apparently by his vocation. Many think of their vocation as who or what they are and as such, accept tasks given to them as being a part of them. The question that I believe rises from this quote, is whether he is seeking Beauty because he genuinely wants to, or because he believes it is his job to. If it is his desire, the tale is one of introspection and deep personal reflection. If it is his vocation, the tale may be one of societal pressures and influences on personal desire. I believe Briar Rose explores the former subject and the hero will come to realize that it is him who in the end wants her.

cass ford & briar rose

"... [H]e does think of her, less now in erotic longing than in sympathetic curiosity.... And now, what if no one ever reaches her, what if she goes on dreaming in there forever, what sort of a life would that be, so strangely timeless and insubstantial? Yet, is it really any different from the life he himself has until now led, driven by his dream of vocation and heroic endeavor and bewitched by desire?" - page 25

"... [N]ow he thinks of her principally as a kind friend who might heal his lacerations and calm his anguished heart." - page 28

This pair of quotes is interesting in that they are the first truly introspective thoughts of the knight trying to save Briar Rose. As he suffers more and more to get to her, his thoughts shift from erotic desire to a longing for companionship. His endeavor leads him to an epiphany about his goals, and he seems to have realized the fleeting nature of desire. He realizes that rather than it being a part of him, it is an external force (created by society, I would argue) compelling him to find Briar Rose and conquer her. These introspective quotes are interesting, because instead of the traditional post-modern take on fairytales and gender, in which the male is the evil, oppressive 'other,' Coover gives dimension to both the Sleeping Beauty and her "hero."

Briar Rose

"She dreams, as she has often dreamt, of abandonment and betrayal, of lost hope, of the self gone astray from the body forsaking the unlikely self."

I feel like this quote could easily sum up Sleeping Beauty's long slumber. Everything has abandoned her: her parents, her beliefs, her aspirations, and even herself. She is alone in her dreams and cannot move forward. Her future has been shattered. She is now dependent on a man to save her, as she cannot save herself in this instance.

Briar Rose

"They seem to be instructing him that the prize here without may well exceed the prize within, that in effect his prize lays not before him but behind, already passed, or rather, that the test is not of his valor or judgement..."

This quote seems to reiterate the saying that "it's not the journey, not the destination." The hero of Briar Rose thinks that the prize he is seeking, fame and glory, may already lie in his past. The point of this quote is that the main point of the story is not what it seems. It could be a bit of self-discovery along the way to the castle, not getting the princess from the castle.