Sleeping Beauties

Fiction by Stephen King and Owen King.


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"What do women want?" This supposedly impossible question is attributed to Sigmund Freud in the text of this story, and Freud was indeed quoted by his biographer to have said he did not know the answer to the query (Was will das Weib? in the original German). It seems that this question has been asked by men throughout history, however, as evidenced by Chaucer's Canterbury Tales actually recording it in the fourteenth century. 

In this book, an answer is posited. "What do women want? They want a nap."

While this answer is a bit simplistic, I can't argue that there is some truth in it. I recently wrote a post in my blog about my own quest for a nap, actually.

This story could be read as a cautionary tale of the "be careful what you wish for" variety. In it, every woman in the world is suddenly unable to wake up when she falls asleep; instead she is encased in a cocoon-like sleeping bag cannot be roused. Obviously, this does not go well. What happens to the world when all the women are out of commission? (Nothing good, I'll wager.)

It's an interestingly feminist story in way, especially for one written by men, although it could be said that it's another argument for the unanswerable nature of the above question. As in, "You give women what they want, and suddenly they don't want it any more!"

But it could also be giving the same answer that Chaucer's Wife of Bath gave so many years ago: women want exactly what men want, which is to be in control of their own lives.

All this intellectual rigmarole aside, this was a really interesting and thought-provoking story. It was worth the 700-page read.