I am a painter and writer who has lived in Glasgow for more than twenty-five years. My ongoing interest in fairy tales and Surrealism has been nourished by that context—notably through dialogue with the Scottish writer and art historian, Catriona McAra, who has written extensively on these genres. In her exploration of the work of Leonora Carrington and Dorothea Tanning, McAra has explored how surrealist art was influenced by literary fairy tales. For McAra the ‘surrealist fairy tale’ is a hybrid genre that subverts the reader’s expectations, bringing about a contradictory relation of text and image.

In the summer of 2024, I began making a series of 25 illustrations to Charles Perrault’s ‘La Belle au Bois Dormant’— the frequently censored baroque version of the story more commonly known as ‘Sleeping Beauty’ (first published in 1697). Intended for both an exhibition and an artist book, these works stage a material encounter of surrealist aesthetics and the literary fairy tale. Taking the form of watercolour paintings derived from collages of 1980s-era magazine-images and film-stills, these works are intended to subvert and expand the reader’s familiar response to the well-known tale.

Perrault’s ‘Sleeping Beauty’ is a text which played a key role in the (imperfect) historical process of ‘civilising’ fairy tales. According to the Marxist folklorist Jack Zipes, the bourgeois appropriation of fairy tales (undertaken by writers such as Perrault, from the late 17th century onwards) sublimated their erotic and political content (their latent ‘revolutionary’ fantasies). The idea of a repressed content lurking within fairy tales, which has the potential to be surfaced through close reading or interpretation in other media, has further informed queer and feminist studies of this story; my own project is a direct response to Lewis C. Seifert’s essay ‘Queer Time in Charles Perrault’s “Sleeping Beauty”’ (2015)—concerned with how Perrault’s tale disrupts notions of chronological time and ‘compulsory heterosexuality’.

In this proposed paper I will describe the methodology and critical context underpinning this project, beginning with Hal Foster’s analysis of Max Ernst’s surrealist collage-novel Une Semaine de Bonté (1934). As Foster observes (in his book Compulsive Beauty, 1992), Ernst’s process of cutting and re-assemblage ‘articulates’ the psychological and political content repressed in his source material. This paper will examine whether (in our current moment) an equivalent method can have a similar effect when deployed as illustration. The paper will describe what configurations of image/ text occur when a method of surrealist collage is used to illustrate Perrault’s tale; and how these configurations might allow the viewer access to the story’s subliminal content (as identified by Seifert and other critical commentators).

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