Analysis of "Briar Rose" by Jane Yolen
Uploaded by spootyhead on Apr 18, 2007
Analysis of "Briar Rose" by Jane Yolen
Briar Rose by Jane Yolen is a heart-wrenching story of Sleeping Beauty intertwined with the horrors of World War II. The novel contains all the elements of the classic Sleeping Beauty: the castle, thorns, princess, and a tale of death and awakening from eternal sleep. Yolen compared a story that fictitiously occurred during World War II with Sleeping Beauty, which allowed one of the main characters, Gitl Mandelstein, to indirectly tell her horrifying experiences during the war.
The story beings with Gitl, or Gemma (as she is referred to by her granddaughters), in a nursing home. Her granddaughters Silvia, Shauna, and Becca went to visit her, for she was on her deathbed. She began telling them the story of Sleeping Beauty, a story which she had told them throughout their childhood, although this time was different. She told her grandchildren that she was in fact Briar Rose. Gemma did not go into detail, but made her granddaughter Becca promise to discover everything about her past. This is shown in the following quote: "’Promise me you will find the castle. Promise me you will find the prince. Promise me you will find the maker of the spells‘" (Yolen 20). Soon after, Gitl died.
Throughout Briar Rose Yolen depicts Becca’s struggles to uncover the truth about her Gemma’s connection to Sleeping Beauty. She had so many unanswered questions. Was her Gemma a princess? Did she live in a castle? Who was her prince? The only thing Gitl had left behind was a small box of papers with very few answers. Becca did end up finding all her answers from a man named Josef, who had actually known and interacted with Gitl.
After a trip to Poland to speak with Josef, Becca figured out that the fairy tale her grandmother told was in fact a tale of horror. The castle Gitl described to her grandchildren was in fact an extermination camp, Chelmno. The thicket of thorns which surrounded the castle in which the princess slept represented the barbed wire that surrounded the camp.
Gitl was thought to have been dead, and therefore her body was discarded. Some refugees, which included Josef, had escaped from various extermination...