The Sleeper and the Spindle

Pages 20 through 49 comprise the story’s second act, beginning with the first on-page meeting of the dwarves and their queen, signaling the start of their quest. Riddell’s illustration of the queen being fitted in her wedding dress provides a jumping off point for her character arc. She begins the story resigned to her fate as a wife and queen, emphasizing the story’s thematic exploration of Freedom and Constraint. Gold coloration gives particular attention to the waist-cinching element of the gown, highlighting the queen’s sense of suffocation and constraint. In the text, Gaiman describes the dress as “whiter than snow” (20), alluding to her fairy tale name as well as the purity that she is expected to embody as a beautiful, unmarried woman. This scene also expands the queen’s relationship with the dwarves; they are open and comfortable with each other, despite their marked difference in physical and social status. The dwarves allude to the queen’s previous enchanted sleep, further cementing the association with the traditional Snow White tale. Taking one last opportunity to live a life of adventure before the finality of her marriage, the queen embarks on a quest with her friends.

It’s not until Page 23, nearly halfway through the book, that Gaiman acknowledges his narrative choice to leave most characters unnamed: “The queen had a name, but nowadays people only ever called her Your Majesty. Names are in short supply in this telling” (23). While there are clear implications regarding which elements are taken from other canonized stories, the lack of names also gives this retelling a universality and a contemporary relevance. The accompanying illustration depicts the queen looking very different from her previous dress fitting; her most prominent features are her sword and her tied-back hair, both practical and battle-ready. This shift from bride to warrior signals an Inversion of Gender Dynamics and foreshadows a narrative departure from traditional Preconceptions of Youth and Beauty. As the companions enter the village, the narrative re-introduces the townspeople and takes time to establish some of the story’s worldbuilding. The queen and the dwarves consider whether the sleepers are held in a state of eternal stasis, or whether they are still beholden to the limitations of their mortal human bodies. At this point, the sleepers begin echoing the thoughts of the princess through whom their captivity originated. Once the queen falls into a temporary though ominous sleep, the story temporarily deviates into a broad-lens view of the enchanted briar forest. Both the text and the accompanying illustration give the scene a botanical gothic quality (a tone widely associated with the traditional fairy tale canon).

Riddell’s illustrations allow the story to move back and forth between the quest of the queen and the dwarves and the princess asleep inside the tower. The illustration of two contrasting women, juxtaposed both visually and narratively, depicts the sleeping maiden as a symbol of purity and innocence and the old woman, the only human in the kingdom left awake, as bitter and filled with malice. The story alternates between this intimate setting and the larger one of the wider world as the queen and the dwarves draw closer to the castle. The sleeping people soon become a singular antagonistic presence, stripped of any humanity or individuality. In the full-page illustration of the sleepwalking town, every sleeping person is covered in spiderwebs, contributing to the motif of spiders spinning their webs and their connection to the spinning wheel or spindle that the enchantress uses to spin the lives of others. As the queen comes within reach of the castle, she begins experiencing hallucinations that allude to her past. Of particular importance to the story is the queen’s memory of her wicked stepmother, whom Riddell depicts wearing glowing iron shoes—a reference to the Grimm Brothers’s version of Snow White in which the heroine’s stepmother was punished for her crimes and her vanity by being forced to walk in burning metal shoes. Although Gaiman doesn’t specify the enchantress’s origin or heritage, her description being cast down by mortal invaders suggests a connection to older pantheons of Pagan gods and fairy folklore.

Soon the travelers encounter the skeleton of a knight caught in the wall of thorns, an image widely associated with the Sleeping Beauty tale. Using ingenuity rather than force, the queen burns her way through so she can continue on her journey, allowing the central characters to come together in one shared space as the story approaches its climax: the defeat of the evil enchantress by the queen.