Briar Rose Jane Yolen Analysis

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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, 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…show more content…
Fairytales tend to place a large deal of emphasis on love, romance and happy endings. Yolen ends the novel with Stan who is Becca’s boss and the person that has supported her throughout her quest kissing Becca when she arrives from Poland. However their relationship and romance is based in modern day reality rather than the cliché love at first sight from fairytales. We also see through Josef, that there are different types of love but because he was homosexual he was not able to love freely. The short marriage between Aron and Gemma in the woods represents a fairytale romance. We also see Josef’s love for Aron which Josef is unable to say. Josef ends up alone with his memories, many of them painful. There is also a strong sense of family love and connection, which is significant because of Gemma who had survived and was put in safer surroundings by Josef. The family is portrayed as a typical modern bickering group however their love is based on real respect and
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