Parents often use fairy tales as bedtime stories for their children. Anne Sexton takes these often light and whimsical tales and turns them into her own creation. According to Diana Hume George in "An Overview of Sexton's Canon," Sexton "updated their contexts and language to emphasize their applications and parallels to modern life, and she exposed the dark psychic core of each tale of a inverted, or even inverted, manner. reversed their normative meanings. The poem "Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty)" begins with a young girl in a hypnotic state, sitting on her father's lap. The stanza is disturbing and uncomfortable to read, setting the tone for the rest of the poem. In the following stanzas, the traditional fairy tale plays out, but as it continues, Briar Rose's happy ending is nowhere to be found. Sexton focuses on the story's crucial events and twists them in ways that recreate the original fairy tale and expose its darker nuances that would otherwise be overlooked in the original story. Say no to plagiarism. Get a custom essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essaySexton begins the first stanza in the third person and describes a girl in a hypnotic trance in order to establish the unsettling tone of the rest of the poem . The speaker states, “She's stuck in the time machine, / suddenly two years old, she sucks her thumb” (l. 7-8). The girl regresses to a younger age, making her more childlike and vulnerable. The speaker goes on to state that the girl is having trouble finding her mother, but it is her father who holds her. On his knees, he says to her: “Come, be my snooky / and I will give you a root” (l. 21-22). Snooky is slang for a romantic partner and one root has a phallic shape. The fact that the father says this to his daughter immediately signals the incestual undertones that will be present later. Over the course of the poem, Briar Rose's life is marked by unfortunate events. The first happened when she was just a baby. Her father organized a baptism for her but he only had twelve gold plates and therefore only invited twelve fairies. The thirteenth fairy, feeling slighted, prophesies that “the princess will prick herself on a spinning wheel in her fifteenth year and fall dead. Kaputt! (l. 37-40). Using a silly expression such as “Kaputt!” contrasts sharply with the serious tone of the situation. It highlights the deadly nature of the curse, which is otherwise glossed over in the watered-down version of the bedtime fairy tale. In response to the curse, the king becomes overbearing in his need to protect his daughter. He orders that all the spindles in the kingdom be destroyed. This makes sense in relation to the prophecy, but the king's orders end up becoming more extreme. The speaker states that “He forced all the men of the court / to rub their tongues with Bab-o / lest they poison the air in which she dwelt” (l. 60-62). By asking men to clean themselves with a modern product. product containing bleach, it's as if the king wanted men to cleanse themselves so as not to corrupt his daughter. However, the curse says nothing about men who harm Briar Rose, so the king's need to protect her becomes an obsession. The king's obsession with his own daughter's purity is the beginning of the incestual undertones that subvert the original tale's message of selfless love. Despite his best efforts, the king's precautions to protect Briar Rose from the two men and the curse are thwarted, leading to the story's second pivotal moment. Inevitably, Briar Rose pricks her finger.