Rewriting the Sleeping Beauty Myth: Archetype, Cinema, and the Ecofeminist Resurrection of Maleficent from Monstrous Feminine to Fairy Godmother in Disney’s Maleficent (2014)

Abstract

Canonical fairy tales have historically functioned as ideological apparatuses that naturalize patriarchal gender relations through romance-driven narrative closures. The Sleeping Beauty myth, in particular, encodes female passivity, aestheticized silence, and heterosexual rescue as normative ideals, culminating in the prince’s kiss as the ultimate agent of awakening. Feminist critics such as Angela Carter have famously exposed these narratives as “sugar-coated lies” that conceal structures of gendered domination beneath enchantment and moral certainty. This paper offers a theory-heavy ecofeminist reading of Robert Stromberg’s Maleficent (2014), arguing that the film radically revises the Sleeping Beauty myth by dismantling patriarchal archetypes, rescinding the masculine hero, and reconfiguring awakening through relational ethics and ecological consciousness. Drawing on feminist critiques of Jungian archetypal theory, ecofeminist philosophy (Vandana Shiva, Carolyn Merchant), feminist psychoanalytic criticism, and revisionist myth theory, the paper contends that Maleficent reappropriates myth as a site of resistance. By foregrounding Maleficent as the eponymous protagonist—aligned with nature, care, rage, and wounded agency—the film resurrects female subjectivity from the symbolic death imposed by patriarchal fairy-tale traditions and reimagines love, power, and sovereignty beyond capitalist and masculinist logics.