SOURCE: “Text and Countertext in Rosario Ferré's ‘Sleeping Beauty,’” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 33, No. 2, Spring, 1996, pp. 207–18.

In the following essay, Glenn concentrates on the form and structure of “Sleeping Beauty,” highlighting the function of its fragmented narrative and the play between texts and countertexts from a variety of media that inform the story.

Rosario Ferré is one of a group of angry young Puerto Rican women authors who have seized the pen and wielded it effectively. Educated on the island and the mainland, Ferré is the daughter of a former governor of Puerto Rico and by birth a member of the upper-class, conservative society she satirizes in her fiction. She has acknowledged that writing is for her a destructive as well as a constructive endeavor and that she is driven by a need for vengeance and a desire to give permanence to what hurts and...