Disney, in their version of Sleeping Beauty, creates the Princess Aurora as the epitome of womanhood and femininity, while Maleficent is her exact inverse. The structure of the Sleeping Beauty tale gives Disney the perfect opportunity for designing Aurora as the ultimate woman. The fairies are each supposed to give the girl a gift at her birth that will make her the picture of perfection. In Disney's Sleeping Beauty, the first fairy grants her beauty, including "lips that shame the red, red rose" and "sunshine in her hair." Maleficent, in contrast, has a sharp, pointed face, sneering lips, and no hair at all. The gift granted by the second fairy is the gift of song. Princess Aurora has a beautiful, melodious voice, while Maleficent's voice is scratchy and low.

Throughout the movie the direct contrast between Aurora and Maleficent is very apparent. Maleficent is drawn surrounded in gloom, dressed all in black, her face a pale and hideous shade of green; Aurora, with her soft pink complexion, wears light blue dresses and is surrounded by sunshine. Maleficent sits, smoldering with rage in a distant, gray castle, encircled in storm clouds, while Aurora waltzes about in the warm, green woods. Aurora converses with cute, furry animals; Maleficent lives among dim-witted, boorish, troll-like henchmen. Even their names emphasize the direct contrast between their two characters.

While Aurora is the Ultimate Woman, Maleficent is presented as unwomanly and unfeminine. She is powerful and strong-- a threat to masculine authority-- and so her womanly characteristics must be diminished. A "real" woman would be like Aurora: obedient, naive and passive. Aurora is so passive that she does not even touch the spindle on her own initiative. In other versions of Sleeping Beauty she reaches out for the spindle in curiosity at an object she's never seen before; in the Disney version she touches it because she is in a trance induced by Maleficent. Maleficent, of course, is active and clever and unruly. She is toweringly tall and devoid of feminine feature (such as hair) and the complete opposite of the standard of feminine beauty set by Aurora. Worst of all, she is a woman alone. The three "good fairies" have each other and are motherly figures who end up raising the princess, but Maleficent is without anyone. As the green fairy, Fauna, explains: "Maleficent doesn't know anything about love or kindness or the joy of helping others." A woman's life should revolve around love and the joy of helping others, but these are qualities in which Maleficent is deficient. By presenting Maleficent as unwomanly, Disney is able to make her a monstrous anomaly and therefore to deny the threat of feminine power.

Young girls watching the Disney version of Sleeping Beauty see an outlet for their feelings of strength and power in Maleficent at the same time they desire to be like the ideal set for them in Aurora. They come to feel this good woman/bad woman dichotomy within themselves-- and to believe these are two separate selves which are incompatible with one another. Disney makes the "good woman" and the "bad woman" so separate-- such complete, binary opposites-- that it seems impossible that they can co-exist within one person. A girl ends up feeling that in certain situations she is one, and in other situations she is the other; she aspires to be like the ideal woman, presented in Aurora, but she enjoys using power like Maleficent. She will see a division between the kind and loving, and the powerful and strong within herself, rather than seeing the combination and the way they work together within her and combine to create one, complete personality.

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