Josef Wittmann's "Sleeping Beauty" reexamines the Sleeping Beauty tale from a male perspective. The speaker in the poem feels that the woman to whom he speaks expects too much from him. She wants a prince who will be devoted to her, but he has other demands on his time; he cannot spend his life serving her.
This poem subverts the traditional reading of Sleeping Beauty in which the princess is a prize to be won. And yet, unlike a typical feminist revision of the tale, the poem does not condemn the man for seeing the princess as a prize. Instead, the man himself is complaining that he is expected to be a prince, though he has no time in his life for impractical fairy tales.
The poem can be seen as a criticism of Sleeping Beauty and the expectations it causes women to have. Women, the poem suggests, are waiting for a prince to come for them, marry them, and be devoted to them, but this is an unrealistic wish. A man's life cannot revolve around any one person, but if that is what a woman wants she must "keep sleeping/ and dream another hundred years/until the right one/appears." In other words, it is unlikely that this dream will ever be fulfilled; the fairy tale Sleeping Beauty raises unrealistic expectations in women.
Josef Reding's "Girl, Forget That Prince!" is another poem which criticizes the tale of Sleeping Beauty for causing women to expect a prince to come and "save" her. Unlike Wittmann's "Sleeping Beauty," however, this poem encourages the woman to move beyond her passivity and to take action; it suggests to the woman: "rely on your own powers" in order to "build your own life." This poem is more concerned with the woman's feelings than with the man's and encourages women to take action in their own lives.