When the world first met Maleficent, in the early 17th century, she was neither witch nor evil fairy. In the earliest known version of Sleeping Beauty—Giambattista Basile's Sun, Moon, and Talia—the 'villainess' is, in fact, a queen betrayed. When her husband the king cheats on her and starts a new family with the younger Princess Talia, the queen orders the illegitimate children of their union killed, cooked, and fed to her husband. Then she orders "a large fire lit in the courtyard of the palace, and command[s] that Talia should be cast into it." The king swoops in and saves the day by having his wife burned in Talia's place and taking the younger and more amiable princess as his new wife. As luck would have it, their children had in fact been spared, and, in a Henry VIII kind of way, everyone but the wronged queen gets to have their happily ever after.

And so Maleficent emerged onto the world literary stage. A woman without rights, with no recourse when her husband lies to her and cheats on her with a younger woman. An archetypal "mad" or "hysterical" woman who is jealous, vain, and petty, and who stoops to cruelty and murder to get her revenge.

Ever wonder why the world needed The First Wives' Club?

In the late 17th century Charles Perrault picked up the mantle of Basile's story and recast it as The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood. Here Maleficent becomes an amalgam of different kinds of 'evil' women. She is part "old fairy," jealous and spiteful and murderous, and part "ogress," a woman who cannot be trusted to abstain from eating her own grandchildren and/or feeding them to a pit of snakes. A woman married solely for her money, whose own son does not mourn her death for long, "for she was his mother; but he soon comforted himself with his beautiful wife and his pretty children."

Because who needs a mother, really, when you have a beautiful wife and pretty children?

In each of these tellings the author sets up a dichotomy of types of women. The beautiful young princess—malleable, obedient, and acted upon by dominant men—versus the unwanted older woman who is jealous, bitter, vengeful and cruel. And so we are taught to revere youth, beauty, and passivity among women, and to be suspicious—hateful even—of women who are older, powerful, and opinionated. Women who stand up for themselves are equated with murderous child-killers, witches, and ogres, while women who literally lay back and take what men give them are rewarded for their 'virtue.'

The Grimm Brothers borrowed Perrault's narrative, but left out the ogress. In fact, the whole serving-people-for-dinner scenario is omitted, and we are left, more or less, with Sleeping Beauty as retold by Disney in 1959. It is here that our villainess first gets the name Maleficent; until that point she is nameless and known only in derogatory terms. It is not until the 2014 film Maleficent, however, that she sheds her two-dimensional reputation for evil and fights the longstanding negative stereotyping of women that has haunted this story through the ages.

If villainizing powerful women is not enough, the original tale has another dark secret: rape. Remember the married king who cheated on his rightful queen and started a new family with Princess Talia? Yeah, that all happened while Talia was sleeping. That's right. In the original story the king rapes and impregnates the princess, fathering two children upon her in her sleep. Disney's 2014 Maleficent pays homage to this buried secret [SPOILER ALERT] when the fairy's former love cuts her wings off of her body in her sleep. The rest of the film becomes about reclamation of women's bodies and women's power.