‘Bluebeard’ (‘Barbe‐bleue’)made its literary debut in Charles Perrault's Histoires ou contes du temps passé (Stories or Tales of Past Times, 1697), a collection that placed the earthy, ribald narratives of a peasant culture between the covers of a book and turned them into bedtime reading for children. Like the other fairy tales in Perrault's collection, ‘Bluebeard’ has a happy ending: the heroine marries ‘a worthy man who made her forget the miserable time she spent with Bluebeard’. But ‘Bluebeard’ also deviates from the norm of most fairy tales in its depiction of marriage as an institution haunted by murder. While canonical fairy tales like ‘Cinderella’ and ‘Snow White’ begin with unhappy situations at home, centre on a romantic quest, and culminate in visions of marital bliss, ‘Bluebeard’ shows us a woman leaving the safety of home and entering the risky domain of her husband's castle. As Bruno Bettelheim has argued, Perrault's story represents a troubling flip side to ‘Beauty and the Beast’, for it arouses disturbing anxieties about marriage, confirming a child's ‘worst fears about sex’ and portraying marriage as life‐threatening.
Just who was Bluebeard and how did he get such a bad name? As Anatole France reminds us in his story ‘The Seven Wives of Bluebeard’, Charles Perrault composed ‘the first biography of this seigneur’ and established his reputation as ‘an accomplished villain’ and ‘the most perfect model of cruelty that ever trod the earth’. Perrault's ‘Bluebeard’ recounts the story of an aristocratic gentleman and his marriage to a young woman whose desire for opulence conquers her feelings of revulsion for blue beards. After a month of married life, Bluebeard declares his intention to undertake a journey. ‘Plagued by curiosity’, Bluebeard's wife opens the door to the one chamber forbidden to her and finds a pool of clotted blood in which are reflected the bodies of Bluebeard's dead wives, hanging from the wall. Horrified, she drops the key and is unable to remove a tell‐tale bloodstain from it. Bluebeard returns home to discover the evidence of his wife's transgression and is about to execute her, when his wife's brothers come to the rescue and cut him down with their swords.
‘Bloody key as sign of disobedience’: this is the motif that folklorists consistently read as the tale's defining moment. The bloodstained key (in some cases it is an egg or a flower) points to a double transgression, one that is at once moral and sexual. If we recall that the bloody chamber in Bluebeard's castle is strewn with corpses, this reading of the key as a marker of infidelity becomes wilfully wrong‐headed in its effort to vilify Bluebeard's wife. Yet illustrators, commentators, and retellers alike seem to have fallen in line with Perrault's view, as expressed in his moral to the tale, that ‘Bluebeard’ is about the evils of female curiosity. A 19th‐century Scottish version summarizes in its title what appears to be the collective critical wisdom on this tale: ‘The Story of Bluebeard, or, The Effects of Female Curiosity’.
The French folklorist Paul Delarue has mapped the evolution of ‘Bluebeard’, documenting the liberties taken by Perrault in transforming an oral folk tale into a literary text. The folk heroines of ‘Bluebeard’ delay their executions by insisting on donning bridal clothes, and they prolong the possibility of rescue by recounting each and every item of clothing. Perrault's heroine, by contrast, asks her husband for time to say her prayers, thus becoming a model of devout piousness. Unlike folk heroines, who figure as their own agents of rescue by dispatching letter‐carrying dogs or talking birds, Perrault's heroine sends her sister up to the castle tower to watch for her brothers. Most importantly, folk versions of the tale do not fault the heroine for her curiosity. On the contrary, when these young women stand before the forbidden chamber, they feel duty‐bound to open its door. ‘I have to know what is in there’, one heroine reflects just before turning the key. These folkloric figures are described as courageous: curiosity and valour enable them to come to the rescue of their sisters by reconstituting them physically (putting their dismembered parts back together again) and by providing them with safe passage home.
The French versions of ‘Bluebeard’ that predate Perrault's story reveal a close relationship to two tales recorded by the Brothers Grimm. The first of these, ‘Fitcher's Bird’, shows the youngest of three sisters using her ‘cunning’ to escape the snares set by a clever sorcerer and to rescue her two sisters. The heroine of ‘The Robber Bridegroom’ also engineers a rescue, mobilizing her mental resources to thwart the thieves with whom her betrothed consorts. Oddly enough, however, these two variants of ‘Bluebeard’ seem to have fallen into a cultural black hole, while Perrault's ‘Bluebeard’ and its literary cousins have been preserved and rewritten as cautionary stories warning about the hazards of disobedience and curiosity. It is telling that Margaret Atwood turned to ‘Fitcher's Bird’ and ‘The Robber Bridegroom’ for inspiration (for her ‘Bluebeard's Egg’ and for The Robber Bride, in particular) and that a visual artist like Cindy Sherman created a picture book of the Grimms' ‘Fitcher's Bird’. Along with Angela Carter, whose ‘Bloody Chamber’ rewrites the Bluebeard story from the point of view of the wife, Atwood and Sherman have reinvigorated a story that lost its socially critical edge when it was appropriated for children.
Bibliography
- Bettelheim, Bruno, “‘The Animal‐Groom Cycle of Fairy Tales’”, in The Uses of Enchantment (1976).
- Hartland, E. Sidney, ‘The Forbidden Chamber’,
Folk‐Lore Journal , 3 (1885). - Lewis, Philip, “‘Bluebeard's Secret’”, in Seeing through the Mother Goose Tales: Visual Turns in the Writings of Charles Perrault (1996).
- McHaster, Juliet, ‘Bluebeard: A Tale of Matrimony’,
A Room of One's Own , 2 (1976). - Moshowitz, Harriet, ‘Gilles de Rais and the Bluebeard Legend in France’,
Michigan Academician , 4 (1973).
— Maria Tatar
