Bluebeard

Bluebeard is the title character in a famous fairy tale about a violent nobleman and his over-curious wife. It was written by Charles Perrault and first published in 1697, but the original provenance is much older; Shakespeare (circa 1599) alludes to it in Much Ado About Nothing, Act 1, Scene 1:

Like the old tale, my lord: "it is not so, nor `t was not so; but, indeed, God forbid it should be so."

Synopsis

Bluebeard was a wealthy aristocrat, feared because of his fierce appearance and wild behaviour. He had been married seven times, but no-one knew what had become of his wives. He was therefore avoided by the local girls. When Bluebeard visited one of his neighbours and asked to marry one of her daughters, they were terrified, and each tried to pass him on to the other. Eventually he persuaded the younger daughter to marry him, and after the ceremony she went with him to live with him in his chateau.

Very shortly, however, Bluebeard announced that he had to leave the country for a while; he gave over all the keys of the chateau to his new wife, including the key to one small room that she was forbidden to enter. He then went away and left the house in her hands. Almost immediately she was overcome with the desire to see what the forbidden room held, and finally her visiting sister convinced her to satisfy her curiosity and open the room.

Its floor reeked of blood, and the dead bodies of her husband's former wives hung on the walls. Horrified, she locked the door, but blood would not wash off the key. Bluebeard returned unexpectedly and immediately knew what his wife had done. In a blind rage he threatened to behead her on the spot, and so she locked herself in the highest tower with her sister. While Bluebeard, sword in hand, tried to break down the door, the sisters waited for their two brothers to arrive. At the last moment, as Bluebeard was about to deliver the fatal blow, the brothers broke into the castle, and as he attempted to flee, they killed him.

He left no heirs but his wife, who inherited all his great fortune. She used part of it for a dowry to marry her sister to the one that loved her, another part for her brother's captains comissions, and the rest to marry a worthy gentleman who made her forget her ill treatment by Bluebeard.

Analysis

Although best known as a fairy tale, the character of Bluebeard is believed to have been based on the 15th-century Breton nobleman and serial killer, Gilles de Rais.

The motifs of the mysterious absent husband, the sumptuous palace, the sister who encourages illicit curiosity ,and the one forbidden thing (a central theme: compare Pandora's Box and the story of Adam and Eve), all appear in the Hellenistic story of Cupid and Psyche.

While the story was regularly reprinted in fairy tale collections up until the 1950s, its popularity then greatly diminished as it was deemed less and less appropriate for children to read. As the pivotal element of the story involves the discovery of the dead wives, Bluebeard was harder to tone down for younger audiences, a factor which no doubt greatly contributed to its decline.

According to the Aarne-Thompson system of classifying fairy tale plots, the tale of Bluebeard is type 312.

Adaptations

Literature

The Perrault version reappears retold in Andrew Lang's Blue Fairy Book.

In 1979, Angela Carter published an updated version of the Bluebeard story, the eponymous story in her collection, The Bloody Chamber. Carter sets the story sometime between the World Wars, and writes a first person narrative from the perspective of the young wife. Her revision has feminist undertones that bring out the story's latent themes of domestic violence and predatory sexuality, and rescues its heroine from bland fairy-tale passivity. Another feminist interpretation is given by Suniti Namjoshi in her short story "A Room of His Own".

Donald Barthelme also wrote a characteristically brief, surreal parody of the tale, set in 1910. Published first in The New Yorker, it was included later in the collection Forty Stories.

Francesca Lia Block writes of a modern Bluebeard, in her fairy-tale anthology, Rose and The Beast, in this version however, the girl goes because of an invitation to a party rather than being invited to live with Bluebeard (here: a young, handsome, and successful photographer), the story is also modernised however, and along with many other subtle changes the heroine is openly shown the forbidden closet. Also, Block establishes quickly that the girl must find her own escape; no sister or brothers are present to help her.

Edna St. Vincent Millay's poem "Bluebeard" is an adaptation of the story with a different ending. She describes his secret chamber as "an empty room, cobwebbed and comfortless" representative of his need for privacy. The girl is recast as a selfish character who, by violating Bluebeard's trust and refusing to allow him any secrets, proves herself unworthy of his love. In the end, Bluebeard merely leaves, abandoning the girl to her own greed.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes uses the myth of Bluebeard in Chapter 2; "Stalking the Intruder: The Beginning Initiation" in her book Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archtype ISBN 0345409876

Kurt Vonnegut's novel Bluebeard (1988), however, is only tangentially related to the folklore character.

In L. M. Montgomery's The Blue Castle, the heroine is told, before marrying the hero, that she must not go into a room in his house. She calls it "Bluebeard's Chamber" thereafter, although assuring him that she doesn't care if there are dead wives in there, as long as they are really dead.

Opera

Operatic versions of the Bluebeard tale have been made by:

Hungarian composer Béla Bartók: Bluebeard's Castle (A kékszakállú herceg vára), from a heavily psychosexual libretto by Béla Balázs;
Paul Dukas, Ariane et Barbe-bleue ("Ariane and Bluebeard"), also a psychological tale (to a libretto by Maurice Maeterlinck), in a luxuriant chromatic polytonal post-Wagnerian idiom; and
Jacques Offenbach, the operetta "Barbe-bleue", a lighter take on Duke Bluebeard's journey through multiple nuptials.

Other Media

In 1979, the Soviet cartoon A Very Blue Beard (a twenty-minute comedy in which Bluebeard recounts his version of events) was produced.

Bluebeard is an important character in the Fables comic book series. This version of the character is ostensibly reformed, having fled his "homeland" for our world to escape a conqueror. As the narrative progresses however, it is revealed that beneath his urbane appearance he has changed very little, and he frequently uses his wealth to manipulate his fellow "Fables".

External links

Characters in written fiction | Fairy tales | Fictional serial killers | Literature villains

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