4 These words are repeated by Shakespeare in Much Ado About Nothing.
5 Published in Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales, edited by Kate Bernheimer, 1998.
6 Arranged marriages to monstrous men had blighted the lives of several women in Perrault’s salon circle. The fairy-tale writer Madame D’Aulnoy, for example, was pulled out of a convent at age fifteen and married off by her father to a wealthy brute thirty years her senior. After a series of rather scandalous adventures, she managed to establish a separate household in Paris, where she ran a fashionable salon that Perrault and his niece, L’Héritier, both frequented. Perrault, like his fellow salonnières, was firmly against arranged marriages.
7 For an interesting look at orientalism and Bluebeard, particularly as it relates to Angela Carter’s rendition of the tale, see Danielle M. Roemer’s article “The Contextualization of the Marquis in Angela Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber,’” which can be found in the special Angela Carter issue of Marvels and Tales: Journal of Fairy-tale Studies, Vol. 12, #1, 1998.
8 The Classic Fairy Tales, Maria Tatar (1999).
9 From the Beast to the Blonde, Marina Warner (1994).
10 Historically, this was time when religious fervor, doomsday cults, and experimental utopian communities were widespread in the area—as well as quasi-scientific ideas like mesmerism, which Gregory Frost makes use of in Fitcher’s Brides. Oddly enough, mesmerism grew out of the same French salons that fostered the creation of fairy tales like Bluebeard. You can read Gregory Frost’s article on the subject on the Endicott Studio Web site: www.endicott-studio.com/formsmr.html.
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