Folklore often trades in the sensational—breaking taboos, enacting the forbidden, staging hidden desires, and exploring pathologies with uninhibited investigative energy. In many ways, the story of a wife’s transgressive curiosity about her husband’s violent past could be seen as a self-reflexive meditation on how fairy tales feed our undiminished appetite for horror. “Bluebeard” is also without doubt the most stunning piece of evidence that folktales can be seen as the legitimate precursors of cinematic horror, another genre notorious for trading on collective fears and fantasies. Stories like “Bluebeard” prefigure the gothic plots of modern horror and construct desires and fears that remain remarkably intact (despite cultural variations) as we move from one century to the next and as we cross from one popular form of entertainment to another. In “Bluebeard,” as in cinematic horror, we have not only a killer who is propelled by psychotic rage but also the abject victims of his serial murders, along with a “final girl” (Bluebeard’s wife), who either saves herself or arranges her own rescue. The “terrible place” of horror, a dark, tomblike site that harbors grisly evidence of the killer’s derangement, manifests itself as Bluebeard’s forbidden chamber.2
It is not only in cinematic horror from the 1970s onward that the Bluebeard story manifests its cultural staying power. In what one critic has tellingly called “paranoid woman’s films,” we also find the Bluebeard syndrome at work in all its melodramatic theatricality.3 These films, which were made in the wake of Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) and include such classic thrillers as Robert Stevenson’s Jane Eyre (1944), George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944), and Fritz Lang’s Secret beyond the Door (1948), all feature a heroine who is beset by fears that her husband is planning to murder her. Driven by hermeneutic desire, these women investigators search for the key to understanding the cryptic behavior of their sinister husbands, always by penetrating the mysteries of a chamber in the house where they have taken up residence. In Hitchcock’s Rebecca, the boathouse and Rebecca’s bedroom are forbidden or uncanny spaces for the character played by Joan Fontaine; in Jane Eyre the title character must unlock the secret of the tower room in which Bertha Mason is housed; in Gaslight it is the attic, along with the husband’s locked desk, that are taboo; and in Secret beyond the Door, the heroine is barred from entering room 7, a replica of her own bedroom built to provide her husband with the scene of his next crime.
In much the same way that cinema criticism has been obsessed with the “paranoia” of a wife rather than by the very real threat posed by a husband who seems to be restaging the Bluebeard story, folklorists have shown surprising interpretive confidence in reading Perrault’s “Bluebeard” as a story about a woman’s marital disobedience or sexual infidelity rather than about her husband’s murderous violence. “Bloody key as sign of disobedience”—this is the motif that folklorists consistently read as the defining moment in the tale. The bloodstained key points to a double transgression, one that is at once moral and sexual. For one critic, it becomes a sign of “marital infidelity”;4 for another it marks the heroine’s “irreversible loss of her virginity”;5 for a third, it stands as a sign of “defloration.”6 If we recall that the bloody chamber in Bluebeard’s castle is strewn with the corpses of previous wives, this reading of the bloodstained key as a marker of sexual infidelity becomes willfully wrongheaded in its effort to vilify Bluebeard’s wife.
Illustrators, commentators, and retellers alike seem to have fallen in line with Perrault’s stated view in his moral to the story that “Bluebeard” is about the evils of female curiosity. Walter Crane’s illustration of Bluebeard’s wife on her way to the forbidden chamber shows her descending the stairs, framed by a tapestry of Eve giving in to temptation in the Garden of Eden. “Succumbing to temptation” is the “sin of the fall, the sin of Eve,” one representative critical voice asserts. A nineteenth-century Scottish version of the tale 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.”7
Bluebeard’s wife may have an inquiring mind, but her curiosity is clearly intellectual rather than sexual. It turns her into an energetic investigator, determined to acquire knowledge of the secrets hidden behind the door of the castle’s forbidden chamber. Perrault’s story, by underscoring the heroine’s kinship with certain literary, biblical, and mythical figures (most notably Psyche, Eve, and Pandora), gives us a tale that willfully undermines a robust folkloric tradition in which the heroine is a resourceful agent of her own salvation. Rather than celebrating the courage and wisdom of Bluebeard’s wife in discovering the dreadful truth about her husband’s murderous deeds, Perrault and other tellers of the tale often cast aspersions on her for engaging in an unruly act of insubordination.
The French folklorist Paul Delarue has mapped out the evolution of “Bluebeard,” documenting the liberties taken by Perrault in transforming an oral folktale into a literary text.8 The folk heroines of “Bluebeard” delay their executions by insisting on donning bridal clothes for the event (thus buttressing the folkloric connection between marriage and death), and they prolong the possibility of rescue by recounting each and every item of clothing. Perrault’s heroine, by contrast, who asks her husband for “a little time to say my prayers” (see here), becomes a model of repentent piety. Unlike many folk heroines, who become agents of their own rescue by dispatching fleet-footed pet dogs or talking birds to their families with urgent calls for help, Perrault’s heroine sends her sister up to the castle tower to watch for the brothers who were to visit her that very day. Most important, folk versions of the tale do not fault the heroine for her curiosity. To the contrary, when the young women stand before the forbidden chamber, they feel duty-bound to open its door. “I have to know what is in there,” one young woman reflects just before turning the key. The pangs of conscience that beset Perrault’s heroine are absent.
Once we move from the classic, canonical versions of the tale, we discover heroines who are often described as courageous: curiosity and valor 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. Calculated to maximize melodramatic effects, many of the less-well-known stories side with the heroine, who becomes the agent of her own rescue. In versions of the story told by Jamaican storytellers, African Americans in the U.S. South, or Pueblo Indians, the wives of Bluebeard figures engineer a breathtaking escape that ends with a triumphant return home.
While the story of Bluebeard has been read by countless contemporary commentators as turning on the issue of sexual fidelity, what really seems to be at issue, if one considers the folkloric evidence, is the heroine’s discovery of her husband’s misdeeds, her craft in delaying the execution of his murderous plans, and her ability to engineer her own rescue. In its bold proclamation about the perils of some marriages, “Bluebeard” endorses, above all, allegiance to family and celebrates a return to the safety and security of home, a regressive move back to the household of the heroine’s childhood. Bluebeard’s wife becomes a double of the British Jack, liquidating the ogre and climbing back down the beanstalk to live happily ever after at home.
When we consider the form in which “Bluebeard” circulated in an oral culture, it quickly becomes evident that the story must be closely related to two tales recorded by the brothers Grimm. The first of these, “Fitcher’s Bird” (see here), shows us 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” (see here) also engineers a rescue, mobilizing her wits and her narrative skills to escape from the thieves with whom her betrothed consorts. Oddly enough, however, these two variants of the “Bluebeard” story seem to have fallen into a cultural black hole, while tales like Perrault’s “Bluebeard” have been preserved and rewritten as cautionary tales warning women about the hazards of disobedience and curiosity. It is
telling that an author like Margaret Atwood turned to “Fitcher’s Bird” and “The Robber Bridegroom” for narrative inspiration and that a visual artist like Cindy Sherman created a picture book of the Grimms’ “Fitcher’s Bird.” This new cultural investment in old tales about bad marriages clearly has something to do with the discovery that older versions of “Bluebeard” stressed the resourcefulness of the heroine and with the revelation that Perrault’s “Bluebeard” was not the sole source of narrative authority for this particular marriage tale.
Margaret Atwood, who grew up reading the Grimms, recognized that fairy tales were not at all as culturally repressive as some feminist critics had made them out to be.
The unexpurgated Grimm’s Fairy Tales contain a number of fairy tales in which women are not only the central characters but win by using their own intelligence. Some people feel fairy tales are bad for women. This is true if the only ones they’re referring to are those tarted-up French versions of “Cinderella” and “Bluebeard,” in which the female protagonist gets rescued by her brothers. But in many of them, women rather than men have the magic powers.9
Atwood, who weaves fairy-tale motifs throughout her narratives with almost unprecedented creative energy, also produced a new version of “Bluebeard,” one that has embedded in it the Grimms’ story “Fitcher’s Bird.” “Bluebeard’s Egg,” unlike any fairy tale, is told from the protagonist’s point of view: it charts Sally’s drive to solve “the puzzle … Ed” (see here) and reveals that Ed Bear (who may not sport a beard on his face but surely has one encrypted in his nickname) is not as transparent as Sally once assumed. His inner life becomes a kind of secret chamber, a space that Sally is unable to penetrate. But Atwood challenges our interpretive faculties by refusing to write a text that offers unproblematic parallels with “Bluebeard.” In the profusion of references to other fairy tales (Ed is a “third son” [see here], a “brainless beast” [see here], and a “Sleeping Beauty” waiting to be wakened by Sally, who is both a princess and a false bride), Atwood makes it clear that she taps multiple cultural stories for this work. And by transforming the forbidden chamber of Bluebeard’s castle into everything from Ed’s enigmatic mind and his “new facility” (see here) to the anatomical cavities of the human heart and the keyhole desk before which Ed betrays his sexual infidelity, Atwood unsettles the traditional story of “Bluebeard” and challenges us to understand the complexities of what she calls “power politics.” Ed cannot be reduced to Bluebeard, and Sally is more than his investigative wife. In focalizing the story through Sally and showing how her effort to come to terms with the Grimms’ “Fitcher’s Bird” leads her to powerful revelations about her own life, Atwood suggests that engagement with our cultural stories can open our eyes to realities that—however disruptive, painful, and disturbing—are not without a liberating potential. Hence the story ends on an ambiguous note, with a sense of anxiety but also with the possibility of hope about what will hatch from the “almost pulsing” (see here) egg of Sally’s dream vision.
There is always another side to every story, and Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Bluebeard” poem reminds us of the perils of wanting to know too much when it comes to romance. A sharp stick against snooping, prying, nosiness, and spying, it reminds us that sometimes there is nothing to suspicions aroused, sometimes there is “no treasure hid, / The sought-for truth, no heads of women slain” (see here). Curiosity kills not only the cat but also a love that might have endured.
* * *
1. Anatole France, “The Seven Wives of Bluebeard,” in Spells of Enchantment: The Wondrous Fairy Tales of Western Culture, ed. Jack Zipes (New York: Viking, 1991), p. 567.
2. Carol J. Clover draws up an inventory of generic properties of the horror film in Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1992), pp. 26–44.
3. Mary Ann Doane, “Paranoia and the Specular,” in The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987), pp. 123–54.
4. Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Knopf, 1976), p. 302.
5. Carl-Heinz Mallett, Kopf ab! Gewalt im Märchen (Hamburg: Rasch & Röhring, 1985), p. 201.
6. Alan Dundes, “Projection in Folklore: A Plea for Psychoanalytic Semiotics,” in Interpreting Folklore (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980), p. 46.
7. These critical voices are cited in Maria Tatar, The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1987), pp. 157–64.
8. Paul Delarue, “Barbe-Bleue,” in Le Conte populaire français (Paris: Editions Erasme, 1976), I:182–99.
9. Sharon R. Wilson, Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1993), pp. 11–12.
CHARLES PERRAULT
Bluebeard†
There once lived a man who had fine houses, both in the city and in the country, dinner services of gold and silver, chairs covered with tapestries, and coaches covered with gold. But this man had the misfortune of having a blue beard, which made him look so ugly and frightful that women and girls alike fled at the sight of him.
One of his neighbors, a respectable lady, had two daughters who were perfect beauties. He asked for the hand of one, but left it up to the mother to choose which one. Neither of the two girls wanted to marry him, and the offer went back and forth between them, since they could not bring themselves to marry a man with a blue beard. What added even more to their sense of disgust was that he had already married several women, and no one knew what had become of them.
In order to cultivate their acquaintance, Bluebeard threw a party for the two girls with their mother, three or four of their closest friends, and a few young men from the neighborhood in one of his country houses. It lasted an entire week. Every day there were parties of pleasure, hunting, fishing, dancing, and dining. The guests never even slept, but cavorted and caroused all night long. Everything went so well that the younger of the two sisters began to think that the beard of the master of the house was not so blue after all and that he was in fact a fine fellow. As soon as they returned to town, the marriage was celebrated.
After a month had passed, Bluebeard told his wife that he had to travel to take care of some urgent business in the provinces and that he would be away for at least six weeks. He urged her to enjoy herself while he was away, to invite her close friends and to take them out to the country if she wished. Above all, she was to stay in good spirits.
“Here,” he said, “are the keys to my two large store rooms. Here are the ones for the gold and silver china that is too good for everyday use. Here are the ones for my strongboxes, where my gold and silver are kept. Here are the ones for the caskets where my jewels are stored. And finally, this is the passkey to all the rooms in my mansion. As for this particular key, it is the key to the small room at the end of the long passage on the lower floor. Open anything you want. Go anywhere you wish. But I absolutely forbid you to enter that little room, and if you so much as open it a crack, there will be no limit to my anger.”
She promised to follow the orders he had just given exactly. After kissing his wife, Bluebeard got into the carriage and embarked on his journey.
Friends and neighbors of the young bride did not wait for an invitation before coming to call, so great was their impatience to see the splendors of the house. They had not dared to call while the husband was there, because of his blue beard, which frightened them. In no time they were darting through the rooms, the closets, and the wardrobes, each of which was more splendid and sumptuous than the next. Then they went upstairs to the storerooms, where they could not find words to describe the number and beauty of the tapestries, beds, sofas, cabinets, stands, and tables. There were looking glasses, in which you could see yourself from head to toe, some of which had frames of glass, others of silver or gilded lacquer, but all of which were more splendid and magnificent than anyone ther
e had ever seen. They kept on expressing praise even as they felt envy for the good fortune of their friend who, however, was unable to take any pleasure at all from the sight of these riches because she was so anxious to get into that room on the lower floor. So tormented was she by her curiosity that, without stopping to think about how rude it was to leave her friends, she raced down a little staircase so fast that more than once she thought she was going to break her neck. When she reached the door to the room, she stopped to think for a moment about how her husband had forbidden her to enter, and she reflected on the harm that might come her way for being disobedient. But the temptation was so great that she was unable to resist it. She took the little key and, trembling, opened the door.
At first she saw nothing, for the windows were closed. After a few moments, she began to realize that the floor was covered with clotted blood and that the blood reflected the bodies of several dead women hung up on the walls (these were all the women Bluebeard had married and then murdered one after another).
She thought she would die of fright, and the key to the room, which she was about to pull out of the lock, dropped from her hand. When she regained her senses, she picked up the key, closed the door, and went back to her room to compose herself. But she didn’t succeed, for her nerves were too frayed. Having noticed that the key to the room was stained with blood, she wiped it two or three times, but the blood would not come off at all. She tried to wash it off and even to scrub it with sand and grit. The bloodstain would not come off because the key was enchanted and nothing could clean it completely. When you cleaned the stain from one side, it just returned on the other.
The Classic Fairy Tales_Norton Critical Edition Page 29
