Bluebeard

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For other uses, see Bluebeard (disambiguation).
Bluebeard forbids his wife to enter a small room in the chateau. From a 19th-century illustration by Gustave Doré
Bluebeard forbids his wife to enter a small room in the chateau. From a 19th-century illustration by Gustave Doré

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.

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[edit] Synopsis

Bluebeard was a wealthy aristocrat, feared because of his "frightfully ugly" blue beard. He had been married three 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 to live with him in his château.

Very shortly after, 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.

However, the wife immediately discovered the room's horrible secret: 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 had come onto the key which would not wash off. 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 brothers' captains commissions, and the rest to marry a worthy gentleman who made her forget her ill treatment by Bluebeard.

[edit] 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.

Another possible source stems from the Life of St. Gildas, written five centuries after his death in the sixth century. It describes a nobleman, Cunmar the Accursed, marrying a noblewoman, Triphine. She is warned by the ghosts of his dead wives that he murders his wives when they become pregnant. Pregnant, she flees; he catches and beheads her, but St. Gildas miraculously restores her to life, and when he brings her to Cunmar, the walls of his castle fall down. Cunmar is a historical figure, known locally as a werewolf, and various local churches are dedicated to Saint Triphine and her son, Saint Tremeur.[1]

Others regard both origins as unlikely and point to the blue beard as a symbol of his other worldly origins.[2]

In no version of the tale is it made clear why the first wife was killed; she could not have entered the door and seen a wife he murdered.[3]

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.

[edit] Adaptations

[edit] Literature

  • The character of Florian de Puysange in James Branch Cabell's novel The High Place is based on Bluebeard.
  • 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. Other feminist interpretations are given by Suniti Namjoshi in her short story "A Room of His Own".
  • 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 Archetype ISBN 0-345-40987-6
  • Kurt Vonnegut's novel Bluebeard (1988), is named Bluebeard, because the main character (Rabo Karabekian) owns a potato farm on the outskirts of his property which he nailed shut when his wife died. The entire book, well Rabo tells his life story, Circe Berman continually tries to find out what is in the Potato Barn. Rabo compares the potato barn to Bluebeard, and tells the basic plot of the children's story Bluebeard. Rabo was offer 3 million dollars for what was in the Barn sight unseen, because an article leaked out claiming that he was holding a piece of art in the barn to make it more valuable when he died, and it was released. (Rabo claims this is untrue).
  • 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.
  • In Charlotte Bronte's Victorian novel Jane Eyre, Jane comments in Chapter 11 that the third floor of Thornfield is "looking, with its two rows of small black doors all shut, like a corridor in some Bluebeard's castle."
  • Margaret Atwood uses the tale as the basis of a short story in the collection entitled Bluebeard's Egg.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales And Their Tellers, p 261 ISBN 0-374-15901-7
  2. ^ Maria Tatar, p 145-6, The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales, ISBN 0-393-05163-3
  3. ^ Maria Tatar, p 151, The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales, ISBN 0-393-05163-3

[edit] External links

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