How does it taste? Curious. Feminine. Grotesque.
Bluebeard Themes, Retellings, and Tradition
Mollie: What? You do not need a man, okay? Or anybody, for that matter. It’s just the way we’ve been raised since fucking Disney movies.
Noa: Yeah. Fuck Ariel.
Mollie: Fuck her. Stupid Bitch. Left the whole sea for a man. Come on, now. Like fuck Beauty.
Noa: Yeah, fuck the Beast. I am the Beast.
- From the film Fresh (2022)
If one were to ask my eight-year-old niece what happens when a man courts a woman and brings her to a castle, perhaps she’d animate it today with the universal elements marked by the usual fairy storytelling of happily ever afters, prince charmings, and magical enchantments. However, a blue-bearded man with a bloody chamber, from which a lady opens with a key that is forbidden to be used, reveals the dead bodies of her husband’s previous wives and warns of her future death, written by Charles Perrault in 1697 seems to be more of a tale angled on a thriller, if read within the background of what we seek for a fairy tale in the present.
Bluebeard’s tale and tradition can be many expressions of enduring cultural archetypes. They can be seen through many perspectives, such as forbidden spaces, curiosity, taboo, gothic, baneful curiosity, depiction of women, secrecy, etc. It touches on the angles of marital anxieties, gendered rights, and sexuality, among many other things. But this paper will only concentrate on limited themes such as morbid curiosity, feminist/female gaze and proclivity, and deliberate vicious elements (bloody chambers, concealment, and/or grotesque horrors) present in the retellings.
In this paper, I’ll be discussing the main text of Perrault’s Bluebeard, along with the re-tellings of Brother’s Grimm Fitcher’s Bird, the poem Blue-bearded Lover by Joyce Oates, Margaret Atwood’s Bluebeard Egg, and some references to modern adaptations in films and shows wherein Bluebeard’s elements can be derived as well.
A curious cat crossing the road (Perraults’ retelling)
The world’s evils were released when Pandora opened the box, and much is the same when Eve took a bite of the apple in the garden of Eden — for which the theme of curiosity’s danger can be best known.
One thing to note when reading Perrault’s Bluebeard is the concentration of the narrative on the woman’s act of disobedience, not on Bluebeard’s attempt at his temptations and murders. Written in the 17th century, it’s particularly blunt in attempting to draw out a cautionary tale for women to curtail their curiosity and not stick their noses in their husband’s affairs. The first stanza of the story’s moral fundamentally declares this:
“Curiosity, in spite of its many charms,
Can bring with it serious regrets;
…And it always proves very, very costly.” (Perrault, 1697)
In the typical fairy tale, women who behave like a human, and has power or seek it, are quite portrayed as always repulsive (Lieberman, 1972). In this story, inquisitiveness and temptations have dire consequences for women who seek to inquire about the secrets of a man. During this period, women who deem to be knowledgeable, powerful, and willful are dangerous, thus the warning.
On sexuality, psychological analysis usually draws out women’s acquisition of knowledge to sexual connotations, like Eve’s shame in nakedness, for which it again cautions women not to give in to sexual curiosity and infidelity (Bettelheim, 1976). Moreover, one can also interpret her being doomed to death as a motif of the perils of marriage, marital estrangement, and the women’s anxieties prior to union at that time. Warner (1995) writes that the story may address the cruel fact that before the 19th century, the primary cause of death for women is childbirth — in the forbidden chamber, Bluebeard’s wife found herself in the face of her own future (maternal) death.
“You tried to enter that little room. Well, madam, now that you have opened it,
you can go right in and take your place beside the ladies whom you saw there.
She threw herself at her husband’s feet, weeping and begging his pardon, with
all the signs of genuine regret for disobeying him.” (Perrault, 1697)
The weight of the story allows the readers to sympathize with the husband in seeing the result of disobedience as an appropriate penalty, further emphasizing the effects of female transgressive desire and curiosity. In this original tale, curiosity certainly deserves to kill the cat.
He versus Women (Fitcher’s Bird and Blue-bearded Lover retelling)
The heroine in Perrault’s version is a “prime example of the helpless damsel-victim” (Lieberman, 1972). The Brother’s Grimm’s retelling, Fitcher’s Bird, strays on mapping out an alternative angle for the genre of the tale as one can see the woman’s actions as courageous instead of the unruliness of her insubordination. The voice of one who has been customarily silenced is now heard; cunning, clever, and devious in her ways.
“After handing over the keys and egg, he went away, and she put the egg in a safe place. She explored the house and entered the forbidden chamber.” (Brother’s Grimm, 1857)
By putting the egg in a safe place, being the hero of her sisters, tricking the sorcerer into carrying a basket to her home, and steering clear from death due to her ability to engineer her own rescue, a woman became her own salvation.
Fairy tales have often come under criticism by feminist critics for the way heroines are presented — passive, helpless, more often — submissive. In Joyce Oates’ Blue-bearded lover, we instead see the element of “submissiveness” equaled to being shrewd; the considerable difference prior to the usual retellings lies in her craft of steering away from all the drama and being cunning by means of succumbing.
“Did I not know that my lover’s previous brides had been brought to this house to die? — that they had failed him, one by one, and had deserved their fate?
I have slipped the golden key into my bosom, to wear against my heart, as a token of my lover’s trust in me.” (Oates, 1987)
The author fascinatingly writes that this tale was a “cold, cynical, sexual manipulation”, wherein the woman conquers him by surviving; but more to that is the esteem of bearing a child, an achievement never attained. With this, the story pins the woman’s triumph. She undermines and outwits by seeking to relieve the story’s tension by obeying the husband.
Generally, Bluebeard’s tale has been retold countless times as it can be seen as double structured in a way that it relates to both narratives and roles of the gender, depending on which sex reads it; in time, with the need to see changes in women’s status in the society, this offered a way for more works that closely examines the tale with a feminist focus. The works that follow after a feminine focus, according to Emily Moore in her book “Plots, Paradoxes, and Parodies: Women Writers Rewriting ‘Bluebeard.’” are used to demystify the patriarchal power in contexts of domestic violence, domestication, corporal punishments, and conditions of select female writers, etc. (Hermansson, 2009). In both narratives, by passing the test, the men no longer have rule over her.
The Egg and Female proclivity (Bluebeard’s Egg retelling)
In 1983, Margaret Atwood’s Bluebeard’s Egg captured the notion of the “new woman” dwelling on the wisdom of gender relations. Atwood was simply able to recapture the magic of fairy tales with its power to reflect the needs and concerns of its age (Tartar, 2017). In contrast to the accustomed setting of castles, weddings, and bloody chambers, Sally and Ed’s story is set in the present, cast in a realistic tone, and guided by an unreliable narrator as she arranges the story of their married life.
Ed’s perspective somehow remains masked both to Sally and the reader. The framing of the narrative is told particularly with the female gaze (the way women are portrayed through the eyes of a woman instead of a man). It again offers a reading of the tale, which is distinctively female (Lovell-Smith, 1999). In some of the excerpts, one can observe Sally’s perceptions of how the world is for her as well– her relationship with Ed, the women around Ed, her job, her interpretation of the Bluebeard tale, etc.
In the story, she remains to play the curious lady in the Bluebeard tale, to know the truth of what Ed truly is, and perhaps how he can also be capable of replacing Sally, like the many brides, with interchangeable women.
“His protestations of ignorance, his refusal to discuss the finer points, is frustrating to Sally, because she would like to hear the whole story. But it’s also cause for anxiety: if he doesn’t know what happened with the other two, maybe the same thing could be happening with her.” (Atwood, 1983)
Sally constantly tries to understand Ed’s world but is afraid of seeking more for the chance to be set on edge once she solves “the puzzle”. She claims she’s afraid of fooling around or even asking if he still loves her; we further see Sally’s inclination toward Ed’s inner life, “which she can’t get at”, and “a surface, one she has trouble getting beneath” in many of the excerpts in the text such as this:
“Ed is a real person, with a lot more to him than these simplistic renditions allow for; which sometimes worries her….. His obtuseness is a wall, within which he can go about his business, humming to himself, while Sally, locked outside, must hack her way through the brambles.” (Atwood, 1983)
There is much to discover here, but it’s adept at tackling what curiosity entails for a woman while also giving a conventional narrative from a female. This does lack the barbaric bloody room, but Ed’s character throughout the story was a chamber Sally was constantly trying to penetrate; the story was also deliberate in portraying the harshness of concealment and horror of the possible dilemma of being deceived by Ed’s façade in the end.
The story appears harmless as it frames the typicality of everyday couples, but it leaves a threatening and cruel theme to the readers as it ends nowhere near the murder of Bluebeard nor the triumph of the woman, it ends not with a finality. This tale, unlike the others, ends openly, leaving the readers a “now what?” — now that we have entered Bluebeard’s chamber, how are we to go with our cleaved pieces? What does “knowing” entail for the one that was curious, especially that of a woman?
Human butcherer and Book dungeons
In fairy tales, there is no such thing as a forbidden chamber that is never opened, and such a chamber always contains a tremendum numinous (awe-inspiring mystery), Von Franz (1996) writes, which humanity both trembles and is fascinated, repelled, and attracted.
The elements of Bluebeard still thrive to this day, as its tale can be a gothic prefiguring of modern cinematic horror, which can be seen in many of our thriller films today, especially with hit serial killer movies. Staging secrecy of a chamber and curiosity with gruesomeness, a serial killer plot ignites our sense to crave fear.
Fresh, a comedy horror film by Mimi Cave released last January 2022, introduces the story of Noa exchanging numbers with a stranger named Brendan in a grocery store (where he looks for his next victims). She eventually dates him after several online conversations. Brendan invites Noa to his luxurious home, where the story reveals Brendan butchers, eats, and sells human meat. He then showed Noa items belonging to his previous victims, all hidden in his secret compartment, along with another revelation of a prior captive held in the next room. The film concluded with Noa, her friend Mollie, and the captive in their attempt to escape, from which Brendan was then shot dead by Noa.
The film, in relation to the Bluebeard tale, takes the modern approach to the dangers in male-female relationships, specifically the “hell” and repercussions of online dating, especially for women. Noa was inclined to be curious about dating a guy she mainly conversed with online, which brought about her own doom by being Brendan’s next meat. The film is grotesque in essence as it factors the normalcy of Brendan’s serial killing cannibal character, along with his secret compartment containing unusual possessions of his previous women.
Furthermore, Netflix’s show YOU (2018) is explicit in branding the recurring themes of Bluebeard — a secret glass box where Joe kept his captives: “book dungeon” (supposedly a temperature-controlled room to keep old books in pristine condition), and the horror of murdering not only the woman (Beck) he dates but people whom he sees as a threat for his relationship with Beck. By the end of the first season, in Beck’s endeavors to uncover the secrets of Joe, she became a captive and was killed in her attempt to escape.
How the hell did you end up here? You used to wrap yourself in fairy tales like a blanket but it was the cold you loved. Sharp shivers as you uncovered the corpses of Bluebeard’s wives. Sweeter goose bumps as Prince Charming slid one glass slipper over your little toes, a perfect fit……. Now, in his castle, you understand Prince Charming and Bluebeard are the same man. And you don’t get a happy ending unless you love both of him. Didn’t you want this? To be loved? Didn’t you want him to crown you? Didn’t you ask for it? Didn’t you ask for it? So say you can live like this. Say you love him, say thank you, say anything but the truth.
(Beck’s monologue while she was locked in Joe’s “chamber”, Episode 10: Bluebeard’s Castle)
Seemingly, in contrast to the females in Bluebeard’s tales, in her narrative, Beck accepts her fate, and though not completely implied, blames herself for wanting and seeking “more”, and condemns yet again what curiosity led her to.
These contemporary crafts brand a timeless tale, where they’re all grotesque, violent, and morbid in essence. Perhaps it foreshadows our thriving fantasies about serial killers, secret rooms, and our tendency to be curious about the forbidden. Simply, the [Bluebeard] story of a woman’s transgressive curiosity about her husband’s undertakings can be seen as our self-reflexive contemplation on how fairy tales feed our appetite for horror, Maria Tartar (2017) writes.
Bluebeard’s grotesque elements continue to construct fears, desires, and thrills that remain intact despite our many several cultural and societal differences as we move through different centuries and genres, presently and even in the succeeding.
There can be no unifying interpretation of this tale, nor can it be subjected to only the motifs mentioned above and in the traditions of its retellings. Our perceptions continue to evolve, propped by the many changes in our time, the tale will continue to be reshaped to create new stories angled from the old.
— BL111 Year 2, Final Paper, 2022
References:
Main readings are from the Bluebeard Reading Packet — Perrault’s Bluebeard (1697), Brother’s Grimm’s Fitcher’s Bird (1857), Margaret Atwood’s Bluebeard’s Egg (1983), and Joyce Oates’ Blue-bearded Lover (1987).
Bettelheim, Bruno. 1976. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Vintage Books. https://books.google.com.ph/books/about/The_Uses_of_Enchantment.html?id=qTbBAYVv_KkC&redir_esc=y.
Hermansson, Casie E. 2009. Bluebeard: A Reader’s Guide to the English Tradition. Jackson:University Press of Mississippi
Lieberman, Marcia. 1972. “Some Day My Prince Will Come’: Female Acculturation through the Fairy Tale.” JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/375142.pdf.
Lovell-Smith, Rose. “Feminism and Bluebeard.” ELO: Estudos de Literatura Oral 5 (1999) (1999): 43–54.
Tatar, Maria ed. 2017. Introductory Essay. The Classic Fairy Tales. 2nd ed. New York: W. W.Norton & Company
Von Franz, M‐L. 1996. The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, 191- 92. Boston: Shambhala.https://books.google.com.ph/books?hl=en&lr=&id=gPE0DwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP12&ots=P2Bsj8V2B_&sig=Yy4O6bnc7bLJBZIQnjKy1r5ZaE&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
Warner, Marina. 1995. Essay. In From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers, 240–57. Farrar Straus & Giroux.
