Bluebeard is a wealthy and powerful nobleman who has been married several times to beautiful women who have all mysteriously vanished. When Bluebeard visits his neighbor and asks to marry one of his daughters, the girls are terrified. After hosting a wonderful banquet, he chooses the youngest daughter to be his wife – against her will – and she goes to live with him in his rich and luxurious palace in the countryside, away from her family.
Bluebeard announces that he must leave for the country and gives the keys of the château to his wife. She is able to open any door in the house with them, each of which contain some of his riches, except for an underground chamber that he strictly forbids her to enter lest she suffer his wrath. He then goes away and leaves the house and the keys in her hands. She invites her sister, Anne, and her friends and cousins over for a party. However, she is eventually overcome with the desire to see what the forbidden room holds, and she sneaks away from the party and ventures into the room.
She immediately discovers the room is flooded with blood and the murdered corpses of Bluebeard’s former wives hanging on hooks from the walls. Horrified, she drops the key in the blood and flees the room. She tries to wash the blood from the key, but the key is magical and the blood cannot be removed. Fearing for her life, she reveals her husband’s secret to her visiting sister, and they plan to both flee the next morning. However, Bluebeard unexpectedly returns and finds the bloody key. In a blind rage, he threatens to kill his wife on the spot, but she asks for one last prayer with her sister Anne. Then, as Bluebeard is about to deliver the fatal blow, Anne and the wife’s brothers arrive and kill Bluebeard. The wife inherits his fortune and castle, and has the dead wives buried. She uses the fortune to have her other siblings married then remarries herself, finally moving on from her horrible experience with Bluebeard.
COMMENTARIES
The fatal effects of female curiosity have long been the subject of story and legend. Eve, Lot’s wife, Pandora, and Psyche are all examples of mythic stories where women’s curiosity is punished by dire consequences. The Bluebeard story also echoes the story of The Fall. In giving his wife the keys to his castle, Bluebeard is acting the part of the serpent, and therefore of the devil, and his wife the part of the victim held by the serpent’s gaze.
In addition, hidden or forbidden chambers were not unknown in pre-Perrault literature. In Basile’s Pentamerone, the tale The Three Crowns tells of a Princess Marchetta entering a room after being forbidden by an ogress, and in The Arabian Nights, Prince Agib is given a hundred keys to a hundred doors but forbidden to enter the golden door, which he does with terrible consequences.
While some scholars interpret the Bluebeard story as a fable preaching obedience to wives (as Perrault’s moral suggests), folklorist Maria Tatar has suggested that the tale encourages women not to unquestioningly follow patriarchal rules. Women breaking men’s rules in the fairy tale can be seen as a metaphor for women breaking society’s rules and being punished for their transgression. The key can be seen as a sign of disobedience or transgression; it can also be seen as a sign that one should not trust their husband.
Tatar, however, does go on to speak of Bluebeard as something of a “Beauty and the Beast” narrative. The original Beauty and the Beast tale by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont is said to be a story created to condition young women into the possibility of not only marriage, but marrying young, and to placate their fears of the implications of an older husband. It shows the beast as secretly compassionate, and someone meant to curb the aggressive sexual fears that young women have towards marriage. Though “Beauty and the Beast” holds several similarities in Gothic imagery to “Bluebeard,”(such as is shared with Cupid and Psyche as well, in the case of a mysterious captor, a looming castle, and a young, beautiful heroine) Tatar goes on to state that the latter tale lives on the entire opposite side of the spectrum: one in which, instead of female placation, the tale simply aggravates women’s apprehension, confirming one’s “‘worst fears about sex'”.
Jungian psychoanalyst Clarissa Pinkola Estés refers to the key as the key of knowing which gives the wife consciousness. She can choose to not open the door and live as a naive young woman. Instead, she has chosen to open the door of truth.
For folklorist Bruno Bettelheim, Bluebeard can only be considered a fairy tale because of the magical bleeding key; otherwise, it would just be a monstrous horror story. Bettelheim sees the key as associated with the male sexual organ, “particularly the first intercourse when the hymen is broken and blood gets on it.” For Bettelheim, the blood on the key is a symbol of the wife’s indiscretion.
For scholar Philip Lewis, the key offered to the wife by Bluebeard represents his superiority, since he knows something she does not. The blood on the key indicates that she now has knowledge. She has erased the difference between them, and in order to return her to her previous state, he must kill her.
kiara
July 5, 2020 at 10:10 AM
IT’S OK TO NOT BE OK Eps 6: “BLUEBEARD.” A French folktale, written by Charles Perrault.
Surviving version
https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/68/fairy-tales-and-other-traditional-stories/4858/blue-beard/
PLOT
Bluebeard is a wealthy and powerful nobleman who has been married several times to beautiful women who have all mysteriously vanished. When Bluebeard visits his neighbor and asks to marry one of his daughters, the girls are terrified. After hosting a wonderful banquet, he chooses the youngest daughter to be his wife – against her will – and she goes to live with him in his rich and luxurious palace in the countryside, away from her family.
Bluebeard announces that he must leave for the country and gives the keys of the château to his wife. She is able to open any door in the house with them, each of which contain some of his riches, except for an underground chamber that he strictly forbids her to enter lest she suffer his wrath. He then goes away and leaves the house and the keys in her hands. She invites her sister, Anne, and her friends and cousins over for a party. However, she is eventually overcome with the desire to see what the forbidden room holds, and she sneaks away from the party and ventures into the room.
She immediately discovers the room is flooded with blood and the murdered corpses of Bluebeard’s former wives hanging on hooks from the walls. Horrified, she drops the key in the blood and flees the room. She tries to wash the blood from the key, but the key is magical and the blood cannot be removed. Fearing for her life, she reveals her husband’s secret to her visiting sister, and they plan to both flee the next morning. However, Bluebeard unexpectedly returns and finds the bloody key. In a blind rage, he threatens to kill his wife on the spot, but she asks for one last prayer with her sister Anne. Then, as Bluebeard is about to deliver the fatal blow, Anne and the wife’s brothers arrive and kill Bluebeard. The wife inherits his fortune and castle, and has the dead wives buried. She uses the fortune to have her other siblings married then remarries herself, finally moving on from her horrible experience with Bluebeard.
COMMENTARIES
The fatal effects of female curiosity have long been the subject of story and legend. Eve, Lot’s wife, Pandora, and Psyche are all examples of mythic stories where women’s curiosity is punished by dire consequences. The Bluebeard story also echoes the story of The Fall. In giving his wife the keys to his castle, Bluebeard is acting the part of the serpent, and therefore of the devil, and his wife the part of the victim held by the serpent’s gaze.
In addition, hidden or forbidden chambers were not unknown in pre-Perrault literature. In Basile’s Pentamerone, the tale The Three Crowns tells of a Princess Marchetta entering a room after being forbidden by an ogress, and in The Arabian Nights, Prince Agib is given a hundred keys to a hundred doors but forbidden to enter the golden door, which he does with terrible consequences.
While some scholars interpret the Bluebeard story as a fable preaching obedience to wives (as Perrault’s moral suggests), folklorist Maria Tatar has suggested that the tale encourages women not to unquestioningly follow patriarchal rules. Women breaking men’s rules in the fairy tale can be seen as a metaphor for women breaking society’s rules and being punished for their transgression. The key can be seen as a sign of disobedience or transgression; it can also be seen as a sign that one should not trust their husband.
Tatar, however, does go on to speak of Bluebeard as something of a “Beauty and the Beast” narrative. The original Beauty and the Beast tale by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont is said to be a story created to condition young women into the possibility of not only marriage, but marrying young, and to placate their fears of the implications of an older husband. It shows the beast as secretly compassionate, and someone meant to curb the aggressive sexual fears that young women have towards marriage. Though “Beauty and the Beast” holds several similarities in Gothic imagery to “Bluebeard,”(such as is shared with Cupid and Psyche as well, in the case of a mysterious captor, a looming castle, and a young, beautiful heroine) Tatar goes on to state that the latter tale lives on the entire opposite side of the spectrum: one in which, instead of female placation, the tale simply aggravates women’s apprehension, confirming one’s “‘worst fears about sex'”.
Jungian psychoanalyst Clarissa Pinkola Estés refers to the key as the key of knowing which gives the wife consciousness. She can choose to not open the door and live as a naive young woman. Instead, she has chosen to open the door of truth.
For folklorist Bruno Bettelheim, Bluebeard can only be considered a fairy tale because of the magical bleeding key; otherwise, it would just be a monstrous horror story. Bettelheim sees the key as associated with the male sexual organ, “particularly the first intercourse when the hymen is broken and blood gets on it.” For Bettelheim, the blood on the key is a symbol of the wife’s indiscretion.
For scholar Philip Lewis, the key offered to the wife by Bluebeard represents his superiority, since he knows something she does not. The blood on the key indicates that she now has knowledge. She has erased the difference between them, and in order to return her to her previous state, he must kill her.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluebeard
Carolina
July 5, 2020 at 1:28 PM
So interesting!