14. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type C610 and C611, The one forbidden place (forbidden chamber).
Bluebeard’s greatest lie was that there was only one rule: the newest wife could do anything she wanted—anything—as long as she didn’t do that (single, arbitrary) thing; didn’t stick that tiny, inconsequential key into that tiny, inconsequential lock.14
But we all know that was just the beginning, a test. She failed (and lived to tell the tale, as I have), but even if she’d passed, even if she’d listened, there would have been some other request, a little larger, a little stranger, and if she’d kept going—kept allowing herself to be trained, like a corset fanatic pinching her waist smaller and smaller—there’d have been a scene where Bluebeard danced around with the rotting corpses of his past wives clasped in his arms, and the newest wife would have sat there mutely, suppressing growing horror, swallowing the egg of vomit that bobbed behind her breastbone. And then later, another scene, in which he did unspeakable things to the bodies (women, they’d once been women) and she just stared dead into the middle distance, seeking some mute purgatory where she could live forever.
(Some scholars believe that Bluebeard’s blue beard is a symbol of his supernatural nature; easier to accept than being brought to heel by a simple man. But isn’t that the joke? He can be simple, and he doesn’t have to be a man.)
Because she hadn’t blinked at the key and its conditions, hadn’t paused when he told her her footfalls were too heavy for his liking, hadn’t protested when he fucked her while she wept, hadn’t declined when he suggested she stop speaking, hadn’t said a word when he left bruises on her arms, hadn’t scolded him for speaking to her like she was a dog or a child, hadn’t run screaming down the path from the castle into the nearest village pleading with someone to help help help—it made logical sense that she sat there and watched him spinning around the body of wife Number Four, its decaying head flopping backward on a hinge of flesh.
This is how you are toughened, the newest wife reasoned. This is where the tenacity of love is practiced; its tensile strength, its durability. You are being tested and you are passing the test; sweet girl, sweet self, look how good you are; look how loyal, look how loved.
14. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type C610 and C611, The one forbidden place (forbidden chamber).