PRINCIPAL VARIANTS
The French fairy tale of Charles Perrault, “La Barbe bleue” (“Bluebeard”), was penned in 1695 and published in 1697. The figure Perrault named, however, had dominated international folklore and myth for centuries before Perrault gave him the particulars of a blue beard and a sumptuous castle with one forbidden room with which to tempt and test his wives. Whether for its ever-popular depiction of female curiosity or for serial wife murder, the story in Perrault’s form took prompt and lasting hold over the English imagination.
This fairy tale is one of the grisliest in the canon. But one of the first issues to address is that while there is a French fairy tale named “Bluebeard” by Charles Perrault, translated into English in 1729, the “Bluebeard story” that is referred to throughout this book does not exist. In more necessarily general terms, the Bluebeard fairy tale is a nexus of variants related by themes: curiosity, forbidden chambers, punishment, wife murder. The smallest core of tale variants that have influenced the English tradition consists of Perrault’s “La Barbe bleue,” Grimms’ “Fichters [sic] Vogel” (“Fitcher’s Bird”) and “Der Räuberbräutigam” (“The Robber Bridegroom”), and the main English variant itself (predating Perrault), “Mr. Fox.” The next ring out includes primarily other Grimm tales, such as “Marienkind” (“Mary’s Child”), in which the Virgin Mary punishes a young girl for disobedience, specifically for looking into a forbidden chamber. Beyond them are hundreds of variants interconnected by shared themes and story elements. Variations between regional French versions of “Bluebeard,” for instance, are usually slight, while the details of comparative tales from different nationalities may be greatly different. But, at its most elemental, the fairy tale concerns a prohibition and its transgression. Tales most closely approximating “Bluebeard” feature a secret kept by a male suitor and discovered by his wife or betrothed. The secret is the source of the prohibition, often manifested as a prohibited room. Discovering the secret means death for the woman, and typically the revelation is that the groom has murdered his previous wives or betrotheds. Nonetheless, transgression by the final wife enables her to be saved from such death in time. The useful German term Blaubartmärchen groups these related folk and fairy tale variants and ballads, but has no equivalent in English; reference to the generic “Bluebeard tale” or “Bluebeard story” (as opposed to Perrault’s “Bluebeard”), presumes a deliberate imprecision.1
In categorizing international fairy tales, the Aarne and Thompson classification (1961, 101–04) groups examples by type, assigning each type a number. The principal variants of Bluebeard discussed so far fall into the three groups of variants: AT 311: “The Heroine Rescues Herself and Her Sisters” (for “Fitcher’s Bird”), AT 312: “Bluebeard,” and AT 955: “The Robber Bridegroom.”2
The earliest of the three principal recorded variants, and the only one to use the name “Bluebeard,” is Perrault’s literary fairy tale “La Barbe bleue” (“Bluebeard,” AT 312). If there is such a thing as “the real Bluebeard,” this tale is it. The name itself does not appear to have been applied to any real or fictional personage prior to Perrault’s version. Perrault’s tale appeared quickly in England in chap-book form and was translated in 1729 by Robert Samber.
In Perrault’s “Bluebeard,” a wealthy nobleman with an unfortunate blue beard courts and marries one of two sisters, who overcomes her trepidation at the beard in order, it seems, to enjoy the wealth. Bluebeard gives her the keys to all the rooms of his extensive castle, but forbids her to use one of them, threatening her with extreme punishment should she disobey him. He leaves, and quickly she opens the forbidden chamber, discovering there the bodies of his murdered former wives. She drops the key in the blood on the floor, and because the blood is magically indelible, it betrays her guilt when Bluebeard suddenly arrives home and asks for it. He says she is to die. The wife asks for time to pray and uses it to call repeatedly to her sister to tell whether she sees their brothers coming.3 One of the hallmarks of Perrault’s tale is the haunting and desperate repetition as the wife hopes to be rescued by her avenging brothers: “Sister Anne, Sister Anne, do you see anyone coming?” The keys, the forbidden chamber, the trespass, and the murdered women are the essential elements of the tale. After Perrault, Bluebeard is firmly a figure of fairy tale, despite the fact that the story really only has a couple of fée (fairy, or magical) elements: strictly speaking, only the magic indelible blood on the key, but perhaps also the blue beard.
Helpers such as talking animals or crones who serve as housekeepers and cooks to the murderer are frequent in these tale groups. In Perrault’s version, Sister Anne signals from the turret and the brothers dispatch Bluebeard. With the exception of the ruse to gain time to pray, the heroine is passive in her rescue. Rescue of a sister by her brothers is a common folkloric formula: “Don Firriulieddu” is able to rescue his sister when he is only three days old. In “Mr. Bluebeard,” one of the brothers is “an old-witch” like Bluebeard himself, and by seeing water turn to blood he knows something is wrong with his sister. Often, the bride or family members set up a warning system in advance, already uneasy with the bridegroom. The bride is given messenger doves or dogs to send in an emergency.4
The Grimms’ Die Kinder- und Hausmärchen (first edition 1812–1815, second 1819), selectively translated into English in the early nineteenth century (1823–1826), contributed two more principal variants in addition to “Blaubart”, the German version of Charles Perrault’s tale.5 “Bluebeard” was in fact omitted from editions following 1812 for the very reason that it was considered to be Perrault’s and not an “authentic” older tale. The two principal variants of the Bluebeard tale group deriving from Grimm are “Fitcher’s Bird” (“Fichters [sic] Vogel”) and “The Robber Bridegroom” (“Der Räuberbräutigam”). The English translations of Grimm in German Popular Stories were the first in any country to be fully illustrated (Darton 1932, 216), and by the already-famous English illustrator George Cruikshank. Whereas German Popular Stories featured “The Robber Bridegroom,” the other major German variant, “Fitcher’s Bird,” was not published in English until decades later.
In Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s “Fitcher’s Bird,”6 Bluebeard is a wizard who magically kidnaps two of three sisters in turn, giving each a bunch of keys to his castle and an egg, telling them not to open the locked chamber door and to carry the egg everywhere as great harm would result from its loss. In turn each sister opens the door, dropping the egg into the basin of blood and dismembered body parts she finds there. She is betrayed by the stained egg and murdered. But the youngest (third) sister is “clever” and immediately places the egg out of harm’s way. When she opens the door to the chamber and finds her two sisters there, she is able to resurrect them. The wizard, believing that he has found a woman who can master her curiosity (or who has none), announces that she has passed the premarital test. Because she is to be his bride he no longer has power over her, so she is able to command Bluebeard to carry a basket of gold home to her family, hiding her sisters in the basket. She decorates a skull in bridal ornaments and places it in the tower window so that Bluebeard will believe she is watching him and he will not pause on his way. She bedecks herself in honey and feathers to disguise herself as a bird, whereby she tricks the wedding guests arriving at the castle and escapes. Even Bluebeard does not recognize her after this metamorphosis, and she is able to gather her kinfolk together to burn the castle, the wedding guests, and Bluebeard himself.
Maurice Sendak, “Fitcher’s Bird.” Courtesy of Maurice Sendak.
The “three sisters” motif that “Fitcher’s Bird” presents is common in folklore. The story is told in detail for the first (usually eldest) sister, the second sister briefly succumbs to the same fate as the first, and the third telling of the sequence presents the difference that in some way the murderer is outwitted by the (usually youngest) sister.
The Bluebeard stories all revolve around seeing: the wife sees what she is not allowed to see, and what she sees in the bloody chamber is her own end at her husband’s hands.7 Bluebeard himself sees that she has disobeyed him. In “Fitcher’s Bird,” the ability to see is alluded to by the bridal skull decorated and set in the window to watch the sorcerer on his way. In many kindred variants, the outwitting of the Bluebeard figure involves this turning of tables. It is now the wife who makes the injunction that Bluebeard must not stop on his way (back to her house with the hidden sisters and, often, with his own treasure). Further, he must not look in the bag, basket, or chest he is carrying. The wife tells him she can see a very long way and tells her sisters that should he set them down, they are immediately to cry out “I see you! I see you!” and thus prevent him from looking where he is forbidden. Ironically, Bluebeard attempts to be as disobedient as his wife had been. And each time he tries, after believing his wife can still see him, even around corners and behind trees, he expresses his amazement at her ability to see so far.
In stories of this type, it is a common motif to have the wife or captured woman make an effigy of herself in some form: to use a rag or straw doll (“Devil Gets Tricked,” “The Fair Young Bride”8), to dress her pillow (“Jurma”) or stuff her clothes (“How the Devil Married Three Sisters,” “Silver Nose,” “Ímarasugssuaq, Who Ate His Wives”), or to put her clothes on a well pole (“The Robber’s Bride”) and hold a broom (“Hen Is Tripping in the Mountain”) or cooking spoon (“The Hare’s Bride”). In all these versions, when attempts to get her attention fail, the man (or animal) becomes violent, and only by decapitating or hitting the effigy does he realize that he has been tricked.
An important feature of “Fitcher’s Bird” is that, by contrast to Perrault’s tale, the heroine rescues herself and her sisters and without assistance. Also, the stained egg, instead of the stained (or sometimes broken) key, is the magical tale-teller in “Fitcher’s Bird.” In the Italian “Silver Nose” (and variant “Devil Gets Tricked”), the devil sneaks flowers into the three sisters’ hair during the night before they open the forbidden door leading to the Inferno. In turn the rose and the carnation are singed by the heat and flames of the abyss, giving away the disobedient women. The third sister puts her jasmine in water to keep it fresh, thus escaping detection. In the Spanish “Merchant and His Three Daughters,” an apple falls and is bruised until the third sister wraps it in cloth before opening the door.
The first English translation of Grimms’, German Popular Tales, features “The Robber Bridegroom,” (“Der Räuberbräutigam,” AT 955) with a footnote giving the tale “a general affinity to that of Bluebeard.”9 Notably the list of variants of this tale type is predominantly British. One of the variants, “Mr. Fox,” is the form of the Bluebeard tale type earliest known in English, predating Perrault’s “Bluebeard” in writing by a century.
In Grimms’ “The Robber Bridegroom” (1857 version), a miller’s daughter is betrothed to a suitor she does not quite trust. She goes out on Sunday as appointed, following the trail of ashes he laid for her. But because she doubts him, she fills her pockets with peas and lentils and makes her own trail also. The house is empty, but a bird calls out: “Turn back, turn back, you young bride. / You are in a murderer’s house.” It repeats the warning. She goes through the house, finally coming to the cellar, where an old woman tells her she is in danger from the robbers who eat women. She hides behind a large barrel just as the band return dragging a woman. They kill that woman by giving her three glasses of different colored wines (white, red, yellow), which cause her heart to break. They chop her up and salt her. They cut off her finger to get her ring, but the finger bounces into the betrothed’s lap. The old woman diverts the bandits from searching behind the barrel and puts a sleeping potion in their wine. That night both women escape. On the wedding day the fiancée tells her story, interjecting the reassuring refrain, “Darling, it was only a dream,” until she produces the finger as proof. The robber and his gang are killed.
Corinna Sargood, “Old Foster” (“Mr. Fox”). We see at once the brutal dismemberment of the woman Foster has captured and the proof the woman will use to denounce him later landing in her lap: “and here I have the hand to show.” Courtesy of Corinna Sargood.
The motifs of this variant type, recognizable in other variants, are the secret visit to the man’s house after he has laid a trail to follow (often ashes; sometimes of flour or red silk thread or even a trail of pig’s blood).10 The woman is warned at the house by writing over the gate and doors or frequently by a bird who speaks or a crone helper-figure (a housekeeper or the bandit’s mother). She is able to take a token of the murderer’s crime away with her: a hand, finger, or ring, which usually falls to where she is hidden. In all stories of this type, there is a public event in which the murderer is denounced as the heroine tells her story disguised as a “dream” story or a riddle, over the man’s repeated interruptions and objections. In some cases, it is the wedding feast itself. In others, a story-telling event is either already planned or created specifically to entrap the criminal (the heroine dresses as a boy to tell her story on more than one such occasion, and constables are planted or a regiment surrounds the house or inn where the event is taking place). In a last grisly detail, the dead hand is sometimes recognized by someone in the crowd.
The other motif present in “The Robber Bridegroom” and in many Bluebeard tales is the cannibalism of the bandit-groom.11 In one version of “Pretty Polly” the woman is invited to help herself to food and does so; the meat is delicious, until she finds a hand in it. In others, there is a cook or a boy boiling meat over a fire. In “The Robber’s Bride,” the woman is told to decide her own method of being cooked: boiled in water, or in oil. In Charles Dickens’ literary variant “Captain Murderer,” the ogre requires his wife to bake a pie. She makes the crust, but when she asks him where she is to get the meat that goes in the pie, he takes her to a mirror to see her own reflection as she is murdered.
The English variant “Mr. Fox” belongs to the same tale type as “The Robber Bridegroom” and has a plentiful set of variants of its own. There are two main types of “Mr. Fox” tales. One is typified by the motif of “the girl who sees her own grave dug.”12 In this, a slick man named Fox (sometimes, an actual fox) invites the girl he is courting to visit him at a prearranged place. She is suspicious but does so, or even goes early, and hides herself up a tree to wait and watch. What she sees is Mr. Fox digging a grave, which she understands only too well to be her own. In some instances, as in “Mary, the Maid of the Inn,” he has an accomplice, and in these the pair may be killing and/or burying another woman’s body. These variants share another motif: that of a riddle told at the end to publicly denounce Mr. Fox, akin to the following from “The Oxford Student”: “One moonshiny night, as I sat high, / Waiting for one to come by, / The boughs did bend; my heart did break, / To see what hole the fox did make.”
The second variant set of “Mr. Fox” tales (“Mr. Foster,” “Old Foster”) bear a closer resemblance to the plot elements of “The Robber Bridegroom,” with a specific formula used for the warnings given the curious betrothed and a parallel formulaic series used by the betrothed to allay the bridegroom’s fears as she tells the tale publicly and denounces the groom. Lady Mary is suspicious of her fiancé and decides to visit him at his home unannounced. The warnings are sequential: “Be Bold, Be Bold”; then “Be bold, be Bold, But not too bold”; and finally: “Be Bold, Be Bold, but not too Bold, Lest that your heart’s blood should run cold.” She nevertheless goes upstairs and finds a “bloody chamber,” in which are the bodies of many murdered women. On her way out, she must hide to avoid Mr. Fox, who is dragging another woman. He cuts off that woman’s hand to get a diamond ring, which is then taken up by the hidden betrothed. In many variants, the victim grabs at a stair rail or door frame in an effort to save herself, and the hand is severed to prevent further resistance. Lady Mary denounces him at the wedding breakfast by telling of her dream. At each sequential warning, he interjects: “It is not so, nor was not so, And God forbid it should be so.” When she produces “hand and ring … to show,” she points the hand at him to denounce him.
“Mr. Fox” was earliest recorded in Edmund Spenser’s English epic romance The Faerie Queene (1590). When Britomart the (female) knight of chastity enters the castle of the wizard Busyrane to rescue Amoret, who has been kidnapped, she is warned by inscriptions over inner doors to “Be Bold, Be Bold” and then “But Not Too Bold”:
Tho as she backward cast her busie eye,
To search each secret of that goodly sted,
Ouer the dore thus written she did spye
Be bold: she oft and oft it ouer-red,
Yet could not find what sence it figured:
But what so were therein or writ or ment,
She was no whit thereby discouraged
From prosecuting of her first intent,
But forward with bold steps into the next roome went.
. …
And as she lookt about, she did behold,
How ouer that same dore was likewise writ,
Be bold, be bold, and euery where Be bold,
That much she muz’d, yet could not construe it
By any riddling skill, or commune wit.
At last she spyde at that rooms upper end,
Another yron dore, on which was writ,
Be not too bold; whereto though she did bend
Her earnest mind, yet wist not what it might intend.
(3:11, 50, 54, my emphasis)
Shakespeare’s play Much Ado About Nothing also refers to it: “Like the old tale, my lord—‘it is not so, nor ’twas not so, but indeed, God forbid it should be so!’” (1.1: 203–04). Although the tale is not named, the refrain is precise and by 1600 it is already referred to as “the old tale.”
One Appalachian variant furnishes another interesting hybrid, containing several motifs: Pretty Polly sees her own grave dug, then follows the trail to the man’s house to discover what has happened to three other women. In a prearranged play-telling, she tells both the riddle (common to the grave-digging motif) and also denounces using the dream-story formula. In this particular Southern “Mr. Fox,” Pretty Polly first spies Mr. Fox digging a grave for her in the woods. As she does not appear that night, he stops coming to see her, but three other women disappear. Although he is suspected, there is no evidence and no one knows where he lives. When he begins courting Polly again, the story includes the “Mr. Fox” story that is more commonly told, except that Polly is deliberately on his trail to discover what happened to the three missing women. She follows a flour trail to his house and there spies a woman being dragged along. She keeps a severed hand as dramatic proof that the story she later tells is true. The common animal helper warning, given here by a parrot (“Don’t go in, pretty lady! / You’ll lose your heart’s blood”), fails as it must. Before Mr. Fox returns dragging another woman, Polly has entered his house and seen a chamber containing women’s beheaded bodies: “But she opened the door anyhow and looked in. It was like a slaughter room in there: women hung up all around the walls with their heads cut off. Polly shut the door right quick” (“Mr. Fox” 1993, 97). This story adds an extra exchange in that she asks the bird to promise to lie when it is asked if anyone has been there, which it does. During the subsequent “play-party in the settlement,” Polly tells a riddle: “Riddle to my riddle to my right! / Where was I that Saturday night? / All that time in a lonesome pine, / I was high, and he was low. / The cock did crow, the wind did blow. / The tree did shake, and my heart did ache / To see what a hole that fox did make (1993, 99).”13 She delays the answer until after she has completed the sequence of dream descriptions (with the ritual protests from Mr. Fox). Somewhat clumsily, the riddle wraps up at the end: “After they took Mr. Fox out [for trial], everybody recollected Pretty Polly’s riddle and asked her about it, and she told ’em about the grave and all” (101).
The “Mr. Fox”/“Old Foster”/“Pretty Polly” tales of Appalachia have also generated a set of ballad variants named “Pretty Polly” or “Pretty Molly.” Unfortunately, the end for the ballad heroines is rarely a happy one, as Polly (or Molly) is killed by her lover, who throws some dirt over her and leaves nothing behind but the birds to mourn. Other ballads share the theme: Annie Miller, Lady Isabel, and May Colven and even another Pretty Polly are related ballad heroines14 who manage to turn the tables on their murdering spouse. Invariably, the groom says: “I have drowned seven young ladies, / The eighth one you shall be.” In some variants, the heroine must convince a parrot not to betray her.
In contrast to the other Appalachian variants that adapt “Mr. Fox” in a fairly straightforward fashion, there is another contribution to the Bluebeard story nexus that is a “Jack Tale.” In these tall tales, Jack is always the hero: quick witted and a trickster figure, he always comes out on top. In “Old Bluebeard,” the focus is on Jack outwitting a Bluebeard who gets away with eating the brothers’ dinners (Tom and Will are unable to prevent him); when it is Jack’s turn, he changes the pattern by offering Bluebeard food instead of trying to prevent him from having any. Until this point, Bluebeard is referred to as “old indigo beard,” but there is no evidence of woman-collecting tendencies. But once Jack follows him to his hole in the ground and determines to go after him, his women-collecting propensity is revealed. Jack finds, by turns, three women sitting down the hole in three houses and rescues each one. The last one becomes Jack’s own wife.15
Just as the marriage to death is archetypal, most if not all cultures offer versions of the marriage to an animal groom: a snake, a bull, a fierce tiger; some include human transformations. When these marriages are cruel or linked with curiosity and disobedience, they fall within the realm of the Bluebeard story, although they have never gone by that name.
The bestial nature of the murderer is often expressed by representing him as an actual animal like “Mr. Fox”; examples abound internationally. One American variant, “The Secret Room,” collects in one place obvious threads from Perrault’s “Bluebeard,” “Fitcher’s Bird,” and the animal helper variants, as well as the betrothal to a nonhuman (who is transformed into the marriageable prince by her trickery). In this tale, a mother and her three daughters are spinning outside their cottage when they see a bull in the cabbage patch (in “The Hare’s Bride” it is a hare stealing cabbages who then steals the girl away; in “Peerifool” it is a giant, and in “The Widow and Her Daughters” it is a gray horse). The oldest daughter runs after it, chasing it to a house on the edge of a wood. Here, the bull gives her a bunch of keys, “and told her that she could go anywhere in the house she liked except one room” (“The Secret Room” 1960, 149). The story follows Perrault’s “Bluebeard.” As the bull leaves her, she succumbs to curiosity and opens the forbidden room. The room contains headless bodies of other women. There is blood now on the key, on her hand, and on her shoes. A cat offers to tell her the secret to cleaning the blood off in exchange for a dish of bread and milk, but the daughter shoos the cat away and is killed when the bull returns.16 The same happens to the second sister, as in Grimms’ “Fitcher’s Bird.” The youngest daughter does everything the same, including getting blood stains on the key, her hand and shoes, but she does give what the cat requests and is given the secret spell to clean away the blood. This releases the bull from his spell, and he transforms into a prince: “‘I was bewitched,’ he said, ‘by a girl who first loved me and then hated me because I wouldn’t marry her. I killed many a girl while I was a bull, but now we will have the bodies taken care of, and then we will be married’” (1960, 152). They marry and live happily ever after.
The Turkish Bluebeard, a common English depiction of the French noble tyrant, is often ascribed to the influence of the Thousand and One Arabian Nights, itself illustrating a Bluebeard tale in the frame story of King Schahriar and Scheherezade. The Arabian Nights stories were recorded around 1545 in Arabia, but are much older.17 Within the collection, “Story of the Third Calendar” is another example. Scheherezade’s own father is the grand vizir commanded to procure the Sultan’s brides. After his first wife betrayed him (sexually, it is implied) and was executed, Schahriar resolved to have a bride a night and to kill her in the morning. Scheherezade implores her father to bring her to the Sultan as his next bride so she can end the practice once and for all. She asks her sister Dinarzade to attend her. She relies on her sister to keep watch in the night and to wake her an hour before dawn and beg a story of her. She tells the stories to keep his interest, and thus to stay alive.
The embedded tale “The Story of the Third Calendar” is set within another internal frame: it is the story of one of three men who are blinded in one eye and who have come to see the Caliph of Bagdad. Prince Agrib, the third calendar, tells that it was not fate, but rather his own curiosity that cost him his eye. He tells of meeting ten men all blind in the right eye and asking how they came that way. Like them, he too elects to be whisked away by a giant bird to a palace with beautiful women. After many days of rich living, they leave him alone for forty days and ask him not to open the golden door or he will have to leave forever. On the last day before their return he gives in to temptation and opens the door, falling across the threshold. He finds and mounts a black horse that carries him immediately to the place he began, knocking out his eye with its tail.
As with Mother Goose, the Arabian Nights arrived in English via France. Antoine Galland translated and adapted into French the Mille et une Nuits (1705–1717). The English translations began to be published in 1705–1708, even before Samber’s Mother Goose translation, and launched a trend for orientalism that was reflected in myriad forms throughout the eighteenth century.
The Italian collection of tales of Giambattista Basile, Lo Cunto deli Cunti overo Lo Trattenemiento de’ Peccerille (1634), modeled after Boccaccio’s Decameron, contains a “Bluebeard” incident within Day 4, Tale 6. Marchetta, a wandering princess, is forbidden by an ogress (ghula) to open a certain door: “here are the keys of all the chambers, and be thou mistress, and faculty, and most arbitrary power; only one thing I reserve for myself, and that is, that on no account must thou open the door of the last chamber, which this key fitteth, because then thou wouldst make mustard rise to my nose; … Now when the ghula went forth, great curiosity got hold of Marchetta to see what was within that forbidden chamber, and she opened the door, and found therein three damsels arrayed in golden raiments, seated upon three imperial seats, and seemingly fast asleep” (Burton 1893, 293).18 She wakes the three sisters (who are daughters of the ogress), which angers the girls’ mother and launches Marchetta on to her next adventure.
While Perrault’s tale was an original composition, the story of Bluebeard is archetypal. Andrew Lang wrote in his scholarly preface to Perrault’s Popular Tales (1888): “Blue Beard is essentially popular and traditional. … The leading idea, of curiosity punished, of the box or door which may not be opened, and of the prohibition infringed with evil results, is of world-wide distribution” (188, lxi).19 Bluebeard’s wife disobeys a strict injunction (specifically, not to look), and when she transgresses she sees something horrific and punitive: her own fate for looking. Traditionally, she disobeys because she cannot contain her curiosity. She is a fairy tale representation of the archetype of female transgressive curiosity, which has expression in the Western canon through Greek mythology (Psyche, Pandora) and the Bible (Eve, Lot’s wife, Judith of Holofernes).
The myth of Psyche is a lengthy narrative, recorded by Apuleius in The Golden Ass (second century) from oral tradition. It concerns the path of the mortal woman, through many trials at the hands of Venus (Aphrodite), to immortality and her marriage to the god of love, Cupid (Eros). The pertinent part of her story is when she betrays an injunction by her husband not to look upon his face. She is betrayed in the act of doing so by hot wax falling from the candle onto his shoulder while he sleeps. Frightened of the jealousy of his mother Venus toward Psyche, Cupid forbids Psyche to see him; she has been told he is a monster. As Apuleius described the transgression, Psyche becomes bold and takes a razor as well as a lamp; but when she sees the beauty of her sleeping husband she falls to embracing him. The lamp—perhaps, suggests Apuleius, out of jealousy or a desire to embrace Cupid also—spills its hot wax and burns him. Cupid immediately flees, but later tells Psyche she is to be punished by his abandonment of her. After severe trials set by Venus, she is rescued by Cupid, and her punishment ends with immortality.
If Psyche was rendered miserable by her breach of a husband’s taboo, Pandora’s transgression is famous for the ills others suffered as a result of her curiosity. Pandora was a revenge on man for Prometheus’ act of stealing fire from Zeus. In Hesiod’s Works and Days (ca. 700), he related the myth that Zeus ordered her to be made by the gods as a bait. Hephaestus formed her, and the gods contributed both beauty and deceit for her nature. Hermes took her to Epimetheus, Prometheus’ brother, who immediately forgot the warning his brother had given and took Pandora. Pandora is now best known for her transgressive curiosity; she opens the box sent by Zeus containing the evils of the world, sending them out among mankind and leaving only hope behind.
Although the templates here firmly establish transgressive curiosity as a female trait, the example of Orpheus offers an exception. Orpheus was famed for his musical prowess. He fell in love with Eurydice, and they were married in splendor. But at the wedding procession, Eurydice was bitten by a snake and died. Heartbroken, Orpheus descended to the underworld to beg for her back. By playing his lyre and singing his tragedy, he won the right to take Eurydice back to the world: on the condition that he not look back during the arduous journey out of the underworld to check that she is behind him. Despite managing to keep the injunction for most of the journey, with the end in sight Orpheus looks back and, in that instant, loses Eurydice again to the underworld, this time forever. The remainder of his life was unhappy, and his death was violent.
Forbidden Curiosity in the Bible
The archetype of female transgressive curiosity takes its most castigating form for the Christian tradition in the Biblical story of Eve. Like Pandora, Eve’s transgression resulted not only in her own unhappiness and that of her husband, but in the eviction from Eden, the attendant curses of mortality, shame in nakedness, and pain in childbearing. Thus, by eating the fruit of the tree of Knowledge, expressly forbidden to Adam and Eve by God, and by offering the fruit to Adam as well, Eve’s curiosity is deemed responsible for the fall of man. That the punishment entails consequences for human sexuality implies a connection between cognitive and carnal knowledge, and this taint of illicit sex frequently underpins the archetype of female curiosity, as stated by one late-Victorian commentator: “It symbolizes the eternal curiosity of the eternal Eve concerning that which has been forbidden” (Saltus [1880–1899], 177).
Because of Eve’s transgression, she is among several women in the Bible who transgress through curiosity. Lot’s wife is another well-known example. Lot’s family is assisted by the angels in fleeing from Sodom before its destruction by God, but they tell the family not to look back or to stop or they too will die. As God destroys Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot’s wife disobeys the injunction and looks back; instantly she is transformed into a pillar of salt.
Of the Biblical women who form the Western context for Bluebeard’s wife, Judith of Holofernes, from the Apocrypha, is perhaps less self-evident as she does not breach any injunction. Indeed, she functions as God’s agent in successfully ending the siege of Bethulia and thereby rescuing her people. Yet she does so by beheading a man (Holofernes) in his sleep. She has become part of the tradition of representing Bluebeard’s wife, most recognizably after Balázs-Bartók’s early twentieth-century opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle named Bluebeard’s wife Judith, drawing on turn-of-the-century depictions of both Judith and Salome as sexualized mankillers.
Although there is no known specific source for Perrault’s tale, much work has explored possible precursor figures. The main two are French, from two millennia. Comôr the Accursed was a sixth-century Breton chieftain, said to have killed his wives when they became pregnant. Gilles de Rais was a noble marshal of France from the Nantes region and was executed in 1440 for killing many children. The third precursor figure is England’s Henry Tudor. In many ways his story is closer to Perrault’s plot than the other two.
Although Comôr predates the next possible historical precursor for the role by centuries, he is a lesser-known contender and not the star of his own story, but the tyrant who occasions a Christian resurrection miracle. Comôr was a sixth-century Breton chieftain, who supposedly killed his wives when they became pregnant because his death by a child’s hand had been foretold. In legend he beheaded Triphine, the daughter of the count of Vannes, who had tried to escape when she became pregnant. She was then resurrected by St. Gildas de Rhuys, a British historian and monk and the author of De excidio et conquestu Brittanicae. One story has it that her murdered infant miraculously walked to Comôr and killed him. In fact, it is reputed that he was killed in battle by Judwal, a stepson from a previous marriage whose own life Comôr had attempted.
The legend of Comôr appears as early as 1514 in the Grands Cronicques du Bretagne of Alain Bouchard and had the status of a conte populaire.20 In the serial murder of wives who became pregnant, the story is actually closer to the Perrault tale (and closer yet to the German “Fitcher’s Bird”) than that of Gilles de Rais, who is ironically the most popularly ascribed historical precursor to Bluebeard, reflective perhaps of “the pranks of oral tradition.” But in another account closer to Perrault’s time, the Vie de Saint Gildas (1636) by Albert le Grand, the context for the account is given more fully, as is the future of her son, Saint Trémur, and an interesting iconographic moment occurs in this telling: Comôr catches up with her, tracks her down, and, unmoved by the tears of poor Triphine, now kneeling before her slayer, grabs her by the hair and beheads her with one swipe of his sword.21
After sending the Duc d’Aumale a copy of his Fairy Tales, which included his translation of Perrault’s “Bluebeard” ascribing the role of Bluebeard to Gilles de Rais, nineteenth-century English writer James Robinson Planché recorded his irritation that the Duc corrected him: “His Royal Highness’s information respecting the Maréchal de Raix [sic] is extremely interesting, and very important, inasmuch that it contradicts on official authority a report which had been circulated for centuries, and quoted without suspicion by French antiquaries” (1872, 360).22 It is no legend but historical fact that the fifteenth-century nobleman Seigneur Gilles de Laval Rais (1404–1440), a lieutenant of Joan of Arc and a Maréchal of France, murdered more than a hundred children of both sexes at his castle, Tiffauges, in Nantes, France.23 The transcript of his trial survives and records his confession to a number of macabre sexual crimes that were linked to his alchemical pursuits. As an already-famous nobleman, his trial was unusual, as was the overwhelming number of peasant witnesses and victims’ family members. The fact of his execution was also therefore very public.
However, although he was married to Catherine de Thouars and had been previously betrothed, he did not murder wives but rather children.24 Yet Gilles de Rais, “dit Barbe Bleue,”25 is now widely known as Bluebeard. While it is worth noting that “Rais was never called a Bluebeard in contemporary documents” (Mowshowitz 1970, 65), nevertheless the association is now so strong that critics may allude to such a thing as the “Bluebeard-Rais complex” (183). Even Rais’ castle advertizes itself as: “Tiffauges: Château de Barbe-Bleue.”26 As one critic remarks, Rais is “now virtually synonymous with Bluebeard whereas less than two hundred years ago, only Perrault’s tale bore that name” (Odio 1986, 286), and it is perhaps for this reason that the historical figure may be called by this same critic, “an international leitmotif in the Western world.”27 Gilles de Rais continues to be infamously connected with Bluebeard, even in contemporary mysteries such as the novel Thief of Souls by Ann Benson (2002).
In A Dictionary of the Noted Names of Fiction, William Wheeler stated: “Bluebeard is also the name by which King Henry VIII lives in the popular superstitions of England” (1866, 49).28 Henry Tudor married six wives in all, and he had more than one of them executed in order to make way for the next. His first marriage to Katharine of Aragon (daughter of Isabella of Spain and widow to Henry’s older brother Arthur) lasted twenty-two years (1509–1526). When the marriage produced no living male heir in addition to their daughter, Mary, Henry set Katharine aside, annulling the marriage with the claim that Katharine had consummated the marriage to Arthur. The second wife, Anne Boleyn, was decapitated at the Tower of London after three years of marriage (1533–1536), having borne Elizabeth and no living male heir. The marriage was annulled, as Anne was found guilty of treason for sexual infidelity. Henry’s third wife was Jane Seymour, one of Anne’s ladies in waiting. Jane died eighteen months later, two weeks after giving birth to Henry’s only legitimate male heir, Edward, in 1537. Henry’s fourth marriage to Anne of Cleves was made to form a Protestant alliance, but the marriage was again annulled in the same year (1540). The fifth wife, Catherine Howard, was married for only two years (1540–1542) before she was also beheaded on the Tower Green for sexual infidelity to her husband. The sixth wife, Catherine Parr, married him in mid-1543 and survived three and a half years of marriage to Henry by outliving him (he died in January 1547).
Obviously, Henry Tudor predates Charles Perrault’s Bluebeard by a century and a half. But the story of the English king and his six wives was popular and just as well-known in France as in England. It is possible that Henry Tudor’s marriages contributed to the fairy tale of Perrault. Regardless, once Perrault had created a name for the figure of the wife murderer in fairy tale, the English used it to label the safely long-dead Tudor king.29 One theory states that it was a Catholic plot to discredit Henry.30 It is an interesting example of ownership or adoption of the French fairy tale, another way in which these “fashionably dressed French invaders” became “naturalized” English (Darton 1932, 94). At the same time, having married “only” six times, and thus being “a wife or two in arrears of the Turk” (D. G. [1837?]),31 the English maintain a genteel view of Henry compared to his continental counterparts.
As a pirate, Bluebeard has gained broader criminal notoriety, and his connection with serial wife murder seems at first glance to have become obscured by this new reputation. But even as a pirate confused with Blackbeard (Edward Teach), this salient feature of his fairy tale history remains intact and the graft of the two stories has been further generative of a variant tradition. In true crime, the “Bluebeard” label has become a useful noun for the male serial killer whether of wives or, more recently, simply of women. The “female Bluebeard” borrows the label and, through it, is depicted as taking on the male properties of the serial killer; she is labeled a perversion of the female. What is clear for serial killers of either sex is the public needs to ally them with folklore. They both derive from folklore, and they generate it.