BLUEBEARD IN VICTORIAN ARTS AND LETTERS
Interestingly, Bluebeard’s nineteenth-century popularity in chapbooks and drama was occurring at a time when the status of folk and fairy tales was in question in England, and this period was critical for their adoption by the middle-class readership. The widespread presence of the Mother Goose tales attests to their popularity, but not to their respectability. Jack Zipes noted that the Puritan suppression of morally dubious entertainment had far-reaching effects, and that the “‘civilized’ appropriation” of such tales by Perrault and other salon writers did not happen in England (1987a, xiv). The following suggestion by Maria Edgworth (1798) for how to bowdlerize “Bluebeard” is a case in point: “Just at the critical moment, when the fatal key drops from the trembling hands of the imprudent wife, the gentleman interrupted the awful pause of silence that ensued and requested permission to relate the remainder of the story.” Such relation turns the wife into “a curious, tattling, timid, ridiculous woman” so that “The terrors of Blue-beard himself subsided when he was properly introduced to the company.”1 The religious and pedagogical value of the Bluebeard fairy tale was debated at some length in Bitter-Sweet, a monograph-length poem by Josiah Gilbert Holland (1858) set on Thanksgiving Eve in a Puritan household in New England. The dramatic verse story of Bluebeard told by one of the boys ends with four stanzas describing Bluebeard’s remorse, the private funeral for Bluebeard and internment of his wives, and Fatima’s good works (similar to the contemporary chapbook versions). The children who hear the story then comment, alternately wishing to have been one of the avenging brothers, marveling at the inheritance, and wondering whether Bluebeard drank. At this point, the adults in the poem debate the merits of “these bloody old romances” (1858, 156). Ruth argues “Story and comment alike are bad” (156), while her brother-in-law David argues instead that the negative example is useful: “So this ensanguined tale shall move / Aright each little dreamer, / And Bluebeard teach them how to love / The sweet Fatima” (159).
Following the massive multivolume English translations of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments and Grimms’ Die Kinder- und Hausmärchen, and the antiquarian research into English folklore that ensued, “Bluebeard” became visible in the prose writings of several major Victorian writers’ works. Among these are Charlotte Brontë’s “Bluebeard novel” Jane Eyre and multiple works of both mid-Victorian writers Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray. In addition, the popular art of Alfred Henry Forrester, Thackeray (inspired by George Cruikshank), and Walter Crane contributed a store of nineteenth-century images of Bluebeard to rank alongside those by contemporary French artists Gustave Doré and “Cham” (Amédée de Noé).
The Bluebeard tale had already been orientalized in the Colman-Kelly production of 1798 and consequently throughout the chapbooks and popular theater. In 1811, the same year as the hit revival of the Colman-Kelly play on both sides of the Atlantic, Jonathan Scott issued the first literary English translation of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments from Galland’s French translation.2 After Henry Torrens also began another translation from Arabic (1838), Edward Lane’s multivolume translation appeared monthly between 1838 and 1841 and was then published in three volumes, with anthropological footnotes later published separately. Some forty years later, when John Payne issued his nine volumes of translation (1882–1884), followed by those of Sir Richard Burton (ten volumes, 1885), the print media debated the relative merits of the Lane translation over those of Payne and Burton, and such notables as Leigh Hunt and Andrew Lang weighed in. The Arabian Nights thus developed a scholarly context that included rival source manuscripts, controversies over apocrypha and “orphan” tales (those with no known manuscript source), the necessity of reading several languages, and development of English translation tools for Arabic.
The nineteenth century also saw the English translation of Die Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales), which ensured the survival, popularity, and legitimacy of fairy tales in England. As noted in chapter 1, the story “Blaubart” was included in the first German edition published by the Grimms (1812 1:62), but was omitted from subsequent editions because it was thought to be Perrault’s own tale. Moreover, and despite the inclusion of “Bluebeard” in the German tales published in 1845 by Ludwig Bechstein (the first English edition, The Old Story Teller: Popular German Tales, was published 1854 in London), this subordination of German variants of Bluebeard to French appears to have occurred even within the German tradition itself.3 The Grimms’ “Blaubart” was not published in English translation until Jack Zipes did so in 1987 with his translation of the omitted tales in The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm.
Aside from “Blaubart,” the principal Bluebeard variants from the Grimm collections “Fitcher’s Bird” (tale 46) and “The Robber Bridegroom” (tale 40) were also first published in 1812, substantially revised for the 1819 edition, and reappeared in the final (seventh) 1857 edition.4 Other related Grimms’ tales included in the 1812 edition were “Mary’s Child” (tale 3: “Marienkind”), and “The Castle of Murder” (tale 73: “Das Mordschloss”) which was omitted after the first edition5, and in 1819 “Faithful John” (tale 6: “Der treue Johannes”) and “The Hare’s Bride” (tale 66: “Häsichenbraut”). These were available for Edgar Taylor to select for his English translation, which he derived from the 1819 German edition. However, of other “Bluebeard” variants in Grimm, “The House in the Forest” (“Das Waldhaus”) did not appear in a Grimm edition until 1840, and “Old Rinkrank” (“Oll Rinkrank”) was not published until 1850.
Taylor’s (anonymous) translation of the Grimms appeared in two volumes (1823, 1826). They were illustrated by George Cruikshank, the popular English artist in his prime, and this was the first edition of Grimms in any country to be fully illustrated (Darton 1932, 216). Cruikshank made twelve etchings for the first edition and ten more for the second (Blamires 2006, 170); there is no illustration for “The Robber Bridegroom,” however. Taylor’s translations were popular and reprinted before being circulated in a one-volume form.6 “The Robber Bridegroom” was translated for the second volume, that of 1826, after the popularity of the first volume encouraged Taylor in his efforts. He noted of the second selection that the tales “have more of the general character of fairy tales, and less of German peculiarity, than those of the first volume, in preparing which, the whole of MM. Grimm’s collection was open for the choice of examples of all classes” (Taylor 1823–1826).
Taylor did not select “Fitcher’s Bird” for translation in either volume, and thus it was not translated into English until 1853 in the two-volume Household Stories (Addey & Co).7 But the first edition of German Popular Stories includes “The Robber Bridegroom.” The tale provides an interesting case study for Taylor’s translation principals overall. In his preface he noted that the translators have omitted select tales “which the scrupulous fastidiousness of modern taste, especially in works likely to attract the attention of youth, warned them to pass by” (1823–1826, 1:xi), and they were sometimes “compelled” to make alterations in tales, making notes to reflect such changes, but that “in most cases the alteration consists merely in the curtailment of adventures or circumstances not affecting the main plot of the story” (1:xi). The note provided for “The Robber Bridegroom” reflects that, although in Taylor’s translation the ring alone flew into the maiden’s lap, in the original it was the entire finger. Additionally, the note signals the tale’s “general affinity” to “Bluebeard.” However, the other significant changes Taylor silently made from the Grimm version similarly curb the brutality of the cannibal robbers. Instead of killing the woman by making her heart burst, she “fainted and fell down dead.” The episode of ripping off her clothes, dismembering her, and salting the body to eat is omitted altogether.8
Walter Crane, “The Robber Bridegroom.” From Grimm, Household Stories (1866).
A new translation of Perrault’s tales was undertaken by the scholar James Robinson Planché (author of the 1839 Colman-Kelly burlesque) for Four and Twenty Tales (1858), including several fairy tales by other authors. His approach was scholarly, and he toured France in search of a first edition of Perrault’s Histoires (Planché 1872, 356–60). His translation included footnotes (two for “Bluebeard”) and appendices. His discussion of “Bluebeard” includes the disputed origin in Gilles de Rais, the translation of the “fée” key, and the difficulty of translating Sister Anne’s speech from the turret: “unless we could say in English ‘the sun that dusts and the grass that greens,’ we cannot approach the terse and graphic description of dear Sister Anne” (517, original emphasis). His translation is clearly distinct from those of Samber and G. M. (see chapter 4), despite several phrases that directly repeat them, such as: “The poor wife was almost as dead as her husband, and had not strength to rise and embrace her brothers” (Planché 1858, 7).9 Overall, he blends Samber’s diction (“collation,” “cutlass”) with G. M.’s (“twice or thrice,” “half a quarter of an hour”), and corrects both on the matter of the women “reflected” in the blood on the floor. The morals are translated in verse, but the translation is unique. A striking contribution is a direct address to the reader: “Behold them immediately running through all the rooms” (4).
Jack Zipes retranslated Planché’s translation of “Bluebeard” for Beauties, Beasts and Enchantment: Classic French Fairy Tales (1989), noting that “to [Planché’s] credit, his renditions contained a certain style and idiomatic characteristics that I felt helped recapture the highly mannered style of the French authors” (13). However, Zipes returned to the “quarter of an hour” translated by Samber, as opposed to the “half a quarter of an hour” of both G. M. and Planché (and Perrault). Elsewhere, modernized idiom in Zipes’ translation loses some of the flavor of earlier translations (not to mention the Othello allusion). Bluebeard orders the key from his wife in Samber: “Do not fail … of giving it to me presently”; in G. M.: “Fail not … to bring it me presently”; and in Planché: “Fail not … to give it me presently.” But in Zipes, Bluebeard says simply: “Bring it to me right now.”
Andrew Lang championed Perrault in Perrault’s Popular Tales (1888), reprinting them in French from early editions and including a scholarly introduction and headnote information on each tale. For “Bluebeard” he argued its archetypal nature, transcending the French national specifics of Perrault, but he argued at length how he “admirably handled” his materials (lx): “in point of art, Perrault’s tale has a great advantage over its popular rivals. It is at once more sober and more terrible, and … possesses an epical unity of idea and action” (lxiv). Lang listed a range of international examples, including the English “Mr. Fox,” in support of his argument. He also selected “Bluebeard” for inclusion in the first of his fairy tale series, The Blue Fairy Book (1889), using G. M.’s English translation, but (significantly) altered “scymitar” to “sword.” The alteration was in keeping with Lang’s argument that Bluebeard was not a Turk, made in the edition’s “Introduction.” The story’s two pen-and-ink illustrations by G. P. Jacomb Hood depict the chamber discovery (the wife viewed from within the chamber) and the near execution and rescue of the wife, but does so in orientalized dress for all characters. Bluebeard is dark skinned, with thick beard and mustache, and wields a short, curved scimitar over his head (in traditional contrast to the straight blades of the arriving brothers). In disagreement with his illustrator, Lang wrote: “[t]hey were all French folk and Christians; had he been a Turk, Blue Beard need not have been wedded to but one wife at a time” (358). There again he argues for its archetypal nature: “Punishment of disobedient curiosity is the motive of ‘Blue Beard,’ and of all the stories about forbidden doors, wells, trees, fruits, and so forth, which, among many races, are interwoven with the myth of ‘The Origin of Death’” (354).
In the preface to the 1826 translation German Popular Stories, Edgar Taylor noted that “The popular tales of England have been too much neglected” (iv), and his subject was one “little noticed” (xii). As late as 1888 in the introduction to his collection of Perrault’s stories, Andrew Lang noted his opinion that English fairy tales were insubstantial: “No nation owes [Perrault] so much as we of England, who, south of the Scottish, and east of the Welsh marches [sic], have scarce any popular tales of our own save Jack the Giant Killer, and who have given the full fairy citizenship to Perrault’s Petit Poucet and La Barbe Bleue” (xvi). Only two tales in Lang’s Blue Fairy Book were English (Burne 1986, 143). After many decades of Grimm volumes, translations of The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, English translations of Hans Christian Andersen (appearing in 1846 by Mary Howitt10), and the now-canonical Mother Goose Tales, the time was ripe for editions of English stories.
In 1849, James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps published Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales: A Sequel to the Nursery Rhymes of England. He included both “The Story of Mr. Fox” and a related variant, “The Oxford Student,” in full under the heading “Fireside Stories.” In addition, he provided notes, stating of “Mr. Fox”: “A simple, but very curious tale, of considerable antiquity. It is alluded to by Shakespeare, and was contributed to the varorium edition by Blakeway. Part of this story will recall to the reader’s memory the enchanted chamber of Britomart” (47). In “The Oxford Student” he provided the rhyme that refers to the murderer as a “fox”: “One moonshiny night, as I sat high, / Waiting for one to come by, / The boughs did bend; my heart did ache / To see what hole the fox did make.” He contextualized the material as English antiquities in danger of disappearing and neglected by “antiquaries of the old school [who] considered such matters beneath their notice”: “It may be that little of this now remains in England, but the minutest indications should be carefully chronicled ere they disappear” (275).
In 1878 the Folk-Lore Society was established in England. With a now legitimate subject matter and a primed readership, and in spite of Lang’s claims for the inadequacy of English folklore, two other members of the Folk-Lore Society published English collections, in which “Mr. Fox” was again represented. Joseph Jacobs published the tale in English Fairy Tales in 1890,11 and Edwin Sidney Hartland collected it in English Fairy and Other Folk Tales at the same time (ca. 1890), taking the tale from Malone’s Shakespeare Varorium (1821, vol. 7).
The novelist William Makepeace Thackeray worked with the “Bluebeard” fairy tale repeatedly, and his use of the tale marks a radically new opening up of the intertext. Allusions to the fairy tale are scattered throughout his works,12 but in novels like The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon (1844) and the unfinished play “[Bluebeard at Breakfast]” the allusion is direct and sustained. Thackeray also retold the tale parodically in pictorial format in The Awful History of Blue Beard (1833) and in short story format in both “Bluebeard’s Ghost” (1843) and “Barbazure” (1847), which he also illustrated.13 Despite the caricatures, his use of Bluebeard manifests a “sneaking sympathy” for him.14 This can be seen in taking the first-person voice of Bluebeard for Barry Lyndon, “The Irish Bluebeard” (1844, 276), whose memoirs are reminiscent of Moll Flanders’. Lyndon writes frankly of his imprisonment and surveillance of his wife, his drunken beatings of her, and his periodic removal of her child in the spirit of self-justification. At one point he comments: “if I can prevent one of you from marrying, the Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq., will not be written in vain” (255). The moral context is provided (and at the same time parodied) in the form of the memoir’s “editor,” Fitz-Boodle, whose notes in fact tend to sympathize rather than chastise: “From these curious confessions, it would appear that Mr. Lyndon maltreated his lady in every possible way; that he denied her society, bullied her into signing away her property, spent it in gambling and taverns, was openly unfaithful to her; and, when she complained, threatened to remove her children from her. Nor, indeed, is he the only husband who has done the like, and has passed for ‘nobody’s enemy but his own’; a jovial, good-natured fellow. The world contains scores of such amiable people; and, indeed, it is because justice has not been done them that we have edited this autobiography” (245 n.). As Lyndon ends in poverty, dying in prison of delirium tremens, the statement that “justice has not been done them” clearly situates Fitz-Boodle on Lyndon’s side.
William Makepeace Thackeray’s own illustration to his story “Barbazure” (1877).
The play fragment sees Bluebeard discussing matrimonial woes over breakfast with boyhood friend Jack Butts, and Thackeray’s sympathy is again clear. Butts points out that Lady Bluebeard spends many evenings with Captain Jones and is newly accustomed to the moneyed life, but Bluebeard is unwilling to understand him on the first point and defends his wife on the second. In the process, Butts reveals that he is “dev’lish tired of Mrs. Butts” (223), confirming Bluebeard’s grim point that all marriages are alike: “There is cold mutton, Butts, in every house” (226).
The later of the two short pieces, “Barbazure,” is a parody of George Payne Rainsford James, the popular historical novelist, published in Punch’s Prize Novelists. It retells the traditional tale in florid prose, saturated with sensibility. Fatima’s jilted lover Romané de Clos-Vougeot arrives from the Crusades to discover her marriage to Bluebeard. As the jilted knight, he challenges the Baron Raoul to a joust with untipped lances, which results in Fatima’s imprisonment. The narrator then abbreviates: “(As it is impossible to give the whole of this remarkable novel, let it suffice to say briefly here, that in about a volume and a half, in which the descriptions of scenery, the account of the agonies of the baroness, kept on bread and water in her dungeon, and the general tone of morality, are all excellently worked out, the Baron de Barbazure resolves upon putting his wife to death by the hands of the public executioner)” (Thackeray 1847, 59). The executioner, revealed at the moment when he decapitates the Baron instead, turns out to be Clos-Vougeot himself. In “Barbazure,” the secondary target of the satire is women, within the story and without. As Fatima goes unprotesting to the execution block, the narrator comments: “How few are the wives, in our day, who show such angelic meekness!” (60), while she is attended by a cousin who has already promised to marry Bluebeard next. This satire on women is extended in “Bluebeard’s Ghost,” which depicts Mrs. Bluebeard after Bluebeard’s death being “haunted” by the ghost of her dead husband (in actuality, a disguised suitor). As in Perrault, female greed is a feature of the story, from the style of her mourning: “There was not a widow in all the country who went to such an expense for black bombazeen” (Thackeray 1843, 337), to her dispute with the Bluebeards over her inheritance: “‘Your argument may be a very good one, but I will, if you please, keep the money’” (340). Throughout the story she refers to her deceased husband as a blessed saint, but the narrator gives her loyalty a different hue: “If anyone would but leave me a fortune, what a funeral and what a character I would give him!” (340).
The major contribution of Thackeray’s comic and cartoon use of Bluebeard may be in opening the intertext to rewriting. Although the comic stage fleshed out the tale, adding the popular secondary cast, variations had kept the traditional character of Bluebeard even as it rendered him a dramatic ogre or a pantomime buffoon. Even as Thackeray’s use of the names Fatima and, more particularly, Shacabac, demonstrate his awareness of the Colman-Kelly legacy15 and signal his comedic treatment of his subject, “Bluebeard’s Ghost” extends the confines of the original tale for perhaps the first time, while playing knowing intertextual games with the reader.16 Beginning his story where “Bluebeard” traditionally ends, after the death of Bluebeard, the reader is immediately cast into new territory. At the same time, the fairy tale is both presupposed and called into question. Bluebeard’s track record of wives and his diary of their deaths is offered to the reader as evidence that Bluebeard remains a serial wife murderer, at the same time as Mrs. Bluebeard argues against such calumny. The issue is left formally unresolved: “Whether it is that all wives adore husbands when the latter are no more, or whether it is that Fatima’s version of the story is really the correct one, and that the common impression against Bluebeard is an odious prejudice, and that he no more murdered his wives than you and I have, remains yet to be proved, and, indeed, does not much matter for the understanding of the rest of Mrs. B.’s adventures” (339–40). Although there are hints that Widow Bluebeard had more to be afraid of than she allows (“Fatima once more had occasion to repent her fatal curiosity” [355]), it is certainly true that Thackeray’s story is concerned with after, not before. His story traces the competition between rival suitors for Fatima’s hand and fortune, and the chicanery they rely on to win her over. The ghost of Bluebeard presides over the story, but he is an imposter. In Barry Lyndon, presenting Bluebeard’s first-person memoirs, Thackeray predated the defense written by Anatole France in “The Seven Wives of Bluebeard” (1909). Thackeray’s treatment of the tale signals a much broader use of the tale’s intertextual possibilities and with them the games narrators can play with their readers.
Charles Dickens’ essay “Frauds on the Fairies,” published in Household Words (1853), argued for allowing fairy tales to thrive unmolested: “In an utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that Fairy tales should be respected” (57). He argued against his friend George Cruikshank who had altered the fairy tale “Hop o’ My Thumb” to reflect “Total Abstinence, Prohibition of the Sale of spiritous liquors, Free Trade, and Popular Education.” Whatever the agenda, Dickens argued that no one has a right to lay a hand on them, and he used Bluebeard as a primary example: “With seven Blue Beards in the field, each coming at a gallop from his own platform mounted on a foaming hobby, a generation or two hence would not know which was which, and the great original Blue Beard would be confounded with the counterfeits” (58).17
In his own writing Dickens did not censor the fairy tales so much as glory in their macabre humor and grotesquerie. The “Bluebeard” fairy tale is one of his favorites. He makes comic references to it in The Pickwick Papers (1837), Barnaby Rudge (1841), Bleak House (1853), Hard Times (1854), Our Mutual Friend (1865), The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1869–1870), and in his journalism.18 But Dickens stamped Bluebeard in a full-blown “counterfeit” of his own, Captain Murderer, a “wretch” who “must have been an offshoot of the Blue Beard family” (1860, 150). But while Thackeray’s Bluebeard in “[Bluebeard at Breakfast]” made “culinary metaphors” of women, Dickens’ Captain Murderer actually eats them.
While “Captain Murderer” has become known as a literary fairy tale, it was in fact published as one story of the horrors of his nurse, a “female bard” who subjected the boy before the age of six to frightful stories. The tale is set within the “Nurse’s Stories” essay of The Uncommercial Traveller (1860). Captain Murderer is a cannibal ogre whose “mission was matrimony, and the gratification of a cannibal’s appetite with tender brides” (150). In his courtship he always asked whether the woman could bake pie-crust, “and if she couldn’t by nature or education, she was taught” (151). When he then produced a golden rolling pin and silver pie board a month after the wedding, she rolled her sleeves up to bake pie: “The Captain brought out flour and butter and eggs and all things needful, except the inside of the pie; of materials for the staple of the pie itself, the Captain brought out none” (151), prompting his wife to inquire what kind of pie it is to be: “Then said the lovely bride, ‘Dear Captain Murderer, I see no meat.’” To this he would “humorously retor[t], ‘Look in the glass.’” The joke is borne out at the point where the crust is completed and the bride looks up just in time to see her head cut off. The Captain courted twin sisters and married the fair one who loved him. The dark twin is suspicious of him, and notes the joke about house lamb, having peeped in the shutter and seen him file his teeth sharp. After her sister dies, she determines to be revenged, but does so through taking a strong poison before she is killed. Her posthumous revenge involves the Captain swelling, turning blue and spotty, and then exploding. The incident ends with a paragraph omitted when “Captain Murderer” is retold,19 regarding his nurse’s storytelling abilities:
Hundreds of times did I hear this legend of Captain Murderer, in my early youth, and added hundreds of times was there a mental compulsion upon me in bed, to peep in at his window as the dark twin peeped, and to revisit his horrible house, and look at him in his blue and spotty and screaming stage, as he reached from floor to ceiling and from wall to wall. The young woman who brought me acquainted with Captain Murderer had a fiendish enjoyment of my terrors, and used to begin, I remember— as a sort of introductory overture—by clawing the air with both hands, and uttering a long low hollow groan. So acutely did I suffer from this ceremony in combination with this infernal Captain that I sometimes used to plead I thought I was hardly strong enough and old enough to hear the story again just yet. But, she never spared me one word of it. … Her name was Mercy, though she had none on me (153).
Unlike the heroine in Captain Murderer, who must kill herself to kill the ogre, the heroine of the literary fairy tale “The Ogre Courting” (1871, 1987) by Juliana Horatia Ewing outsmarts the cannibal ogre on his own terms. It is said that “The Ogre only cared for two things in a woman—he liked her to be little, and a good housewife” (129). As he has eaten twenty-four women already, Managing Molly is aware that she is to be next and so plans ahead. She demonstrates such a degree of thriftiness that the ogre finally cannot bear the idea of marrying her, even as she has been the financial beneficiary of her efforts and is now well-dowered. In the Victorian fictions by women writers there emerges a dialogue, like this one between “Captain Murderer” and “The Ogre Courting,” in which the traditional terms of the tale are deliberately renegotiated. Earlier in the century, this is begun in the novel Jane Eyre.
Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre (1847) has been called “the first adult, non-burlesque treatment of the Bluebeard theme in English literature” (Sutherland 1997, 68), although the dramatic Colman and Kelly production of 1798 is not a burlesque treatment, and the tale in chapbooks was arguably not produced for children.20 The plot twist of the novel is that Jane discovers at the altar of her marriage to Edward Rochester that he has a living wife. Furthermore, this wife has been housed all along in the locked upper rooms of Thornfield Hall, in which Jane herself has been living as a governess. The novel describes the upper floor of the Hall as “looking, with its two rows of small black doors all shut, like a corridor in some Bluebeard’s castle” (122), and at this very moment Jane hears Bertha Mason’s “preternatural” laugh for the first time. Later, she describes Rochester as a “three-tailed bashaw” (302) while negotiating terms for her marriage to him.21 The “madwoman in the attic” Bertha Mason was married for financial reasons under family pressure; her genetic predisposition to insanity was a secret her family kept from Rochester. Displaced from the West Indies to England, Bertha becomes increasingly unstable and is finally incarcerated, with a female “jailor,” Grace Poole. Jane runs from Thornfield and is taken up on the point of starvation by the devout Rivers family. After a period in which she earns employment as a teacher, refuses a loveless proposal by St. John Rivers, and discovers that she is financially independent, she returns to find Thornfield Hall a burned ruin, and Rochester both blind and disabled by the events of the fire. Bertha’s death in the fire she laid allows the couple to marry, and the novel concludes at the birth of the couple’s first child. The novel was published pseudonymously, occasioning a public furor to discover the identity (sex) of the author. Critics commented that if the author was female, she was “unsexed” (Monsarrat 1980, 254); she had “forfeited the society of her own sex” (Rigby 1848).
Some three decades later in February and June 1871,22 Anne Thackeray Ritchie published “Bluebeard’s Keys” in her father’s conservative Cornhill Magazine aimed at “pleasant and instructed gentlemen and ladies” (Thackeray 1859).23 Although the publication context should have dictated conservative treatment of the Bluebeard story, Ritchie managed to make claims for women’s rights that escaped such censorious criticism.24
The gothic-flavored story is set in Rome: Ottavio Barbi has seduced “silly” Fanny de Travers with wealth and power, but she is not in love and is even frightened of him. Her sister Anne tries to save her before the marriage. The story opens with a verse argument telling the traditional version of “Bluebeard,” and despite the wife being named “Barbara,” the verse is otherwise orientalized (her brothers are named Osman and Alee). Part I contains Ritchie’s version of the story, young Fanny de Travers’ engagement to Enrico Ottavio Barbi. Ritchie made clear the connection between male power and violence, and “commerce”: “Did Fanny expect to do as she liked when she married Barbi? Jealous, narrow, exclusive—a violent man, accustomed to rule and to dominate over all those who came in contact with him. There is nothing more curious than the dominion some persons now and then establish over others perhaps a hundred times cleverer, warmer-hearted, more tractable, wiser than themselves. A sheer strength of will seems to count for more in the commerce of life than all the grace, and accomplishment, and study, and good intention in the world” (Ritchie 1875, 24). The sisters are impoverished thanks to the vagaries of male relatives, whose wills they are written out of and back into at their benefactor’s caprice. While Mrs. de Travers is castigated throughout the story, her need to sell her daughters for a good price is ascribed to the patriarchal economy, rather than personal vanity. Notably, Fanny becomes disenchanted with the engagement even before she discovers Barbi’s sordid past (Rochester-like, he had courted one woman while a wife pined away): “Fanny’s eyes wandered sadly round the room. Here her future life was to be spent, she thought to herself. There Barbi would sit” (28). It is less her husband she is afraid of than herself: “Fanny had begun to be afraid of herself” (27); “Fanny did not dare own it to herself, she had scarcely realized it hitherto, but a bitter disappointment was hers” (27). Barbi’s injunction when it comes is traditional: “My present from this date belongs to you. Do not seek to know what is past” (26). He forbids Fanny access to a trunk in which she discovers first a mirror in the lid (the moment of reflection on the threshold is thus preserved), then clothes and letters revealing Barbi’s past, and an ambiguous emblem: a “sort of whip or discipline, of long iron chain, rusted in places and fastened to a handle” (28). Unlike the traditional wives, “Fanny did not lose her presence of mind” (29) upon Barbi’s return, but attempts to break off the engagement. Part I ends with Barbi insisting that she cannot break off the engagement, and the sisters shutting themselves away from his anger. The rescue of the two “brothers” (monks) comes in the nick of time, and Barbi is lead away to join them. The story is completed, but Part II exists to drive the point home.
In an Ozark version of “Mr. Fox,” collected in the twentieth century, the decision to remain single is ascribed to trauma, after the young woman has seen Mr. Fox and two accomplices dig her own grave and plan to rob her. The story’s last comment refuses to endorse her choice: “After that poor Elsie wouldn’t go with nobody, because she figured men was all son-of-a-bitches. And so she never did get married at all, but just stayed around with the kinfolks. They was glad to have her, of course. But it is kind of sad to see a pretty girl bound and determined to be an old maid like that” (“Mister Fox” 1955, 97).
Because Fanny, merely eighteen, is likewise unmarried at the end of Ritchie’s story, her “critic” wants to know how it ends: “what happened afterward” (Ritchie 1875, 30). The narrator comments that “the point of my story was, that they did not marry” (30). The rightness of this decision is emphasized throughout Part II. Fanny had been threatened with “a slow extinction of life” (30) in marriage to Barbi. Instead, as the story continues, Fanny embraces her narrow escape: “‘Free!’ she said to herself, drawing a long breath. She had not known until now how she had dreaded the thought of a life spent with that man” (31). Instead, alone, “she might be miserable, she might be lonely some day, but she was free” (31). Rather than returning to her old life reconciled to her lot, however, her epiphany has been life altering: “She herself was different, and she had found out that to every human being is granted a certain will and liberty of action and feeling which should be as much part of life as faith or affection itself” (33). The narrator also endorses this realization: “Happy those who find this out in time, and who have the courage and constancy to keep to the clue” (33). After tying up loose ends with Barbi and being gifted her financial independence, the narrator comments of Fanny: “She has never married. She is not one of the very happiest women of my acquaintance, but she is one of the most contented; her life is happier than the average, and bright and melancholy too” (41).
In 1875, Sabilla Novello published The History of Bluebeard’s Six Wives, a quarto volume of some fifty pages telling the story of each of Bluebeard’s wives in detail, and illustrated with color illustrations by George Cruikshank Jr.25 The press notices being favorable enough, she followed this with Bluebeard’s Widow and Her Sister Anne: Their History Evolved from Mendacious Chronicles (1876), illustrated by herself with pen-and-ink drawings. It is interesting for taking up the story after Bluebeard’s death, as Thackeray did in “Bluebeard’s Ghost,” and concerning the next courting of Fatima (by the malapropistic Prince Adelbren). It depicts Fatima satirically as a greedy and vain woman, and Sister Anne is the genteel heroine of the work who is properly rewarded by fairyland characters for her good nature. A third volume, the story of Anne’s children (named by their grandfather’s first words upon seeing each): HoHo and HaHa: Adventures Narrated and Illustrated (by the author) followed in 1877. In a review of the reissue of The History of Bluebeard’s Six Wives (1878), the Dublin University Magazine commended it as a “passable story” in a “decidedly clever and spirited style,” but lamented the “vulgar” nature of the fairy tale itself: “To whisper, even under our breath, that the time-honoured legend of Bluebeard is just a little bit vulgar, would bring down upon us the wrath of the entire juvenile population, past, present, and to come. But though we have decided not to commit ourselves to so monstrous a libel, we yet are obliged to confess that the modern introduction to it is not so refined, either in thought or in tone, as nineteenth century taste would prefer.” Ironically, while fairy tales had gained general respectability, Bluebeard was fast losing his.
It is in this context that Louisa May Alcott drew on the Bluebeard story as a coded commentary on the Victorian oppression of women’s freedoms, intellectual ambitions, and sexuality. Rebellious from an early age and later an activist for woman’s suffrage, Alcott gained public success and financial security from writing juvenile literature whose “moral pap for the young” (Alcott 1877b) she privately disdained. Her anonymous and pseudonymous writings (as A. M. Barnard) masked an alternative Alcott who revels in sensation fiction with “lurid” subjects, and the Bluebeard story is an apt vehicle both for her treatments of marriage (“the tragedy of modern married life” [Alcott 1868]), curiosity, and knowledge, as well as for her criticism of the gendered power dynamics of her times.26
In Alcott’s juvenile novel Under the Lilacs, little Betty is told “to choose whichever one she liked best out of the pile of Walter Crane’s toy books lying in bewildering colors before her”: “‘This one; Bab always wanted to see the dreadful cupboard, and there’s a picture of it here,’ answered Betty, clasping a gorgeous copy of Bluebeard to the little bosom, which still heaved with the rapture of looking at that delicious mixture of lovely Fatimas in pale azure gowns, pink Sister Annes on the turret top, crimson tyrants, and yellow brothers with forests of plumage blowing wildly from their mushroom-shaped caps” (1878, 162). Both Betty and Bab have a prurient interest in the contents of “the dreadful cupboard” (contents by now fast disappearing from juvenile illustrations). Betty herself is then compared to Bluebeard’s wife: “Curious as Fatima, Betty went to look” (163). Even within Alcott’s sanctioned writing for children, then, “Bluebeard” can appear as complex code: for female eroticism, books as the means to reveal censored mysteries, and the traditional depiction of gendered power dynamics, reiterated when the children put on their own parlor play in which Bab and Betty play Fatima and Sister Anne, respectively: “after a terrific struggle, the tyrant fell, and with convulsive twitchings of the scarlet legs, slowly expired, while the ladies sociably fainted in each other’s arms, and the brothers waved their swords, and shook hands over the corpse of their enemy” (207).
It is no coincidence then that Alcott treated Bluebeard story more fully in the gothic novel A Modern Mephistopheles (1877a), published anonymously in the No Name series. (So different was the style from that of Little Women, the reading public were unable to guess the true author until it was made known a decade after.) An earlier version depicting a female Faust was rejected by the publisher.27 In the novel Jasper Helwyze aims to corrupt Gladys Canaris by exposing her to erotic reading material and hashish. He is able to do this because of a pact he has made with Glady’s husband, Felix, the Faustian figure, in which Felix gains literary success by allowing Helwyze to be his author. Helwyze also uses Olivia to distract Felix from his “work” with Gladys. The “one forbidden, yet most fascinating spot in all the house” (98) is the study in which the secret of authorship is hidden:
Full of some pleasurable excitement, Canaris lead his wife across the room, threw open a door, and bade her look in. Like a curious child, she peeped, but saw only a small, bare cabinet de travail.
“No room, you see, even for a little thing like you. None dare enter here without my keeper’s leave. Remember that, else you may fare like Bluebeard’s Fatima” (75–76).
Clearly, Victorian women artists were not burlesquing the story. Against the prevailing comic mode, these works borrow the marital dynamic of the Bluebeard story to engage with the role and rights of women within marriage. For women writers, the forbidden chamber is explored as a previously forbidden place of writing.
Although George Cruikshank did not illustrate “The Robber Bridegroom” when he illustrated German Popular Stories, and while they are not caricatures such as those on which his earlier career had depended, the style of the acclaimed illustrations he did create for the two volumes captures the comic element of the stories (Patten 1988, 26).28 Thackeray’s own illustrations of Bluebeard are in the caricature vein, suitable for a student of Cruikshank’s. The comic verse version by F. W. N. Bayley circulated with cartoon illustrations by Alfred Henry Forrester, depicting grotesquely exaggerated figures. Later in the century, however, the illustrations of Walter Crane reclaim the adult drama in poignant terms, better fitting the “heavy tragedy” Crane saw in the story.
Around 1875, Routledge published “Bluebeard” in the Walter Crane’s Toybooks shilling series, whose cover illustrates emblems and pages from a number of recognizable fairy tales (ca. 1877, Opie: 013:101). The pictures take up most of the page, leaving space for small scrolled text boxes in a corner of each page. Crane’s Bluebeard is courtly, and not orientalized; the French origins of the story are echoed in his motto “Gardez le clef” (keep the key/look after the key) both on his crest and carved in his furniture, and the word “Barb[e]” visible on the pennant fluttering from a spire. The scenes are all interior, with the exception of Anne at the turret, but in almost every illustration there is a secondary focus on something happening outside. In the first picture of Bluebeard handing the keys to his wife and enumerating them, a groom waits outside with Bluebeard’s horse, anticipating his departure. The text stops at Bluebeard’s marriage to a wife. In the second image, the wife hurries downstairs while over her shoulder and through the open doorway are seen the women admiring her goods. The text here explains their presence with Bluebeard’s departing instructions to his wife, but he has not left yet; the text lags behind the image. In the third picture, his wife is opening the door and peering inside; behind her, the staircase she has descended beckons, but clearly she has descended into an underworld of experience and she cannot return to innocence, a reading supported by Crane’s prominent use of Edenic imagery in several of the pictures. Both of his crests feature a horned head above them, cleft hooves, and in one a pointed tail; the demonic connection is clear even before the final picture depicting Bluebeard’s face transformed into a devil. In the next, Bluebeard is angrily pointing at the keys, as his wife kneels imploring before him, her hair now unpinned and flowing loose. Anne walks past the open doorway in the background. In two panels of text, one on either side of the two-page illustration, the poetry has almost caught up with the image depicted. The next image shows Sister Anne gazing from the tower over a flat and extensive landscape. The text contrasts her languorous pose with the urgency of direct speech: Bluebeard threatens “You have been in the closet once, and you shall go again!” as the wife pleads for time, is granted it, and begs her sister to watch for their brothers. The penultimate image is particularly arresting; while the wife is central, reclining up the stairs through the center of the picture, Bluebeard is coming up (visible from his torso up and wielding a sword) and seems to have one hand on the hem of her dress. At the top of the staircase, in the top left of the frame, Sister Anne is bending over and waving. Above Bluebeard’s head out of a casement window can be seen the two arriving brothers, still on horseback, their swords raised like his. In the final image, the two brothers take up most of the frame, while Bluebeard is on his knees struggling in the lower left quadrant. A brother has each of his hands pinned, his sword lies on the ground in the corner of the frame. In the extreme right edge behind the edge of a curtain can just be seen the two women, Bluebeard’s wife on the floor.
Crane’s illustrations take top billing, as seen in the marketing of The Bluebeard Picture Book (London: Routledge, after 1876). The cover states: “32 Pages of Design” and “By Walter Crane.” The edition contains “Blue Beard,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Jack and the Bean-Stalk,” and “Baby’s Own A B C.” It was printed in colors by Edmund Evans, as noted on the title page. A John Lane reissue of Bluebeard’s Picture Book (Walter Crane Picture Books, large series, 1899) offers a different selection: “Bluebeard,” “The Sleeping Beauty,” and “Baby’s Own Alphabet” with “the original coloured designs” as engraved by Evans. The cover offers images of all three personages: Bluebeard snarls as he points to the table of contents; he seems to inspire awe in the child representing “Baby,” in his alphabet smock. The internal cover illustration by Crane shows Bluebeard riding on a horse, another of him leaving as his young wife (very different in appearance from the pre-Raphaelite woman in the original series) stands with keys in hand and Bluebeard waves farewell, and another shows a different turret scene with the brothers riding in on the same height as the tower itself. The preface to this reissue, also dated 1899, refers to the grouping of “Bluebeard” with “Sleeping Beauty” and the “Baby’s Own Alphabet,” and was thus written for the occasion, and signed with Crane’s insignia. But it is also self-referential, depicting Bluebeard reading his own book: “Bluebeard’s key, no doubt, unlocked many mysteries, and he may have had among his treasures a picture-book, if only to amuse his wives with, or to divert their attention from his own dark designs: but it must not be supposed that Bluebeard—although he is not free from the suspicion of having put several beauties to sleep—in presenting himself again with The Sleeping Beauty is at all responsible for her enchanted slumber, or that either Bluebeard or the Sleeping Beauty are concerned with Baby’s Own Alphabet—except for the spelling of their own names.” The preface also notes that Bluebeard is a “heavy tragedy” and this is perhaps the most striking contrast to the contemporary caricatures of Bluebeard. There is no comic element to the verse (which is unusual in verse versions of “Bluebeard”) or in the illustrations. Instead, if Bluebeard’s wife is shown submitting to the same temptation as Eve, she is nevertheless outmatched by the devilry of the Bluebeard she has married, and the poignancy of her danger and the justice of her rescuing brothers are given full play in Crane’s illustrations.29
Through the work of Victorian literary and visual artists, the Bluebeard tale once again became less of a laughing matter. Its innate doubling and doubleness was foregrounded through using it in a doubled way, retelling the story in a genre other than fairy tale and highlighting the tale’s ability to address the themes of violence and gender inequality in a serious manner, no matter which stance on the theme the artist adopted.