BLUEBEARD TODAY
In the postmodern present, all Bluebeards are simultaneously possible. In the pantomime Bluebeard (2003) by Paul Reakes, the treatment of “Bluebeard” is entirely traditional.1 Contemporary references to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Wallace and Gromit are the only clues that the pantomime is less than a hundred and fifty years old, and the pantomime delights in the traditional comic business, the kitchen scene, ad lib interaction with the audience, and the pantomime dame as Sister Anne (Ruby, played en travesti by a male actor), whom no one wishes to marry.2 Symbolically present in this traditional pantomime are the dozens of traditional Bluebeard pantomimes and harlequinades that precede it on the British stage, as well as more recent postmodern exploitations of the form and postcolonial dialogues with it (such as the Jamaican Bluebeard pantomime, Busha Bluebeard).3 In the same year, S. P. Somtow’s extravagant novel Bluebeard’s Castle (2003), a compulsively allusive, postmodern sprawling pop-culture, gothic fantasy set in Bangkok, attempts to include within it many Bluebeards both real and counterfeit.
Two of the most recent “Bluebeard” works are a collection of poetry and a collection of short stories, both of which use the allusion to the fairy tale in their titles. The new poetry collection Bluebeard’s Wives (edited by Boden and Brigley 2007) again embraces the creative possibilities of reimagining the Bluebeard story and telling it from multiple points of view (the wives’, Bluebeard’s, even his sword). At the same time, the prior intertext is not simply the Bluebeard tale (“Mr. Fox,” in one poem and “The Robber Bridegroom” in another), but the influential Balázs and Bartók precursor opera, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle (1912). An English National Opera production at Birmingham Symphony Hall was the direct inspiration for a women’s poetry project; many of the poems published in Bluebeard’s Wives derive from it. Some voices contradict the terms of the opera, while others pay homage. The collection is prefaced by the sonnet of Edna St. Vincent Millay,4 claiming another important precursor text, specifically a poem by a progressive feminist. Sophie Hannah’s reading of the sonnet in the preface to Bluebeard’s Wives is of a female speaker claiming preserved space, a right traditionally accorded to Bluebeard alone, for herself. Even as the poems create other secret spaces, as a group they refuse the status of sacred space for the Bluebeard intertext itself; they dare to “profane” by using it freely. Interestingly, the poets refer to themselves as Bluebeard’s Wives and as a harem, but beyond this notion of a collective the twenty-four poets and their personae have little in common. As a result, though grounded in the particulars of the Bluebeard story and the iconography of the modernist opera, and intertextu-ally aware of each other, the poems are universalized expressions: all women, all lovers, and all wives are envisioned.
Pierre Furlan’s short story “Blue-beard’s Work-shop” (2007), translated from the original “L’atelier de barbe-bleue” (2002) in a New Zealand collection of the same title, encapsulates both the lasting desire that we have for the Bluebeard story and the unexpected influence it has on the stories we tell about it. Like Margaret Atwood’s “Bluebeard’s Egg” (1983), the metafictive story is set in a writer’s workshop, this time in a sultry Belgian summer, in a “fake” eighteenth-century castle. The postmodern knowledge of the workshop is offered as a writer’s “key to success”: rewrite a known story because, as the teacher of the workshop says, “People’s subconscious hasn’t changed over the last five centuries, really” (23). The male protagonist decides also to exploit this “tacky story” (27) in order to exploit the teacher’s masochistic desire to be not Sister Anne, who knows the truth and sounds the alarm, but Bluebeard’s wife. At the same time, the control he exercises over his own desire is quickly revealed to be an illusion: the companion to “hormone-fuelled desire” (24) is “insan[e] jealous[y]” (27). Once again, and just as it has done from the very beginning in Charles Perrault’s version, in “Mr. Fox” and “The Robber Bridegroom,” those stories about storytelling, and “Fitcher’s Bird,” the story about transforming the known story into a new disguise, the tale escapes the frames, spilling out of the embedded story into the Belgian summer and out into the remainder of the stories in Blue-beard’s Work-shop. Although the themes are archetypally consistent, once again the story takes protagonist and reader alike to a place they did not expect.
It seems unlikely that Bluebeard will reenter English cultural parlance as a children’s nursery story. The image of Bluebeard the “pirate” now firmly occupies the vacuum left when Bluebeard the serial wife killer was censored out of fairy tale collections for children. But as gender politics both endure and evolve, so will artistic engagement with the Bluebeard fairy tale.