1. In 1973, Evening Standard graphic strip writer Peter O’Donnell published a strip of Modesty Blaise over a year called “The Bluebeard Affair.” When the strip was collected in 2006, he wrote in the preface: “The name still appears in modern dictionaries and was generally known in the early decades of the twentieth century, but then seems to have faded from the vocabulary. I’ve now asked a number of people about it but nobody under about seventy knew what it meant. That being so, it was pretty dumb of me to use it in the title, wasn’t it?” (O’Donnell and Romero 2006). Kurt Vonnegut in Bluebeard has his main protagonist write: “I meant to mention Bluebeard in this book. I wanted to know if I had to explain, for the sake of young readers, who Bluebeard was. Nobody knew” (1987, 45).
2. Maggie Pearson and Gavin Rowe (2000). Alternatively, “Bluebeard” is listed as “antique” by Judy Mastranglo’s Antique Fairy Tales (Perrault 1988).
3. T. Allston Brown (1903): “all the dresses which had been made for ‘Bluebeard’ were likewise consumed” along with the show animals (elephants, lions, bears, leopards).
4. See Balanchine’s “Chronology” (Balanchine and Mason 1977, 738). This Bluebeard is based on the 1866 Offenbach operetta.
5. Darnton’s example seems limited, however: “The English versions seem almost jolly in comparison. ‘Peerifool’ begins in Peter Rabbit fashion … and it ends with some good, clean giant killing (by boiling water)” (1984, 46).
6. Manfred Grätz (1988), quoted by Meredid Puw Davies (2001, 6–7): “Grätz goes on to show that it is more likely that the German Märchen were in fact modelled on the highly fashionable, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French contes de fées, which were sophisticated literary products of a high salon culture, rather than unsullied transcriptions of peasant narrative, although their authors, as in the case of Perrault, did sometimes make such claims.” Focusing on the tale and close variants, Josef Herzog in Die Märchentypen des “Ritter Blaubart” und “Fitchervogel” (1938) analyzed a large set of international variants (thirty-one, with multiple variations for each) by comparing their motivic content. However, his hopes for locating its source through ethnographic study did not yield a result.
7. Emil Heckmann (1930) quoted by Harriet Mowshowitz (1970, 16).
8. Meredid Puw Davies (2001) cited Bottigheimer (1987, 1993) on the Grimms and uses largely German scholars: Suhrbier (on how the German tradition blunts the tale’s subversive elements), Gräz, Heckmann, and Saintyves. In a chapter surveying the scholarly tradition, largely German, she surveyed mythology, anthropology, social history, and folklore studies in turn. Mythology: Kretschmer (1901) and Heckmann (1930) and Gabory (1926); Astrology: Pancritius (1930); Social Practice: leprosy, beards and their significance, tarring and feathering, cannibalism, werewolfism, eliminating matrilineal inheritance; fear of death in childbirth, Perrault’s proto-feminist comment on married women’s lack of legal and property rights; Psychology: Jungian primarily (Mowshowitz, Suhrbier, Lüthi [via Jacoby], Hedwig von Beit, Verena Kast, Helmut Barz, Bettelheim, and Annemarie Dross). Notably, she did not include any more recent (non-Jungian) feminist studies.
9. Roger Schlobin was more specific: Bluebeard would fall under the “femivore” archetype, the “lovable bastard” that includes Don Juan, Romeo, lady killer, Casanova types, and others. Still, “the couplings of femivores and victims repeat archetypal patterns in which they both seek individually and mutually destructive power” (1989, 96).
10. For the sun theory applied to Bluebeard, Saintyves cited: H. Husson, La Chaine Traditionnelle (Paris: A. Franck, 1874, 34–41) and A. Lefèvre, Les Contes de Perrault, lxvi–lxix (Paris: C. Marpon & E. Flammarion, 1875). He noted that for F. Dillaye in Contes de Perrault (Paris: 1880, 218–19), the struggle of day and night explication is not essentially any different and depends on the same arguments as Husson (362 n.). At the same time, Saintyves links with this discredited theory that of Bluebeard as Kronos or Saturn, in a struggle to kill the new year (363–64).
11. Jean-Pierre Bayard (1955) similarly universalized the gender of the initiate, concluding that curiosity is a prevalent and eternal theme pertaining as often to men as to women. Derek Brewer also universalized the theme of escape from death: “We all have to open the door of the little room, where our predecessors have gone” (1980, 40).
12. See also Bayard (1955), Mowshowitz (1970), and Brewer (1980).
13. The first wife was killed for looking into a forbidden room; one hid the fact she was “bandy legged”, and another that she was black. All other wives, from different nationalities, are unfaithful to Bluebeard.
14. See Shuli Barzilai (2009). She has applied Freudian and Lacanian approaches to the tale previously.
15. Essentially, Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ (1992) reading was the same in Women Who Run with the Wolves. Bluebeard is a predator. Being curious is the “key” to psychic individuation. The bride learns to summon her animus (her two brothers) to overthrow the predator. Ann and Barry Ulanov also agreed that Bluebeard is representative of a “killer animus” who functions aggressively, the solution to which is to “transform it into something positive” (1994, 284). He is a contrasexual archetype; the Bluebeard negative animus complex in women would be an anima complex in men (284).
16. Both Mowshowitz (1979) and François Flahault (1979) offered similar readings. Jack Zipes (2006) cited his agreement with Philip Lewis’ reading of the crisis of phallotocracy. In publishing the secret to phallocratic power, Perrault revealed the unrevealable. Janel States argued in “Confronting the Forbidden” (1996) that Bluebeard is threatened by his wife’s inability to reflect his gaze perfectly and thus in frustration destroys her; he wishes his wife to occupy an object rather than a subject position.
17. Studies such as that by Jennifer Welch looked at the use of the tale as a revisionist tactic: “When revisionists challenge the Märchen paradigm, they also implicitly comment on the method of storytelling. As with all works of art, form and content are inseparable” (1994, 12).
1. See Davies The Tale of Bluebeard in German Literature (2001: 60–65) for her criteria for Blaubartmärchen and a brief discussion of the difficulties of classifying the tale, calling it “more elusive than some other tales” (61).
2. There are numerous variants within each nationality also. In their catalogue of French and francophone fairy tales and folklore, Le conte populaire français (1957), Paul Delarue and Marie-Louise Ténèze also added a subcategory: AT 312B, a Christianized version of AT 312, citing three of these and giving one in full: “Le diable et les deux petites filles.” Other tales are often fruitfully compared with selections from these three AT categories, such as Grimm’s “Castle of Death” or “The Murder Castle” (“Das Mordschloss”); “The Hut in the Forest” (“Das Waldhaus”); “Our Lady’s Child” (“Marienkind”). “Faithful John” (“Der treue Johannes”), on the other hand, reverses the usually brutal consequences of transgression to bring its male protagonist great fortune. This example of apparent double standards running through many of the tales was analyzed by Maria Tatar in “Taming the Beast” (1987, 167). Tatar read this standard in, among others, the Russian folktale “Marya Morévna” in which Prince Ivan’s violation of a prohibition happily brings him wealth and marriage. The AT system has been criticized for being Eurocentric. Nevertheless, European variants have most strongly marked the English tradition.
3. In variants, particularly French, the bride stalls by dressing elaborately in wedding clothes. In “The White Dove,” for instance, she requires dress, veils, skirts, train, cap, etcetera. Harriet Mowshowitz conjectured that details of dressing would have offended Perrault’s courtly audience (1970, 23).
4. In one French (Vendéen) variant of Bluebeard the dog is named Sarène, an evident cognate for sister Anne: Soeur Anne (“Barbe Bleue,” variant in Bødker).
5. In The Folktale, Stith Thompson noted: “The tale in approximately this form (AT 311) is known over most of Europe from Germany eastward. Its area of greatest popularity is found in the Baltic states and in Norway. In the north, it seems to go no further east than the Urals, but it is found in Palestine and has several versions in India. It has also been carried to the Eskimos and to Puerto Rico. The story has never been thoroughly studied, but a cursory examination of the variants suggests Norway as at least an important center of dissemination of this tale, if not its original home” (1946, 36).
6. There are many translations of this enigmatic title. Most common are “Fitcher’s (or Fetcher’s) Fowl” and “Fitcher’s Bird.” The origin of the German title is unknown, but it is presumed to be connected with the bird disguise the heroine adopts. The Grimms associated it with the Icelandic word fitfugl, a web-footed or water bird (Zipes 1987a, 730–31 n.). Elsewhere, “Fitcher” becomes “Fezzy the Fetcher” (of women).
7. In many variations, the punishment for seeing the forbidden is to be struck blind, as in “The Story of the Third Calendar” (The Thousand and One Arabian Nights), and “Mary’s Child.”
8. The latter, by Ludwig Bechstein (1845), is a hybrid of “Fitcher’s Bird,” because in addition to creating the effigy of a straw doll dressed in her clothes and cap, the “young bride” covers herself in honey and feathers to escape recognition. But she is escaping a robber’s den, where she has been a captive for several years.
9. The 1823, 1826, and 1834 editions of German Popular Stories are identical in typesetting and pagination and contain the note to “The Robber Bridegroom”: “in the original, the finger is chopped off, and is carried away by the bride, as well as the ring upon it” (201 n.).
10. The trail of blood is used in the English Squire King Caley variants “Cellar of Blood” and “Doctor Forster.”
11. In the Afro-Caribbean tale “Jack and the Devil,” they cook the ogre and eat him. In the Sicilian tale “The Story about OhMy” the test is whether the girl will eat a dead body part; the first two sisters throw it away, but it is called back by OhMy. The third is advised by the soul of her dead mother to burn it and grind the powder so that it cannot be called back to disprove that she ate it. This command to eat a body part is a consistent alternative to the prohibition.
12. As in “The Girl Who Got up a Tree,” “Lass ’at Seed Her Awn Graave Dug,” “Lonton Lass,” (although she is spared by the premonition dream of a nearby farmer), “The Oxford Student,” and “Riddle Me, Riddle Me Right.”
13. The rhyme here is very close indeed to “The Girl Who Got up a Tree”: “I’ll rede you a riddle, I’ll rede it you right, / Where was I last Saturday night? / The wind did blow, the leaves did shake, / When I saw the hole the fox did make” (1970).
14. Francis Child, creator of the Child Ballad classification, lists six variants for Child Ballad #4: “Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight.”
15. A Caribbean variant on this is “Jack and Old Bluebeard,” also a Jamaican pantomime (1960s). Another is the Greek tale “The Underworld Adventure.”
16. Similar help is given by the third daughter in “The Widow and Her Daughters” and in “Peerifool.”
17. Hürlimann also noted that the provenance of some stories leads back to Persia and India (1959, 1963, 26).
18. Translated by Richard Burton (who also had earlier translated Arabian Nights for the Victorians); Burton may even have modeled his translation of this episode on “Bluebeard.”
19. Andrew Lang also quoted the French Romantic writer Charles Nodier (1780–1844): “Odysseus, Figaro, and Othello are not more certain to be immortal than Hop o’ My Thumb, Puss in Boots, and Blue Beard, the heroes whom Charles Nodier so pleasantly called ‘the Ulysses, the Figaro, and the Othello of children’” (1888, xxxv). Nodier (through Lang) is also quoted in J. Saxon Childers’ edition of Perrault’s and (G. M.’s 1763] Histories (1925, 123–24).
20. The existence of frescoes at St. Nicholas de Bienzy and another nearby church dating from 1704 and discovered in 1850 demonstrate the cult of Triphine has been interwoven with the Bluebeard story in popular imagination. Renée Van Raamsdonk summarized the images in the frescoes: “first, the saint’s marriage with a Breton lord; second, her receipt of several keys from her husband; third, her discovery of a room where seven female corpses hang from a wall; fourth, her husband’s return, his anger, and her evident dejection; fifth, the saint at a window praying with a woman who is presumably her sister. In the sixth and last frescoe, the saint, Tropheme [Triphine], has been hanged, but St. Gildas resuscitates her, while her two brothers kill the murderous husband” (1976, 6–7; see also Flahault 1979). The 1912 modern gothic novel Château Bluebeard, by Mrs. Leeds, uses the legend for its setting and the lineage of the novel’s villain, the Count de Kerouac.
21. As summarized by Brigitte Cazelles in “Arthur as Barbe-Bleue” (1999). Cazelles looked in detail at a nineteenth-century French play that turns King Arthur into the tyrannical husband of Triphene, manipulated by a false advisor into condemning her to death first for matricide, then for adultery: Saint Tryphine et le roi Arthur. Mystère breton en deux journées et huit actes, trans. F. M. Luzel, ed. M. l’abbé Henry (Quimperlé: Clairet, 1893). This variant does not appear to be widely known outside of Breton tradition.
22. The duke had written: “25 March, 1858 … Mr. Planché there reports with good reason that one of the supposed precursors for Blue Beard is the Maréchal de Rais who was burned in Nantes in 1440. It is the opinion the most widely given, [but] I doubt that it has any foundation. I have retrieved in my archives an old copy of the trial of the Maréchal, who was, I regret to say it, a very notable Lord and a very brave soldier. He was tried and condemned for a number of ghastly crimes, but entirely different from those of Blue Beard” (Planché 1872, 359–60, my translation).
23. Harriet Mowshowitz went to great lengths in her dissertation “Bluebeard and French Literature” (1970) and in her article “Gilles de Rais and the Bluebeard Legend in France” (1973) to untangle the historical figure Gilles (and his own legends) from the legend of Bluebeard. In her thesis, “Gilles de Rais in Life, Literature and Legend” (1986), Elena Baca Odio concludes that both Comôr and Rais were the joint precursors for the Bluebeard tale, reappearing in this form after centuries in which the historical tales had been circulated in an oral tradition.
24. Harold Dearden noted that before Rais was fourteen years old, two arranged marriages resulted in the death of the brides “almost immediately after the ceremony” (1937, 575), and elsewhere it is reported that two fiancées died before the wedding. Cazelles did mention one story about wives cited by Bossard, an early biographer of de Rais: “One evening, Gilles welcomes two travelers in his castle of Rais (between Elven and Questembert): the count Odon de Tréméac, lord of Kervent, and Blanche de l’Herminière, his betrothed. Gilles de Laval, whose beard is of a most beautiful red hue, has Odon thrown into a dungeon cell and tries to force Blanche to wed him. Upon a promise that he will be hers ‘body and soul,’ Blanche finally accepts and soon reveals her true identity; she is the devil in flesh, who is come to notify Gilles de Laval that because of the crimes and misdeeds he has committed, henceforth he belongs to Hell. The devil makes a sign, and Gilles’s beard changes from red to blue” (Bossard 1885; Cazelles 1999, 137). Clement Wood’s bizarre fairy tale Bluebeard and His Eight Wives (1926) describes de Rais fulfilling a prophecy in wedding eight “women”: Tiphaine and Beatrice, his wife Catherine, a household traitor Marie, Joan of Arc, a spirit Leopard Lady who fled into the forms of all the children he murdered, Gilla, and finally Morta: Death.
25. Subtitle of Rais’ first major biography by the Abbé Eugène Bossard (1885).
26. Website of the Conseil Général de la Vendée: “Tiffauges: Château de Barbe-Bleue”, http://www.chateau-barbe-bleue.com/pages/menprin.asp.
27. Leonard Wolf’s scholarly biography Bluebeard: The Life and Crimes of Gilles de Rais drew together the scattered source materials in one place, and confirmed that Rais is not known to have had a blue beard (or, indeed, any beard at all), and that a black beard that shows blue is a plausible but fanciful notion (1980, 156–58). In the note to the appended story by Perrault, Wolf added: “What is curious and poignant and worth mulling over is that in the process by which Gilles’s name and Blue-beard’s have been confounded, the child murderer has been transformed and softened into a man who murders his wives” (218).
28. Wheeler also quoted Holinshead’s reference to another “Bluebeard,” in the reign of Henry VI, anno 1450 (1866). A similar suggestion was made by A. A. ([18]66): “Blue Beard in England”: “In Caxton’s Polychronicon (54, 6, recto, A.D. 1449) is the following passage: ‘After relating the troubles in Flanders; the loss of the towns in France, Pont l’Arche and Rouen; the arrest and return of the unpopular Duke of Suffolk; the anger of the Commons for the deliverance of Anjou and Maine, the loss of Normandy, the author goes on to say,—‘And in especial for the death of the good duke of gloucester, in soo moche that in somme places men gadred togeders and made hem Captaynes as blew berd and other, which were resysted, and taken and had Justyce and deyd. And thenne the sayd parlement was adiourned to leycetre.’ Can this ‘blew berd’ be the original of the truculent hero of the fairy story? Of course we often hear of Jacke Strawe, Hob Miller, and such names, but I do not recollect among any of the mob leaders a Blue Beard’” (original italics).
29. The association of Henry Tudor with Bluebeard was made by Jane Austen, according to her nephew’s “Memoir,” where she says of Henry VIII that he was “held to be an unmitigated tyrant, and an embodied Blue Beard” (Austen-Leigh 1869, 331). One verse chapbook frequently reprinted throughout the nineteenth century made the allusion: “he did marry / As many fair dames / As our eighth English Harry” (J. Harris 1808). In Anne Thackeray Ritchie’s “Bluebeard’s Keys” two men in the street comment on “Barbi’s” chances of getting another wife in the following terms: “he will not find much difficulty. Remember Henry Tudor, and the Sultan in Arabian Nights” (1875, 28). In Broadbent’s History of Pantomime, he began by stating that the pantomimes of Blue Beard are thought to be based on “a satire on our King Henry VIII,” but went on to talk of it being in fact Gilles de Rais (1901, 200). The novel by Emma Cave, Bluebeard’s Room (1995), casts the persecution of fiancée Lucy as a vague extension of her ancestors’ religious persecution by King Henry. Catherine Howard was called “the fifth wife of Bluebeard” in a book of that title by Olivia Leigh (1969).
30. “[W. C.] Taylor locates the tale as before the time of the Tudors since the text seems to indicate no surprise that a man would have the right to kill his wives” (Taylor 1848, 136).
31. “The dramatic Blue Beard is a bashaw with three tails, who has cut off the heads of his seven wives; consequently, our eighth Harry is a wife or two in arrear with the Turk.”
1. See Cordingly (1998, xii–xiii). The book is still widely listed under Defoe’s name in bibliographies.
2. Named for the Belgian town of Ramillies and the British victory there in 1706. The wig is braided down the back and tied with ribbons.
3. Lee wrote, “There has not been found any authenticated record or any statement of the identity of the girl whom Blackbeard married. Tradition has it that the girl’s name was Mary Ormond, and there exists a letter written by a relative of Mary Ormond so stating” (1974, 74 and note). The footnote dates the letter 1947, however, and the genealogy has not been proven. Lee’s own research did not turn up any “legitimate” descendents of Blackbeard with his surname or any of the accepted variations upon it (198n29).
4. Lee noted “neither in Spotswood’s letters nor elsewhere is there any evidence that Eden ever had improper dealings with Edward Teach” (1974, 141) and quoted Johnson’s five-paragraph retraction. Lee quoted Johnson as his oldest source for Eden performing the ceremony: “Writers have seized upon this marriage performed by Governor Eden as sufficient proof that Blackbeard and the governor were bosom friends allied in the commission of piratical acts. Such a conclusion reveals ignorance both of the laws and of the conditions existing in North Carolina in 1718 with respect to marriages.” Lee was a Professor of Law, who published on North Carolina law.
5. Even with such a history, Teach did not feature at all in the 1924 publication Love Stories of Some Famous Pirates by A. Hyatt Verrill.
6. Lee also cited: “It has been said that, prior to his formalized wedding of 1718 in North Carolina, he had been married on at least thirteen occasions and even had a wife living in London” (1974, 25). Lee’s source for this information is more reputable: a letter from Governor Walter Hamilton to Council of Trade and Plantations, dated January 6, 1718, Cal State Papers, XXX (Aug. 1717–Dec. 1718), sec. 298. This letter predates Johnson’s account, which also mentioned the same information and was cross-referenced by Lee along with a 1962 account (Michael Craton, A History of the Bahamas) that no doubt drew on the former.
7. The expanded fourth addition in 1726 and the expanded edition of 1734 increased the original number of pirates in the book.
8. Robert Lee argued that Blackbeard did not reap cash treasures but rather ships’ stores, which he used or sold, and that he was a notorious spendthrift; thus, it was unlikely that he ever buried much, if any, treasure at all (1974, 171–72). That has, of course, not stopped people from searching for it and evidence of digging still occurs at all major Blackbeard/Teach sites, even those that have not been authenticated.
9. See also “Bluebeard’s Castle,” n.d.
10. Subtitle of Harold Schechter’s book on Holmes. The term “multimurderer” was coined by a Chicago journalist (Schechter 1994, 258).
11. The confession is problematic; it is the fullest confession of his crimes, but he described killing several people who were not in fact dead and is suspected of killing many more than he confessed to. He provided rooms for tourists during the Chicago World Fair, and “as many as fifty tourists who took rooms at the Castle never returned home from their trip” (63). See Schechter (1994).
12. Newspapers took to calling him “the Modern Bluebeard” (Schechter 1994, 258).
13. Walz stated that the “ultimate proof of Landru’s crimes was the simple assertion [by the press] that he was the ‘Bluebeard of Gambais’” (2000, 100).
14. See Le Queux (1966).
15. The actual number is not known. In a 1926 account, “The Stockyards Bluebeard,” Edward Smith wrote: “The total number of the man’s wives has been placed as high as fifty, though I think thirty-five more like the correct number. Bluebeard had seven wives and has become a legend” (1926, 101).
16. See Encyclopaedia of Murder (Wilson and Pitman 1961, 283–84). This entry on Gufler used “Bluebeard” as an adjective, lowercase, and twice as a noun. The waltz of this name is used to effect in both the Claude Chabrol film (1963) when Landru waltzes with one of his victims to this music in his blue villa, and again in the Edward Dmytryk film (1972) as background to Richard Burton’s activities. Further, it appears in the title of a pantomime listed by Georges Doutrepont (1926, 420): Barbe-Bleue ou la Sorcière du Danube (1830).
17. Harold Schechter’s article “The Bloody Chamber” discussed the facts and the films in terms of the fairy tales “Bluebeard,” “Fitcher’s Bird,” “The Robber Bridegroom,” and the epigrammatic warning from “Mr. Fox” and drew on E. Sidney Hartland’s 1885 essay on the forbidden chamber cycle.
18. In reference to South African Daisy de Melker, by her biographers (Bennett and Rousseau 1934).
19. Holbrook is also author of “Belle, the Female Bluebeard” American Mercury 53.212 (August 1941): 218–26. This title echoes the entry of a circa-1920 crime detective pamphlet (Crimes of Love and Passion no. 2): “Belle Gunness: ‘The Female Bluebeard’” by Henry K. Vernon (cited in Langlois 1978, 159 n.).
20. Anderson picked up the “Lady Bluebeard” moniker presumably from the press of the period, as his book reproduced a San Francisco Chronicle headline describing her as “Mrs. Bluebeard.”
1. The first five stories of the eight that became Contes de Ma Mère l’Oye were present in this manuscript, discovered in Nice in 1953, now in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York (see Perrault 1695). The debates over authenticating original authorship between the father and son derive from the name on the publishing license, which was that of the son. Percy Muir stated: “at the time of original publication, and throughout the lifetime of Perrault senior, the son’s authorship was generally accepted” (1954, 49). The opposite opinion holds sway in most scholarship on the topic. Jacques Barchilon provided an even-handed survey in “The Authorship of the Tales,” in the first chapter of the Facsimile, and for the first time also performed a handwriting analysis of the manuscript original, concluding: “the facts available are not absolutely conclusive. On the basis of different contemporary statements either the father or the son could be the author of the Contes. The manuscript does show apparent evidence of the father’s work in the dedication inscription and in a few corrections, and the scribe who copied the tales also copied another manuscript for Perrault in the same year” (Barchilon 1956: 32, 35).
2. Barchilon noted in his “Foreword” to the Samber reprint (Authentic Mother Goose): “The text which he used for his translation was the French edition of 1721 or its reprint of 1729 published in Holland. In these, the sequence in the original Perrault edition of 1697 has been changed” (Barchilon and Pettit 1960, 47).
3. Muir ascribed the (mis)translation of this title to Samber: “Samber, the first translator, was responsible for the switch from La Belle au Bois Dormant to The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood, which is probably accountable to a faulty acquaintance with the French language” (1954, 49).
4. Claire-Lise Malarte-Feldman wrote: “This error in authorship is not unique to Samber. We know that from the beginning of the eighteenth century, cheap editions were sold all over France; these were the blue books of the bibliothèque de Troyes. It is not too farfetched to imagine that Samber may have seen some of those editions in which often Perrault was mistakenly presented as the author of Mlle L’Héritier’s tale” (1999, 187). She also added in a footnote that Catherine Velay-Vallantin (1987, 145) noted that this novel was “erroneously attributed to Perrault as early as 1716” (Malarte-Feldman 1999, 196). Andrew Lang also footnoted an example of its inclusion from 1721 (1888, xxvi) and commented that it “holds its place even now”; Barchilon noted that these were the Dutch editions of 1721 and 1729 (Barchilon and Pettit 1960, 49). Interestingly, editions of the translator G. M. also include it. In his book on French chapbooks, Pierre Brochon also stated that the erroneous attribution derived from the French chapbook tradition (1954, 76).
5. See Percy Muir (1954, 50) for a description of the comparison between editions.
6. “The story of Blue Beard … Gent’s translation from Perrault” (book no. 451). “The master cat; or, Puss in Boots, a tale. To which is added, An historical story of Blue Beard. … Both these are from Gent’s English version of Perrault” (book no. 538). He went on in the next paragraph with even greater sarcasm about their use of “Gent” as the surname: “This family was so numerous that almost every literary man of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth century, who had no other title, was admitted to membership” (Saxon Childers 1925, 122–23).
7. In his Notes, he says “the designs for these wood cuts were borrowed from the 1687 edition of Contes de ma Mère l’Oye” (Saxon Childers 1925, 122). Ironically, this is a slip for “1697.” As Percy Muir (1954, 50) noted, the earliest edition of any of the tales is several that appeared in the Receuil of Moetjens (the Hague), beginning in 1694.
8. Samber’s edition clearly includes them, even in the title: Histories … with Morals. Furthermore, his Dedication to the Countess of Granville emphasizes their importance, as Michael Patrick Hearn underscored in his preface to the Garland edition of Samber’s 1729 text (Perrault 1729, xv). In addition to the passage Hearn quoted, Samber wrote in the Dedication that, like the instructive fables, the tale “carries notwithstanding in the Bottom, a most solid Sense, and wraps up and infolds the most material and important Truths” (Perrault 1729). Percy Muir, in his English Children’s Books 1600–1900, summarized the history of the 1719/1799 misprint and its discovery, which is otherwise rarely discussed (1954, 49).
9. Percy Muir is the only author I have found to begin a list dividing “Samber” editions from “G. M.” editions (1954, 51), but his list in either case is brief, only giving the editions that attribute a translator. It is not merely the eleventh edition of 17[99] that credits “G. M.” with the “Englishing” of Perrault, and a list of prominent extant editions from the eighteenth century and after demonstrates the enduring intertwining of translations. Where square brackets are given around the translator the attribution is my own, made by comparing the text with known translations by both translators: 1729: R. S., Gent (London: Pote and Montagu, and 3rd corrected ed. London: Pote and Montagu, 1741); 1763 G. M., Gent (Salisbury: B. Collins, and London: W. Bristow, and 7th corrected edition, Salisbury: B. Collins; also sold in London: Carnan and Newbery, and London: S. Crowder, 1777; 8th corrected edition, Salisbury: B. Collins and London: S. Crowder, 1780; 11th edition, Salisbury: B. Collins, the misdated edition, 1799); 1764 R. S. (London: S. Van den Berg, bilingual edition; ascribed to Samber by Hearn in the prefatory material to his reproduction of the 1729 translation [xxiii], and by the British Library); 1785 [G. M.] (Brussels: B. Le Francq, bilingual edition); 1790 R. S. (Dublin: Richard Cross; predating this, a Dublin: Richard Cross edition of d’Aulnoy’s The history of the tales of the fairies (1785) was the first to include “The Blue Beard,” and similarly used Samber’s translation of it); 1794 [G. M.] (1st American edition, Haverhill, MA: Edes; Malarte-Feldman is not correct when she ascribes this as a Samber reprint [1999, 185], as are Barchilon and Flinders [1981, 112]); 1796 [G. M.] (London: T. Boosey, bilingual edition); 1798 [G. M.] (New York: John Harrison; the copy filmed for readex was imperfect, but the first three pages of “Blue Beard” are included, and suffice to determine the translator); 1800 [G. M.] (Edinburgh, Morrow and Cowgate); 1803 G. M., Gent (London: J. Harris, successor to Newbury); 1817 [G. M.] (Glasgow: Lumsden); 1888 [G. M.] (Clarendon: Oxford University Press; Andrew Lang’s Blue Fairy Book. Glenn Burne attributes it to Samber incorrectly in his article “Andrew Lang’s The Blue Fairy Book: Changing the Course of History” [1986, 142]); 1925 G. M. (London: Nonesuch Press, Ed. J. Saxon Childers); 1928 G. M. (London: Fortune Press).
10. In Lang’s introduction to The Blue Fairy Book which also includes “Blue Beard,” he stated: “I have given his tales of Mother Goose in the words of the oldest English translation I can procure. … Though published in 1697, Perrault’s Contes … do not seem to have been Englished till 1729. A version is advertised in a newspaper of that year, but no copy exists in the British Museum. The text we print is from a very pretty little edition of 1763 which I purchased in Paris. The French and English face each other. … Clearly the English version was not made from Perrault’s first edition, but followed a later and slightly altered text” (1889, 356). Claire-Lise Melarte-Feldman, in her brief study of the English and American translations from Perrault, “The Problems of Translating Perrault’s Contes into English,” used as two of her major twentieth-century editions Philip and Simborowski’s The Complete Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault (1993) and Jack Zipes’ Beauties, Beasts, and Enchantment: Classic French Fairy Tales (1989). Melarte-Feldman noted that Philip and Simborowski retranslated Lang’s 1889 edition; thus, apparently unwittingly, G. M. (Philip noted in “Translating Perrault” that Lang used the 1697 text [1993, 129], but he omitted Lang’s own reference to the source being an “old English version of the eighteenth century” in Lang’s “Preface” of 1889.) Zipes instead retranslated James Planché, who seems to have followed Samber.
11. For the G. M. transcription I have used the Salisbury 1763 edition, attributed to him, from the Lilly Rare Book Library, Bloomington, Indiana. For the Samber text I have used the 1977 Garland reprint edition. A scanned facsimile of the 1729 edition is also available online as part of the Eighteenth-Century Texts online. It is also available (minus the morals) in Opie and Opie (1974, 137–41).
12. My colleague, Dr. Lyle Morgan III, generously leant a linguist’s eye to the two versions. He concluded that the results were frustratingly indeterminate. Whoever G. M. was, he was generally contemporaneous with Samber, and the diction does not therefore help to date G. M.’s translation more closely. Morgan commented: “Grammatically, both translations are equally accurate with G. M.’s most often, but not always, demonstrating a patina that is stylistically more elegant and formal. Samber’s translation often appears stylistically tighter; he most generally uses fewer words to express the same thought, and more often tends toward an idiomatic colloquial usage as you can see throughout the text. However, this apparent difference is somewhat schizophrenic. At times, Samber lapses into the more ‘elegant’ usage of the Elizabethan English of an earlier age such as is seen in the King James Version of the Bible of the early 17th century. ‘I beg you’ in G. M.’s translation is rendered as ‘I desire thee’ in Samber’s, and so on. In these instances, Samber reverts to an older, more ‘stylish’ usage. However, this does not hold true throughout. What G. M. renders as ‘I shall,’ Samber renders by the more vernacular contraction ‘I’ll’” (personal communication, 26 January 2006). Similarly, Barchilon and Flinders noted the juxtaposition of styles in Samber’s translation: “In ‘Bluebeard’ there is an oddly colloquial and modern question: ‘How comes this blood upon the key?’ In the same tale, we find it quaint that the wife and her sister address each other with the archaic ‘thee’ and ‘thou’” (1981, 112).
13. Malarte-Feldman commented: “Where the tales speak the universal and timeless language of the marvelous, their morals fix them in the time and space of the late 1600s, often providing Perrault with the opportunity to mock the miraculous content of his own narrative. Samber, Johnson, Zipes, and many others have attempted to produce a translation in verse whose tone might to some extent render the savor of Perrault’s affected and précieux style” (1999, 191).
14. Barchilon, Flinders, and Foreman note in the Concordance that Perrault uses a vocabulary of 2676 words for the Tales, using a concordance prepared in 1968, while Corneille or Racine used printed vocabularies of 4088 and 5000 words, respectively (1977, viii).
15. This word is highlighted by Malarte-Feldman as posing a special difficulty for English translators: “In the lexicon of the Contes, there are two recurrent terms with meanings deeply rooted in the language of the late 1600s: ‘honnête/honnêteté’ and their opposite ‘malhonnête/malhonnêteté.’ The Dictionnaire de l’Académie (1694) proposes ‘poli’ or ‘courtois’ as the definition for ‘honnête,’ which in English is quite adequately reflected in words such as ‘polite,’ ‘kind,’ ‘civil,’ or ‘mannerly.’ On the other hand, ‘malhonnête’ (meaning, according to the same dictionary, ‘qui ignore les règles de la politesse et de la bienséance’ [that which ignores the rules of politeness and bienséance] is most often erroneously translated into ‘rude’ or ‘rudeness’ (‘grossier’ or ‘rustre’ in French). The word is especially problematic for translators because it alludes to a past way of life and a culture particular to a period when les bonnes moeurs and la bienséance constituted elements of a rigid social code which ruled over France’s upper society and was reflected in the literary style” (1999, 190; italics for French are added). Meredid Puw Davies in The Tale of Bluebeard in German Literature (2001) made this issue central to her interpretation of Perrault’s comments on civilization.
16. This is one example where there was a substantive revision made between the 1695 dedication manuscript and the publication of 1697. In the first instance, Bluebeard adds: “et que ie vienne a le scauoir” (and if I come to find out about it), which is later omitted. Perhaps more important is the change of verb from “fear” (craindre) to “expect” (attendre), leaving the punishment both clear and at the same time unspecified: “Il n’y rien que vous ne deuiez craindre de ma colere” (there is nothing that you may not fear from my anger).
17. I am indebted to my colleague in Modern Languages at Pittsburg State University, Dr. Myriam Krepps, for confirming this and my reading of Perrault’s French.
18. This last sentence, spelling out the reality of the spectacle and thus the consequences of seeing it, was added after the 1695 dedication manuscript.
19. Interestingly, Malarte-Feldman used this last sentence as a representative example of the challenges of translating Perrault. She said: “Often we found out that American English enabled more modern and looser translations: for example, Blue Beard’s wife, after having discovered the corpses of her husband’s former wives hanging in the forbidden room, returned to her bedroom, but ‘she could not relax because she was too upset’ according to Zipes’ translation (Beauties [1989] 32). In the Clarion edition, Neil Philip ([1993], 38) translated the same passage as ‘but she was so distressed that she fainted on the way,’ which, besides being inaccurate, underlines the challenge translators were up against when they had to interpret Perrault’s enigmatic formula ‘mais elle n’en pouvait venir à bout, tant elle était émue’ [but she could not come to the end of it, so much was she emotional]” (1999, 187).
20. It is unlikely that Guy Miège would have mistranslated from Perrault’s French; but whoever G. M. was, it appears that either Samber or G. M. grounded their translation primarily on the other English translation, rather than on Perrault. Barchilon and Flinders missed the G. M. connection altogether when they stated: “The bizarre translation quoted above was reproduced in the first American edition (1794) and thus proves that the American publisher simply reprinted Samber’s translation” (1981, 112). In fact, the American edition (Edes) used G. M.’s version; see note 9 above.
21. Another (twentieth-century) example gives “One mere hour to live,” in order to give the brothers time to arrive on “the swift Arab horses” (William Cowper [192–?, n.p.]).
22. Malarte-Feldman also commented on the possessive adjective used here. Perrault’s wife uses “my” brothers, and Anne also responds, here come “my” brothers; neither woman uses the more expected “our” brothers. Malarte-Feldman said: “As a whole, English translations respect the incongruities in Perrault’s text, particularly as concerns Perrault’s sometimes surprising use of possessive adjectives. … One would more logically expect that the two sisters, sharing as they do the possession of the two brothers in question, would refer to them with the possessive adjective ‘our’ rather than ‘my.’ The Clarion edition took upon itself to rectify Perrault’s puzzling grammar by using the plural ‘our’ (Philip [1993] 41)” (1999, 190).
23. Except that, as Planché commented in the Appendix following his translation, it is not possible to translate the “dust” and “green” as verbs, as in the original (perdoyer, verdoyer): “I wished to point out that 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” (Planché 1858, 517, original emphasis).
24. Hannon (2001) argued that the instrument is a reflection of his true class and cowardliness, in that the cutlass is the instrument of a mere executioner (bourreau), and Bluebeard is someone who does not know how to handle the more aristocratic “épée.”
25. Barchilon and Flinders noted that Perrault was trained as a lawyer and the “legalistic precision” of his fairy tale endings (1981, 108).
26. See chapter 4 for description and analysis of the English orientalized version of “Bluebeard.”
27. Samber and G. M. were the first to translate these morals aiming for the “spirit” rather than the literal letter. Theirs is as follows: “O Curiosity, thou mortal bane! / Spite of thy charms, thou causest often pain / And fore regret, of which we daily find / A thousand instances attend mankind: / For thou, O may it not displease the fair, / A flitting pleasure art, but lasting care; / And always costs, alas! too dear the prize, / Which, in the moment of possession, dies. / Another. / A Very little share of common sense / And knowledge of the world, will soon evince, / That this a story is of long time past, / No husbands now such panick terrors cast; / Nor weakly, with a vain despotick hand, / Imperious, what’s impossible, command: / And be they discontented, or the fire / Of wicked jealousy their hearts inspire, / They softly sing; and of whatever hue / Their beards may chance to be, or black, or blue, / Grizzled, or russet, it is hard to say / Which of the two, the man or wife, bears sway.” Nonetheless, the translation is more literal than, for instance, the Philip and Simborowski translation, which went so far as “Once the wife’s made up her mind, / The husband meekly trails behind” (1993, 44).
1. The “three tails” refer to horses’ tails worn in the shield as a mark of rank (Colman 1798, 1983: 184 n.).
2. As discussed in the previous chapter, the earliest G. M. attribution is 1763, although it is not a first edition.
3. See Kelly’s Reminiscences (1826, 130–31).
4. In the introduction to the Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama, containing a reprinting of Colman’s 1798 libretto, the editors noted: “As popular dramatic pieces, BlueBeard, Timour the Tartar, and Harlequin and Humpo do more than reveal popular styles and changes in theater technology and dramatic technique. Like many pieces of popular culture, they engage with the topical issues, anxieties, and fascinations that held the attention of their respective publics. Thus the plays’ ritualistic treatment of gender—BlueBeard’s tale of violent misogyny, … all echo with key concerns in the age of Wollstonecraft and the subsequent backlash against her and other women writers and intellectuals. Even more striking are the ‘orientalist’ motifs invoked in Blue-Beard and Timour, which show Colman, Lewis, and their wartime audiences constructing a collective fantasy of Asia. Both plays direct their viewers to consider the importance of the ‘East’ just as England comes to dominate India, as Napoleon moves into Egypt, and as diplomatic and military manoeuvring intensifies in the Balkans and around the Black Sea. It is no accident, then, that audiences of Blue-Beard drew parallels between Abomelique’s minister Ibrahim and George III’s prime minister William Pitt” (Cox and Gamer 2003, xxiv).
5. The tales themselves “so far as we know, found their way into ms in Arabia round about 1545. The provenance of some stories, however, leads back to Persia and even to India” (Hürlimann 1959, 26). Marshall’s list of chapbooks in 1708 includes the title Arabian Nights’ Entertainments (Muir 1954, 26 n.). Harvey Darton wrote in his study of children’s literature: “The Eastern tales [Arabian Nights], already present in some sort in Aesop, and to a less extent in details of the Romances and Gesta Romanorum—even in Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale—spread over Western Europe in the eighteenth century like an epidemic. The first serious European translator of them was the French diplomat Antoine Galland, whose Mille et une Nuits appeared in twelve volumes between 1704 and 1717. … The first English translation, from such of Galland’s edition as had appeared, came out between 1705–8; no perfect copy seems to be known” (Darton 1932, 91).
6. Banbury Chap-books, by Edwin Pearson, shows three woodcuts for Bluebeard; the orientalized one bears the note: “This woodcut did duty for ‘Arabian Nights,’ ‘Bluebeard,’ etc; probably designed by Cruikshank, engraved by Branstone” (1890, 116). Ros Ballaster made a compelling case in her study of the oriental influences on eighteenth-century English literature that Arabian Nights established the Turkish spy as a male, despotic, scopic figure in contrast to the female, survivalist, vocal figure of Scheherezade. Of Scheherezade and Schahriar, Ballaster noted: “Her agency is that of the tongue and of time, his of the eye and of the masterful control of space” (2005, 78). The connection with the Turk as a scopic figure is interesting, given the idea that he controls the castle and his wife’s gaze and that he knows of her transgression almost as quickly as it happens. The other major text in the English eighteenth century according to her study was Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy, which ran to 600 letters (dates) and occasioned a sequel by Defoe: A Continuation of Letters Written by a Turkish Spy (1718). This text perpetuated the same dichotomy, but cast a male spy who in turn must fear for his life (as Caleb, of Caleb Williams) from a Turkish despot.
7. See “Othello Turns Turk” by Daniel Vitkus for a precise examination of English Protestant fears of the Ottoman invasion expressed through Othello. Vitkus also noted that Othello, while not a Turk, easily slips into the “othered” position for English protestant audiences: “Othello, the noble Moor of Venice, is not, however, to be identified with a specific, historically accurate racial category; rather, he is a hybrid who might be associated, in the minds of Shakespeare’s audience, with a whole set of related terms—‘Moor,’ ‘Turk,’ ‘Ottomite,’ ‘Saracen,’ ‘Mahometan,’ ‘Egyptian,’ ‘Judean,’ ‘Indian’—all constructed and positioned in opposition to Christian faith and virtue. More than being identified with any specific ethnic label, Othello is a theatrical embodiment of the dark, threatening powers at the edge of Christendom. Othello’s identity is derived from a complex and multilayered tradition of representation that includes the classical barbarian, the Saracen or ‘paynem knight’ of medieval romance, the ‘blackamoor,’ and (an early modern version of the medieval types of lust, cruelty and aggression) the Turk” (2003, 90). Vitkus later discussed that for contemporary audiences a black skin was conventionally associated with damnation, and damned souls on stage, from medieval miracle plays on, were represented in black paint or black costumes (102–03).
8. Adultery is central to the cultural fear: the threat is not simply to Christendom, but to sexual virtue. Vitkus wrote of Othello: “The transformation of Othello, the ‘Moor of Venice,’ from a virtuous lover and Christian soldier to an enraged murderer may be read in the context of early modern conversion, or ‘turning,’ with particular attention to the sense of conversion as a sensual, sexual transgression” (2003, 84). Later: “Iago brings on the ‘conversion’ of Othello, and that conversion is dramatized as a fall into a bestial, sex-obsessed condition” (87).
9. Ysaure is also the name of the heroine in Untermeyer’s “Bluebeard,” Tales from the Ballet (1968), but the hero is Arthur.
10. Of this story, Daniel Vitkus wrote: “This story was dramatized on the London stage in at least four different versions during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was printed in both prose and verse forms and was widely disseminated” (2003, 99). Vitkus deferred to Chew, and both list: George Peele’s lost play The Turkish Mahomet and Hyrin the Fair Greek; Thomas Goffe’s The Couragious Turke, or Amurath the First, “written after, and influenced by, Shakespeare’s Othello” (Vitkus 2003, 99) but dramatizing an already well-known story; Lodowick Carlell’s Osmond the Great Turk (ca. 1637–1642); and Gilbert Swinhoes’ Unhappy Fair Irene (ca. 1640).
11. After looking at earlier anecdotal examples, a fuller version from William Paynter was given by Chew in The Crescent and the Rose (1937): “Mahomet—‘not the false prophet,’ the narrator is careful to note, but the Conqueror of Constantinople—fell in love with a fair Greek named Hyrenee and became ‘a prey to his darling,’ neglecting the affairs of state so that the people murmured against him and sedition would have arisen but for dread of his cruel rigour. For a long while the ‘bewitched’ despot was ‘overwhelmed in beastly pleasure.’ Among the courtiers was a frank and courteous gentleman, one Mustapha, who had been since boyhood the Sultan’s intimate friend. He ventured to remonstrate with him and in order to inspire emulation recited to him the heroic deeds of his ancestors. He warned Mahomet that the Pope was organizing against him a coalition of all Christendom; and if Europe joined with the power of the Persian Sophy the Ottoman Empire would be destroyed. Mustapha suggested that if the Sultan could not overcome his infatuation he could take the lady with him to the wars. Mahomet was at first angry with his friend but presently saw the justice of his remonstrances. For a day and a night he had his pleasure of the fair Greek; and then after a banquet he commanded her to appear, decked and adorned; and in the presence of the nobility he caught her by the hair and with his falchion struck off her head. ‘Now,’ he exclaimed, ‘ye know whether your Emperor is able to represse and bridle his affections or not!’” (Paynter 1566 1.30).
12. Of the last Chew stated it “is too well-known … to require comment.”
13. “Selim” appears to be a common name in Eastern-themed English dramas; in addition to Barbarossa and Bluebeard, there is also a Selim character in the contemporary The Forty Thieves. J. N. Ireland indicated that Sheridan sketched the outline, the dialogue was written by his brother-in-law Ward, the music composed by Kelly, and the drama revised by Colman (1968, 257). It first appeared on the New York stage in March 1808. Chew (1937) is a good source for these, including Selim the Grim.
14. Burke prosecuted Hastings’ impeachment trials from 1788 to 1795.
15. The different versions were discussed and collated by William McBurney in his scholarly edition. Lillo’s play was first briefly produced by Henry Fielding at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket. After a first run of seven nights during the spring of 1736, it was withdrawn, “refurbished” somewhat by Henry Fielding, and replayed for eleven nights in 1737. McBurney noted: “Lillo lost both champion and stage, and the tragedy was not presented again before his death in 1739” (1966, xi). It had “sporadic” revivals through the midcentury. “Between 1782 and 1784 two rival adaptations of the tragedy, by George Colman the elder and Henry Mackenzie, appeared on London stages and bookstalls. Eventually, the Colman text (1782) surpassed in popularity not only Mackenzie’s version but also Lillo’s original” (x). In addition to the versions listed by McBurney, including the “influential collection, The British Theatre (London, 1808)” by Elizabeth Inchbald, the version reprinted in The Select London Stage (1827) under Lillo’s name is also Colman’s version, unattributed, determined according to McBurney’s collation. As McBurney commented, the most notable effects of Colman’s alterations are to cut the play from an already economical 1244 lines to 1050 lines (xvi n.). Interestingly, it was Lillo’s play referred to in a chapter entitled “Woman’s Curiosity” by T. Thiselton-Dyer, as late as 1906.
16. McBurney’s Appendix, “The Source of Fatal Curiosity,” cited a black-letter pamphlet of 1618: Newes from Perin in Cornwall of a Most Bloody and un-exampled Murther very lately committed by a Father on his owne Sonne (who was lately returned from the Indyes) at the Instigation of a mercilesse Step-mother (1966, 55). But the introduction also footnoted William E. A. Axon, “The Story of Lillo’s ‘Fatal Curiosity,’” from Notes & Queries 6th Series, V (1882): 21–23, which cited several international analogues to it (xii).
17. McBurney noted the convention of double titles: “The first title stated a norm or a problem, and the second implied or stated a complementary aspect of the problem. Thus, in Guilt Its Own Punishment; or, Fatal Curiosity, Lillo suggests that Old Wilmot and Agnes, who commit ‘this horrible deed that punishes itself,’ are complemented by their son, whose ‘curiosity’ brings disaster to himself and to his parents” (1966, xx). He footnoted that “the title was reduced to Fatal Curiosity after the first performance, perhaps in imitation of those plays such as The Fatal Dowry and The Fatal Marriage.” Colman’s edition was first published as: Fatal Curiosity … With Alterations (London: Printed for T. Cadell, 1783).
18. McBurney (1966, xiii) noted the Shakespearean allusions rife in Lillo’s play, including Othello.
19. The libretto was published in Amsterdam in 1791 by G. Dufour.
20. Kelly’s claim, repeated in volume 2 of his Reminiscences, at the point where he discusses the first productions of Blue Beard, that he used none of Grétry’s music is not accurate. Critics are clear on the fact of his borrowing, but nevertheless praise his abilities in selecting and adapting music. See in particular Porter (1990, 63–66) and also Porter (1994, xii–xxiii).
21. The libretto consists of 20 handwritten leaves, without music.
22. Also interesting is the use of a key “form’d of gold” (Blue Beard, “Recitative”). Such a golden key crops up occasionally in chapbooks also. Another less obvious gothic effect made its first appearance in this play: immediately prior to the finale, during the quartetto in which Abomelique calls for Fatima while she, Irene, and Shacabac try to get assistance, trombones are played. In her edition of the play in British Opera in America, Susan Porter quoted Roger Fiske who said, “it is the first occurrence in trombones in eighteenth-century theater music, and is intended to produce a ‘spine-chilling effect’” (Fiske 1973, 283).
23. This may in part be due to generic considerations. Philip Cox reminded us that “The relationship between a novel and its dramatic adaptation in the Romantic period would, of course, have had very different cultural resonances: the drama had an established literary genealogy which invested it with a potential cultural respectability whereas the novel was, historically, a relative newcomer which was often denied such respectability as a result of the very popularity which rendered it so culturally prominent” (2000, 5).
24. Initially the play was a “Spectacular failure” that was performed “only four times” until the more successful revised version was staged and “received sufficient acclaim to heal the author’s wounded pride” (Colman 1798, 1983: 60). Damian Walford Davies noted the play’s success and legacy: “George Raymond remarked in 1844 that the play became ‘a stock-piece in the acting drama’ (Memoirs of R. W. Elliston, 2 vols., London, 1844–1845: 1:74) and Bagster-Collins notes that ‘The Iron Chest, stand[ing] somewhere between tragedy and melodrama’ held the stage for ‘longer than forty years’ and that ‘Most of the great tragedians of the nineteenth-century played it and scored personal triumphs. It [the 1815 production Hazlitt saw] was one of Edmund Kean’s greatest performances’ (Bagster-Collins, George Colman, 100–01 n.; Colman 1798,1983, 63). The last major staging of the play was Sir Henry Irving’s at the Lyceaum in 1879; the Times described it as ‘a curious fossil’ and the London Figaro as being of ‘purely antiquarian’ attraction, but the Daily Telegraph recorded that it took ‘a deep hold on the people’” (Davies 2002, 532).
25. See Philip Cox’s chapter “Caleb Williams and The Iron Chest” (2000, 25–43). In “The Politics of Allusion: Caleb Williams, The Iron Chest, Middlemarch and the Armoire de Fer,” Damian Walford Davies also suggested that in playing down the critical commentary posed by Godwin’s highly political and “thoroughly allusive” novel, Colman made the subject palatable for the stage: “The stage has now no business with Politicks: and, should a Dramatick Author endeavour to dabble in them, it is the Lord Chamberlain’s office to check his attempts, before they meet the eye of the Publick” (Colman 1796, xxi). In an interesting coda to this sort of remark, Colman himself was made Examiner of Plays in 1824, and is widely recorded to have been vicious in the prosecution of his duties. Robert Hume noted a practical reason for the rise of melodrama in the acoustics of ever-larger theatres: “The new Drury Lane of 1794 held more than 3,600 people—with disastrous effects on the audibility of the dialogue. Covent Garden was likewise inflated—from a capacity of some 1,400 in 1732 to about 3,000 in 1792. The Licensing Act prevented the erection of more theatres, and in consequence the patent houses bloated themselves on their monopoly. Given the difficulty of hearing dialogue clearly in such barns we cannot be surprised that ranting melodrama flourished while wit comedy languished” (1981, 7).
26. Another critic who argued that Godwin uses the locked trunk motif in a way that transcends the mere gothic use of it (per Colman) is W. M. Verhoeven: “while Colman mistakenly assumes that the meaning of the trunk is its contents—Godwin realized that the true significance of the locked trunk lies in the very act of opening it. While Colman’s interest in the trunk is merely dramatic, therefore, Godwin is interested in the locked-trunk motif because it opens up possibilities for psychological and epistemological analysis and speculation” (1995, 212–13).
27. Davies does not cite the source, other than to call it “A widely circulated contemporary print.”
28. Verhoeven wrote that “little use of [the armoire] was made at the king’s trial, [but it] entered history surrounded by myth as the revelation that proved his treachery and sealed his fate” (1995, 527). He quoted Andrew Freeman (1989) in support.
29. “Both horrible and sensual (all those wives!), Bluebeard is perhaps a more comfortable figure when he is the Other, the Outsider, the Foreigner, and not one of us” (Windling 2002, 6).
30. Winfried Menninghaus analyzed in book length this example of a Romantic poetics of nonsense. She provided all quotations from the work in English. The tale is also the subject of a German dissertation by Klaus Buschmann: “Everything Was Empty: Ludwig Tieck’s Bluebeard Adaptations” (Universität Wien, 2006).
31. See chapter 7 for more on Tieck’s play at the time of its English nineteenth-century translation.
32. The orientalization of Bluebeard has had a permanent impact. However, by the last decade of the nineteenth century, the London Stage calendar (Wearing 1976) did not list a single version of Bluebeard, English or French, drama, opera, Christmas pantomime or otherwise, and the only Colman piece to appear in London that decade was another comedy, The Heir-at-Law.
33. This information is repeated in library catalogues of Colman’s drama, citing “Barker” as their source. In the section “Bluebeard in Theatre” in Harriet Mowshowitz’s study (1970), she cited Doutrepont as the source for this date. Alone of the critics consulted, R. J. Broadbent in The History of Pantomime (1901) provided more information on this play, and he was possibly still quoting a source (the magazine The Drama, from the early 1800s, source not given): “‘Blue Beard’ was first dramatised at Paris, in 1746, when ‘Barbe bleu’ was thus announced:—Pantomime—representée par la troupe des Comediens Pantomimes, Foir St. Laurent. It was afterwards dramatised at the Earl of Barrymore’s Theatre, Wargrave, Berks., and in 1791. After that the subject was produced at Covent Garden Theatre as a Pantomime” (Broadbent 1901, 204).
34. As Harriet Mowshowitz noted, “the bearded wife-slayer was adapted wholeheartedly by the [French] theatre. … One finds him in all varieties of popular theatre: in pantomimes, in vaudeville, in operettas and in burlesques” (1970, 85).
35. In Biographica Dramatica; or, a Companion to the Playhouse, Stephen Jones also ascribed the orientalism to Colman: “Mr. Colman has made him [Bluebeard] a bashaw of three tails; presuming, we may suppose, that the murderer of seven wives must have been a very Turk indeed. The original Blue Beard, however, was none other than Gilles, Marquis de Laval” (1811, 2:62).
36. “And if ye fear that ye shall not act with equity towards orphans of the female sex, take in marriage of such other women as please you, two, or three, or four, and not more” (The Koran, chapter 4, Bath, 1795 [sic], 92; cited in Colman 1798, 1983).
37. Colman shifted this scene in later editions to keep the chamber mysterious.
38. Kelly had a share in management of Drury Lane Theater for many years. He was a first-hand witness to its destruction by fire, and it is possible that the originals of Blue Beard burned with the theater, as Kelly commented later in his Reminiscences (1826, 252–53).
39. Kelly similarly noted the practice of handing off work to Colman, his friend of decades, in his Reminiscences (1826, 2:204–05). For his part, Colman noted in his preface to Blue Beard; or, Female Curiosity! the largesse of allowing Kelly to make his reputation as composer with this piece: “I have given an opportunity to Mr. Kelly of fully establishing his reputation, as a Musical Composer, with a Publick, whose favour he has long, and deservedly experienced as a Singer. Crouded [sic] audiences have testified the most strong, and decided approbation of his original Musick, in Blue-Beard; and amply applauded his taste, and judgment, in Selection” (1798c).
40. Debate does not seem to be over whether the play was popular, but whether (as melodrama) it was “good.” J. W. Lake noted representatively, in The dramatic works of George Colman the Younger: with an original life of the author: “If popularity is any indication of merit, the dramatic romance of Blue-Beard, or Female Curiosity is a chef d’oeuvre of its kind, and excited in an extraordinary manner the curiosity of the play-going public of both sexes. It was brought out at Covent Garden, with all the pomp and display of scenery and machinery, dresses and decorations for which that theatre is so justly celebrated in getting up such pieces. … The march over the mountains, when Abomelique comes in oriental magnificence to claim the fair, but unwilling, Fatima, as his bride, is one of the finest ever produced on the stage” (1823–1824). In the preface to the Oxberry edition of the play, the editor P. P. wrote: “The poetry, we admit, is not of a very high order; the puns are vile, the sentiments stale, and the language in general bombastic. Yet, the author, who had little in view beyond manufacturing a convenient vehicle for the display of gorgeous scenery and shewy [sic] processions, has effected his intention with a cleverness, which many who may think meanly of the performance, would find some difficulty in equaling; and, what probably was to him but the pastime of an evening, has on numerous succeeding evenings imparted gratification to thousands” (1823, iv).
41. Extant copies at the British Library alone show that the play was in its 7th reprinting by 1800. See Porter (1990, 1994) for other major editions. The play continued to be printed even much later in the century, as evidenced by a “one penny” edition of around 1854, which changed Beda to Gulnare but otherwise remained the same as Colman’s libretto: Blue Beard; or, Female Curiosity, Boys of England Edition (London: Skelt). It is dated 1854? by the National Union Catalogue Pre-1956 Imprints: 61:686.
42. Apparently, “The March in Bluebeard,” even accompanied sailors on a North Pole expedition in 1810 and was described as “one of the smash hits of the era” (Roberts n.d.). Susan Porter commented: “Of the more than two hundred separate issues of Kelly’s works published in American cities during his lifetime, one of the most popular was the ‘March’ from Blue Beard” (1994, xxi). See Porter for more on music statistics (1990, 66–70).
43. Porter noted: “By 1810, it had been performed more than 120 times in theaters in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston, and Charleston; it was one of the ten works most performed in America between 1790 and 1810” (1990, 61).
44. See Cox and Gamer. “P.P.” wrote in the prefatory remarks to the 1823 Oxberry edition of the play that this was the first use of live horses on stage (see Colman 1823). Michael Kelly also wrote of the event in his memoir (1826, 263). Porter noted that live elephants had been used in a New York staging in 1806 (1990, 67).
45. Saxon (1968) wrote about the revival in Enter Foot and Horse: “At a time when the annual average receipts amounted to approximately 80,000 pounds, the season of 1810–1811 brought in 100,000 pounds, of which more than 21,000 pounds was produced by the first 41 nights of Blue Beard alone.” The annual profits from the 1810–1811 season exceeded the contemporary average by that much or more (Frederick Reynolds 1826, 2:403–04). Saxon quoted the initial review in The Examiner at greater length, which gave details of the performance. Saxon also cited a lengthy excerpt from Kemble’s biographer James Boaden, who described the horses’ choreography and well-acted death throes in particular (1825, 2:541–42). The spectacle was another smash hit to which Covent Garden had recourse whenever profits were slow (Alfred Bunn 1840, 2:216–17), and it launched a trend: Timour the Tartar joined Blue Beard as a new equestrian spectacle in April 1811. But critics were unhappy with the equestrian Blue Beard, as Saxon illustrated. The tenor of protest is at the mixing of genres. Covent Garden is a stage for legitimate theater, while Astley’s horses allegedly belonged to another genre entirely. But as Saxon summarized: “Spectacle, not Shakespeare, was what audiences now paid their money to see” (1968, 93). The same year also saw the French play Barbe-Bleue ou les Enchantements d’Alcine: Tableaux en Trois Actions (Paris, 1811), which features a German Bluebeard: Rodolphe Barbe-Bleue (Prince Souverain d’Allemagne, “Sovereign Prince of Germany,” my translation), recalling Tieck’s Ritter Blaubart. But the additional cast of characters and storyline follows the template begun by Grétry and developed by Colman and Kelly: young, poor, and beautiful Aglaure, her sister Anne, Aglaure’s true love Arthur (a rich young lord), and a secondary cast of servants. However, Aglaure’s sister is still Anne, they have two brothers (Verther and Mederic), and their mother Mathilda. The French play does not adopt the Turkish scenario of the mercenary father.
1. This grandiose claim for chapbooks is echoed throughout chapbook studies. John Ashton wrote in 1882 that they went “to every village, and to every home” (v). In 1904, Ralph Bergengren described the chapbook readership as “the entire rank and file of the British nation” (39). Harvey Darton noted: “They were the books of the people of England” (1932, 70). Victor Neuburg wrote in The Penny Histories that they “formed the most important and numerically the most considerable element in the printed popular literature of the eighteenth century” (1968, 3).
2. One comparison demonstrates how little deviation there could be: The Popular Story of Blue Beard, or, the Effects of Female Curiosity (G. Caldwell 1828) and The Popular Story of Blue Beard, or, Female Curiosity (J. Innes, [1830?]), whose illustrations reappear with different text entirely in The History of Blue Beard (W. S. Johnson 1850). The text and typesetting of the Caldwell and Innes versions are identical, but slight deviations show whichever text is the later (dating of Innes copy is uncertain) being somewhat devious about the wholesale borrowing.
3. There is no doubt that English chapbooks were imported and sold in America just as were other books. William Williams, a printer of Utica, New York, in the “Patriot and Patrol” of August 18, 1818, advertised for the wholesale and retail trade, “8,000 Chap Books, 60 kinds,” and “27,000 toy books, 33 kinds,” and previous to that date there are booksellers’ advertisements relating to definite importations from abroad (Weiss 1938, 22). While it is not possible to know whether copies now in American libraries were imported then or since, the 1905 Catalogue of the New York Public Library lists several versions of Bluebeard chapbooks. A “home grown” version attests to the story’s popularity in the early 1800s in the Northeast: A New History of Blue Beard, written by Gaffer Blackbeard, for the Amusement of Little Lack Beard and his Pretty Sisters survives in twenty or so editions from a handful of different publishers in the northeastern states; see note 11, below.
4. In a journal entry dated 10 July 1763, Boswell noted: “I must mention that some days ago I went to the old printing-office in Bow Church-yard kept by Dicey, … There are ushered into the world of literature JACK AND THE GIANTS, THE SEVEN WISE MEN OF GOTHAM, and other story-books which in my dawning years amused me as much as RASSELAS does now. I saw the whole scheme with a kind of romantic feeling to find myself really where all my old darlings were printed. I bought two dozen of the story-books and had them bound up with the title CURIOUS PRODUCTIONS” (Boswell 1763). Margaret Spufford commented on such evidence: “If Johnson and Boswell, Burke and Morris all read the chapbooks as schoolboys … the gap between the culture of the elite and popular culture was not complete” (1981, 75).
5. Their French equivalents are similarly described: “Vagabonde, humble et méconnue” (Brochon 1954, 92). In 1900 Charles Gerring, who otherwise copies wholesale from Percy Cropper, called them: “Uninviting, poor starved things, printed in the rudest manner on the roughest of paper, decorated with the most villainous of cuts” (1900, 100).
6. Harvey Darton wrote similarly that fairy tales were an endangered species: “It is easy to condemn that huckstering trade and its products. [But] … they also, and they alone, found a home in print, among all the treasure and the rubbish they preserved, for two higher, more immortal things, the Fairy-Tale and the Nursery Rhyme” (1932, 82, emphasis added); “The chapmen gave them their true juvenile vogue in print” (1932, 94). Interestingly, as part of the slow death of the chapbook, fairy tales may have enjoyed a longer shelf-life than other types in the catalogues. Victor Neuburg noted in The Penny Histories that when the main trend was over by the early decades of the nineteenth century, “It was no longer the most important element in popular literature; and it was now entirely intended for child readers” (1968, 65). He does not date the actual death of the chapbook (current revivals notwithstanding) until the 1880s, with the close of W. S. Fortey’s business, as the last owner of the Catnach Press (a renowned chapbook publisher). The seventy intervening years, then, are left to these “child readers” and their favorite chapbooks, of which Bluebeard was undoubtedly one. Neuburg situated the chapbook as the only source of fairy tales during this period: “More important from the point of view of young readers was the fact that fairy tales were available to them only in chapbook form. The rich tradition of English fairy mythology survived in the eighteenth century almost entirely because of chapbooks. Like the medieval romances, fairy legends and tales had remained popular amongst educated people until about the middle of the seventeenth century, and they declined similarly about this time. Through chapbooks, children had immediate and ready access to a very considerable range of traditional literature that their more sophisticated elders had, for better or worse, outgrown” (1968, 15–16).
7. As in Gloria Delamar: “John Newbery was to gain recognition as the first publisher to devote a line to the publication of books expressly for children” (1987, 6).
8. The quote is given in chapter 3. W. J. Bowd states in “The Life of a Farm Worker” that his father James Bowd was “what we call Maneger [sic] over the haymakers” and, as the title and autobiographical content of the excerpt from Bowd’s 1889 journal indicates, the man recalling the chapbooks of his childhood was a farm worker in later life, supporting the argument that chapbooks were not limited to the educated classes (1955, 293–94).
9. The years 1854–1856 were dated by the Lilly Library (IN). The identical Bodleian Library version (filmed for the Opie Collection) suggests the year 1860. The cover pages are different: the Bodleian Library chapbook cover is adorned with a repeating border of floral tiles, larger inset corner tiles, and borders around each section of text. The first section has the series title: “Children’s Popular Tales.” But text and images are the same, save that where the Bodleian version has the name as “Fatimer” in the text, the Lilly version has “Fatima.”
10. The W. Walker & Sons Blue Beard [185–] and the Peter G. Thomson [n.d.], respectively, describe this sequence: “They spent a great part of the night in trying to clean off the blood from the key, but without effect” and “they passed a sleepless night in trying to clean off the blood from the key, but without effect.”
11. The Colman-Kelly storyline and characters are also used by the American verse chapbook: A New History of Blue Beard Written by Gaffer Blackbeard for the Amusement of Little Lack Beard and His Pretty Sisters, that circulated in multiple editions from presses in the northeastern states from 1800 (John Babcock 1800) through around 1822 (Watson, David). Editions were printed in Philadelphia (John Adams); Montpelier, Vermont (Park’s Press); Windsor, Vermont (Farnsworth, Josse Cochran); Albany, New York (Hosford); New Haven, Connecticut (Sidney’s); and Stonington, Connecticut (Trumbull). The chapbook is unusual in praising Fatima for her learning: “She wrote immediately to Selim. Now only think what a fine thing it is to be a scholar, for if Fatima could not have wrote to her lover, nobody else would have done it for her, and what would have been the consequence you will find by and by; so above all things learn to read your book, that your daddy and mammy may learn you to write too” (Printed by John Adams 1804, 11–12).
12. In History of Blue Beard (J. L. Marks [1835–1857]) it goes as follows: “There lived a rich Turk in Con-stan-ti-no-ple, / Who had a blue beard—and whiskers as well.”
13. The Dean & Munday version [not after 1847] repeats this theme, with more elaboration: “the younger of the two was thought to be unusually handsome, and was therefore noticed rather more than her sister. It often happens that beauty is a misfortune, because, if a young lady has not good sense as well as beauty, it will make her vain; and a vain girl often falls into misery or trouble.” It is repeated in Dean & Son [not before 1882].
14. Also: J. Innes [1830?]; W. Walker & Sons [185–]; and Peter G. Thomson [n.d.]. Greed is directly addressed in the later comic version by Bayley, at Bluebeard’s entertainment: “And didn’t she gobble, and didn’t she stuff? / And wasn’t she sorry when she’d had enough!!” (Wm. S. Orr & Co. [ca. 1842], 10, original emphasis).
15. This version is used for “Blue Beard, or Female Curiosity” in Dean & Munday [not after 1847].
16. It is unclear how her “love of display” is relevant to the story as it is told in this version. It goes on further: “you would have thought she was a Queen at least, making a tour of her dominions. This was all very pleasant for the vain and giddy Fatima: so much so, indeed, that she was in no hurry to fix a date for the marriage.”
17. See Blue Beard (Pott & Amery [n.d.]): “At this moment her sister, who wondered at her absence, and had gone in search of her, came up, and tried to keep her back; but all in vain, so her sister left her.” In the illustration, Anne has both hands on her sister’s arm, trying to prevent her from using the key. Similarly: “Her sister, who alone knew what she meant to do, followed and tried to bring her back; but all in vain, so her sister left her” (Thomas Nelson 1900, 115).
18. Same text as Blue Beard (Pott & Amery [n.d.]).
19. “He knew she was in his power, and that her escape was impracticable; her beauty had also some effect: he gave her five minutes more” (Printed for N. Hailes 1817); “I’ll give you ten minutes / I’m not in a hurry” (McLoughlin Bros. [189–]).
20. In one example, they are “one a captain of foot, and the other of horse” (J. M. Dent & Co. 1895).
21. A French version printed in London also gives it as “La Chambre bleue” (Tabart et Co. 1804), but they also printed more than ten English editions of the same, and the French version has a list of “Idioms in the foregoing story, with their proper Interpretations,” so it perhaps originated in English (Tabart et Co. 1804.)
22. In another example the word gore is itself used: “Fatima beheld the floor crimsoned with human gore! which had flowed from the bodies” (T. Richardson [not before 1838], 8).
23. The practice of labeling important places and people for audience edification was long established in dramatic terms through the pantomime, where it was often necessary.
24. The same is seen in 1828: “Bluebeard’s wife was a bold-spirited woman, with whom he quarreled soon after marriage; and having in the heat of his anger murdered her, he concealed the body in the blue closet” (G. Caldwell 1828, 13; J. Innes [ca. 1830]).
25. One version even uses the word lawful to describe her inheritance, either out of anxiety over her riches, in contrast to Bluebeard’s unlawful behavior, or both: “as Blue Beard had no heirs she found herself the lawful possessor of his great riches” (J. March [1864–1875], 8).
26. This moral is reprinted on the cover of J. Pitts [1810?].
27. Same as McLoughlin Bros. [ca. 1856–1870].
28. This “variant” version is quoted by Cunningham (1889).
29. See Harvey Darton (1932, 71).
30. Le Men went on to link the morals provided by Perrault to this tradition: “The image appeals to the sense and emphasizes the concreteness of the text, that is, the story. The rhymed epigram, or ‘morality,’ belongs to the emblem’s abstract aspect, its moral lesson. The motto is used to link image and text, and it has a double meaning: the first is related to the picture preceding the tale; the second is discovered with the ‘morality’ at the end, which becomes integrated only upon a second reading. This format is indicative of how involved illustrations are in the reading and rereading process” (1992, 21).
31. Whether by accident or design, all illustrations in one edition are out of order. If not accidental, it demonstrates the disregard for the order of events in the narrative: what matters is not the order, but the inclusion of the illustrations. They show, first, one brother killing Bluebeard; next, Ann waving from the turret; third, a woman looking at herself in a mirror, another woman behind her; Bluebeard giving the key, the near-execution, courtship or departure with Bluebeard bowing to a woman seated before the parted curtains of a tent (S. Marks & Sons [1876]). The cover of this chapbook shows the wife reacting to the contents of the chamber: billowing smoke and skeletons.
32. While Perrault did not make the illustrations himself, his dedication and presentation of the maquette to his niece is a form of approval of the manuscript: “No one knows who drew these illustrations, even though the frontispiece was signed by an engraver named Clouzier. He was probably someone close to Perrault, as was the scribe of the manuscript. And, presumably, Perrault himself approved the illustrator’s interpretations since he gave the illuminated manuscript to ‘Mademoiselle’” (Le Men 1992, 34).
33. Le Men also added here that “the violent scenes of Bluebeard … expressed with simple gestures, are close to the style of popular broadsheet imagery” (1992, 32). In L’Histoire des Contes (1992), Catherine Velay-Vallantin provided three Bluebeard illustrations, one from a chapbook, one from a broadsheet, and one from a juvenile collection. All three show the iconic near-execution: the wife is on her knees, held by the hair, Bluebeard has his cutlass raised. Taken representatively, the imagery is consonant with English chapbook illustrations. See also her Les Usages de l’imprimé (1987, 155–56) on the blue book iconography of the “interrupted execution.”
34. This is evident even when more than one tale is shown on the cover, as in Blue Beard: Pleasing Picture Book ([G. Bishop & Co.] [185–]), where scenes from six tales are shown in medallions. Bluebeard is shown top right, and is the moment of near-execution: Blue Beard holds his wife’s hair, she implores him on her knees, his sword is raised overhead, the curve of the scimitar matching that of the medallion.
35. Earliest extant is Hurst & Co. (1840).
36. The text is the same as that used in the Pott & Amery [n.d.] version. The Dulac illustration shows the wife frontally, but as she is looking out at the reader, the fourth wall is broken and if there are bodies, they are out here with us, the readers. Another version dated sometime in the twentieth century similarly does not show a chamber, but does depict an axe and chopping block (Printed in Bavaria 19–).
1. The line “You outrageous man!” is from Sister Anne to Bluebeard, in Droll Dramas for Christmas Comedians and Parlour Performers (Evans 1846, 20).
3. David Mayer, in Harlequin in His Element, noted first that the gothic template (used to such effect in the Colman-Kelly melodrama) heavily influenced pantomime (1969, 90–91). He also noted that the fad for exoticism pervaded the pantomimes of the period: “The most pervasive foreign and exotic style was the potpourri of Indian and near-Eastern styles variously called Asiatic, Hindu, Eastern, or Persian. … In pantomime, however, the Eastern style was the apex of splendor and luxury and was well established as a fashionable decor by the 1790’s” (156–57). He added: “innumerable pantomimes were enriched with Asiatic or Persian settings and costumes. Many pantomimes whose libretti give no indication that their milieu is Eastern appear, when reproduced in the juvenile drama, to have been costumed and decorated in some variant of that style” (160).
4. See Meredid Puw Davies, “Laughing Their Heads Off” (2002). Her thesis is that in contrast to the French and English comic tradition of Bluebeard on stage, the German tradition was a serious one, with several exceptions, which are the focus of her study in this article (using 12 works, dated 1797–1895).
5. The French source is Eugène Sue’s Le Morne au Diable (1842), translated as the novel The Female Bluebeard (1844).
6. Possibly still quoting The Drama magazine from the early 1800s, source not given.
7. Broadbent wrote: “The year 1702 marks the appearance of the first Pantomime introduced to the English stage, written by John Weaver, a friend of Addison and Steele’s, and entitled ‘Tavern Bilkers.’ It was produced at Drury Lane” (1901, 137). Cyril Beaumont refuted this specifically, and cited several instances of native harlequinades in England before then, including one by Aphra Behn (1926, 87).
8. Drury Lane began by mocking the popular trend, but quickly changed their stance when the lucrativeness of pantomime production became known. Leo Hughes described the eighteenth-century chronology in “Afterpieces: Or, That’s Entertainment,” noting that when Drury Lane burlesqued John Rich’s Harlequin in 1723, the burlesque was hissed. Whereupon “Drury Lane shifted their strategy from ridicule to imitation” (1981, 62). All critics agree that the holiday pantomimes made the money on which the theatre depended for the rest of the year’s offerings. One critic commented that Laura Keene’s failing season (1857) was “redeemed by a Christmas Pantomime, Harlequin and Bluebeard” (Mowry 1993, 39).
9. Pantomimes were holiday fare, but not until much later in the century were they merely Christmas fare (opening on Boxing Day). Booth noted that they were staged in the major theatres at Easter and Christmas, and sometimes in November, while the minor theatres staged them at Easter and midsummer.
10. Booth, in English Nineteenth Century Plays, noted: “The rage for spectacular displays of horsemanship on stage was also parodied in Charles Dibdin’s Harlequin and Bluebeard (1811), in which the Genius of Burlesque transforms the main characters of Colman’s newly equestrianized spectacle-melodrama Blue-Beard into the harlequinade stereotypes” (1976, 5.30). David Mayer further noted that Grimaldi, England’s most famous Clown, possibly played Sister Anne, and then was Clown in Dibdin’s production: “When Bluebeard was produced as a melodrama at Covent Garden in February 1811, Charles Dibdin, Jr., responded by offering Harlequin and Bluebeard with the summer’s entertainment at Sadler’s Wells. Of his parody, Dibdin observed: ‘In the Town Scene, in which the Trio and Chorus “I see them galloping” is introduced (of which my Trio was a Parody), Grimaldi was very happy in his caricature of the action and manner of Miss Decamp (now Mrs. C. Kemble) the heroine of Bluebeard, who (as I was informed) witnessed the performance of our Pantomime, and joined heartily in the laughter and plaudits of the audience’” [Citing Charles Dibdin, Jr.]. Mayer added: “although no libretto of Dibdin’s pantomime survives to reveal the extent of the parody, puffs for the pantomime in the daily newspapers revealed that the villainous Bluebeard transformed by the Genius of Burlesque became Pantaloon, Selim and Fatima were likewise transformed into Harlequin and Columbine, and Grimaldi was added as Clown. The horses were not neglected, for the piece concludes with ‘a grand Gallimaufry Combat, Bipeds and Quadrupeds; the Quadrupediant department under the direction of Mr. Grimaldi’” (Mayer 1969, 78–79). A play called Harlequin Bluebeard also played at the Royal Pavilion Theatre, Whitechapel, in 1840 (noted in reference to the set design by William Beaumont, “People Play UK” website). A Harlequin Bluebeard was also recorded by John Kenrick (1996) as being played on Broadway, opening December 26, 1864 at the Hippotheatron (circus), and running for fifty-six performances. Similarly, a circus “Grand Pantomime of Blue Beard” is noted in the British Library, with an illustrated poster (Sanger’s Hippodrome, Circus and Menagerie, Lambeth, Evanion Catalogue), dated circa 1881. It notes the use of “20 elephants, dromedaries &c.”
11. Broadbent noted of Columbine’s origins: “About 1695, Columbine appeared in a parti-coloured gown like a female Harlequin, and in the piece ‘Le Retour de la foie de Besons,’ acted at the Comedie Italiene. As the innovation was much liked, the part of Columbine came to be dressed like the Harlequin. The Columbine dressed in short muslin skirts is a creation of modern times. In the French Comedies Columbine was often Harlequin’s wife, but she never had the powers of a magical wand” (1901, 125).
12. Booth attributed the change to Sheridan’s Robinson Crusoe: “This pattern had changed little from the years of John Rich’s pantomimes at Covent Garden and Garrick’s at Drury Lane, except that after Sheridan’s Robinson Crusoe (1781) the harlequinade scenes constituted the second and greater part; instead of being interwoven with the serious and refined scenes. They were also directly related to what became known as the ‘opening’ (the first part) by the transformation of the principal characters in that opening … into the regular personages of the harlequinade. … At the same time the supernatural being effecting the transformation awarded Harlequin his wonder-working bat, which, slapped upon the scenery, floor, or object, gave the cue for the transformation whose purpose was to hinder pursuit or bewilder, frighten, and torment the pursuers; this ritual existed in England from the earliest days of eighteenth-century pantomime” (1976, 2–3).
13. Hunt, The Examiner (1817). For his writing in The Tatler (28 December 1831), I am indebted to the quotation provided in Booth (1976, 8–9).
14. Booth and Beaumont attributed this to the loss of Grimaldi, who as Clown was a main attraction. Presumably also the lapse of patent theatre restrictions led to the demise of harlequinade, as it was no longer as necessary as a means for the minor theatre to stage dramatic spectacles that did not rival the patent theatre offerings.
15. Beaumont wrote: “During the eighteenth century there had been isolated speaking-pantomimes … Opening scenes were sung until 1830, when Mark Lemon wrote a burlesque to precede the harlequinade in Harlequin Fat and Harlequin Bat, or, The Giant’s Causeway, produced at Covent Garden” (1926, 94). Planché discussed the restrictions imposed on the minor theatres critically: “no one had a legal right to open his mouth on stage unaccompanied by music; and the next step was to evade the law by the tinkling of a piano in the orchestra throughout the interdicted performances” (1872, 289).
16. Although Booth distinguished specifically between melodrama and “melodramatic spectacle,” using this play as an example of the latter (1973a).
17. Bluebeard comments: “I’m par excellence, the mormon of the day,” (6) and sings “I rather like polygamy,” while Oberon comments: “How they would welcome him in Salt Lake city” (4). The practice of aiming salvos at public figures was lamented by Planché, who wrote in his autobiography that the emendations required by the Licenser of plays are all but ignored (1872, 315).
18. In another, elaborately extended pantomime version of this scene (Millward 1869), it is the source for protracted commentary on topical events and politics: “BLUE BEARD Five minutes, and no sharper blade is seen./ FATIMA What else see you, sister, now?/ ANNE Quite a miracle, I vow,/ An election free from bribery and wrong! / FATIMA: That’s too distant to serve me,/ ANNE But the ballot too, I see!/ And a Gladstone Bill is with it as it now creeps along” (and so on; 19–20).
19. Booth wrote: “Because of the various licensing laws, governing the minor theatres in the 1830s, the early Olympic extravaganzas were called ‘burlettas,’ a word whose vagueness of meaning legally permitted the performance under that name of a wide variety of drama, except legitimate comedy and tragedy, outside the patent theatres” (1976, 10–11). David Mayer likewise noted that the nineteenth-century definition of burletta was intentionally ambiguous: “The burletta, loosely defined at best, was described by George Colman, the actor-manager and Examiner of Plays, as ‘a drama in rhyme, which is entirely musical; a short comic piece consisting of recitative and singing, wholly accompanied, more or less, by the orchestra.’ That Colman, charged with the duty to enforce the Licensing Act, could so ambiguously define its provisions is evidence of the latitude granted performances at burletta houses” (1969, 20, citing Watson Nicholson’s quotation of Colman, The Struggle for a Free Stage in London, Boston, Archibald Constable, 1906, 282). (There is of course an additional irony in Colman being Examiner of Plays, and in Planché using the term burletta in order to burlesque Colman’s own play Blue Beard.)
20. First performed at the Royal Olympic Theatre, January 2 (according to the 1848 edition) or January 1 (according to the 1864 edition), 1839. Planché’s style of extravaganza was unique, as noted by Peter Thomson: “these are Planché’s seminal contribution to comic drama. The theatrical trick was to present fairy tales in quirkily rhyming couplets that could accommodate puns and topical references and cheerfully descend to doggerel, in elegant settings and tasteful costumes and through actors who gave the appearance of taking them seriously. Later writers of outrageously punning Victorian pantomimes owed much to him” (2006, 201). Thomson called these an “overlapping network of dramatic categories [so that] burlesque and travesty are not easily distinguishable from extravaganza, which shares a bed with pantomime” (201). Indeed, as Booth noted, in the specific context of Planché’s fairy plays, “the fairy extravaganza is essentially a pantomime with the harlequinade removed and the comedy and magic tricks transferred to the opening” (1976, 19).
21. Play Submitted to the Lord Chamberlain, London (original copy in the British Library) MS 42950 (17), reproduced in microfiche Readex (New Canaan, CT), Nineteenth Century English drama series [198–].
22. Lacy’s Home Plays, “An inexhaustible source of harmless amusement, occupation and interest, adapted for all stations and localities, to any age, to either sex” (Planché 1839, 19).
23. Elsewhere the same reference is made by Bluebeard, “a ferocious Turk”: “I’m like King Harry, with his numerous wives; / He never scrupled to destroy their lives– / No more do I –’Twas only six he had, / And history sets him down as monstrous bad” (Blue Beard: a Christmas Masque [1884?], 3).
24. In Operetta: A Theatrical History, Richard Traubner noted that Meilhac and Halévy along with W. S. Gilbert were “the undisputed masters, indeed, the creators” of operetta (1983, xiv–xv).
25. Under the theatre management of Horace Wigan. A footnote to the program of the Lacy edition noted: “Since this piece was written, the Irish nationality of its hero [Mr. W. M. Terrott, as Bluebeard] has been discovered. By the addition of ‘Faix!’ and ‘Bedad!’ to the dialogue at suitable intervals, the language of the modern-stage-Irishman will be faithfully represented.”
26. It debuted in America at Niblo’s theatre (1868) and demonstrated several things, according to Gerald Bordman in American Musical Theatre: “In this Gallic version Bluebeard is tamed by his sixth wife, the country wench Boulotte. M. Aujac and Mlle. Irma starred. [H. L.] Bateman’s faith and determination [in forming an Opera Bouffe Company] were justified. The work was a resounding hit, running twelve weeks. Barbe Bleue’s popularity assured the reign of opera bouffe over the musical stage for several seasons. But its success did something else. The people flocking to Niblo’s box office convinced many a manager that audiences would buy musical entertainments even during hot weather when they would not attend ‘legitimate’ attractions. Within a year, even Wallack’s, the most august of the ‘legitimate’ houses, offered its summer-darkened auditorium to producers of lyric pieces. The notion of the frivolous, space-filling ‘summer-musical’ was born” (2001, 24). Bordman noted productions of Barbe Bleue in 1869 (Théâtre Française), 1871 (Lina Edwin’s Theatre), and Farnie’s extravaganza of 1884, an adaptation of Offenbach, a six-week run at the Bijou theatre with Jacques Kruger in the title role (2001, 75).
27. According to Bordman, in 1875 “The Henderson and Colville company opened the season on August 19 with a reworking of Barbe Bleue called Boulotte. The piece ran until the beginning of September” (2001, 38). A fourteen-night run was noted at Wallack’s, beginning August 19, 1875 (Kenrick 1996). As Bluebeard Re-Paired is the title frequently given for Offenbach’s opera bouffe, Boulotte may well be yet another variation on this theme.
28. Stebbins quoted a reminiscence from “H. W.” that she played Selim to her friend’s Abomelique: “I may fittingly insert here portions of a letter I have received from a friend of her childhood, which refers to these days. She says:—‘… She recalled with the greatest zest, and laughter long and loud, an earlier stage début than the world had seen, when, in our school-days, her mother, my eldest sister, and perhaps one or two of our neighbors, made up the audience to our first representation of the operetta of Bluebeard, in the large attic chamber of her mother’s house. This was before the days of popular private theatricals, and marks the mind to dare and do at that early age. Fatima and Irene have gone to their graves before her. I was Abomelique. She, with her then good voice, which afterward became such a rich and wonderful contralto, was the lover, Selim. Even now I seem to hear the cheering song of the young soldier, in his white Turkish trousers, close jacket, red sash, wooden scimetar, and straight red feather, which, if not that of the Orient Turk, was of the Western Continentals, as, mounted on some vantage-ground, a chair, or wooden steps perhaps, he bravely sang out loud and clear,— ‘Fatima, Fatima, Selim’s here!’” (1878, 17). Clara Erskine Clement similarly noted “During her school days she made her mark in theatricals in her mother’s attic, and ‘brought the house down’ as Selim, the lover, in ‘Blue Beard’” (1882, 2). That she “brought the house down” indicates a comic rendition.
29. The typescript has a manuscript notation at the top of the first page: “Corinne Robinson—Alphonso” and Alphonso’s lines are underlined throughout in pencil. The typescript is not dated, but Corinne Roosevelt became Corinne Robinson by marriage to Douglas Robinson April 29, 1882. The print edition of the same play is also not dated, but estimated by the Houghton Library to be 1890–1899.
30. “Bluebeard’s March” plays as Bluebeard arrives (Gower 1841, 20), so Kelly’s well-known music is present as well.
1. See also Sarah Kirby Trimmer’s negative review of the Benjamin Tabart fairy tale collection (1803) containing “Bluebeard,” for the influential Guardian of Education.
2. See Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion (1994), whose information is summarized here.
3. Davies wrote: “First, while the KHM [Kinder- und Hausmärchen] has been central in the definition of what constitutes a Märchen, the first edition of 1812, the only one to contain the Blaubartmärchen, is hardly ever used as a basis for anthologies. This situation certainly explains the subordination of ‘Blaubart’ to ‘Fitchers Vogel’ in such works of reference as Bolte’s and Polívka’s. But although it is tempting to assume that this alone would account for the omission of ‘Blaubart’ from the contemporary German Märchen canon, the issue is more complex, particularly since ‘Fitchers Vogel’ too is missing from the anthologies explored above. Moreover, Ludwig Bechstein’s Deutsches Märchenbuch (1845), which did include ‘Das Märchen vom Ritter Blaubart’, was better known and more popular than the Grimms’ book in the nineteenth century, and a wealth of other nineteenth century ‘Blaubart’ texts exists too” (2001, 64).
4. For “Fitcher’s Bird” the Grimms’ sources were Friederike Mannel (1783–1833) and Henriette Dorothea (Dorchen) Wild (1795–1867). D. L. Ashliman translated the 1812 version, which is simpler but in essence the same as the revised version of 1819 and after. For “The Robber Bridegroom” the Grimms’ source was Marie Hassenpflug (1788–1856) and other sources. Ashliman also translated the 1812 version of the latter tale to illustrate its greater differences from that of 1819 and after: the maiden is a princess instead of a miller’s daughter, and the robber bridegroom is a prince; he ties ribbons on trees rather than leaving an ash trail; an old lady is killed instead of a young maid. Additionally, the bride does not wait until the wedding celebration to reveal her knowledge to the bridegroom, but he arrives the next day to ask why she missed her appointment with him.
5. Omitted “due to its Dutch origins and similarity to ‘Bluebeard’” (Zipes 1987a, 739).
6. See Brian Alderson, who stated they were reprinted “at least twice before 1834.” He also noted three rival English translations of the nineteenth century and weighed their comparative merits (1978, 69–71).
7. While there were some exclusions from the 1853 edition, “Fitcher’s Vogel” is not among them. David Blamires noted the first complete translation of the KHM dates from 1884, by Margaret Hunt (2006, 173).
8. English translations by Zipes, Ashliman, and Tatar, all based on the 1857 version, are consistent. Blamires analyzed Taylor’s selections, arguing that the resulting collection paints a “skewed … picture of the Grimms’ collection” (2006, 166). Taylor “zealously avoided using any of the tales with a religious dimension” so that “Marienkind,” another Bluebeard variant, is excluded. “Taylor tended also to avoid stories that contained too much of a frightening character,” which may account for the exclusion of “Fitcher’s Bird.” Blamires noted “It is surprising that [Taylor] actually included ‘The Robber Bridegroom’” (167), despite excising the cannibalism from this story and others.
9. Samber and G. M. both add “enough” after “strength.”
10. Wonderful Stories for Children includes ten translated tales. Two additional volumes followed the same year.
11. Glenn Burne noted that Lang in fact meant specifically “English,” as opposed to Scottish, fairy tales and had published several tales of his own before The Blue Fairy Book (1986, 144).
12. In her introduction to the play fragment “[Bluebeard at Breakfast]”, Juliet McMaster noted Thackeray’s references to Bluebeard both by name and indirect allusion in Barry Lyndon, The Rose and the Ring, Pendennis, Philip, and The Newcomes (Thackeray 1971, 206–07, 210). She also noted the reference in Vanity Fair (1848) to Michael Kelly’s “March in Bluebeard” from the Colman-Kelly production of 1798. There are two further: to Sister Anne’s lookout on the tower (Thackeray 1848, 68), and another focusing on female materialism: “a title and a coach and four are toys more precious than happiness in Vanity Fair: and if Harry the Eighth or Bluebeard were alive now, and wanted a tenth wife, do you suppose he could not get the prettiest girl that shall be presented this season” (1848, 93).
13. McMaster reproduced Thackeray’s illustrations (1971, 200–01) for the picture book from a copy at Princeton Library, Robert Taylor collection.
14. So labeled by Juliet McMaster (1976, 19), who posited that in depicting Bluebeard other than as a villain, “The work would run afoul of those of Thackeray’s critics who objected to his comic handling of evil, and the consequent tendency of his works to confound good with evil” (1971, 214). The fact of Thackeray’s own marital tragedy whereby his wife suffered from long-term depression, ultimately housed in confinement abroad, lends force to McMaster’s discussion of his investment in the tale and his representation of Bluebeard as a beleagured “Everyman.” McMaster speculated that the play remained unfinished “because the action [of wife murder] is not really compatible with the agent he has created to perform it” (Thackeray 1971, 215), in keeping with Thackeray’s “notorious reluctance to plunge into action” (215).
15. Fatima’s surname is Shacabac. Also, the theatre manager in the story lends a gong and blue fire, both of which were features of the 1798 spectacle.
16. See Hermansson (2001) for more on the use of intertextual presupposition in the story.
17. In a published reply, George Cruikshank (writing as “Hop o’ My Thumb”) defended his “editor” with examples of the horrific details in fairy tales and asking how they can be considered a “pretty example for children” (1854, 6).
18. Allusion is also made in Old Curiosity Shop (ch. 28); noted by McMaster (1976), who also cited Mr. Murdstone in David Copperfield ([“Bluebeard”]). There is a reference to Dickens by name and to Old Curiosity Shop in Bayley’s comic verse version of Blue Beard (the earliest extant edition of which is 1840 [New York], the same year as Old Curiosity Shop was serialized). (See Barzilai 2004.)
19. As in Briggs’ A Dictionary of British Folk-Tale in the English Language A.1 (1970), where “Captain Murderer” is listed as a variant of AT 311.
20. However, Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which could be read as a serious response to novels like Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon, was published close afterward, in 1848. Jane Austen’s earlier novel Northanger Abbey parodies Catherine Morland’s gothic reading and her consequent conviction that General Tilney is a Bluebeard, but there is no explicit reference to Bluebeard in the novel (for Northanger Abbey as Bluebeard intertext, see Hermansson 2001).
21. Jane seems aware of the Bluebeard reference, and mockingly states her intention to enter into a harem to stir mutiny in the women: “I’ll be preparing myself to go out as a missionary to preach liberty to them that are enslaved—your harem inmates amongst the rest. I’ll get admitted there, and I’ll stir up mutiny; and you, three-tailed bashaw as you are, sir, shall in a trice find yourself fettered amongst our hands: nor will I, for one, consent to cut your bonds till you have signed a charter, the most liberal that despot ever yet conferred” (Brontë 1847, 302).
22. It was also printed in Littell’s Living Age CVIII (March 11, 1871) and CX (July 15, 1871) and reissued (with revisions) as Bluebeard’s Keys and Other Stories in 1908 (Odio 1986, 116 n.).
23. Moore also pointed out that the Cornhill had published an essay about keys, to which conversation the story appears to address itself, assisted by the extended opening: a musing on keys. The essay “A Few Thoughts on Keys” (whose own epigraph refers to Bluebeard’s key), published six years prior, was addressed to men, and “mocking the carelessness of their wives” (Moore 2002, 164). Moore discussed Ritchie’s story at length, in the context of other writings in the Cornhill at the time, and Ritchie’s other fairy tale rewritings, arguing that it offers subversive commentary on destructive mothers, dangerous marriages (domestic violence), and gender inequality. In 1861 Ritchie wrote “Toilers and Spinsters,” in praise of single women (189).
24. Jack Zipes grouped the story by name into the bracket of authors using fairy tale rewritings to “reconcile themselves and their readers to the status quo of Victorian society,” and as such are “exercises in complicity with the traditional opponents of fairy tales, for there is rarely a hint of social criticism and subversion in their works” (1987b, xxiii). However, the story does appear to offer several nontraditional comments on the subject; as Emily Moore summarized: “To study her is to marvel at her ability to rewrite fairy tales to advance a political position in a publication that avoids politics” (2002, 191).
25. The “Contemporary Literature” review section of The British Quarterly (1876) was unsympathetic: “The vermillion and ultramarine employed in the broad farcical illustrations of the story do not give us any very high idea of the taste or skill of Mr. George Cruikshank, jun. The drawing, colour, and posé of the figures are, it is true, in harmony with the rough and brutal hyperbole of the whole legend.”
26. Among other motifs in Alcott’s “alternative” writings, in “Behind a Mask” the actor Jean Muir assumes the role of Judith of Holofernes in a tableau vivant as a coded gesture (see chapter 9 for the role of Judith in the “Bluebeard” story). Elsewhere, in chapter 4 of Work, Alcott revised the plot of Jane Eyre, giving Christie work as a governess. While reading Jane Eyre, the protagonist tells her employer: “I like Jane, but never can forgive her for marrying that man.” She goes on to say: “If he has wasted his life he must take the consequences, and be content with pity and indifference, instead of respect and love. Many good women do ‘lend a hand,’ as you say, and it is quite Christian and amiable, I’ve no doubt; but I cannot think it a fair bargain” (Showalter 1988, 293).
27. “A Modern Mephistopheles, or The Fatal Love Chase” (1867). Manuscript at Houghton Library, Harvard (Showalter 1988, xxii).
28. Patten also notes that in costuming his illustrations he “derived in part from English rather than German theatrical and pictorial precedents” (1988, 20), so the “Englishing” of the German tales is reflected in the illustration.
29. Another Bluebeard illustration by Crane is on the cover of O. B. Dussek’s Fairy Songs and Ballads for the Young in which Fatima is opening the door and looking surprised; the key is falling, the wives are hanging (in shading) by their hair on either side of the door, forming a triptych for the viewer in which “Fatima” is in the center. The verse version refers to Bluebeard as “a Bashaw,” his wife as Fatima, and his cutlass as a “scimitar.”
1. The play was a burlesque of Bluebeard, Jr.
2. The history of the tragedy was given in researched detail in Nat Brandt’s Chicago Death Trap (2003). A spark emanating from an exploding light set one of the drops alight, sending a massive fireball through the auditorium. The tragedy made a permanent mark on laws governing safety of public theaters. One of the avowed heroes of the day was Eddie Foy, an already-famous comedian, who was performing the role of Sister Anne (with Pet Elephant, a two-man costume that burned in the fire). As the fire broke out Foy went on stage, looking incongruously comedic in his makeup and female dress, and urged the panicking crowd to stay calm. F. J. T. Stewart, superintendent of the Chicago Underwriters’ Association, noted that the building’s “unfinished condition … together with the highly combustible scenery of the ‘Mr. Blue Beard’ spectacle, combined a remarkable number of very unfortunate circumstances” (Brandt 2003, 125 citing the Superintendent of Inspections, Report of Fire, 2–4, Chicago Historical Society).
3. See Marion Adams (1904); Marguerite Merington (1916); Caroline Thomason (1921); Lyle Cummins (1922); Alice Monro Foster (1924); and T. E. Ellis (1930). While not comic, Edward Rush Duer’s drama Bluebeard in Bologna (1929) is traditional in form. Bluebeard pantomimes also continued to be popular. The third annual Pantomime “Bluebeard” by the 28th Division, Macedonia, was shown on tour during World War I to more than thirty thousand military personnel in five months, December 1917–May 1918 (Horrocks and Jacques, preface by Lt. Col. R. Henvey, 1918, 13). The 1948 pantomime by K. O. Samuel uses the full Colman-Kelly (1798) cast: Abomelique, Shacabac, Fatima, Anne, their father Ibrahim, Fatima’s lover Selim, and Beda (Bluebeard’s French maid).
4. A similar reference was made in Home Acting: “She talked of her ‘rights,’ said ‘her soul was her own,’ /Addressed me in quite in impertinent tone, / I told her no souls our great prophet had given / to women” (Valentine [19–], 12).
5. Méliès, France, and Dukas were French, Maeterlinck a Belgian (francophone), and Balázs and Bartók Hungarians. Balázs, though, was German-Jewish, changed his name to a more Hungarian one, and was later exiled from Hungary for all but the last three years of his life. Dukas was also Jewish. In each case, the issue of nationalism in their art is highly complex. See Suschitzky (1997; on Dukas) and Leafsted (1995; on Balázs).
6. “Monstrous Wives” is the title of Maria Tatar’s chapter in Secrets Beyond the Door, which includes discussion of the two operas discussed here. The desire to know the husband’s secrets is itself monstrous: in the 1912 story “Solomon Bluebeard” by Charles Marriott, Lady Frances expresses “the woman’s need for everything, the weakness as well as the strength—the kinks, the twists, the false starts; the man, the boy, the child” (655). In 1973 an avowed “Homage to Bartók” underscored that this is the ironic legacy of the opera: “‘Alas, Judith, my Judith! It’s not what I did to them. It’s what I failed to do. And they’re not locked in. I can’t persuade them to leave.’ / ‘Ah, my poor Bluebeard, let me console you. You’ll be safe with me. It will all be all right with your Judith. I love you.’ / ‘Yes, my Judith. That’s what I’m afraid of’” (Brophy 1973, 50).
7. I am heavily indebted to Leafsted’s section “The Emergence of a Sympathetic Bluebeard in Turn-of-the-Century Literature” (1999) for his detailed discussion of the Gilles de Rais rehabilitation through the biographies, the Dreyfus Affair, and the efforts to have Joan of Arc made a saint. In addition, he provided examples of works on both Bluebeard and de Rais between 1880 and 1920 (174–75).
8. According to Bernard Bastide in his analysis of Perrault in the earliest French films, “Bluebeard” was apparently the first to be adapted to film (2005, 25), and in fact the first film of Bluebeard predates that by Méliès: an anonymous Barbe bleue of 1897, shown in Lyon in 1898. The film Bluebeard by Étienne Arnaud (1907) dates two months after the opera of Ariadne et Barbe-bleue. In this latter, the wives are not murdered at all, but kept in a cupboard. It is notable for being one of the first French films largely filmed on location and outdoors. The 210 meters of film make 12 scenes of 9–10 minutes’ length (Essai de reconstitution du catalogue français de la Star-Film 1981, 98). In calling the character in the film a “devil,” I am following the terminology in the catalogue description of the film cited by Bretèque (2005, 63).
9. The sight of the hanging women is judged to have been very shocking to an audience in 1901, “encore vierge de tout choc visuel de ce type” (never having seen shocking visual scenes of this nature) (Bastide 2005, 26). It is thought that Méliès did not color the scene for that reason (31).
10. See Hiltbrunner (2005a). It is worth noting, further, that the “sale of the daughter to Bluebeard by the greedy father” motif to the Bluebeard story is not present in the original Perrault, although it has become a commonplace variation in the English tradition. It is unusual that a specifically French retelling of Perrault’s tale would present this alternative, and thus more of a commentary is perhaps being made on the story than has been acknowledged.
11. It is common to refer to Méliès’ cinema as “cinema of attractions,” but usually to the detriment of his narrative development or as an example of “primitive” film. Instead, André Gaudreault argued that “cinematic spectacle is not synonymous with ‘theatricality’” (1987, 112) and that Méliès’ extensive editing of his films goes largely unacknowledged. Further to my present point, Gaudreault added that “his films by their very construction always already point to their illusionary and ‘screen’ existence. … many of the filmic elements in this system exist precisely in order to remind viewers that they are watching a film” (113).
12. Tom Gunning (1995) cited Méliès’ use of the same theater (Théâtre Robert-Houdin) in which spiritualist shows with a magic cabinet had been performed, a lost Méliès film, L’Armoire des Frères Davenport (1902), “which may be based on the original Robert-Houdin version of the brothers’ séance” (158 Scénarios de Films Disparus de Georges Méliès 1986, 46–47), and another called The Spiritualist Photographer (1903).
13. Méliès’ use of irony was noted by Bretèque (2005, 66, my translation): “This ironic treatment of the ‘marvellous’ is a sort of cultural coding which functions as in the operettas of Offenbach and which is a wink at the cultivated public.”
14. There were several English translations of France’s story on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1920s. The notion of redeeming Bluebeard by telling the “True Story” was picked up in an amateur operetta: Bluebeard (Foster 1924). The foreword stated: “This operetta has been written in the laudable endeavor to correct the misleading and unjust ideas of Blue Beard’s character which so universally prevail.” He has indeed murdered so many women he requires an alphabetical “matrimonial ledger” to keep track of them, but all was done under the enchantment of his beard, which he is tricked into losing before the play is done. Similarly, Arthur Quiller-Couch’s story was largely a rendition of Perrault’s, using Samber’s translation as its base, but it offered two or three extended digressions that echo France’s approach.
15. Harriet Mowshowitz said the same in her thesis “Bluebeard and French Literature”: “taking murder out of the situation amounts to robbing Bluebeard of his stuffing” (1970, 90–91). While Bluebeard is ably rehabilitated as “a victim in the sex war,” still “France’s transformation of the legend does nothing to improve upon it” (108).
16. In “In Bluebeard’s Closet: Women Who Write with the Wolves,” Cheryl Walker noted of her Bluebeard sonnet that it is a “surprising” (1996, 16) adoption of the Bluebeard voice by a female writer. She used it to argue against the therapeutic line popularized by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, that women must confront the intruder, the shadow animus, and overcome it in order to function wholly. Instead, Walker argued that literature depicts aesthetically that “women who write with the wolves are Bluebeard as well as the wife” (17, original emphasis).
17. Carl Leafstedt suggested that this play in fact represents a significant change of stylistic direction: “Unlike the plays that brought Maeterlinck acclaim earlier in the 1890s, Ariadne features considerable dramatic interaction between the characters. It is also less overtly symbolic than previous plays, less mysterious, and less gloomy. Oblique allusions to life’s eternal mysteries are correspondingly few” (1995, 132).
18. The angry mob demanding justice is a reminder of the class differences pronounced in Perrault’s “Bluebeard” (1697). A parallel idea was raised in Walter de la Mare’s version of Perrault’s “Bluebeard” (Tales Told Again): “the country people hated Bluebeard, and refused even to sell him their butter and eggs and pigs and fowls” (1927, 155).
19. The symbolic use of stunning color in each of the successive cascades of jewelry (in detailed stage directions in the libretto) is rendered in Craig Russell’s graphic novel adaptation (1989) of the opera in striking color sequences.
20. Interestingly, as Peter J. Somogyi noted, as a result of the glass breaking, the “castle” theme in the music “temporarily vanishes from the score. It only reappears towards the end of the third act as the wives begin to tend to the wounds that the Duke has acquired from the battle with the peasants” (1985, 79).
21. Austin B. Caswell argued that Maeterlinck was ambivalent about Georgette Leblanc both in his life and thus in his play and that this ambivalence plays out in numerous ways through the libretto and the author’s ownership of Ariadne (1988, 203).
22. Caswell (1988, 210, 212) cited examples.
23. Caswell compromised by concluding that the opera is feminist “by accident” and that “Ariadne is a strong figure in spite of the conscious intentions of both of its authors” (1988, 220).
24. My translation. Ariadne says this as she takes the stone and prepares to smash the window with it. Anja Suschitzky argued a nationalist symbolism for the light in Dukas’ opera: “Light is an image of freedom from Wagnerism, of true and essential Frenchness in music, a torch leading to the future” (1997, 148). Further, she argued that Maeterlinck’s revisions to the song sung by the five wives of Bluebeard, “Les cinq filles d’Orlamonde,” (with reference to a well as the source of the key, rather than a cave as in the original poem of 1893) point to the allegorical figure of Truth and its use in period cartoons with reference to the Dreyfus Affair: “The well brings a specific topical context, in the form of a famous brave woman—the allegorical figure of Truth—who, according to tradition, lives at the bottom of a well” (152).
25. “Barbe-Bleue fait un mouvement instinctif pour la retenir. Elle se dégage doucement.” Even this gesture is usually translated as “as though to” prevent her from leaving (Hermann Klein’s translation). In fact, the French is clear: he makes the sign to prevent her from leaving; it fails.
26. In the French symbolist Bluebeard poem by Henri de Régnier [1892] the collection is represented by a collection of dresses, not women. It is represented early in a song dated [1910] by Anna Chapin, “Oh! Mr. Bluebeard”: “Now some collectors hunt for gems, / Others for guns and knives, / Pictures or lamps, or slippers or stamps, But he collected wives.” (In the humorous chorus, these women are prepared to “take a chance” despite the unluckiness of his wives: “Oh, Mister Bluebeard, I’m awfully stuck on you!”). In Merington’s play Blue Beard (1916), Bluebeard had bequeathed his collection of wives to the Constantinople museum: “I will not deny that I have collected wives, as other men collect works of art, also that I have hung them in a gallery, like rare paintings, as indeed they were” (242).
27. Another example from later in the twentieth century is in fact reminiscent of Maeterlinck’s libretto: the wife finds seven women in the chamber and tries to think of some way to help them escape. The gold key had, however, turned “as black as soot” after use (there is no blood in the chamber to mark the key). Finally, Bluebeard runs from his foes “but they soon caught him and tied him up and he was taken away” (Perrault [1961]).
28. An acknowledged masterpiece, the opera’s early reception was mixed. The fist production was “rejected as unperformable” and delayed until 1918 (seven years after composition), whereupon the symbolist libretto was generally disliked and the performance was pulled after a mere eight performances. It was not performed in Hungary again until 1936. (See Banks 1991.) Balázs first offered it to Zoltán Kodály, who passed on it but he introduced Balázs to Bartók, who felt an affinity with it immediately, beginning work on it most likely in 1911. Balázs published the play in Mysteries: Three One-Acters in 1912 (see Leafstedt 1995).
29. The plot that follows is from one version collected by Zoltán Kodály, with whom Bartók collected folk songs (three variants of the ballad were included in published collections of folksongs by Bartók; Leafstedt 1999, 166). A translation by Peter Sherwood and Keith Bosley of a version sung by Samu Szabó in Transylvania (1872) is provided in The Stage Works of Béla Bartók (1991, 23). In the ballad, a young lady is persuaded to leave her husband and young son and go with a mysterious suitor who promises her his seventh mansion. On the way, they lie down to rest under a tree, and he warns her not to peep up into the tree while he sleeps. She does, and sees six women hanging in it. Her tears drop on his face and wake him, so she tells him she was thinking of her own son left behind. He tells her to climb the tree, but she persuades him to go first, and once he turns his back she kills him, dresses in his clothes, and rides his horse home. Once there, she pretends to be a stranger until she is assured of her welcome and takes her place again. The ballad is in keeping with international folk variants of the Bluebeard tale, and is interesting in the echo of Cupid and Psyche (her tears fall on his face, waking him), and her quick-wittedness enabling her own escape. But the fact that she has a child already, leaves of her own free will, and must disguise herself and prove her worth before risking revealing herself to her husband are a unique combination. The ballads of Annie Miller, Lady Isabel and the Elfin Knight, and May Colven are variants of one another (Marina Warner grouped them; Arthur Rackham has also illustrated May Colven). (See chapter 1 for more on variants.)
30. Debussy formed an important influence after Bartók’s exposure to his music in Paris. However, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle is considered unusual for its time in the almost complete exclusion of motifs (the “blood” motif excepted). Simon Broughton quoted Bartók: “It seems … that, in our age, modern music has developed along similar lines in countries geographically far apart. It has become rejuvenated under the influence of a kind of peasant music that has remained untouched by the musical creations of the last centuries.” Balázs similarly stated: “‘We believed that the completely new could be transplanted only from the completely old’” (1991, 17; no source given). Other influences include Wagner’s Lohengrin, which drew upon the Zeus and Semele myth, another Bluebeard story (discussed by Mike Ashman 1991, 37), although musically, like Dukas, Bartók is credited with bringing contemporary opera out from under Wagner’s shadow (see Grant 1991, 25). Carl Leafstedt also discussed Herbert Eulenberg’s play Ritter Blaubart (1905), the only other bluebeard story to use the name Judith for the wife and from which an opera was later based, and Alfred Döblin’s story “Ritter Blaubart” (1911), which follows a similar story arc as the Balázs and Bartók opera (1999, 183).
31. See Leafsted’s chapter “Judith: the Significance of a Name” (1999), and the book by Margarita Stocker Judith: Sexual Warrior (1998), which contains a chapter on fin-de-siècle allusions.
32. Carl Leafstedt (1995) argued compellingly that this is the point of no return, for Judith trespasses (with “tragic self-assertion”) when she continues to the sixth and seventh doors. He posits that Balázs’ doctoral study of Hebbel (1906–1908) influenced the German romantic style and specifically drew upon Hebbel’s theory of “tragic guilt,” which is why Judith steps more or less willingly into the seventh door and into perpetual night at the end of the opera. Further, Hebbel authored a drama entitled Judith (1841), another plausible influence for Balázs. Musically, the turning point is also represented: “the music pays lip service to this [story arch] in a tonal scheme, starting in F#, reaching C major in the centre and returning to F# at the close” (Grant 1991, 26). The arrival at C upon opening the fifth door is frequently noted, however Paul Banks noted the foreshadowing of what is to come: “Here, at the opening of the fifth door, Bluebeard proudly reveals his lands to her accompanied by resounding triads for the full orchestra doubled by the organ. Judith acknowledges the vista, and in doing so uses an unadulterated pentatonic phrase. But Bartók suggests that she is disturbed and confused by this insight into Bluebeard’s soul and that it distances her from him: instead of adopting the ‘white notes’ of the unequivocal C major of the orchestra’s final chord, Judith sings to a tonally remote ‘black-note’ pentatonic scale. The irony of her response is perfectly captured” (1991, 10).
33. As George Steiner used the opera in his critical essay In Bluebeard’s Castle (1971) as a metaphor for the human urge to open doors, and as (ungendered) social criticism, both the opera and Steiner’s book were cited together by Jane Marcus as examples of “recuperations, misreadings and rehabilitations” (1992, 31). In “Sylvia,” she argued further: “This appropriation of the oppressed victim as representation of man’s plight … is one of the characteristics of the modernist rewriting of history” (1990, 536).
34. Nadine Sine, in “Cases of Mistaken Identity: Judith and Salomé at the Turn of the Century” (1988), argued that the many representations of both Judith and Salome around the turn of the twentieth century were backlashes against the various suffrage movements across Europe. The portraits of both women were skewed by their representation in influential plays by Hebbel (Judith, 1841) and Wilde (Salomé, 1891). Hebbel’s play was widely performed in the wake of Wilde’s, and Max Reinhardt’s production of it in 1909 was critically successful. Sine noted: “Thus, between 1893 and 1911, images of Salome and Judith were much in evidence. According to these radically new interpretations of biblical stories, decapitation results from a sexually-related act of revenge by a woman: the virgin Salome seeks revenge for John [the Baptist]’s rejection of her advances [as in Wilde’s play]; Judith avenges the assault on her virginity [as in Hebbel’s play]” (14). Stocker’s book title, Judith: Sexual Warrior (1998), emphasizes the standard reading of Judith.
1. Other “hard-boiled” examples include the Sam Spade radio play A Bluebeard Caper in which Sylvia is “forcing” her Bluebeard to marry her, because he’s “so courtly” (Hammett 1980). See also Bruce Sanders (1951) and Kerrigan (1945). A recent but typical example is that of Alistair Boyle’s Bluebeard’s Last Stand (1998) in which Gil Yates, P.I., quickly finds himself “feeling sorry for Bluebeard” (29).
2. Jane Marcus (1990, 536; 1992, 31) referenced the Balázs-Bartók opera and its rehabilitation of Bluebeard in contrast with Warner’s stories and “Bluebeard’s Daughter,” in particular.
3. If Farthing realizes the social function of literature, presumably espoused by Warner as a member of the British Communist party, he nevertheless evinces the high modernist hierarchical approach to narrative, disparaging fairy tales: “I can’t have it coming out like a story-book for children” (Warner 1940, 31; the narrator points out that these are in fact nursery stories). This ironic comment frames Warner’s own publication here of a collection of fables; she also published other elfin stories, and her “fantastic realism” is a hybrid precursor to “magic realism.”
4. Jane Marcus commented: “I cannot help but read the mark of the patriarchy on Djamileh’s mouth and tongue, as the ink of all the patriarchal texts on which women have been nurtured as their father’s daughters” (1992, 30–31).
5. The novel was in the public view in other ways in 1975 also, with the opening of the musical adaptation of it by Uhry and Waldman. In its runs in 1975 (the Play Lab, the Saratoga Performing Arts Festival, where Kevin Kline was in the cast, and a first run in Los Angeles) it was nominated for two Tony awards. Reception was mixed, but it was picked up (and revised) for a New York run on Broadway in 1976 (with Barry Bostwick winning a Tony as best actor in 1977).
6. Welty herself acknowledged the use of the myth of Psyche and Cupid, and by using berry juice she “binds it” with historical reality (1975, 17).
7. See Barbara Carson (1988, 64) for a survey.
8. Ironically, in stating that the fairy tale world fails because it is either/or, black/white, right/wrong, Arnold rejected the novella’s fairy tale properties (by arguing a successful if loving parody that undermines the genre) because of the same either/or mentality: “as a fairy tale, it cannot be significant fiction” (1989, 32). In “Fairy Tale of the Natchez Trace,” Welty referred once to the “ironic modification” she effected from the fairy tale, specifically in reference to Rosamund’s pragmatism. However, throughout that essay Welty wrote that the fairy tale and fantasy genres were the best incarnation for her material: “In my story, I transposed these horrors—along with the felicities that also prevailed—into the element I thought suited both just as well, or better—the fairy tale. The line between history and fairy tale is not always clear. … And it was not from the two elements alone but from their interplay that my story, as I hope, takes its own headlong life” (1975, 18). Later in the essay she wrote: “Fantasy is not good unless the seed it springs from is a truth, a truth about human beings. The validity of my novel has to lie in the human motivations apparent alike in the history of a time and in the timeless fairy tale” (21). Her writing does not support Arnold’s thesis.
9. The novel is set just before 1798; however, Suzanne Marrs came closer to a unified reading by looking at the historical and fairy tale material as an aesthetic projection of wartime reality, drawing upon Welty’s personal correspondence in support of her reading of the novella as the “aesthetic distance” needed “to confront issues relevant to the war-torn present” (2002, 53). With the rise of fascism, anti-Semitism, and German military aggression reported from the mid-1930s in Welty’s two local papers, and ultimately her two brothers leaving in 1942 for their military training, Welty was highly aware of the implications of the war and recorded her revulsion for it. One expression of it is in the violence of the novella and the (future) genocide of the Natchez Indians haunting it. Kreyling stated: “the rape and murder of the Natchez girl operate symbolically as the genocide of her nation” (1999, 46) and that the guilt of genocide “hovers over the novella” (45). Welty later stated in the process of converting it to screenplay that the rape needed to be there, as a shadow deed to what happened to Rosamund but also as “a reality of the times” (Welty 1948; notably, Uhry’s libretto removes the Indian subplots altogether). Other critics note that the positive character Clement Musgrove, Rosamund’s father, expresses the awareness that the Indians are enacting their “end time,” and that the end of other nations will follow it. Another element is the “destructive nature of self-glorification” (56) that occasions such acts of violence, and third in Marrs’ analysis is the nature of memory, which is not static and fixed in the novella but evolving. At the same time, a weakness of Marrs’ reading is to elide the violence against women as “only a feminist statement” (58); the use made of the allusive material of The Robber Bridegroom is demonstrably a working out of both the global and personal concerns of the war, but it is also marked by gendered violence. The rape and murder of the Natchez girl is not merely symbolic. Marrs went on to state: “Violations of women are representative of violations more far reaching in nature” (58). The symbol itself, however, is not as transparent as Marrs suggested.
10. See Barbara Harrell Carson (1988) on the doubleness and the work of the novella focused on integration of the self by realizing the interdependence of contrasting states in the natural order. As well as doubleness of character, most of the plot incidents are also paralleled or inverted elsewhere in the novel.
11. Mary Ann Doane most fully defined the women’s film in her book The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s: “The films deal with a female protagonist and often appear to allow her significant access to point of view structures and the enunciative level of filmic discourse. They treat problems defined as ‘female’ … and, most crucially, are directed toward a female audience” (1987, 3). Doane argued for a subversiveness to these films: “there is a sense in which the woman’s film attempts to constitute itself as the mirror image of this dominant cinema, obsessively centering and recentering a female protagonist, placing her in a position of agency” (129). Her study explores the full implications for construction of female spectatorship and female subjectivity in cinema. See also Laura Mulvey’s controversial study, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975; and a counter to it in relation to Hitchcock’s films by Keane 1986). For the “women’s film” subset (they are not generally given genre or subgenre status due to the variance in film types they represent), see also Elsaesser (1987) and Haskell (1973).
12. For films that have a “secret room” she listed Gaslight (the attic), Dragonwyck (the tower room), Jane Eyre (the tower room), and Secret Beyond the Door (the locked room). Her chapter “Paranoia and the Specular,” as well as another devoted to Rebecca and Caught, is thoroughly useful to the present study, although her list excludes the Bluebeard film titles. She argued further that these paranoid gothic films “in their articulation of the uncanniness of the domestic, and more especially in their sustained investigation of the woman’s relation to the gaze, the gothic films not only reside within the ‘genre’ of the women’s film, but offer a metacommentary on it as well” (Doane 1987, 125).
13. For instance, madness is explicit in the narratives of Love, Rebecca, Experiment Perilous, Gaslight, Jane Eyre, Undercurrent, Secret Beyond the Door, and Caught. It is implied in Ulmer’s Bluebeard (he kills the women he has painted, in spite of himself) and Spellbound (in the amnesia that results in the suspected Bluebeard playing the main psychiatrist at a mental asylum). Interestingly, in Beatrix Potter’s grisly Sister Anne (1932), Fatima is just such a “paranoid” heroine and the plot is similar to that of Gaslight.
14. Tatar in her chapter “Investigative Pleasures: Bluebeard’s Wife in Hollywood” (2004) charted select films from Gaslight (1944) through several Hitchcock examples, Fritz Lang’s Secret Beyond the Door (1948), to Caught (1949), discussing three in more detail (Gaslight, Secret, and Notorious). After briefly setting the context for these films around World War II, what she discovered is that the films offer a female investigator/ would-be victim, powerfully motivated by terror and desire. As in traditional noir films, the investigator is also a passive observer. Her paranoid characterization frequently belies her very real imperiled state. Tatar argued that the women in the Bluebeard cycle must contribute to their own rescue but that overall the films contain women’s investigative threats to the domestic arena and thus the happy endings are a “let down.”
15. Hitchcock also edited Witches’ Brew, which contains “The Gentle Miss Bluebeard” by Nedra Tyre (1959). With deft ironic humor, the story describes an elderly woman who realizes she has been in training for murder all her life: she was nicknamed Mary Ann Bluebeard in childhood. She sets about killing elderly and ill people within a five-block radius of her own apartment.
16. See Gregory Mank (1994). Initially, Boris Karloff was touted in the Carradine role but in 1934 Universal fired Ulmer, and it was not until 1944 that he would direct Bluebeard for PRC.
17. Mary Ann Doane (1987) pointed out that the verbal lacks weight to overturn the more powerful visual images to which the audience has been privy, many of them out of Lina’s subjectivity and thus carrying the authority of third person omniscient, such as the glass of milk Johnnie carries up the stairs. Hitchcock placed a light within the milk so that it glows ominously. The poisoned milk device is echoed in The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1947), and scenes of Bogart carrying the glass of milk on a saucer to both his first wife and, later, his second, overtly recall the Hitchcock film.
18. As Mary Ann Doane wrote of this subgenre: “violence is precisely what is hidden from sight” (1987, 134).
1. In a brief exploration, Cristina Bacchilega studied different postmodernisms manifest in different contemporary rewritings of fairy tales against models proposed by Jameson, Lyotard and Alice Jardine, as well as drawing on Linda Hutcheon’s theorization. While types vary, all emphasize their self-reflexivity: “Postmodern fictions then hold mirrors to the magic mirror of the Märchen [tales] and play with the images it frames in a desire both to expose its artifice and to multiply its refractions” (1998a, 315).
2. The farce Too Much Bluebeard by Gertrude Jennings (1944) is similarly self-aware, but one of the characters having read the story of “Bluebeard’ to her grandson then finds herself as Fatima in her dream. Only her knowledge of the story enables her to manipulate the desired ending.
3. Although translated into English from the German, the novel has not necessarily impacted the English tradition so much as reflected that postmodern European treatments are similar to it.
4. Mererid Davies cited Atwood and Carter when noting the utopian potential expressed by English women writers, contrasting that with the German tradition (2001, 70).
5. See Hermansson chapter 5: “Death Artistry” (2001). Maria Tatar (2004) also offered a chapter focusing on Bluebeard’s artistry: “The Art of Murder: Bluebeard as Artist and Aesthete.”
6. Simpson wrote of serial murder that it “substitutes repetition for creativity, pattern for design, and the spilled blood of corpses for paints” (2000, 18).
8. Sherman confirmed this idea in several interviews. In one she said: “I don’t want to make art that looks self-referential. I’d rather make things that anybody could relate to without having to have a degree in art or art theory or art history or criticism” (Howell 1995, 5).
9. Laura Mulvey (1975, 1991) extensively theorized Sherman’s challenge to the construction of femininity as “to-be-looked-at-ness,” which is a term Mulvey also used.
10. The erotic Bedtime Stories for Women by Nancy Madore (2003) similarly features “Bluebeard,” a sado-masochistic sexual fantasy that Madore alleged in her preface is what women want.
11. See also Resa Nelson, “The Key to Bluebeard’s Heart” (1994).
12. Reference is from “Object Relations” by Australian poet Tracy Ryan (1996) and forms the title of her collection.
13. Bliss Lim noted of The Stepford Wives: “This ghastly tableau is what brings slasher and serial killer movies into the compass of the Bluebeard tale” (2005, 170).
14. There is a Finnish article that read The Silence of the Lambs in relation to Bluebeard: “Fran Riddar Blaskagg till Hannibal,” Finsk Tidskrift (Finland) 232–232.3(1992): 110–23.
15. The detail links the film to Psycho and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, both of which use the Ed Gein story. Among the horrors of his house were found “a skin-vest, complete with breasts” (see Schechter 1984, 75).
16. Diane Dubois (2001) included references to Taubin (1991) and Rich (1991), both of whom endorsed the film as feminist. Dubois focused her analysis on the use of the gaze, both on screen and off.
17. This scene is at the crux of arguments on both sides of the issue; Dubois’ reading of it (2001, 301) is the one offered here. See also Linda Williams (1984) on the use of the gaze in horror films.
18. Exactly as illustrated in “The Way to Show the Heads” in Mrs. Valentine’s Home Acting for Amateurs (n.d.), and the “Description of Bluebeard’s Closet” for the 1921 juvenile play by Caroline Thomason.
19. As with Atwood, an interest in depicting “Bluebeardian sexual politics” broadens Carter’s use of the tale to include most of her works, such as feathered woman Fevvers in Nights at the Circus, which suggests the bird-woman symbol of “Fitcher’s Bird.” For Carter’s use of the “Bluebeard” tale, see in particular, Duncker (1984); Lokke (1988); Waite (1993); Walker (1996); Renfroe (1998); Benson (2000); Hermansson (2001, 186–94, 205–14); Moore (2002, 115–32); Tatar (2004, 114–19); Pyrhönen (2007).
20. The woodcut was intended as the frontispiece to The Bloody Chamber, but was not used. Instead it appears on the title page of Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale, ed. Danielle M. Roemer and Cristina Bacchilega (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001). See also Sargood in Bacchilega (1998b).
21. The same was used by Maurice Sendak for “Fitcher’s Feathered Bird” in The Juniper Tree. The cut deliberately evokes “a sense of an earlier age” (Bodmer 2003, 129–30).
22. Benson (2000, 245) dated it as “the latter half of the 1910s.” He argued an “interrelation of contemporary and fin-de-siècle treatments of the [Bluebeard] tale” (246), using Carter’s story and those of John Updike, “George and Vivian” and “Bluebeard in Ireland” (1994).
23. Throughout Atwood’s works, such as The Handmaid’s Tale, in which the protagonist Offred is a captive second “wife,” couples negotiate the Bluebeard paradigm. The same is true of same-sex relationships, of which The Robber Bride is only the most obvious example. See in particular Sharon Wilson (1986, 1988, 1993), Kathleen Manley (1996), and Karen Stein (2003) for surveys of intertextual use of Bluebeard across Atwood’s work. For select works in this context see: McMaster (1976); Grace (1984); Walker (1996); Hermansson (2001, 229–37, 240–44); Moore (2002, 132–49); Tatar (2004, 108–14); Barzilai (2005, 2006).
24. The phrase is Sharon Rose Wilson’s.
25. Another example would be “Bluebeard’s Children,” by Meredith Steinbach (1987), in which two children of Bluebeard reveal the violent fragmenting of subjectivity that domestic violence has caused them.
1. So is that by Martin Ladbrook (2005), although focused for much of the play on secondary characters.
2. In Trudy West’s 1952 pantomime, Sister Anne is referenced as “the typical dame of pantomime dressed in loud, exaggerated clothes” (3).
3. Bennett and Vaz (1949–1950). It was first presented at the West Indian Festival 1958. Jean Rhys’ novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) is another postcolonial engagement with a “Bluebeard” master text, Jane Eyre (1847).
4. Quoted in chapter 9. Aline Kilmer’s story “The Case of Bluebeard” (1923) is also prefaced by four lines from the sonnet, but rather than diverging from the traditional perspective it endorses the castigation of Fatima as someone who sinned and was not cleansed of her sin or even aware of the need for it: “Not since I reached the age of reason have I sympathised with Bluebeard’s wife” (93).