Three Hundred Years of “Bluebeard” in English
This gallimaufry of stuff insists that traditional forms and ideas arise, thrive, and fall away over time, taking shape in the tangible, traceable materials, circumstances, and ideologies of history. –DIANNE DUGAW (1995, 10)
Looking for Bluebeard in the contemporary landscape produces a riot of examples that appear to have very little in common. Peering through the colorful fog of blue-bearded lilies and dog breeds, he is revealed as a glorious pirate. He is in fact the first pirate to spring to the mind of Bart Simpson when Bart tries to fake a homework report on Treasure Island (“Bart Gets an F,” October 11, 1990). But the story told of the numerous pirates and their paraphernalia is as disingenuous as Bart’s homework report. Bluebeard has only recently become a pirate and only through the force of popular contemporary belief in his existence. Elsewhere, he appears in his older form as a blue-bearded murderer of many wives. Here, he is the stereotypical Turkish tyrant: beturbaned, wielding a scimitar, about to strike off Fatima’s head for her disobedience. The art deco razor stroppers that illustrate Bluebeard cutting his beard with his own scimitar suggest the widespread phenomenon of Bluebeard of Baghdad (or Constantinople). Although this story is closer to Bluebeard’s fairy tale origins, he has only become Turkish since an enormously popular English melodrama of 1798, Blue Beard; or, Female Curiosity! made him so.
Outside the English tradition, Bluebeard is neither a pirate nor a Turk. Instead, he derives from the French fairy tale of Charles Perrault, one of the Mother Goose set first published in 1697, who married several wives, telling each not to venture into a certain forbidden room, supplying each with the keys and the time to transgress, and beheading each in turn when they did so. The last wife is rescued in the nick of time by her military brothers, hastened by her sister Anne signaling them from the tower. This Bluebeard is also present in the contemporary landscape, as in the episode of the HBO television series Six Feet Under in “Terror Starts at Home” (Kate 2004). Ruth has married George, a man she knows little about, who has a past. When she confronts him about it, he is enraged and says he left his previous wives because they asked too many questions. The next episode begins with Ruth dusting his fossil collection, only to have them turn into six women’s heads in jars, and they tell her she is being too snoopy. When she asks these women—his previous six wives—to tell her about George, they only laugh until they begin to cry. This version of Bluebeard romps through New York in the pages of the Vertigo comic book series Fables, the dangerous arch enemy of Prince Charming. He is sung about in three songs titled “Bluebeard,” by Troubadours of Divine Bliss, Gravenhurst, and the Cocteau Twins, and he cuts off women’s heads in shadow play in Jane Campion’s celebrated film The Piano (1993). Although this Bluebeard is pervasive in popular culture, most Anglophones are not on a first-name basis with him as they once were.1 Indeed, Charles Dickens’ prophecy for Bluebeard has come true: “With seven Blue Beards in the field, each coming at a gallop from his own platform mounted on a foaming hobby, a generation or two hence would not know which was which, and the great original Blue Beard would be confounded with the counterfeits” (1853, 58).
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Bluebeard was a staple story in juvenile reading materials in England and the colonies, whether in chapbook form alone or in expensive colored editions of fairy tales. In either case, the forbidden chamber was depicted in word and image, bathed in blood. He terrified generations of children from James Boswell to Charles Dickens. Passing references to Bluebeard can be found in the writings of numerous authors, such as this by Thomas Carlyle: “A dark tragedy of Sophie’s this; the Blue-beard chamber of her mind, into which no eye but her own must ever look” (Wheeler 1866, 49); or this by Herman Melville in the poem Clarel: “She comes, the bride; but ah, how pale: / Her groom that Blue-Beard, cruel Death, / Wedding his millionth maid to-day; / She, stretched on that Armenian bier, / Leaves home and each familiar way— / Quits all for him” (1876, 130). In these allusions the symbolic function of Bluebeard is presupposed; he is widely known as an emblem for the dangerous husband, the unknown secrets of the spouse, the retribution for transgressive female curiosity. The name and the story continue to be used by famous writers as well as lesser-known artists to the present day, but even as “Bluebeard” has become a relative stranger and an exile from the nursery (unless prefaced with a “warning” label, such as in The Headless Horseman and other Ghoulish Tales2), the intertextual use of the story has become ever more complex and self-conscious. The accretions of three centuries come into play at the mention of Bluebeard’s name.
At the same time, the Bluebeard story did not spring fully-formed from the head of Charles Perrault. Instead, the fairy tale is one expression of enduring archetypes: the marriage to death, the animal groom, fatal curiosity. Within the folk and fairy tale realm, there are global variants of these archetypes in cultures around the world. Close European cousins to Bluebeard are plentiful, including the English folktale “Mr. Fox,” which was referenced by Edmund Spenser in Book III of The Faerie Queene (1590) a full century before Perrault published his Contes. In Shakespeare’s play Much Ado About Nothing (1600) it is already called “the old story.”
Despite the arrival and success of the Grimm versions in English (“Fitcher’s Bird” and “The Robber Bridegroom,” both kindred to “Mr. Fox”) in the mid-nineteenth century, the French version—with oriental twists—is the one that continued to dominate late Victorian culture. Only relatively recently have the Grimm versions come into their own and, with the necessary exceptions such as Eudora Welty’s 1942 novella The Robber Bridegroom, works like the two Fitcher’s Bird (one a book of Cindy Sherman’s photographs, the other a novel by Gregory Frost) or The Robber Bride (novel by Margaret Atwood), have only lately contributed to the popular conception of the story.
This book attempts to trace with some thoroughness the story of the Bluebeard fairy tale in the English tradition of arts and letters from those early named allusions to “Mr. Fox” to the present. I have aimed to capture some of the comprehensive nature of a survey, while focusing particular attention on seminal influential works (such as George Colman and Michael Kelly’s 1798 melodrama, or Béla Bartók’s 1912 opera) and trends (such as the cross-dressed comedies of the nineteenth-century stage). My focus is on English expressions, which must frequently take into account influential European works. For all that Bluebeard was a French fairy tale, and likely because of it, the untold history of Bluebeard in the English tradition is one of wresting ownership of it. By referring to Henry VIII as or “our old Harry Bluebeard,” the English claim a precursor figure with evident fondness.
Finally, I have a fascination for the “gallimaufry of stuff” that Bluebeard has strewn through history. No doubt a study of any such enduringly popular fairy tale would occasion a similar list, but filtering three hundred years through the lens of Bluebeard reveals some interesting “stuff.” The child riding the elephant as Abomelique (Bluebeard) in the first production of the Colman and Kelly spectacle (1798) is the future-famous actor Edmund Kean (Kelly 1826, 2:130). Charlotte Cushman, the androgynous Romeo of the Victorian stage, played Selim (the male rival) as a child in her mother’s attic “theater.” All the costumes for Bluebeard (and the animals) burned in the fire that ended the New York Hippotheatron, Christmas Eve, 1872.3 The Grand Opera House and Cirque (Belfast) opened to Bluebeard in 1895. Eddie Foy was playing Sister Anne in the 1903 pantomime Mr. Bluebeard when the newly opened Iroquois Theatre in Chicago burned, killing more than six hundred people at a matinee performance. Beatrix Potter’s grim 1932 novella Sister Anne was the last publication in her lifetime, and Boris Karloff had been cast to play Bluebeard in the film Bluebeard that John Carradine made famous in 1944. The New York Ballet Theatre opened its first international engagement at Covent Garden in 1946 with four arrangements, including Bluebeard.4 Such footnotes to history have been indulgently recorded here as well.
As should by now be clear: no single or global interpretation of the fairy tale exists, and none is offered here. Nevertheless, attempts to explain and interpret the tale have been made. Over the past three hundred years, folklore scholars and artists using the Bluebeard story alike have made statements about the meaning and importance of the fairy tale and have tried to account for its endurance. At the same time, the Mother Goose and Grimms’ tales have remained in print, and every new edition and translation offers its own interpretation or bias. While the tale can be read through the perspectives of curiosity, taboo, secret spaces, the gothic and representation of women (dead or alive) and of spectatorship, the dominant strains of criticism on the tale briefly surveyed here derive from historical anthropology, universal folklore classification, psychology, feminism, and postmodernism.
Criticism of this type insists that “folktales are historical documents” (Darnton 1984, 13), and as such represent national and historical specifics reflecting authorship and society of origin. French criticism of “Bluebeard” dominates the field, although it is often in comparison to other European variants. Here, a number of scholars focus specifically on the relative social stations of Bluebeard and his wife, his “blue beard” as either a marker of nobility or the desire to attain it through marriage, and on the caked (sullied) blood on the floor of the bloody chamber as a commentary on the blood purity of the nobility. In such readings, “Bluebeard” is a fable of the French ancien régime (see Apostolidès 1991; Cashdan 1999; Hannon 2001; Lewis 1987). Barchilon and Flinders (1981) and Zipes (2001) discussed Charles Perrault’s biography in detail to interpret the tale as the product of a lawyer, engaged in a debate over the Ancient and the Moderns with Nicholas Boileau; “Bluebeard” thereby contains a number of specific ripostes. Marina Warner (1989) also returned to seventeenth-century France but to argue for Perrault’s parable of “the right of women to administer their own wealth” and of the story’s allusion to the dangers to women of death in childbirth (Bluebeard has had a number of wives, but remains childless).
In French scholarship the search for borrowed sources features large. As proposed historical precursors, Comôr the Accursed and Gilles de Rais were both French, and almost all French nationalist criticism of the tale discusses them (see in particular Van Raamsdonk 1976; Odio 1986). Elsewhere, Jean-Louis Pichérit (1988) studied a little-known French term barbeu to designate werewolf (loup-garou). He thus attributed the beard of Bluebeard, his one sign of terrifying abnormality, to an association with this man-beast, and dated it “well before Charles Perrault” (377, my translation). Further in the search for origins, Catherine Velay-Vallantin focused on French regional variants of the “Bluebeard cycle” (1992, 68), be they folklore variants, ballads (Renaud, le Tueur de femmes), or local legends of Triphine (from the Comôr story) or Gilles de Rais. Earlier, Paul Delarue (1952) also analyzed French regional variants to determine that a particularly French subcategory of AT 312 exists, which he termed 312B: a Christianized variant.
Robert Darnton commented on European national variants of the tale: “Although each story adheres to the same structure, the versions in the different traditions produce entirely different effects—comic in the Italian versions, horrific in the German, dramatic in the French, and droll in the English” (1984, 46).5 Fabienne Raphoz concurred with him that the French variants of Bluebeard, compared to those of other European nationalities, are less horrific (1995, 46–47).
German scholars of the Bluebeard tale and variants must contend with the legacy of Perrault, which loomed large in the successive editions of the Grimm brothers’ tales. One scholar went so far as to argue that all German Märchen were in fact modeled on French salon precursors: “evidence of such Volksmärchen in Germany before the eighteenth century is meagre.”6 With regard to the Bluebeard tale, another German scholar “interpreted all versions of Bluebeard to be emanations from Perrault.”7 Grimm scholars also point out that while “Blaubart” was deliberately omitted from the second and subsequent editions of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen as a French derivative, in fact the Grimms’ contributors were Huguenot French and the “German-ness” of the tales was constructed after the fact, in large part through the deliberate efforts of the Grimms themselves.
In a full-length study of the Bluebeard story in the German tradition, Meredid Puw Davies studied the “cultural ambivalence” toward the Bluebeard story that dates to the Grimms. She argued (with support from German and Grimm scholarship8) that the tale “breaches a series of specifically German Märchen taboos as codified in the Kinder- und Hausmärchen” (2001, 59): first, acquisition of knowledge by a female character; second, “taboo on the acquisition of riches by a woman”; and third, breaking a Kinder- und Hausmärchen taboo on “depicting irrational, human, male evil” (66–67). She noted that the German literary versions that have followed “blunt the tale’s pro-feminist or subversive potential in one of three ways”: they reinterpret the moral as a warning against female curiosity, transpose the tale into a distant context, especially the Middle Ages, and/or they exculpate Bluebeard explicitly (69–70). Her own conclusions make the civilizing process a major theme.
English studies of the Bluebeard tale as a national phenomenon are essentially nonexistent. However, Juliet McMaster (1976) noted the existence of an English tradition, citing Henry Tudor and George Smith as English examples of historical Bluebeards, the English variant “Mr. Fox” and its presence in Spenser and Shakespeare, and then focused on the Romantic and Victorian examples, referring to them as “explorations of the Fatima-Bluebeard syndrome” (17). In Secrets Beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives, Maria Tatar (2004) broadened the scope of her earlier discussions of “Bluebeard” (1987, 1988, 1992), which largely focused on the historical prejudice against female curiosity demonstrated by it. In Secrets she revisited the tale, asking specifically why it has been so enduring a phenomenon in Western culture.
Scholars focusing on international variants with common motifs collect the forbidden chamber examples together (see Hartland 1885; Yearsley 1924). The Types of the Folktale by Anthi Aarne and Stith Thompson (1961), as well as Vladimir Propp’s folktale morphology (1958) in which he identified thirty-one common functions in folklore, are useful categorization tools and continue to be widely used. For instance, Fabienne Raphoz (1995) collected in one place several regional French variants of “Bluebeard” in addition to other major international variants. With fifty or so variants in place, the second part of the work analyzes these while relying heavily on Propp’s formulations and on the anthropological reading of initiation rites that result (107). However, Allison Tuthill’s study “Forbidden Curiosity: Episodic Repetition in ‘Bluebeard’ Tales from France, Germany, and the West Indies” (1999) critically examined the prevailing classification systems (Aarne’s types classification, Thomson’s motif index, and Propp’s morphology) and their limitations, especially their Euro-centrism. She examined the Bluebeard tales of the French Antilles (Guadeloupe, Martinique) and demonstrated how they do not “fit” the models (and are therefore marginalized by it, frequently as “fragments”). Tuthill also redefined the essential element of the tale as “forbidden curiosity,” a paired motif, to broaden the variant set.
For many scholars, the story represents an initiation, with a central problem of overcoming Death.9 P. Saintyves’ 1923 study built on the anthropological school of folktale readings and argued that: “the various incidents of the tale, in its various variants, correspond to various aspects of the ritual temptation of the initiate” (393, my translation). He was also concerned to discredit the “solar theory” reading, whereby the sun kills the dawn each morning, arguing that in no folkloric examples where the sun has keys are they ever given away or made to form part of a temptation ritual or test (363).10 After surveying three tales (the “Story of the Third Calendar” of the Thousand and One Nights, “Maria Morévna,” and “Marienkind”) Saintyves concluded: “The forbidden chamber, or its equivalent … is always connected with a sort of formation and serves precisely to test the hero or heroine” (374, my translation).11 He went on to show evidence that in many cases, women are excluded from male huts of initiation, in many initiation rituals there is a test, magical obstacles are frequently described, and in many, the simulation of death and resurrection form an integral part.12
In Freudian analyses of the Bluebeard tale, the focus is on sexuality. The key is phallic, while the lock into which it is inserted and the forbidden chamber are both vaginal. Kay Stone’s feminist reading stated the lesson: “There are many symbolic hints that women should not become too familiar with their own bodies. Bluebeard’s wives are murdered for looking into forbidden rooms” (1975, 47). Freudian readings of “Bluebeard” frequently draw on the biblical story of Eve to indicate that transgressive knowledge has sexual connotations, played out explicitly in God’s punishment of Adam and Eve: shame of nakedness, pain in childbirth.
In The Uses of Enchantment (1976), Bruno Bettelheim offered the well-known Freudian reading of the tale in which sexual infidelity is Bluebeard’s wife’s transgression: “The nature of the betrayal may be guessed by the punishment: execution. In certain parts of the world in times past, only one form of deception on the female’s part was punishable by death inflicted by her husband: sexual infidelity” (300). The cautionary tale is therefore: “Women, don’t give in to your sexual curiosity; men, don’t permit yourself to be carried away by your anger at being sexually betrayed” (302). Bettelheim’s reading has been criticized on several grounds. First, by ignoring the gender of the reader, his interpretation essentially conflicts with his arguments about the acculturation of children through a fairy tale education. Second, the blood on the key would indicate that Bluebeard’s wife was a virgin when she transgressed (“defloration is an irreversible event,” 301). Third, Bettelheim must misread Perrault’s French in order to insist on mixed company at Bluebeard’s house (the site of her adultery) when only feminine company is present.
Still, the concept of female infidelity in the Bluebeard tale existed long before Bettelheim. Ludwig Tieck’s play (1797) associates the transgression with sexuality (Davies 1997, 122 n.). It was a staple of the stage, particularly after the English tradition supplied a preexisting rival to Bluebeard, Selim, from whom his wife was unwillingly parted to marry Bluebeard himself. A popular song from 1932 made the connection explicit, as eight of the eleven wives were caught by Bluebeard having an affair: “Wife ten was a flighty Spanish Do nah, / Bluebeard came home one fine night— / Found here with a ‘Knut’ from Barcelona! / Chop! Chop! Chop! And her head came off! / That left nine” (Ewing 1932).13
Freudian concepts such as the uncanny (das unheimlich), the return of the repressed, repetition compulsion, penis envy, and castration have been applied to the tale. Winfried Kudszus analyzed repetition compulsion as a feature of the tale’s own enduring repetition (1990, 117), an approach more thoroughly and recently taken by Shuli Barzilai (2009).14
In Jungian analysis the conflict between Bluebeard and his wife is between two warring aspects of the psyche, reconciliation of which is necessary to individuation. Verena Kast argued in “Bluebeard: On the Problem of the Destructive Animus” that the pattern is identifiably sadomasochistic and operates on both the personal and societal levels: “an enthrallment with the animus is constellated that murders the feminine principle in oneself” (1978, 94). In the more recent article “‘Fitcher’s Bird’: Illustrations of the Negative Animus and Shadow in Persons with Narcissistic Disturbances” (1991), Kathrin Asper applied Jungian frameworks to the Grimm fairy tale to illustrate the struggle of the anima to “depotentiate” the “chopping” negative animus. The negative animus problem (and the corresponding negative shadow problem in men) is a form of narcissistic disturbance acquired through childhood development and exacerbated as a condition of living in a patriarchally biased collective consciousness that mirrors the animus rather than the anima. The anima does not possess self-identity strong enough to contain the dominant negative animus, which manifests as a destructive self-fragmenting nihilism. As read through “Fitcher’s Bird,” the animus is the wizard while the three sisters symbolize a series of attempts to overcome him. The egg is the true identity, the blood the sign of the inability of the first two sisters to delimit their inner self from the negative animus. The third sister has developed the ego strength required to delimit her true self; she acquires autonomy over the animus within her own psyche. Setting the skull in the window and transforming herself into a bird, Asper read as showing the negative animus what he finds alluring (Death); the sister makes her shadow manifest in order to delimit his power. She has overcome the enemy to her individuation.15
Philip Lewis offered a Lacanian/Irigarayan reading of “Bluebeard,” focusing on the doubling in the narrative: the similarities between frame and embedded narratives, the role reversals of Bluebeard and his wife. Similarly, a mirror double is the blood creating a speculum.16 Lewis compared the traditional mirrors in the tale with the vital blood mirror. The key offered to the wife is double: both the sign of her lack and as such the sign of Bluebeard’s masculine difference, one based on “a superiority that depends on knowledge from which others are expressly excluded” (1996, 221). Her blood symbolically claims the key for her female sex (even as she is unable to keep hold of it), and what she reflects to Bluebeard now is her knowledge; she has erased the difference between them. Her refusal to recognize identity constituted for her by Bluebeard triggers crisis, one borne of “recognition of an alarming resemblance” (223). The two-sided key simultaneously reveals parallel crimes (murder; discovery of murder), further conflating the difference in their identities into sameness. To return the wife to the state that marks her difference from him (that of not knowing), Bluebeard must quickly kill her. His “repetition compulsion” manifests the death instinct.
In an article studying two German texts using the Bluebeard story, Meredid Puw Davies commented that in Lacanian terms the compulsion repetition is inherent in narrative: “the act of narrative itself is a compulsive repetition of the traumatic fantasy of the fragmented body which represents and repeats the painful separation of the Symbolic and the Imaginary” (1997, 127). Thus, the double repetition (within the tale and of the tale) is both a thematic and formal (generic) repetition: “the ‘Bluebeard’ tale itself and its use in these texts, in its generically ordained repetition of patriarchal prohibition, transgression, punishment and compulsive, serial dismemberment fantasies, makes manifest the latent content of all narrative. Bluebeard’s repressed and bloody chamber becomes a metaphor for writing itself” (127).
As the quotation above implies, a number of studies look at the Bluebeard story as not just an apt expression of several themes but as self-reflexive “meta-tale.” Its particular doubled structure and Bluebeard’s embedded serial murders indicates a generic predisposition to narrative self-reflexivity even within the tale, suggesting another possible reason for its popularity as an intertextual mirror.17 In almost all cases, this generic and postmodern ability of the Bluebeard tale has been adopted into scholarship and criticism with a feminist focus. Cheryl Walker examined “why women have relished the telling of this barbed and grisly story” (1996, 13). Walker concluded that the room represents different things: for the wife, it is History: “the history of violence against women and the complicity of culture” with it; for Bluebeard it is Psyche: “a creative potential locked in a dark cocoon,” so that for the woman writer “the predator is there and knowledge of that self that we have tried to avoid.” The “scene of writing” then is “a chamber littered with corpses” (23).
In Reading Feminist Intertextuality through Bluebeard Stories (Hermansson 2001), I also argued for the tale’s inherent metatextual status. The tale illustrates intertextual processes of two kinds: Bluebeard’s (monologic repetition) and his wife’s (dialogic engagement). The tale illustrates monologic intertextuality and the wife’s escape artistry at the end (often featuring a tale-telling component in variants of the tale) offers both a dialogic alternative and simultaneous criticism of Bluebeard’s closed and foregone reiterations. This reading offered a way of examining all later works using the Bluebeard intertext as privileging either the monologic or dialogic variety of intertextual relationship and of thereby distinguishing a form of feminist intertextual engagement that privileged the latter.
Looking specifically at the roles of the helper figure, Rose Lovell-Smith in “Anti-Housewives and Ogres’ Housekeepers: The Roles of Bluebeard’s Female Helper” (2002) built on earlier work by Daniela Hempen (1977) on the neglected female helper in the “Bluebeard” stories (Sister Anne in Perrault, the old woman in Grimms’ “The Murder Castle” and “The Robber Bridegroom”). She also studied the “alternative tradition” of revisions by women writers: “Within English-language traditions, oral and literary, in the past two centuries, women have re-told ‘Bluebeard’ in ways that run counter to the contemporary scholarly moralistic silencing of the uneasiness generated by this tale type” (199). She agreed with Hempen that the character exhibits inherent ambiguity and instability, giving rise to the diversity of representations in story retellings. She determined that in most cases, “they are more properly defined as the heroine’s helpers than Bluebeard’s” (199).
In “The Evolution of Bluebeard,” Patricia Burris applied a recent disability studies approach to the Bluebeard story and three rewritings by women. With changes in women’s status in Western society a successful choice of life partner now involves different criteria: “The ‘modern’ Bluebeard tale suggests empowerment for the disabled male character and the woman who chooses him” (2003, 2).
Finally, in a more global feminist reading, Emily Ruth Moore (2002) discussed women’s use of the Bluebeard tale to demystify patriarchy’s powerful encoding. Outlining several useful contexts in addition to the Bluebeard tale itself—domestic violence and corporal punishment of wives, female orality, biographical conditions of select women writers—Moore argued that women writers use focalization (visual and cognitive) as a way to privilege a voice that is traditionally silenced in the story, that of the wife. Moore contended that reader response is essential to this strategy, as focalizations converge in the reader.
The criticism surveyed above sketches the major themes of analysis. However, it is assumed that all “Bluebeard” works discussed in this book, whether film, visual art, music, literature, or popular culture artifacts, also offer their implicit comment on the fairy tale through their manner of its use. Just as there is no single tale of origin for all of these works, there is no single, unifying interpretation of what the Bluebeard story means: to the English or anyone else. Rather, that idea is continually evolving, reshaping, and creating new stories from the old. The Bluebeard story is a particularly engaging conversation, begun some time ago and still thriving. I aim to trace from the present perspective the evolutions of a many-headed fairy tale from its manifestations in many genres, high and low, to tell the story of an English preoccupation.