From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

  A storyteller invites the audience to sympathize with the heroine; with Cinderella, with Beauty, with Snow White: she deals death – physical and moral – to the mother of the heroine; she effectively tells the audience that mothers abandon children to witches in return for the fruits she craves from their garden, as in D’Aulnoy’s The White Cat’ or La Force’s ‘Persinette’, that mothers order daughters to cut off their toes to please the prince, that they die and leave them to the mercies of the wicked. She is killing off the mother, replacing her, and can be aligned with the mother-in-law who talks to her grandchildren, and claims them for her own, overlooking, disparaging, undoing the work of her son’s wife, their mother, and hoping she will not end in the poorhouse.

  Yet, even as the voice of the fairy tale murders the mother who is her rival for the children, she remembers how she herself was maltreated: how she entered the house of another as an outsider and was reviled. One of the reasons for the fairytale prince’s impeccable reputation is that, in a marriage where a bride enters the husband’s family, he becomes her chief ally, and his love her mainstay against the interests of others. Many of the most famous and best-loved tales, like ‘Bluebeard’, and ‘Beauty and the Beast’, tell of the struggles the heroine undergoes in the quest to secure this love.

  CHAPTER 15

  Demon Lovers: Bluebeard I

  The devil capers as the last of Bluebeard’s wives cannot wash the key clean and learns, from the melancholy sight of her predecessors, the just fate of disobedience. (Georges Méliès directed and played the devil. Barbe Bleue, 1901.)

  ‘Loup off the steed,’ says false Sir John,

  ‘Your bridal bed you see;

  For I have drowned seven young ladies,

  The eight one you shall be.’1

  Scottish Ballad

  BLUEBEARD IS A bogey who fascinates: his very name stirs associations with sex, virility, male readiness and desire. His bloody chamber, which his latest wife opens with the key he has forbidden her to use, reveals the dead bodies of her many predecessors, and warns her of her impending doom: the fairy tale written by Perrault in 1697 thrills like a Hitchcock film before its time, it foreshadows thriving twentieth-century fantasies about serial killers and Jack the Rippers. Only it has a happy ending: the heroine’s sister Anne calls for help from the top of the high tower of Bluebeard’s castle as he is preparing to kill his latest bride, and their brothers gallop to the rescue and despatch the monster.2 In Georges Méliès’s highspirited and comical film version of 1901, (here) the brothers impale Bluebeard against the wall, where he continues to kick wildly; meanwhile, a friendly goblin appears in a puff of smoke, resurrects the deceased brides and then conjures up bridegrooms for every one of them so that the story climaxes with a multiple wedding.3

  Beardedness divided the men from the boys in the Olympic Games; in Saint Augustine’s view ‘the beard signifies strong men; [it] signifies young, vigorous, active, quick men’.4 Beards were also the mark of the goat, and given the goat’s lustful and diabolical character, its kinship with satyrs and other classical embodiments of lust, like the god Pan, and the Devil himself (he actually wears a blue beard in the fourteenth-century stained glass at Fairford church, Gloucestershire (Pl. 21)), beards came increasingly to define the male in a priapic mode. Orderic Vitalis, for instance, in the twelfth century, complained of the influence of the East – of the Saracen – on Norman fashions: ‘Now almost all our fellow countrymen are crazy and wear little beards, openly proclaiming by such a token that they revel in filthy lusts like stinking goats.’5 Beards were accorded much greater symbolic value in Islam than in Christianity: a strand of Mohammed’s beard is still preserved in a reliquary in the Topkapi, Istanbul. Hair figures very rarely indeed, however, among the relics of Christian saints; the cultures’ contrasting oaths point up the difference in value: Muslims swear by the Prophet’s beard, Christians by the Saviour’s wounds (though ‘zounds’ is not much found today beyond the pages of Regency romances).6

  Well out of fashion in the court of the Sun King, the beard of Perrault’s villain betokened an outsider, a libertine, and a ruffian. The very word in French – barbe – looks as if it is related to barbare, barbarian, though the etymology remains fanciful. A mid-Victorian version took up the echo, calling Bluebeard a ‘Barbe-hairy-un’.7 And it becomes the custom, beginning with the first woodcuts of the first edition, and continuing in the watercolours by Arthur Rackham and later artists, to portray Bluebeard as an Oriental, a Turk in pantaloons and turban, who rides an elephant, and grasps his wife by the hair when he prepares to behead her with his scimitar (here). In later redactions of the story, she is sometimes called Fatima and he is given an absurd foreign name, like Abomélique, and the setting of his fabulous estate is sometimes specified: a retelling which Arthur Rackham illustrated takes place near Baghdad.8, 9

  By the blueness of his protagonist’s beard, Perrault intensifies the frightfulness of his appearance: Bluebeard is represented as a man against nature, either by dyeing his hair like a luxurious Oriental, or by producing such a monstrous growth without resorting to artifice. The colour blue, the colour of ambiguous depth, of the heavens and of the abyss at once, encodes the frightening character of Bluebeard, his house and his deeds, as surely as gold and white clothes the angels. The chamber he forbids his new wife becomes a blue chamber in some retellings: blue is the colour of the shadow side, the tint of the marvellous and the inexplicable, of desire, of knowledge, of the blueprint, the blue movie, ofblue talk, of raw meat and rare steak (un steak bleu, in French), of melancholy, the rare and the unexpected (singing the blues, once in a blue moon, out of the blue, blue blood).10 The fairy tale itself was first known, in France, as a conte bleu, and appeared in familiar livery between the covers of the Bibliothèque bleue. Mme de Rambouillet received her alcòvistes in her blue bedroom. As William Gass has written, in his inspired essay On Being Blue’, ‘perhaps it is the blue of reality itself’: and he goes on to quote a scientific manual: ‘blue is the specific colour of orgone energy within and without the organism’.11 It is a polar tint: of origin and end, and in consequence adumbrates mortality, too: Derek Jarman, the late artist and film-maker, recently flooded a screen with indigo in order to meditate on his and his friends’ death sentence from AIDS.

  One of the many peculiar aspects of the familiar story of ‘Bluebeard’ is that the narrative concentrates on Fatima’s act of disobedience, not on Bluebeard’s mass murders. In this the tale resembles other favourites of the Victorian nursery, like ‘Red Riding Hood’, which admonishes the protagonist for stopping to pick flowers in the wood, and laying herself open to the wolf’s wickedness; the wolf knows no better, but Red Riding Hood should have been better brought up.12 In ‘Goldilocks’, too, though the insatiably curious child escapes scot-free, there is a hint that she was lucky not to be skinned for the bears’ supper and it would have been a good lesson to her if she had been (here).13 Fairy tales are stories to frighten children, as well as delight them. In ‘Bluebeard’, the initial weight of the story swings the listener or reader’s sympathies towards the husband who instructs his young wife, and presents his request for her obedience as reasonable, and the terror she experiences when she realizes her fate as a suitable punishment, a warning against trespass.

  Perrault appears to side with Bluebeard and his strictures, but his tone remains tongue-in-cheek throughout. At the start, describing the house party Bluebeard lays on for his young fiancée and her friends, Perrault writes:

  It was nothing but a continual round of parties, of walking, hunting, and fishing expeditions, dancing and banqueting and picnicking: no one went to bed, and the whole night was spent playing tricks on one another; in fact everything went so well, that the youngest began to find that the Master of the house no longer had such a very blue beard …14

  Perrault wants to have it both ways: he tells a rousing story of vindication and escape, but then appends two laddish remarks by way of a moral: that there are no lon
ger any husbands as terrible as Bluebeard, and that, besides, between man and wife these days, ‘Whatever the colour the beard might be, it’s hard to tell who is master.’15

  Nevertheless, Perrault, in this story, as in the first tales he published – ‘Griselda’ and ‘Donkeyskin’ – dramatizes the abuse of male privilege and plucks his heroine from disaster and injustice at the end. ‘Bluebeard’ is a story, like ‘Cinderella’, in which the mighty are cast down. The overbearing husband, like the wicked stepmother and ugly sisters in ‘Cinderella’ and the incestuous father in ‘Donkeyskin’, is thwarted, to the joy and edification of all. ‘Bluebeard’ is a version of the Fall in which Eve is allowed to get away with it, in which no one for once heaps the blame on Pandora. Walter Crane, in his sumptuous full colour illustrations at the end of the last century, even shows the heroine against a wall painting of the Temptation in the Garden of Eden, making a direct analogy with Eve, and thus disclosing the inner structure of the fable: Bluebeard acts like God the Father, prohibiting knowledge – the forbidden chamber is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil – and Fatima is Eve, the woman who disobeys and, through curiosity, endangers her life (right).16

  After Perrault, the story often comes with a subtitle, ‘The Effect of Female Curiosity’, – or, in case we should miss the point – ‘the Fatal Effects of Curiosity’, to bring it in line with cautionary tales about women’s innate wickedness: with Pandora who opened the forbidden casket as well as Eve who ate of the forbidden fruit.17 The Grimms included a variant, ‘Marienkind’, (Mary’s Child), one of the nastier morality tales in their book, in which the Virgin Mary herself, no less, plays the part of Bluebeard and savagely punishes the wayward girl who uses the forbidden key. In many illustrated tellings of the story, the key looms very large indeed, a gigantic forbidden fruit, so engorged and positioned that the allusion can hardly be missed.18 In Gustave Doré’s engraving to Perrault, Bluebeard reveals the forbidden key – of gigantic proportions – to his wife with the leer of a pornographer. The mid-nineteenth-century caricaturist Alfred Crowquill featured a key so monstrous in size that Bluebeard’s young wife staggers under its weight like one of Beardsley’s obscene marginalia.19 The heroine finds that she cannot rub away the stain of blood on the key rather in the same way as Adam and Eve try to hide from God but cannot. And how the Victorian verses gloat on her unpleasant newfound knowledge:

  Eve stands behind, the first woman who was also afflicted with curiosity, as Bluebeard’s wife wonders why she should not use the key to enter the forbidden chamber. (Walter Crane, Bluebeard, London, 1874.)

  [She] looked within, and fainted straight the horrid sight to see,

  For there upon the floor was blood, and on the walls were wives,

  For Bluebeard first had married them, then cut their throats with knives.20

  Crowquill again provides a fearsome drawing of the hanged wives, tongues popping out, while his jocular collaborator F. W. N. Bayley compares them to the victims of famous modern murderers, like their contemporary Jack the Ripper, and exclaims:

  Oh Fie! Oh Fie!

  There they all were hanging up to dry!21

  Another, more disciplinarian author gloats: ‘She found herself amidst the severed limbs and mutilated bodies of her husband’s former wives’, before going on to describe the message on the wall: ‘The fate of broken promises and disobedient curiosity.’ This Bluebeard manages – with his dying breath – to continue moulding his wife: ‘I hope she will in future never break a promise, disobey those to whom she promises submission, nor give way to the impulse of improper and forbidden curiosity.’22

  Bluebeard the ogre husband plays two parts at least in his own story: the patriarch whose orders must be obeyed on the one hand, and on the other the serpent who seduces by exciting curiosity and desire and so brings death. As the witch-hunter Pierre de Lancre wrote in 1612, ‘Satan is the true ape of God’.23 He mimics divine rewards and punishments in topsy-turvy, but, as Lancre added, ‘Nevertheless, his imitation is imperfect.’24 In his double role in the fairy tale, he reflects a problem that is intrinsic to the morality tale: Erasmus pointed out that the Devil does God’s work, testing sinners and proving saints. His beard is emblematic of his inherent contrariness, a patriarchal ornament, a devilish goatee. For Freudian commentators, like Bruno Bettelheim, the story of Bluebeard confronts the mystery of sexuality, and, by dramatizing so bloodily the terror of defloration, helps to assuage it.25

  As in the story of the Fall, the serpent may be at fault, but Eve is blameworthy too. In many of the later retellings of ‘Bluebeard’, the blue chamber is presented as the fitting penalty for his wives’ previous wickedness in defying a husband’s commands. Some storytellers, sensitive to the narrative inconsistency that Bluebeard’s first wife cannot have been issued the same instruction (at that point there was as yet no forbidden knowledge, no bloody chamber), invent ingenious reasons for her murder, the start of the series. In ‘The History of Bluebeard’s Six Wives’ by Sabilla Novello, illustrated by George Cruikshank, around 1875, the first victim is actually called Basbluella, or Bluestocking Ella, and is thereby already credited with knowledge both dangerous and unseemly in a woman.26 When a drunken Bluebeard reproaches her for her lack of merriment, she turns his beard blue in vengeance. It is often difficult to tell which side the authors are on, for an air of glee hangs around the telling, although Cruikshank himself was an earnest advocate of Temperance, and wrote a ‘Cinderella’ in which everyone at the ball is on the waggon, and at the wedding the fountains run with lemonade.27

  II

  In Scottish and English ballads, fierce and eldritch tales are told of encounters with the underworld, and its demon denizens who prey on young women. The ballads have counterparts in literatures ranging from Tibetan to Dutch, and they go very far back; it is not my interest here to locate their place or point of origin, which scholars have tried to do, but to relate their narratives of sexual danger and escape to the fairy tales of Bluebeard which they resemble.

  The Marian miracle play Mary of Nimmegen, or Mariken van Nieumeghen, which tells a version of this struggle in a form intended for popular entertainment, was published in the first quarter of the sixteenth century in Antwerp, in Dutch and English versions, as one of the series of chapbooks or volksboeken which disseminated folk tales and romances like the story of Alexander, or of Blancheflor, or the Four Sons of Aymon, all material which flows into the fairytale tradition of the seventeenth century onwards.28 The Devil here takes the form of the one-eyed lecher Moonen; he seduces the protagonist into sex and marriage by promising her power, in the Faustian tradition (here).29 Mary’s mind soon turns to riches rather than learning, and he promises to shower her with jewels. When Mary has duly surrendered to his irresistible charms, and set up house with him at the sign of the Golden Tree, she entertains travellers and drinkers with her ballads: ‘Nigromancy is a merry art …’, she explains before she sings.30

  The lecherous Moonen (the devil in disguise) woos Mary of Nijmegen and wins her with his promises of an education – and riches. (Antwerp, c. 1518–9.)

  Mariken ‘has ado’ with the fiend for seven years before she is saved by the Virgin Mary; her rescue takes place at the performance of a miracle play, set in Nijmegen, during which the representation of the Virgin Mary’s mercy moves her errant namesake to contrition then and there – again a demonstration of the powers of persuasive speech, especially shaped by art. Thus Mary of Nimmegen tells the story of one miracle play, within the frame of another. This story of a female Faust is related to ‘Bluebeard’, because her story places a near-fatal union between a virtuous maid and a fiend at its centre. Mary is saved, in this case – though she is condemned to wear iron rings round her neck in penance for three years – but Moonen, or the Devil inside him, will find another bride. The English version of the play ends with the kind of moral fairy tales borrowed:

  Take all in gree, without grutching,

  This simple tale: ’twas writ for love
,

  That we may win to heavenly glory above.31

  Ballads about the Elfin-Knight’s wooing do not identify him directly as the Devil, but only as a false suitor who kills the women he loves: in these songs, the Lady Isabel, or May Colven, or Annie Miller – the heroine has many different names – sees through her lover, tricks him with words and manages to turn the tables on him and do him to death in the same way as he had planned to kill her.32 In ‘May Colven’, for instance, he wins permission to marry her from her father and rides off with her. They come to ‘a lonesome part / A rock by the side of the sea’, where he orders her to dismount and prepare to die (see epigraph to this chapter).