At the beginning of ‘Bluebeard’, the heroine’s widowed mother, rather like a Jane Austen character, considers him a good match for one of her ‘perfectly beautiful’ daughters precisely because of his riches. In many Mother Goose tales, money and romance are bound up together, but of the two, money is by far the more pressing problem. Cinderella is deprived of her birthright so that her stepsisters may have larger dowries; in ‘Peau d’Ane’ (Donkeyskin), the king sacrifices the magic donkey that shits gold, the source of his wealth, to his illicit love for his daughter.23 The monetary arrangements at the conclusion of Bluebeard, after the heroine’s brothers have galloped to her rescue, are also eminently hardheaded, and include remnants of a now unfamiliar kinship and inheritance system, a modified form of matrilineage which was still practised among the nobility in certain parts of Europe in the early middle ages (and is still common in some parts of the world – among the Ibo of Nigeria, for instance). It gives maternal uncles an important and continuing part to play in their sisters’ affairs, in representing the family interests as well as enjoying title to the fruits of their marriages. It also places a woman at the fulcrum of continuing dynastic alliances between families which can be unbalanced for all kinds of reasons of family honour, political and economic, lying quite outside the marriage itself.24
If the sanguine and practical dénouement of ‘Bluebeard’ is taken together with other romantic endings in Mother Goose tales, Perrault’s partisanship can be seen: he was the first man to write down fairy tales, though they were women and children’s literature, as he was the first to admit. But unlike some of his colleagues, Perrault was eager to espouse the woman’s cause, and in his stories, however frivolous his tone, he took the part of daughters against the arranged marriages of the day, with their cynical ambitiousness for social position and wealth and their disregard for personal inclination. He also issued an open argument, by means of his tales, for the right of women to administer their own wealth.
An early English retelling gives ‘Fatima’ a strong motive for doing away with her monster husband: a nice lover called Selim. This story ends: ‘Selim took possession of the Castle, gave the slaves their liberty, and married Fatima.’25 By the middle of the nineteenth century, when the story was expanded for English audiences, the same point did not have to be made, as widows could expect to inherit. In one version, Bluebeard’s widow is described as a Victorian Lady Bountiful, using her late husband the ogre’s goods to benefit the needy:
Instead of the miserable hovels usually inhabited by the labouring poor, she had annually several comfortable and pleasant cottages built, and to each one she added a large plot of ground … where there were a family of children, she added to this gift a cow and a few sheep. By this means she enabled them, by their own exertions … always to secure a humble competence, and in a very short time, every person upon her estate was rendered happy and became her firm friend.26
The legend of Bluebeard has inspired an impressive body of works over the last hundred years; something about the much married ogre catches the popular imagination and has also challenged some great artists to reinterpret him and his wives. A late Victorian writer for children, Juliana Horatia Ewing (d. 1885), the witty and reforming editor of Aunt Judy’s Magazine, defended female independence of heart in her variation on ‘Bluebeard’, ‘The Ogre Courting’, of 1871. Managing Molly, her Finessa-like subtle heroine, tricks the dull-witted ogre, who has already eaten twenty-four wives at least at the last count (‘within the memory of man’), with a series of riddling ruses that take advantage of his meanness; the final straw, for the monster, is the feather bed she insists he fills by ‘plucking [the] geese in heaven’ – an ancient image of snow used by the Welsh poet Taliesin in the thirteenth century. The ogre shovels snow into the mattress as fast as he can, but of course it melts away; after a night in the cold wet bed, he will do anything to get rid of this new wife with her thrifty ideas, including parting with the dowry he gave her.27
British optimism shows through Mrs Ewing’s robustly practical story; her comic confidence matches the expansive and prosperous confidence of the Victorian heyday, and even implies the climate that allowed a crucial measure of emancipation for women, the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882, which for the first time placed the goods and dowry a wife brought to a marriage securely under her control, and allowed her to retain them after her husband’s death.28
By contrast, continental Europe’s interpretations of ‘Bluebeard’ reflect the comparatively defeated mood of feminism in France after the betrayal of the Revolution and the profound embourgeoisement of the Second Empire. In 1899, the actress and singer Georgette Leblanc inspired her lover, the Belgian Symbolist Maurice Maeterlinck, to write a libretto based on the Perrault fairy tale.29 They were living in a rented château in northern France at the time, which was also to inspire the crepuscular setting of Maeterlinck’s more famous dramatic fairytale poem, set to music by Debussy – Pelléas et Mélisande. Leblanc suggested that Maeterlinck intertwine the Bluebeard legend with the quest of Ariadne, who delivered Theseus from the monster in the labyrinth. Thus, in Ariane et Barbebleue, the wives of Bluebeard become the young Cretan maidens sacrificed to the Minotaur’s lust; his most recent bride, Ariane, takes the role of her classical namesake and Theseus combined as she enters the terrifying castle, opens the door to the forbidden chamber and finds that his previous wives are all still there, enduring a living death, in torpor and darkness – and luxury – so many lulled Rapunzels, prisoners of love, like Mélisande herself, who appears as one of their number. Like the prince, Ariane wakes them to the possibility of freedom, of the world outside, of light and action and independence, and they respond, with a powerful chorus of hope. But Georgette Leblanc also proposed from the start that the subtitle of the opera be La Délivrance inutile, the useless rescue. In the second act, the wives, after their moment of exultation, cannot be persuaded to leave Bluebeard or his castle; they prefer the chains they know, they cling to and caress the lover with whom they are familiar.
Maeterlinck wrote the play in 1899, and gave it to the composer Paul Dukas to set to music; it was first performed in Paris in 1907, and in spite of its luscious, sparkling cascades of chromatic sound it has rarely been put on since.30 Dukas himself commented trenchantly on the wives’ refusal:
No one wants to be rescued. Rescue is costly because it is the unknown. Men (and women) will always prefer a familiar slavery to the terrifying uncertainty of the burden of liberty. The truth is salvation is not possible; better to save one’s self. Not only is it better; it’s the only possible thing. The women make this very clear to poor Ariane. She didn’t know; she thought the world was thirsty for freedom when in reality it only hopes for comfort.31
Bluebeard himself hardly utters in the opera; passive, nearly mute, he accepts the collusion of his wives in their own idle, prosperous imprisonment. The last scene shows Bluebeard’s willing captives, bedecked in shimmering silks and jewels found in his treasury; the libretto addresses a bitter reproach to those new domestic idols, those housewives happy with the booming department stores of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century France: the frippery represents the desolate extent of the freedom they desire.
Béla Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle has eclipsed Maeterlinck and Dukas’s interpretation in fame and frequency of performance; first staged in 1918, eleven years after Ariane et Barbe-bleue was produced, the libretto by Béla Balázs had been offered to one composer in 1910, and Bartók had accepted it in 1911. An extended poetic meditation on the impossibility of love between men and women, it presents Judith, the latest of Bluebeard’s wives, as a questor after experience, after intensity, as a woman who has jilted a man to whom she was betrothed in order to run away with Bluebeard to his deep, secret castle.32 She is given the name of the biblical heroine, to invoke the assassin of Holofernes, the embodiment of lust and sin in secular as well as religious iconography. But Balázs, the librettist, was steeped in fa
iry tale as well as folk music, and he adds a sinister touch to the heroic moral of scripture, for his Judith is eager to go deeper into adventure, wisdom and sexual knowledge, and be annihilated with her despotic lover, rather than kill him. One by one, to ever more keyed up, swellingly sensual and iridescent music, she opens the doors to the chambers in Bluebeard’s symbolic fortress and finds evils behind them, fabulous and tainted treasure, pools of tears, torture instruments, flowers with bloody petals, and finally, three living brides, immured, captives. The opera is enigmatic: the castle becomes a castle of the soul rather than a locale, a symbol of passionate interior striving, of the desperate character of sexual passion, of the doom which all passionate love must suffer. The music suggests voluptuous fulfilment and inevitable separateness simultaneously, and Judith’s determination, in the face of Bluebeard’s reluctance, to know more, to go further and deeper, does not stand condemned.
This Judith personifies the early twentieth-century’s radical revelation of female sexuality and appetite; she can symbolize for us the new woman who desires, and expresses her desires, and Balázs and Bartók used the language of fairytale adventure to create her, for both men were committed to the folk tradition and found in the ballad singers the inspiration for contemporary works which tackled urgent issues. Bartok wrote at the time of composition: Women should be accorded the same liberties as men. Women ought to be free to do the same things as men, or men ought not to be free to do things women aren’t supposed to do – I used to believe this to be so for the sake of equality …’ He does not go on to retract his opinion, but qualifies it as necessary because repressing women’s desires constitutes a graver risk than allowing them equal expression.33
The heroines of twentieth-century stories about marriage to a beast no longer reject him: they are shown welcoming the discoveries the union brings them. The opera dramatizes a ritual of an initiation which can never be fully achieved, and its ultimate import, unlike its predecessor’s, stresses surrender: Judith meets the fate that the earlier heroines are spared, but she steps into the void fully aware of what she is doing.34
III
Of the eight famous fairy tales in Perrault’s Contes du temps passé, ‘La Barbe bleue’ contains the most deeply disturbing adult material beside ‘Red Riding Hood’ – for unlike Perrault’s other ogres, the giant in ‘Puss-in-Boots’, or the wicked fairy in ‘The Sleeping Beauty’, Bluebeard is a Jack the Ripper, who perpetrates his evil on young women in their sexual maturity, not on children in their needs. The story can hardly be said to be a fairy tale: the only magic features the fatal key, which Perrault characterizes as Fée, with a capital letter, using the word as an adjective (enchanted or fey), for the only time in his work. The key, with its smear of blood which will not wipe off, betrays the errant wife to the ogre on his return: a symbol of her pollution, connected to loss of childhood innocence and of virginity, of irrepressible sexuality.
Bluebeard has entered secular mythology alongside Cinderella and Snow White. But his story possesses a characteristic with particular affinity to the present day: seriality. Whereas the violence in the heroines’ lives is considered suitable for children, the ogre has metamorphosed in popular culture for adults, into the mass murderer, the kidnapper, the serial killer: a collector, as in John Fowles’s novel, an obsessive, like Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. Though cruel women, human or fairy, dominate children’s stories with their powers, the Bluebeard figure, as a generic type of male murderer, has gradually entered material requiring restricted ratings as well. (As patriarch, he remains at ease in the nursery.) There are several pornographic film titles which use the name Bluebeard; more surprisingly, perhaps, the story has appealed to women writers like Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter, both of whom have produced contemporary treatments.35, 36
In an essay on the slasher movie, the scholar and critic Carol Clover first put forward the polemical view that the pursuit of the avenging female, who tracks down a murderer and finally ‘slashes’ him, meting out to him what he wanted to mete out to her, actually acts as a satisfying fantasy for women viewers (‘enabling’).37 She develops her argument from looking at such films through the lens of the Icelandic sagas – she teaches Scandinavian studies – and seeks to understand twentieth-century celluloid gore in the light of bardic mayhem. Saga and fairy tale share certain features: oral transmission and the need to please the crowd. At least – they are – or were – literature to be passed on aloud and experienced in a group. The Bluebeard story can be seen as one of the slasher film’s progenitors. But in the earlier versions produced by women, if not directed at them, the threatened heroine resorts to the ruse as well as the axe or her brothers’ brawn to save her skin. The passage from the page (and the voice) to the moving image has profoundly affected the reception of the material; paradoxically, the visual becomes literal, imprinting the imagination and the heroine; the oral excites visualization, giving the imagination semi-free play, with hallucinatory effects, especially among children. But the dominance of imagery over word in storytelling today has pushed verbal agility into the background; even the fast-talking, wisecracking, insult-trading entertainment of 1930s thrillers like Double Indemnity have ceded to almost wordless narratives. Deeds of fantastic efficacy and often extravagant violence have replaced cunning and high spirits in the most popular vehicles for revenge fantasies and triumphs over adversity.38
The excessive, heightened, sadistic side of fairy tales has made them even more compelling in the last decades of the century, especially among adults who value more highly than ever the imagined pristine clarity and depths of childlike fantasy.
An uneasy amalgam of different sources and the resulting non-sequiturs intensify the nastiness of the Grimms’ version of ‘Bluebeard’, ‘Fitcher’s Bird’, and it has rarely been retold in the single, illustrated children’s format of postwar publishing of fairy tales. Recently, however, the artist Cindy Sherman illustrated it for the art publishers Rizzoli’s, in New York.39 Sherman has specialized in an atmosphere of menace in her work and frequently picked out sex crimes as a particular area of interest. Her photography began with remarkable impersonations of film-noir heroines, featuring herself, alone, in black and white pretend stills. Her metamorphoses collapsed to an alarming degree any claim to irreducible or certain personal identity, as she is able to look like … anyone. This effectively produces an eerie, baffling mood of impending danger for all: since she can occupy anybody’s persona, she becomes a kind of cautionary Everywoman. But her metamorphoses do not struggle free of the grip of the assailant, as in the fairy tale, but serve to underline the crisis of subjectivity.
‘Bluebeard’ was a natural story for Sherman to enter, because the seriality of the dead wives also marks their anonymity, their interchangeability, the failure of stable subjectivity. Sherman followed her fake film stills with huge Cibachromes, using their unearthly, keyed-up colours to add a lurid edge to a series of new poses, some of them simulating police shots of crimes against women. In the latter, she again connected with cinematic fantasy: some of her mises-en-scène capture Hitchcock or De Palma visions of sexual assault and female mutilation. An unusual choice, therefore, for a children’s illustrator, but one which intuits the nature of the fairytale material, especially in the Grimm Brothers’ often cruel redactions.
Her collages for ‘Fitcher’s Bird’ are only partly successful, however. Through ghoulish, fragmented, highly lit shots of wax models, using real feathers, hair, jewels and basketry, the sequence does reproduce effectively the jangling, lurid, incoherent violence of the Grimms’ original, but Sherman’s stock-in-trade of irony and kitsch cannot pass for the child audience, since it needs reference points – the thriller movie, the piece of forensic evidence – against which to play its own meanings. Here the art language Sherman parodies is that most commonly found in museum tableaux using waxworks, real clothes and props. Children learn this language at an early age, in theme parks where crimes are re-enacted in tableau
x vivants, as in the Chamber of Horrors in Madame Tussaud’s, London, and it speaks to them directly of actual events and real people, without irony, in a spirit of apparent admonishment and latent prurience. Sherman’s photography annexes this double and dubious pleasure to make the Grimms’ fairy tale real and present to the mind, uninflected by urbane irony. Needless to say, the story, in this version, misses altogether the redemptive mischief of L’Héritier’s ‘Finessa’ or the comic high spirits of Calvino’s ‘Silver Nose’. Sherman’s love affair with horror captures one interpretation of narrative power in this fin de siècle: hair-raising, rather than laughter, has become the motive of the teller, and damage the key motif of the tale – and anyone who escapes damage is lucky.
The seduction of difference: the Beast gazes on Beauty in Jean Cocteau’s classic fairytale film. (Jean Marais and Josette Day, La Belle et la bête, 1946.)
CHAPTER 17
Reluctant Brides: Beauty and the Beast I
I never may believe
These antic fables, nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
From the Beast to the Blonde Page 33