Fitcher's Brides

by Gregory Frost

  “Oh, Fitcher’s bird, where are you from?”

  “From feathered Fitcher’s house I’ve come.”

  “The young bride there, what has she done?”

  “She’s cleaned and swept the house all through;

  she’s in the window looking at you.”3

  She then meets the wizard himself on the road, and these questions are repeated. The wizard looks up, he sees the skull in the window, and hurries home to his bride. But by now, the brothers and relatives of the three young girls are waiting for him. They lock the door, then burn the house down with all the sorcerers inside.

  The Robber Bridegroom is another classic fairy tale about a murderous stranger. It too can be found in the Grimms’ collection, and in variants around the world. One of the most evocative of these variants is the English version of the story, in which the Bluebeard figure is know as Mr. Fox (or Reynardine). A girl is courted by a handsome russet-haired man who appears to have great wealth. He is charming, well mannered, well groomed, but his origins are mysterious. As the wedding day grows near, it troubles the girl that she’s never seen his home—so she takes matters into her own hands and sets off through the woods to seek it. In the dark of the woods, she finds a high wall and a gate. Over the gate it says: “Be bold.” She enters, and finds a large, dilapidated mansion inside. Over the door it says: “Be bold, be bold.” She enters a gloomy hall. Over the stairs it says: “Be bold, be bold, but not too bold.” She climbs the stairs to a gallery, over which she finds the words: “Be bold, be bold, but not too bold, lest your heart’s blood should run cold.” The gallery is filled with the body parts of murdered women. She turns to flee, just as Mr. Fox comes in, dragging a new victim. She hides and watches, horrified, as the girl is chopped to bits. A severed hand flies close to her hiding place, a diamond ring on one finger. She takes the hand, creeps out the door, and runs home just as fast as she can. The next day there’s a feast for the wedding couple, and Mr. Fox appears, looking as handsome as ever. He comments, “How pale you are, my love!”

  “Last night I had a terrible dream,” she says. “I dreamed I entered the woods and found a high wall and a gate. Over the gate it said: Be bold.” She proceeds to tell him, and the assembled guests, just what she found inside.

  “It is not so, no, it was not so, and God forbid it should be so,” said Mr. Fox.4

  “But it is so, and it was so, and here’s the hand and the ring I have to show!” She pulls the severed hand from her dress and flings it into her bridegroom’s lap. The wedding guests rise up to cut Mr. Fox into a thousand pieces.

  An Indian version of the tale has the daughter of respectable Brahmans courted by a man who is actually a tiger in disguise, anxious to procure a wife who can cook the curry dishes he loves. It is only when the girl is married and on her way to her husband’s house that she learns the truth and finds herself wife and servant to a ferocious beast. She bears him a child, a tiger cub, before she finally makes her escape. As she leaves, she tears the cub in two and hangs it over the flames so that her husband will smell the roasting meat and think that she’s still inside. It’s an odd little tale, in which one feels sneaking sympathy for the tiger.

  In various “demon lover” ballads found in the Celtic folk tradition, the Bluebeard figure is the devil in disguise, or else a treacherous elfin knight, or a murderous ghost, or a false lover with rape or robbery on his mind. In “May Colvin,” False Sir John rides off with a nobleman’s daughter he’s promised to marry—but when they reach the sea, he orders the maiden to climb down from her horse, to take off her fine wedding clothes, and to hand over her dowry. “Here I have drowned seven ladies,” says he, “and you shall be the eighth.” May begs him, for the sake of modesty, to turn as she disrobes. And then she promptly pushes him in the water to his death.

  In a Scandinavian version of this ballad, a nobleman’s daughter is courted by a handsome, honey-tongued, false suitor who promises to take her to the fair if she meets him in the woods. Her father will not let her go, her mother will not let her go, her brothers will not let her go, but her confessor gives permission, provided she keeps hold of her virtue. She finds her suitor in the woods busy at work digging a grave. He says the grave is for his dog; but she protests that it is too long. He says the grave is for his horse; she says it is too small. He tells her the grave is meant for her, unless she consents to lie with him. Eight maidens has he killed before, and she shall be the ninth. Now the choice is hers—she must lose her virtue or her life. She chooses death, but advises her false suitor to remove his coat, lest her heart’s blood spatter the fine cloth and ruin it. As he takes it off, she grabs the sword and strikes his head off “like a man.” The head then speaks, instructing her to fetch a salve to heal the wound. Three times the girl refuses to do the bidding of a murderer. She takes the head, she takes his horse, she takes his dog, and rides back home—but as she goes, she encounters her suitor’s mother, his sisters, his brothers. Each time they ask, “Where is thy true love?” Each time she answers, “Lying in the grass, and bloody is his bridal bed.” (In some versions, the entire family is made up of robbers and she must kill them, too.) She then returns to her father’s court, receiving a hero’s welcome there. But in other “murderous lover” ballads, the heroines are not so lucky. Some meet with graves at the bottom of the sea, others in cold rivers, leaving ghosts behind to sing the sorrowful song of their tragic end.

  Charles Perrault drew a number of elements from folk tales and ballads like these when he created the story of the urbane, murderous Bluebeard and his bloody chamber. Like Silvernose, Bluebeard is marked by a physical disfigurement—the beard that “made him so frightfully ugly that all the women and girls run away from him.” Like Mr. Fox, his wealth and his charm serve to overcome the natural suspicions aroused by his mysterious past and the rumors of missing wives. Like the false suitors, he seduces his victims with courtly manners, presents, and flattery, all the while tenderly preparing the grave that will soon receive them. Perrault parts with these older tales, however, by apportioning blame to the maiden herself. He portrays her quite unsympathetically as a woman who marries solely from greed, and who calls Bluebeard’s wrath upon herself with her act of disobedience. This is absent in the older tales, where curiosity and disobedience, combined with cunning and courage, are precisely what saves the heroine from marriage to a monster, death at a robber’s hands, or servitude to the devil. Perrault presents his Bluebeard as a well-mannered, even generous man who makes only one demand of his wife, marrying again and again as woman after woman betrays this trust. Only at the end of the tale, as the bridegroom stands revealed as a monster, does Perrault shift his sympathy to the bride, and Bluebeard is dispatched. Perrault ends the tale with a moral that stresses the heroine’s transgressions and not her husband’s, warning maidens that “curiosity, in spite of its appeal, often leads to deep regret.” In a second moral, Perrault remarks that the story took place long ago, modern husbands are not such “jealous malcontents.” Jealous malcontent? “Homicidal maniac” would be a better description. Again Perrault’s words imply that despicable as Bluebeard’s actions are, they are actions in response to the provocation of his wife’s behavior.

  Another departure from the older folk tales is that Bluebeard’s wife (like the other fairy-tale heroines in his Histoires ou contes du temps passé) is a remarkably helpless creature. She does not outwit Bluebeard herself, she weeps and trembles and waits for her brothers—unlike the folklore heroines who, even when calling brothers to their aid, have first proven themselves to be quick-witted, courageous, and pro-active. As Maria Tatar has pointed out (in her book The Classic Fairy Tales), “Perrault’s story, by underscoring the heroine’s kinship with certain literary, biblical, and mythical figures (most notably Psyche, Eve, and Pandora), gives us a tale that willfully undermines a robust folkloric tradition in which the heroine is a resourceful agent of her own salvation.”

  This difference is particularly evident when we compa
re Perrault’s passive heroine with those created by other fairy-tale writers in the French salons—the majority of them women writers, whose works were quite popular in their day. Perrault’s niece, Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier, was also the author of fairy tales; her story “The Subtle Prince,” published three years before Perrault’s Histoires, drew on some of the same folklore motifs as the story of Bluebeard. In L’Héritier’s tale, a king has three daughters, two of them foolish, the youngest one clever. When the king journeys away from home, he gives each of his girls a magical distaff made of glass that will shatter if the girl loses her virtue. (The telltale key in “murderous bridegroom” tales is often also made of glass.) The wicked prince of a neighboring kingdom enters the castle disguised as a beggar, then seduces each elder sister in turn—marrying, bedding, and abandoning them. The youngest sister sees through his charms, whereupon he tries to take her by force. No wilting flower, she hoists an ax and threatens to chop him into pieces. The story goes on, with more attempts on the life and honor of the Subtle Princess, but she turns the tables on the wicked prince, kills him in a trap he’s set for her, and goes on to marry his gentle, civil, kindhearted younger brother. The Subtle Princess has no brothers of her own to come rushing to her aid, nor does she need them. She manages matters very well for herself, thank you.

  In the following century, as women lost the social gains they’d made in the heady days of the salons, tales by L’Héritier and other women (D’Aulnoy, Murat, Bernard, etc.) fell out of fashion, while those by Perrault—with their simpler prose style, their moral endings, their meek and mild princesses—continued to be reprinted and recounted year after year. As the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries progressed, re-tellings of Bluebeard increasingly emphasized the “sin” of disobedience as central to the story—a subsequent version was titled Bluebeard, or The Effects of Female Curiosity. As fairy tales became an area of scholarly inquiry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, folklorists pounced upon this theme in their analysis of the tale—and took it one step further, suggesting that Bluebeard’s wife’s disobedience was sexual in nature, the bloodstained key symbolizing the act of infidelity. (Never mind the fact that there are no other men in the whole of Perrault’s tale until those convenient brothers come thundering out of nowhere to save her.) Psychologist Bruno Bettelheim was one of the critics who read Bluebeard as a tale of infidelity. In his flawed but influential book of the 1970s, The Uses of Enchantment, he pronounced Bluebeard “a cautionary tale which warns: 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.” But as novelist Lydia Millet has pointed out in her essay “The Wife Killer”5: “Blue Beard wanted his new wife to find the corpses of his former wives. He wanted the new bride to discover their mutilated corpses; he wanted her disobedience. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have given her the key to the forbidden closet; he wouldn’t have left town on his so-called business trip; and he wouldn’t have stashed the dead Mrs. Blue Beards in the closet in the first place. Transparently, this was a set-up.” Fairy-tale scholar Maria Tartar comments: “Bloody key as a sign of disobedience—this is the motif folklorists consistently read as the defining moment of the tale. The bloodstained key points to a double transgression, one that is at once moral and sexual. For one critic, it becomes a sign of ‘marital infidelity’; for another it marks the heroine’s ‘irreversible loss of her virginity’; for a third, it stands for ‘defloration.’ If we recall that the bloody chamber in Bluebeard’s castle is strewn with the corpses of previous wives, this reading of the bloodstained key as a marker of sexual infidelity becomes willfully wrongheaded in its effort to vilify Bluebeard’s wife.”

  Marina Warner, in her excellent fairy-tale study From the Beast to the Blonde, suggests another way to read the tale: as an expression of young girls’ fears about marriage. Perrault was writing at a time, and in a social class, when arranged marriages were commonplace, and divorce out of the question. A young woman could easily find herself married off to an old man without her consent—or to a monster: a drunkard, a libertine, or an abusive spouse.6 Further, the mortality rate of women in childbirth was frighteningly high. Remarriage was commonplace for men who’d lost a wife (or wives) in this fashion, and ghosts from previous marriages hung over many a young bride’s wedding.

  An aspect of the Bluebeard tale that we see emphasized in later re-tellings is xenophobia, with the bridegroom betrayed as an Oriental. There is nothing in the text of Perrault’s tale (except that extraordinary beard) to indicate that Bluebeard is anything but a wealthy, if eccentric, French nobleman—yet illustrations to the story, from eighteenth century woodcuts to the famous Victorian illustrations of Edmund Dulac—depict Bluebeard in Turkish garb, threatening his bride with a scimitar. It must be remembered that “Arabian Nights” style fairy tales were enormously popular in Europe from the eighteenth century onward, yet none of the other tales in Perrault’s collection Histoires ou contes du temps passé were given this Oriental gloss as persistently as Bluebeard. Both monstrous 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. And yet, it’s the fact that he is one of us—the polite, well-mannered gentleman next door—that makes the story so very chilling to this day. While tales like Beauty and the Beast serve to remind us that a monstrous visage can hide the heart of a truly good man, Bluebeard shows us the reverse: a man’s fine facade might hide a monster.7

  Bluebeard remained well known throughout Europe right up to the twentieth century, inspiring new tales in its turn, as well as dramas, operettas, and countless pantomimes. William Makepeace Thackeray published a parody of Bluebeard called Bluebeard’s Ghost in 1843 that chronicled the further romantic adventures of Bluebeard’s widow. Jacques Offenbach wrote a rather burlesque operetta titled Barbe-bleu in 1866. In 1899, the Belgian symbolist Maurice Maeterlinck wrote a libretto entitled Ariane et Barbe-Bleu, set to music by Paul Dukas and performed in Paris in 1907. Maeterlinck’s version, written with the aid of his lover, the singer Georgette Leblanc, combined the Bluebeard story with elements from the myth of Ariadne, Theseus, and the Minotaur. In this sad, fatalistic version of the tale, Ariane, the last of Bluebeard’s brides, attempts to rescue his previous wives and finds them bound by chains of their own making to Bluebeard’s castle. The Seven Wives of Bluebeard by Anatole France, published in 1903, re-told Perrault’s story from Bluebeard’s point of view, portraying the man as a good-hearted (if somewhat simpleminded) nobleman whose reputation has been sullied by the duplicitous women he’s married. Bela Bartok’s opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle (1911), libretto by Bela Balasz, presented a brooding, philosophical Bluebeard, reflecting on the impossibility of lasting love between men and women.

  As fairy tales were relegated to the nursery in the twentieth century, Bluebeard was seldom included (for obvious reasons) in collections aimed at children. And yet the story did not disappear from popular culture; it moved from the printed page to film. As early as 1901, George Méliès directed a silent film version titled Barbe-bleue that manages, despite cinematic limitations, to be both comic and horrific. Other film treatments over the years included Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife directed by Ernst Lubitsch, starring Gary Cooper and Claudette Colbert (1938); Bluebeard directed by Edgar G. Ulmer, starring John Carradine (1944); Bluebeard directed by Edward Dmytryk, starring Richard Burton (1972); and Bluebeard’s Castle, a film version of Bartok’s opera, directed by Sir Georg Solti (1981). In addition to these direct interpretations of the Bluebeard legend, Maria Tatar makes a case that Bluebeard is a precursor of cinematic horror. “In ‘Bluebeard,’ as in cinematic horror,” she writes, “we have not only a killer who is propelled by psychotic rage, but also the abject victims of his serial murders, along with a ‘final girl’ (Bluebeard’s wife), who either saves herself or arranges her own rescue. The ‘terrible place’ of horror, a dark, tomblike site that harbors grisly evidence of the killer�
��s derangement, manifests itself as Bluebeard’s castle.”8 Marina Warner concurs. “Bluebeard,” she notes, “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 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.”9