Bluebeard  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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Bluebeard is the title character in a famous fairy tale about a violent nobleman and his over-curious wife. It was written by Charles Perrault and first published in 1698. Charlie Chaplin plays the eponymous anti-hero of the 1947 murder farce, Monsieur Verdoux (based on the actual case of the French "Bluebeard" killer, Henri Désiré Landru).

Adaptations

The part when, while waiting for her brothers to save her, the wife asks repeatedly if they are coming has been reused and even parodied in film. The following all refer to adaptations of the full plot.

Literature

• Andrew Lang included a variant in Blue Fairy Book.

• Barbe-bleue (1866), an Opéra-bouffe composed by Jacques Offenbach, with a libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy.

• The character of Florian de Puysange in James Branch Cabell's novel The High Place is based on Bluebeard.

• In 1979, Angela Carter published an updated version of the Bluebeard story, the eponymous story in her collection, The Bloody Chamber. Carter sets the story sometime between the World Wars, and writes a first person narrative from the perspective of the young wife. Her revision has feminist undertones that bring out the story's latent themes of domestic violence and predatory sexuality, and rescues its heroine from bland fairy-tale passivity. Other feminist interpretations are given by Suniti Namjoshi in her short story "A Room of His Own".

• Donald Barthelme also wrote a characteristically brief, surreal parody of the tale, set in 1910. Published first in The New Yorker, it was included later in the collection Forty Stories.

• Francesca Lia Block writes of a modern Bluebeard, in her fairy-tale anthology, Rose and The Beast, in this version however, the girl goes because of an invitation to a party rather than being invited to live with Bluebeard (here: a young, handsome, and successful photographer), the story is also modernised however, and along with many other subtle changes the heroine is openly shown the forbidden closet. Also, Block establishes quickly that the girl must find her own escape; no sister or brothers are present to help her. Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype ISBN 0-345-40987-6

• Kurt Vonnegut's novel Bluebeard (1988), is named Bluebeard, because the main character (Rabo Karabekian) owns a potato farm on the outskirts of his property which he nailed shut when his wife died. Throughout the entire book, while Rabo tells his life story, Circe Berman continually tries to find out what is in the Potato Barn. Rabo compares the potato barn to Bluebeard, and tells the basic plot of the children's story Bluebeard. Rabo was offer 3 million dollars for what was in the Barn sight unseen, because an article leaked out claiming that he was holding a piece of art in the barn to make it more valuable when he died, and it was released. (Rabo claims this is untrue).

• In L. M. Montgomery's The Blue Castle, the heroine is told, before marrying the hero, that she must not go into a room in his house. She calls it "Bluebeard's Chamber" thereafter, although assuring him that she doesn't care if there are dead wives in there, as long as they are really dead.

• In Stephen King's novel The Shining (1977), this story is recounted by the main character Jack Torrance. It is also alluded to in King's short story "I Know What You Need".

• Bluebeard: The Play by Charles Ludlam is a comic melange of Grand Guignol and Theater of the Ridiculous.

• Several popular Victorian era burlesques and pantomimes were based on the Bluebeard story.

• In Charlotte Brontë's Victorian novel Jane Eyre, Jane comments in Chapter 11 that the third floor of Thornfield is "looking, with its two rows of small black doors all shut, like a corridor in some Bluebeard's castle."

• Bluebeard is the subject of the play by Maeterlink, Ariane et Barbe-Bleue, set as an opera by Paul Dukas (1907)

• Béla Balázs wrote the libretto for Béla Bartók's opera, Duke Bluebeard's Castle (1911-1917).

• Bluebeard is also a character in the Vertigo Comics series Fables by Bill Willingham. He has shaved off the beard, and shaves his head as well.

• Margaret Atwood uses the tale as the basis of a short story in the collection entitled Bluebeard's Egg.

• Neil Gaiman's books of short stories, Smoke and Mirrors and Fragile Things, both contain stories based on the Bluebeard tale.

• Bluebeard is a secondary character in the play Saint Joan by George Bernard Shaw, in which he is identified as Gilles de Rais, aged 25

• Alice Hoffman's novel Blue Diary is a variant of the Bluebeard story.

• Joyce Carol Oates' short story "Blue-Bearded Lover" tells the story of a woman who is supposedly Bluebeard's bride following the bride from the famous story. Unlike the typical heroine of the fairytale, this young woman remains naïve and obedient, and ends up mothering Bluebeard's children.

• Jack Brennan refers to the Bluebeard legend in Larry Niven's novel Protector when he asks Roy Truesdale not to open any doors on the artificial planetoid Kobold.

• In Seamus Heaney's poem "Blackberry-Picking" the poet likens the experience of blood from the thorns of blackberry bushes to Bluebeard's fairytale, stating 'Our hands were peppered / With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.'

• Beauty and the Beast (1991 film) A similar story (an ugly man and beautiful woman in 'love') but entirely different plot. In this film version the beast allows her free roam of the castle (after some imprisonment), but specifically forbids Belle (beauty) from entering the west wing. Curiosity gets the better of her and she investigates. The beast catches her and flies into a rage.

• Robert Coover's short story 'The Last One', available in the volume A Child Again (2005), presents a version of Bluebeard's story from Bluebeard's point of view.

• John Ringo's novel Ghost contains a scene where the main character Mike tells two women he is dating not to enter a room on his boat where he keeps various illegal weapons.

Movies and Television

• Gaslight (1944 film)

• Rebecca (film) (1940) by Hitchcock has the forbidden chamber, the past wife, and the curious current wife.

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode Ted (Buffy episode) includes the Bluebeard story as a man named Ted (played by John Ritter) who starts dating Buffy's mother. Suspicious, Buffy and friends break into his house and find the bodies of his four former wives in a closet. As a further twist, Ted turns out to be a robot.