Secrets beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives (review)

The story of Bluebeard, the mysterious character with a secret past hidden in a chamber of horrors, and of his wife's curiosity, which leads to her discovery that her husband is a wife murderer, is the subject of this book. Although not frequently appearing in present-day collections of fairy tales meant for children, the story of Bluebeard and the gory contents of the chamber he forbids his wife to enter has had "a powerful literary afterlife" (13), and writers continue to explore it today.

In her study of the Bluebeard story, Maria Tatar, a literary scholar and a professor of Germanic Languages and Literature at Harvard University, demonstrates her familiarity with folklorists' conceptions of the changing nature of oral tales in response to changing cultural and temporal circumstances. The permutations of the Bluebeard story both in oral tradition and in literature seem endless, testifying to its ability to "reinvent itself" to reflect each new cultural setting. Indeed, one of the questions this book addresses is why the story of Bluebeard and his wives has appealed to so many writers, filmmakers, and illustrators, despite its decline among oral storytellers. Tatar discusses an impressive number of "texts" and offers interpretations that provide insights into timely issues that reflect their differing cultural contexts. Her very thoroughness in doing so is part of the book's value to scholars. Her clear and accessible prose will appeal to both scholars and the more general reader.

The book begins with a discussion of the texts most relevant to folklore study. Chapter 1, "The Attractions of 'Bluebeard': The Origins and Fortunes of a Folktale," focuses on Charles Perrault's "master narrative 'Bluebeard' and its relation to folkloric counterparts the world over" (7). Like most other literary renderings of the tale, Perrault's "Bluebeard" highlights the curiosity of the wife and suggests that curiosity is a distinctively feminine trait, associated here with both greed and disobedience, and possibly sexual infidelity as well. Bluebeard's barbarous acts, on the other hand, are framed as exceptional, atypical male behavior (in part by casting him as foreign and exotic and emphasizing the setting of the tale as in another time). According to Tatar, "folklorists" have also read Perrault's tale not as about the barbarous acts of the husband but primarily "as a story about a woman's failure to respond to the trust invested in her," focusing on the motif of the "bloody key as a sign of disobedience" (20). (As a folklorist, I naturally wanted to know which folklorists Tatar had in mind, but she does not name them in this book. Instead, a footnote refers the reader to her discussion of the tale in her 1987 book, The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987, 161], where the "folklorists" are identified as Bruno Bettelheim and Alan Dundes, both of whom are psychoanalytical critics who were predictably drawn to comment on such an obvious sexually charged symbol as "a bloody key.")

The "bloody key" to the door of the forbidden room is also depicted in many of the illustrations of Perrault's tale. The reproduction of numerous illustrations by various artists makes an interesting addition to Tatar's discussion of the text and supports her argument about how the tale was perceived in its time—at least by editors and illustrators of folktale collections. Over and over we see the wife, overcome by temptation and, keys in hand, opening the forbidden door. In addition to their focus on the wife's curiosity, the illustrations often manage to suggest she is greedy and acquisitive as well. Notably, the actual scene of slaughtered wives within the chamber is rarely portrayed.

But what about versions of the tale from oral tradition? Unlike Perrault's narrative, Tatar tells us, folk versions of the tale emphasize the heroine's resourcefulness, courage, and initiative in her search for knowledge that...