Tales of Bluebeard and his Wives from Late Antiquity to Postmodern Times by Shuli Barzilai (review)

“Be bold, be bold, but not too bold”: so states the inscription above the door of the murderous suitor’s castle in “Mr Fox,” a variant of the Bluebeard tale (Joseph Jacobs, English Fairy Tales [Nutt, 1890], 148). In this version, Lady Mary’s bravery pays off when she crosses the threshold, discovers the bloodied corpses of the women that Mr Fox has lured to their doom, and outwits her prospective husband. A short study that attempts to traverse Bluebeard tales in international contexts from antiquity to the twentieth century requires its own type of boldness: this time of a historical and critical kind. For this reader, Shuli Barzilai’s focus here is too diffuse, and the psychoanalytic and structuralist approaches too limiting, for this ambitious gamble to pay off.

Recent controversies over the origin of fairy tales (as the products of early modern print culture, as argued by Ruth B. Bottigheimer, or as narratives that can be dated back to antiquity, as maintained by Graham Anderson) are not explicitly addressed here, but the book subscribes to the latter model. The author, quoting Anderson’s Fairytale in the Ancient World (2000), writes “it is commonplace but erroneous to assume ‘a folktale changes every time it is told and hence quickly distorts into something completely different’”; such distortion “does not always occur, especially if the tale has a ‘clear, logical and naturally stable structure’” (15–16). A number of fairy tale scholars and historians of reading might have problems with the notion that such historically situated reinventions constitute a distortion rather than an evolving tradition, and the understanding of folktales as naturally stable narrative units certainly leads to some bold claims.

The book’s opening chapter, which argues that Bluebeard begins with the late antique Midrashic commentaries on the Book of Genesis, offers a thoughtful feminist reading of these commentaries, and of the use of the parable “The Snake Charmer’s Wife” in exegetical writings on Genesis, but is not explicitly focused on the Bluebeard tale. The approach is certainly original, but the Genesis narrative of the Fall, the tale of a wife who inserts her hand into her husband’s forbidden jar of snakes and scorpions, and Charles Perrault’s La Barbe Bleue (1697) hardly constitute evidence of a stable text, even if they share misogynistic assumptions about female curiosity. For if “the snake has been internalized in this version of the ancient tale,” and “there is no third party who tempts the woman” (16), can La Barbe Bleue really be described as a “version” of “The Snake Charmer’s Wife” at all?

This interest in very loose structural parallels rather than historical lines of influence is apparent throughout, and means that readers looking for a focused analysis of this tale’s reappropriations in print would be more likely to turn to Maria Tatar’s Secrets Beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and his Wives (2004), which also takes on a number of the same writers and texts (including works by Charles Dickens, Angela Carter, and Margaret Atwood). Tales of Bluebeard, in contrast, makes an historical leap from its openings in antiquity to focus on the Victorian period, exploring uses of fairy tale motifs by Dickens, William Thackeray, and Anne Thackeray Ritchie, before tackling twentieth-century works by Carter and Atwood. The reason for the choice of these writers (and for the frequent veering away from Bluebeard motifs into other territory) is not entirely apparent, and for more historically-minded Victorian specialists, the use of biographical details to make psychoanalytic assumptions may feel anachronistic.

Dickens’s Captain Murderer, a cannibalistic husband who makes pies of a succession of wives, first appears in “Nurse’s Tales” (1860) in All the Year Round, but this print context goes unmentioned. Rather than exploring Dickens’s two-dimensional villain as a shrewd hybrid of fairy tale and popular journalism, Barzilai invests him...