Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies

5. "Be Bold, Be Bold, But Not Too Bold": Double Agents and Bluebeard's Plot

5 "BE BOLD, BE BOLD, BUT NOT TOO BOLD" DOUBLE AGENTS AND BLUEBEARD'S PLOT NOWADAYS BLUEBEARD'S NAME evokes the image of a man with a dark secret, a number of murdered wives, and a bloodstained key. Everybody knows that. But perhaps because "Bluebeard "^ gruesome theme is not deemed appropriate for children, now considered the primary audience for classicfairy tales, people are not as generally familiar with the details of the homonymous tale. Published in the 1697 Histoires ou contes du temps passe, Charles Perrault's "La Barbe-Bleue" tells the story of a rich man with a blue beard, "which made him look so ugly and terrifying that therewas not a woman or girl who did not run away from him."1 The first part of the tale describes the "beauties and riches" that convince the younger daughter of a "lady of quality" to marry him. (An older sister, Anne, becomes her companion.) A month later, Bluebeard announces he must go on a journey. Leaving his young bride with keys to all his apartments and jewels, he warns her not to enter "the little room at the end of the long corridor on the ground floor." While her neighbors explore the mansion, the girl breaks her promise and rushes to unlock the door to the forbidden room. Inside, "the floor was covered with clotted blood of the dead bodies of several women suspended from the walls. They were all the former wives of Bluebeard, who had cut their throats one after the other. She thought she would die from fright, and the key to the room fell from her hand." No matter how hard she tries to clean it, the tell-tale key remains stained with blood. Returning earlier than she expected, Bluebeard condemns his wife to death. During the quarter of an hour she is given to pray, the "Be Bold, Be Bold, But Not Too Bold" 105 young wife and her sisterAnne hope for the arrival of their brothers who are to visit that very day.Just as Bluebeard is about to cut off the young woman's head, the two brothers burst through the gate and kill him. The widow shares her wealth with her siblings and marries "a worthyman" who makes her "forget the miserable time she had spent with Blue Beard" (Zipes, Beauties 31-35) .* Charles Perrault appended two morals to "La Barbe-Bleue," which one translation givesas: "Ladies, you should never pry,— You'll repent it by and by!" and "Then the husband ruled as king. Now it's quite a different thing; Be his beard what, hue it may— Madam has a word to say!" The first message warns women to resist curiosity which equals trouble; the second chides men for losing their authoritythanks to the feminine "vice" of talk. In Johnson's translation, both morals nostalgically look back to a time of innocence and absolute male power and both blame women for the change. Though just as playfully ironic, Perrault's French text is not as explicit in its woman-blaming. As Zipes's more literal translation shows, Perrault 's first moralite seems to be a universal, non-gendered warning : "Curiosity, in spite of its charm, / Too often causes a great deal of harm," though it eventually turns to the second sex or sexe, euphemistically rendered as "ladies" in translation. The second moral does not refer to women's talking, and it does admit that Bluebeard's behavior is unacceptable: "No longer are husbands so terrible, / Or insist on having the impossible." The French text does however betray a certain insecurity about household power: "And whatever color his beard maybe, / It's difficult to knowwho the master be." Whether in a more crudely sexist translation or in the original,Perrault's two morals still uphold absolute patriarchy as a "paradise," lost when women's curiosity opened the door to the bloody chamber.3 106 Chapter 5 As the most authoritative version of "Bluebeard," it should not be surprising that Perrault's narrative has led literary retellers and commentators, especially in the nineteenth century, to identify the tale's central theme and crime as women's curiosity. The keyis the central motif; women are targeted as the primary audience for the tale's apparent cautionary message. In The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales and in Off'with Their Heads! Maria Tatar has recently shown how this interpretation...