A Case of Negative Mise en Abyme: Margaret Atwood and the Grimm Brothers

In 1697 Charles Perrault published a tale entitled "La Barbe bleue"—"Bluebeard" in his Histoires ou contes du temps passé. It was a gothic kind of fairy tale with only one fée or magical element: a small telltale key. The key belonged to a mysterious gentleman endowed with great wealth, a splendid many-roomed mansion, and a dreadful blue beard that "made him look . . . ugly and terrible" (732). This gentleman, despite the aforementioned beard, succeeded in persuading several beautiful women to marry him. But each one in turn disappeared, and "nobody knew what had become of them" (732). In fact, after a month or so of marriage, Bluebeard always put his brides to the test and, unhappily, they all succumbed to an epistemological drive or, less grandiosely, to curiosity—a fatal flaw in women—and opened the door to a room they were expressly forbidden to enter: "the floor was all covered with clotted blood that reflected the dead bodies of several women suspended from the walls" (733). Bluebeard never let his disobedient brides off the hook, as the last one discovered when she, too, failed the bride-test and dropped the small key on the floor: "In vain she washed it. . . . But the blood remained, for the key was enchanted" (733). With this tangible evidence of her insubordination (or, if we follow the Freudian devotions of Bruno Bettelheim, with this proof of her sexual infidelity), Bluebeard sharpened his saber and determined that she should take her place among the other wives in his collection. And so she would indeed have done, had it not been for the timely arrival of her brave brothers who put an end to Bluebeard's career: "they passed their swords through his body and left him dead on the spot" (735). Now you might think the lesson of such a cautionary tale is that husbands should learn to control their tempers, or that cutthroats deserve to die by the sword, but Perrault addresses his conclusion, a moralité, to the ladies in the audience: "Curiosity, in spite of its appeal, / May often cost a horrendous deal. /. . . With due respect, oh ladies, the thrill is slight: /. . . the price one pays is never right" (735).

A little over a century later, in 1812, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published several versions of the Bluebeard tale in their Kinder- und Hausmärchen. One of these tales, "Blaubart" ("Bluebeard"), the Grimm Brothers omitted from subsequent editions of the book because of its French origins. The remaining two tales, "The Robber Bridegroom" and "Fitcher's Bird," were deemed good (or Germanic) enough for their historical-national agenda.¹ Together with Perrault's conte, these three tales have become the most renowned Western European variants of "Bluebeard" and continue to be absorbed into and transformed by a wide variety of other writings.

Thus in 1983 the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood published a long short story entitled "Bluebeard's Egg" in her Bluebeard's Egg and Other Stories. It presents a contemporary, realistic retelling of the Bluebeard tale from the perspective of the last wife. That is, it differs from traditional Blaubartmärchen in length (33 pages), in setting (the present day), in generic mode (no magic), and in mediation (the one who sees). Instead of the omniscience of most fairy-tale narrators, Atwood uses restricted internal focalization or what we formerly called, before Gérard Genette and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, a "third-person center of consciousness." As in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the protagonist is the story's only focalizer, and her stylistic register is mimetically rendered.² "Bluebeard's Egg," like Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, takes place on the day a woman gives a party and follows her mundane activities as well as her mental movements up until and including the party itself. Toward the end of the parties, both Atwood's Sally and Woolf's Clarissa Dalloway experience a revelation or "epiphany," albeit a very different kind of revelation, that marks a turning point in each life. Furthermore, just...