Speranza
THE ATTRACTIONS OF "BLUEBEARD": THE ORIGINS AND FORTUNES OF A FOLKTALE
Let us revise the attractions of "Barbablù" and the origins and fortunes of a folk tale.
A. S. Byatt writes in "The Story of the Eldest Princess":
"You
had the sense to see you were caught in a story, and the sense to see that you
could change it to another one for many things may and do happen, stories
change themselves, and these stories are not histories and have not
happened."
Villa Cather once declared:
"There
are only two or three human stories, and they go
on repeating themselves fiercely as if they had never happened before."
Although each of us might have different candidates for those two to three "stories," many of us would come up with the usual suspects: the stories of Oedipus
or Hamlet, Eve or Cassandra, Odysseus or Jack, Cinderella or Snow White.
Much
has been written about the seemingly timeless and UNIVERSAL (as Grice would have it)nature of these
master narratives, which we encounter in print, on screen, and in performance as
poems, myths, films, operas, fairy tales, and plays.
Yet the stories rarely REPEAT
themselves.
Certainly not word for word.
But often not even idea for
idea.
Instead the stories are constantly altered, adapted, transformed, and tailored to
fit new cultural contexts.
They remain alive precisely because they are never
exactly the same, always doing new cultural work, mapping out different
developmental paths, assimilating new anxieties and desires, giving us high
pathos, low comedy, and everything in between.
If Cather recognised the
resilience of certain "stories", she also implicated that we are doomed to endlessly
repeat history through certain plots.
But if we tell one of these "human
stories" -- say, Cinderella -- or Rossini, "La Cenerentola" -- or Jack and the Beanstalk -- to someone from another
part of the world, it quickly becomes evident that traditional "stories" exist in
many different versions, in at least as many versions as there are cultures and
in perhaps as many versions as there are people who know the tale.
Fairy tales,
for example, have an extraordinary cultural elasticity, rarely repeating
themselves even when recited verbatim from a book.
Every voice puts a new
inflection on each episode.
Their expansive range and imaginative play are so
powerful that they never seem to bore us.
Italo Calvino once said of
story-telling that the tale is beautiful only when something is added to it.
Each telling of the tale seems to recharge its power, making it crackle and
hiss with renewed narrative energy.
Or as Tolkien, sometime professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, once put it, drawing on a different
metaphorical regime, "the Cauldron of Story has always been boiling, and to it
have continually been added new bits, dainty and undainty."
Our essay focuses on one of the tenacious cultural stories to which Cather refers, showing
how it has repeated itself but also reinvented itself over the course of the
past centuries, taking unexpected twists and turns as it makes its way into
different cultural settings.
"Barbablù," a tale that is now found between the
covers of fairy-tale collections for children, began as adult entertainment.
And
although it seems to have fallen into a cultural black hole, it has left
profound traces on our cultural memory.
Even if many of us are supremely unaware
of it as a story -- we may not be able to reproduce it the way that we can recite
Hamlet's dilemmas or identify the rivalries dividing Cinderella's household, just having left the opera theatre after a performance of Rossini's La Cenerentola -- we
are familiar with many of its chief ingredients:
(a) a barbaric husband
(b) a curious
wife -- in the sense that SHE is curious, and not that there is anything curious about her.
(c) a forbidden chamber
(d) a blood-stained key -- with blood as symbol for defloration, and
(e) corpses in the closet -- the proverbial skeleton.
The "Barbablù" plot, in its standard folkloric form, features a sinister
figure whose wealth wins him the hand of two sisters, each of whom mysteriously
disappears.
The third and youngest in the trio of young women reluctantly
marries Barbablù, who arranges a test of her fidelity when he hands over the
keys to all the rooms in his villa but expressly forbids entering one remote
chamber.
As soon as Barbablù leaves for an extended journey, Giuditta rushes to
the forbidden chamber, opens the door, and finds her husband's three
previous wives.
A stained key, a blood-spattered egg, a withered flower, or a
bruised apple betray Giuditta's transgression to Barbablù, who, in a
murderous rage, is about to behead her, when her brothers come to the
rescue and cut Bluebeard down with their swords.
This is the 'happy ending' version -- chosen by Perreault. If feminine curiosity is focused on, his wickedness is justly punished.
The story of Barbablù and
his wife Giuditta has a cultural edge so sharp that it continues to be recast, rewritten,
and reshaped even though the name "Barbablù", or "Barba azzurra", often elicits a blank stare or an
erroneous association with piracy on the high seas (the wealthy Frenchman is
often confused with the sea-faring Blackbeard).
Despite the prominent position
that "Barbablù" occupies in the cultural archive of Europe -- the number of
writers and artists with Barbablù skeletons in their closets is
staggering -- most adults seem only dimly aware of the plot outlines of the story.
Dismissed as an obscure tale belonging to another time and place, it seems of
little more than antiquarian interest.
And it is! Perreault's interest was ALREADY antiquarian in spirit! Surely it was a 'modern' story for him, rather than a Graeco-Roman classical one, even if we can find links with the story of GIOVE (and the hidden chamber of his thunderbolts, the key to which was known only to Minerva, or the story of 'il vaso di Pandora').
How do we account for the way in
which "Barbablù" has kept so powerful a hold on our imagination, yet at the
same time fallen into cultural oblivion?
Charles Dickens offers a clue in his
childhood memories of a story called "Captain Murderer," which was told to him
by a nurse-maid incongruously named Mercy.
This Captain Murderer, as the adult
Dickens realised, was an "offshoot of the Barbablù family," and he terrorised
the young Dickens over a period of many years.
That "Captain Murderer" was not
really a story for children becomes evident in Dickens's account of his response
to its telling:
Hundreds of times did I hear this legend of Captain
Murderer, in my early youth, and added hundreds of times was there a mental
compulsion upon me in bed, to peep in at his window as the dark twin peeped, and
to revisit his horrible house, and look at him in his blue and spotty and
screaming stage, as he reached from floor to ceiling and from wall to wall.
The
young woman who brought me acquainted with Captain Murderer had a fiendish
enjoyment of my terrors, and used to begin, I remember -- as a sort of
introductory overture -- by clawing the air with both hands, and uttering a long
low hollow groan.
So acutely did I suffer from this ceremony in combination with
this infernal Captain, that I sometimes used to plead I thought I was hardly
strong enough and old enough to hear the story again just yet.
But, she never
spared me one word of it.
"Barbablù" is one of those stories that did NOT
travel well in the great eighteenth-century migration of fairy tales from the
fireside and parlour to the nursery.
Aline Kilmer declares:
The ugly story of the famous or infamous
French Count" should be "cast out of the society of fairy-stories."
"It is not folklore but yellow-journalism."
A tale that centres on
marriage and focuses on the friction between one partner who has something to
hide and another who wants to know too much, it did not prove attractive to tale
collectors, who were eager to assemble stories that would appeal to adult
sensibilities about what was appropriate reading for children.
And so while "Barbablù" -- an anomaly among "Little Red Riding Hood," "La Cenerentola" and "Jack
and the Beanstalk" -- got lost on its way from adult story-telling cultures to
children's books, the tale managed to lead a powerful literary after-life without
our ever being fully aware that its constituent parts belong to a narrative
whole.
In his autobiography "Black Boy", Richard Wright tells us exactly why
"Barbablù" is a story that has refused to go away.
"Once upon a time there was
a man named Barbablù"
These are the words read by a "coloured
school-teacher" named Ella from a book containing a story called "Bluebeard and
His Seven Wives."
In this coming-of-age portion of Wright's autobiography, we
learn how the folk tale about Barbablù introduces the boy growing up in the Jim
Crow South to the world of adult secrets and intrigue.
The European folk tale
about Bluebeard elicits what is described as a "total emotional response."
When
Wright's grand-mother cuts the narrative short, denouncing the tale as "the devil's
work," the boy is distraught.
"I hungered for the sharp, frightening,
breath-taking, almost painful excitement that the story had given me."
The
"whispered story of deception and murder" feeds a "thirst for violence" and "for
intrigue, for plotting, for secrecy, for bloody murders."
What Wright
discovers as a boy is that narrative can elicit a somatic response, sending a
chill up his spine and taking his breath away.
Nothing is as irresistible as
melo-dramma, as the Italians aptly call it, and the "Devil's work" has always proved more compelling than pious
feelings and saintly behavior.
"Bluebeard and His Seven Wives," with its solemn
mysteries, grim carnage, and damsel in distress, produces the suspense of all
stories in which an enigma about a killer must be solved by one of his potential
victims.
And by casting the killer as husband and the victim as wife, it adds
the ingredients of intimacy, vulnerability, trust, and betrayal to make the
story all the more captivating.
It is above all the pathology of the
husband -- "intrigue," "plotting," "secrecy," and "murder" -- that captures the
young Wright's attention.
"Bluebeard and His Seven Wives" fascinates because it
stages secret anxieties and desires taken to a criminal extreme -- anxieties and
desires that are foreign yet also fascinating to those on the threshold of
becoming adults.
Beyond that, it produces in exaggerated terms what the young
often long for in literature, and sometimes in life as well: not Wordsworth's
sweet serenity of books but the excitement and revelation that keep them on the
edge of their seats while they are reading.
"Barbablù" and its variants
enjoyed widespread circulation in European cultures, and the tale is broadly
disseminated in England, France, Germany, Italy, and Scandinavian countries,
even reaching into Slavic traditions -- and Hungary: hence Bartok (his librettist saw the Dukas-Maeterlinck melodramma in Paris).
Via trade routes, the story found its way
to Africa, India, and Jamaica, where Barbablù sported beards of different hues,
sometimes red, occasionally green, and even blond.
In Italy Barbablù is a
devil who hires women to do his laundry.
In Germany Barbablù is a sinister
wizard who dismembers his brides.
In Norway he is a mountain troll who twists
off the heads of women who spurn his advances.
It was in France -- in BRETAGNA, specifically -- that the story
seems to have originated and taken particular hold, and Paul Delarue, in his
magisterial study of French folktales, lists dozens of versions of the tale.
Margaret Atwood once warned that we should never ask for the "true story,"
for it is always "vicious and multiple and untrue."
Nothing could be closer to
the truth about folklore.
When it comes to folk tales, there is no authoritative,
original version.
We have only variants, "multiple" and "untrue," each
unfaithful to the previous telling and inflecting the plot in a slightly
different way.
And yet all these variants -- oral, literary, or a hybrid of the
two -- can lay claim to unwavering fidelity to their own time and place.
As Italo
Calvino put it, while he was preparing "Italian Folktales" for publication, "I too
have the right to create variants."
In every sense, we are right to
perpetually reinvent the story, for the true one fails to ring true to our
cultural values.
"Why do you need it?" Atwood shrewdly asks.
And yet
understanding how "Barbablù" has engaged in shape shifting over the centuries
challenges us to think about the ways in which stories that we think of as
"timeless" and "universal" constantly have to reinvent themselves in order to
ensure their survival.
For that reason, we want to look at multiple untrue
stories that have emerged over the past three centuries.
We should begin with Charles
Perrault's "La Barbe Bleue," for no other Bluebeard story has been invested with
as much cultural authority as this French variant from Tales of Mother Goose
(1697).
So let us focus on Carlo Perrault's "Barbablù" and its lessons.
"Bluebeard" made
its literary debut in a collection that drew on a culture of oral story-telling
for adults to craft stories that would appeal to children.
For the peasants
who distracted themselves from the monotony of manual labour through gossip,
banter, and tale telling, "Barbablù" did not fall short of the entertainment
mark.
In an age without radios, televisions, or other electronic diversions,
farm labourers and household workers demanded fast-paced narratives with heavy
doses of burlesque comedy, high drama, scatological humor, and freewheeling
violence.
"Barbablù" seems to have escaped the heavy editing to which Perrault
and the Grimms had subjected stories like "Little Red Riding Hood" and
"Rapunzel" (the one story had featured a striptease performed for a lecherous
wolf, the other a young woman wondering why her clothes were too tight after
indulging in daily romps with a prince up in her tower).
Perrault's "Barbablù" retains the dark mystery, suspense, and horror of versions told by adults to
other adults around the fireside.
It does not mince its words about the bloodied
bodies in Bluebeard's chamber of horrors and invests much of its narrative
energy in exposing the title figure's wife to terrors of extraordinary vividness
and power.
Just who was Bluebeard and how did he get such a bad name?
As
Anatole France reminds us in his story "The Seven Wives of Bluebeard," Charles
Perrault composed "the first biography of this seigneur" and established his
reputation as an "accomplished villain" and the "most perfect model of cruelty
that ever trod the earth."
Cultural historians have been quick to claim that
Perrault's "Bluebeard" is based on fact, that it broadcasts the misdeeds of
various noblemen, among them Cunmar of BRETAGNA and Gilles de Rais.
But
neither Cunmar the Accursed, who decapitated his pregnant wife, Santa Trifina, nor
Gilles de Rais, the marshal of France who was hanged in 1440 for murdering
hundreds of children, presents himself as a definitive model for Bluebeard,
though both were frequently invoked in nineteenth-century pantomimes and plays
to assure audiences that there was a certain historical truth to the fairy-tale
tyrant, and they continue to act as narrative magnets when the story is retold.
With his ghoulish forbidden chamber and his magical key that betrays intruders,
Bluebeard remains a figure constructed as a collective fantasy, even if some of
his features are drawn from bits and pieces of historical realities that embed
themselves in the folk narrative.
Like the Russian Baba Yaga, the British
giants, the glaestigs of the Scottish Highlands, or the rakshasas of India, Barbablù
is firmly anchored in the domain of folkloric fright.
Perrault's "Bluebeard"
recounts the story of a man's courtship and his marriage to a woman whose
desire for wealth conquers her feelings of revulsion for blue beards.
After a
month of married life, Bluebeard declares his intention to undertake a journey.
In a seemingly magnanimous gesture, he gives his new bride keys that will open
the rooms of the villa and provide unlimited access to strongboxes holding
gold and silver and to caskets filled with jewels.
But he is not willing to
share everything.
Handing over the key to a small, remote chamber, he tells his
wife:
"Open anything you want. Go anywhere you wish. But I absolutely forbid you
to enter that little room, and if you so much as open it a crack, there will be
no limit to my anger."
(One wonders: it would have been wiser for him to KEEP the key).
"Plagued by curiosity," Bluebeard's wife does not
wrestle long with her conscience:
"The temptation was so great that she was
unable to resist it."
She opens the door to the forbidden chamber and finds a
pool of clotted blood in which are reflected the bodies of Bluebeard's dead
wives, hanging from the wall.
Horrified, she drops the key and is unable to
remove the telltale bloodstain left on it.
Bluebeard returns home to discover
the evidence of his wife's transgression and is about to execute her for her act
of disobedience, when his wife's brothers, summoned by "Sister Anne" (who has
evidently been in the villa all along), come to the rescue and cut him down
with their swords.
Perrault's "Bluebeard" frames the conflict between
husband and wife as a conflict between the familiar and the strange, between the
family (mother, sister, and two brothers) and a foreigner (one whose blue beard
marks him as an exotic outsider).
From the start, mother and sisters alike are
resistant to the thought of marriage to a man "so ugly and terrifying that there
was not a woman or girl who did not run away from him."
But seduced by
Bluebeard's wealth and power, she resolves to marry.
It
is also she who turns to her family for rescue, first to "Anna," pleading
with her to keep watch for the two brothers who were to visit her that very day.
Anna receives a reward for her services in the form of a dowry.
The
brothers are promoted to the rank of captain after their sister pays their
commissions.
This is a narrative that has less at stake in a successful
resolution to the marriage plot than in a serene closure that installs the
heroine's immediate family in comfortable material circumstances.
Perrault's
title raises immediate questions.
What is the significance of the blue beard to
the husband, to the wife, and to their story?
Although the colour blue is encoded
today with powerful cultural associations -- it is often seen as the colour of the
marvelous, the distant, the dreamy, and the exotic -- it no doubt resonated with
earlier readers in a different way.
From Michel Pastoureau's magisterial study
of the colour blue, we know that, during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the
colour blue experienced a stunning rise in its fortunes.
No longer considered a
"second-rate colour" as it had been in antiquity, blue came to be considered both
"aristocratic" and "fashionable."
The French monarchy contributed in powerful
ways to the developing taste for blue by using the colour in its coat of arms, at
coronation ceremonies, and at jousts and tournaments, and thereby turning it
into what Pastoureau calls "the color of kings, princes, nobles, and
patricians."
The blue beard of Charles Perrault's fairy-tale figure can be
seen as a mark of aristocracy, a sign that this man of means is affiliated with
royalty and aristocracy, with both the kings of fairy tales and the royalty of
seventeenth-century France.
Although Perrault's Bluebeard is not designated as
an aristocrat, his literary progeny were, in many cases, elevated to the
knighthood.
"Ritter Blaubart" becomes a standard German designation for
Bluebeard, with "Ritter" the equivalent of "Knight".
One critic has seen
Bluebeard's elevation in social rank as symptomatic of a growing desire to
politicize Perrault's story and to define Bluebeard's tyranny in class terms.
The blue-bearded tyrant ('duca', 'principe', in Italian) becomes, in the course of the nineteenth century, an
aristocratic blueblood.
The beardedness of Perrault's celebrated autocrat
is also revealing.
As Marina Warner tells us, beards were well out of fashion
in the court of the Sun King, and Bluebeard's facial hair signals his status as
"an outsider, a libertine, and a ruffian."
Barbe itself seems related to
barbare, or barbarian, even if etymological investigations do not bear out the
connection.
Beards, as Warner further notes, came increasingly to define the
male in a priapic mode," and for her, Bluebeard's name "stirs associations with
sex, virility, male readiness and desire."
"Bluebeard" deviates from
fairy-tale norms by turning the groom into an agent of villainy.
Most fairy
tales that end in marriage begin with families in crisis, in homes that prove
inhospitable, with hostile parents and siblings.
Mothers, fathers, and same-sex
siblings often seem more interested in stirring up trouble, creating conflicts,
and standing in the way of a happy marriage than in facilitating a "happily ever
after" ending.
Whether we consider Snow White's mother (turned into a stepmother
in the Grimms' version of the story), La Cenerentola's stepsisters, Donkeyskin's
father, or Beauty's sisters, it becomes clear that the path to a happy marriage
is paved with maternal envy, sibling rivalry, and paternal lust.
"Barbablù," unlike the fairy tales that form an acknowledged part of the European cultural heritage,
turns the groom into the source of danger and endorses fidelity to parents and
siblings even as it writes large the theme of marital infidelity.
Folklorists have shown surprising interpretive confidence in reading
Perrault's "Bluebeard" as a story about a woman's failure to respond to the
trust invested in her.
The homicidal history of the husband often takes a back
seat to the disobedience of the wife.
"Bloody key as sign of disobedience" -- this
is the motif that folklorists consistently single out as the defining moment of
the tale.
The blood-stained key points to a double transgression, one that is
both moral and sexual.
For one critic it becomes a sign of "marital infidelity";
for another it marks the heroine's "irreversible loss of her virginity".
For a
third it stands as a sign of "defloration."
If we recall that the bloody
chamber in Bluebeard's mansion is strewn with the corpses of previous wives,
this reading of the blood-stained key as a marker of sexual infidelity becomes
willfully wrong-headed in its effort to vilify Bluebeard's wife.
Furthermore, as
one shrewd reader points out, Blue Beard (alla Grice) wanted his new wife to find the
corpses of his former wives -- he was relying on what Grice calls counter-suggestion.
Barbablù does desire the new bride to discover their mutilated
corpses.
He does desire her disobedience.
Otherwise he wouldn't have GIVEN her the
key to the forbidden closet in the first place.
He wouldn't have left on his so-called business
trip.
And he wouldn't have stashed the dead Mrs. Blue Beards in the closet in
the first place.
Transparently, it was a setup.
And yet from the start,
the finger of blame has unmistakably pointed in the direction of Bluebeard's
wife.
Perrault's "Barbablù" highlights the curiosity of its female protagonist
in a number of ways.
First of all, the wife loses no time getting to the room
forbidden to her.
While her frivolous female neighbours are busy proving
themselves to be true daughters of Eve by rummaging through closets, admiring
themselves in full-length mirrors, and declaring their feelings of envy for so
much wealth, Bluebeard's wife is so overcome with curiosity that she nearly
breaks her neck running down the stairs to open the door prohibited to her.
Although she does briefly reflect on the harm that could come to her as a
result of disobedience, she quickly succumbs to temptation and opens the
door.
Here is what she sees.
The floor was entirely covered with clotted blood,
and in it were reflected the dead bodies of three women that hung along
the walls.
These were all the wives of Bluebeard, whose throats he had cut, one
after another.
Perrault devotes a good deal of space to judgmental asides
about the envy, greed, curiosity, and disobedience of Bluebeard's wife and her
intimates.
Perrault als remains diffident about framing any sort of indictment of a
man who has cut the throats of his three previous wives.
To be sure, it may seem superfluous (alla Grice, "Do not be more informative than necessary") to
comment on Bluebeard's character once the corpses of his three previous wives come to light.
But, unless we take the view that this is a story of dangerous curiosity and homicide (as does one nineteenth- century British playwright), the
censorious attitude toward the curiosity of Bluebeard's wife seems more than
odd.
What is at stake in this story, Perrault suggests, is the inquisitive
instinct of the wife rather than the homicidal impulses of the husband.
We can imagine the thoughts of Bluebeard's
wife as she muses on how Perrault and others distorted her motives and turned
her salutary inquisitiveness into a sin of indulgence.
"Sacred curiosity, an
ephemeral pleasure!" Giuditta declares with indignation.
"The curiosity that
saved me forever when my lord went off on a journey, leaving me with a huge
bunch of keys and forbidding me on pain of death to use the smallest of them,
the curiosity that drove me to uncover the mystery of the locked room."
This
is a heroine who recognizes that ignorance is NOT bliss, that it might NOT be
wise to live in a castle with a room full of dead women hanging from hooks on
the walls, their throats slit, living with the man who had been the husband of
those women.
To those who insist that the wives were all victims of their own
curiosity, Bluebeard's last wife suggests that they consider the fate of the
first wife.
Here is a big paradox.
What was the first wife one curious about, what could she have SEEN?
While Anatole France tells us that Bluebeard was drawn as a perfect model
of cruelty, it was his wife who came to be positioned as a perfect model of
disobedience and infidelity.
Was Perrault's story, as the evidence suggests,
complicit in vilifying the wife, or have critics of the story conspired to turn Giuditta
into a figure who, looking for trouble, ends up creating it?
Perrault, who
recognized the entertainment value of the stories between the pages of Tales of
Mother Goose, believed that the tales had a mission beyond mere diversion.
In
his preface to the collection, he made it clear that each tale had a concealed
lesson embedded in it.
To ensure that those lessons were not buried so deeply
that readers might fail to unearth them, Perrault added moralities of his
own -- moral glosses cast in heavy-handed doggerel.
"Barbablù," as it turns out,
was a tricky case, one so symptomatic of how fairy tales send mixed messages
that Perrault, perhaps unwittingly, crafted what appear to be two very different
readings of his own story.
The first of the two morals concerns the perils
of curiosity and points out the high price of satisfying that urge.
Curiosity is
coded as a feminine trait, one that has its attractions, not the least of
which is the pleasure it provides.
The moral encapsulates a concise
cost-benefit analysis alla Grice, pointing out that the high price for satisfying curiosity NEVER
compensates for the small dose of pleasure afforded by it.
Restraint,
constructed as the product of reason and logic, is consequently affiliated with
the authority of the male narrator, who has marked its opposite as a supremely
feminine trait.
The other moral appended to "Barbablù" is less a moral than
a disavowal of any lessons transmitted about husbands.
If women's curiosity
formed the subject of the first moral, men's behavior would logically serve as
the subject of the second moral.
One would hence expect a commentary on
Bluebeard's vices to follow the meditation on the failings of his wife.
While
the wife's curiosity is seen as a quintessentially feminine trait, Bluebeard's
behavior is framed as exceptional, deviating from the norm of masculine
behaviour.
The second moral insists that no husband today has the terrifying
qualities of a Bluebeard.
It invalidates the notion that men could draw any
lessons at all from Barbablù's behaviour.
Quite to the contrary, males today are obliged to
ingratiate themselves with their wives, and, these days, it is not hard to tell
which of the two is "master."
Perrault's two morals are not only nearly
mutually exclusive (the one prescribing correct conduct by endorsing a limit to
women's innate desire for knowledge, the other proclaiming that women are free
agents and reign supreme), they are also not at all congruent with the story's
plot.
But for Perrault, it was not unusual to preach about matters not practiced
in the tales.
We need only turn to his "Donkeyskin," a tale about a girl who has
to ward off her father's incestuous advances, to get a clear sense of how the
lessons attached to the tales of Mother Goose do not square with the facts of
each plot.
Here is the conclusion to the account of Donkeyskin's flight from her
father and of her marriage to a prince:
Evidently, the moral of this tale
implies it is better for a child to expose oneself to hardships than to neglect
one's duty.
Indeed, virtue may sometimes seem ill fated, but it is
always crowned with success.
Of course, reason, even at its strongest, is a weak
dike against mad love and ardent ecstasy, especially if a lover is not afraid to
squander rich treasures.
Finally, we must take into account that clear
water and brown bread are sufficient nourishment for all women provided
that they have good habits, and that there is not a damsel under the skies who
does not imagine herself beautiful.
What we have here can hardly be
described as a clear sense of the moral drift to the tale.
The narrator not only
frantically disavows the issue of incest and the daughter's courage in
deflecting her father's amorous advances, but also dismantles the notion that
the story has any message at all by engaging in self-parody through the
proliferation of irrelevant messages.
In "Barbablù," Perrault uses a
somewhat different strategy to undermine the possibility of deriving a lesson
from Bluebeard's behaviour.
He alludes to the title of his collection when he
emphasizes that the story is a "tale from times past" ("un conte du temps
passé").
Located in the distant past, it is irrelevant for contemporary
audiences, since the relationship between husbands and wives today is so
completely different from the time in which the story was set.
Perrault's double
move of affirming the seductive pleasures of curiosity for all women and
emphasizing the uniquely brutal nature of a husband who lived a long time ago
set the stage for the tale's illustrators, who appear to have heeded, in
different ways, the advice embedded in the two morals.
Sunday, February 8, 2015
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