Bluebeard

For other uses, see Bluebeard (disambiguation).

Bluebeard, his wife, and the keys in a 19th-century illustration by Gustave Doré

"Bluebeard" (French: La Barbe bleue) is a French folktale, the most famous surviving version of which was written by Charles Perrault and first published by Barbin in Paris in 1697 in Histoires ou contes du temps passé. The tale tells the story of a violent nobleman in the habit of murdering his wives and the attempts of one wife to avoid the fate of her predecessors. "The White Dove", "The Robber Bridegroom" and "Fitcher's Bird" (Also called "Fowler's Fowl") are tales similar to "Bluebeard".

Plot summary

Bluebeard is an aristocrat who has been married several times to women who have all mysteriously vanished. When Bluebeard visits his neighbor and asks to marry one of his children, the girls are terrified and get their younger sister to marry him. After hosting a wonderful banquet, he persuades her to marry him, which she does.

Bluebeard announces that he must leave the country and gives the keys of the château to his wife. She is able to open any door in the house with them, which each contain his riches, save for a room that she is never to enter. He then goes away and leaves the house in her hands. Immediately, she is overcome with the desire to see what the forbidden room holds; and, despite warnings from one of her sisters, Anne, the girl ventures into the room.

The wife immediately discovers the room is filled with blood and the corpses of his missing wives. Horrified, she drops the key and flees the room. She reveals her husband's secret to Anne, and they plan to both flee the next morning, but Bluebeard unexpectedly comes back and finds the bloody key. In a blind rage, he threatens to kill her on the spot, but she asks for one last prayer with her sister. At the last moment, as Bluebeard is about to deliver the fatal blow, the brothers of the wife and Anne arrive and kill Bluebeard. The wife inherits his fortune and castle, and has the dead wives buried. She uses the fortune to have her other siblings married, and eventually remarries herself and forgets about her horrible experience with Bluebeard.

Sources

Although best known as a folktale, the character of Bluebeard appears to derive from legends related to historical individuals in Brittany. One source is believed to have been the 15th-century Breton nobleman and later confessed serial killer Gilles de Rais. However, Gilles de Rais did not kill his wife, nor were any bodies found on his property, and the crimes for which he was convicted involved the motiveless, brutal murder of children and not a punishment for perceived betrayal.

Another possible source stems from the story of the early Breton king Conomor the Accursed and his wife Tryphine. This is recorded in a biography of St. Gildas, written five centuries after his death in the sixth century. It describes how after Conomor married Tryphine, she was warned by the ghosts of his previous wives that he murders them when they become pregnant. Pregnant, she flees; he catches and beheads her, but St. Gildas miraculously restores her to life, and when he brings her to Conomor, the walls of his castle crumble and kill him. Conomor is a historical figure, known locally as a werewolf, and various local churches are dedicated to Saint Tryphine and her son, Saint Tremeur. A third possible source of the character of Blue Beard was king of England Henry VIII, famous for killing two of his six wives. The character's blue beard is regarded as a symbol of his otherworldly origins.

Commentaries

File:Walter Crane06.jpg

Bluebeard is slain in a woodcut by Walter Crane

For Iona and Peter Opie, the tale reads as a legend imperfectly recollected. For example, a gap occurs in the narrative between the wife's entrance into the forbidden chamber and Bluebeard's unexpected return, a time when her house guests vanish without explanation, and Bluebeard's willingness to wait a quarter of an hour before slaying his wife is out of character and poorly excused. Although no earlier retelling of the story has been discovered, it may be assumed one existed.

The fatal effects of feminine curiosity have long been the subject of story and legend. Lot's wife, Pandora, and Psyche are all examples of mythic stories where women's curiosity is punished by dire consequences. In an illustrated account of the Bluebeard story by Walter Crane, when the wife is shown making her way towards the forbidden room, there is behind her a tapestry of the serpent enticing Eve into eating the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden.

In addition, hidden or forbidden chambers were not unknown in pre-Perrault literature. In Basile's Pentamerone, one tale tells of a Princess Marchetta entering a room after being forbidden by an ogress, and in The Arabian Nights Prince Agib is given a hundred keys to a hundred doors but forbidden to enter the golden door, which he does, with terrible consequences. In the story of Prince Agib, the motive is clear: the forbidden door is a test. However, in "Bluebeard", the motive is less clear. It is not explained why Bluebeard would give a key to his wife that will reveal his horrific marital past. In an Indian story, an ogress looks after a prince while disguised as a beautiful woman and tells him not to enter the Tower, Pit or Kitchen, which will reveal her. In the Tower, an old man who has been tied up by her reveals who she is, in the pit are the bones of her victims, and the Kitchen contains three magical balls which the prince uses to escape the Ogress, with the final one a fire is caused which the Ogress runs into and burns to death in.

Aarne–Thompson classification

According to the Aarne–Thompson system of classifying folktale plots, the tale of Bluebeard is type 312. Another such tale is The White Dove, an oral French variant. The type is closely related to Aarne–Thompson type 311, the heroine rescues herself and her sisters, in such tales as Fitcher's Bird, The Old Dame and Her Hen, and How the Devil Married Three Sisters. The tales where the youngest daughter rescues herself and the other sisters from the villain is in fact far more common in oral traditions than this type, where the heroine's brother rescues her. Other such tales do exist, however; the brother is sometimes aided in the rescue by marvelous dogs or wild animals.

Some European variants of the ballad Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight, Child ballad 4, closely resemble this tale. This is particularly noteworthy among some German variants, where the heroine calls for help, much like the calls to Sister Anne in Bluebeard, and is rescued by her brother.

Bluebeard's wives

It is not known why Bluebeard murdered his first bride; she could not have entered the forbidden room and found a dead wife.

In the original 1812 Kinder- und Hausmärchen by the Brothers Grimm, Wilhelm Grimm makes a very interesting handwritten comment in the book on pg XLI of the annotations: “It seems in all Märchen of Blubeard, wherein his Blutrunst [flowing of blood] has not rightly explained, the idea to be the basis of himself through bathing in blood to cure of the blue beard; as the lepers. That is also why it is written that the blood is collected in basins.”

Maurice Maeterlinck wrote extensively on Bluebeard and in his plays names at least five former wives: Sélysette from "Aglavaine et Sélysette" (1896), Alladine from "Alladine et Palomides" (1894) and both Ygraine and Bellangère from "La mort de Tintagiles" (1894), Mélisande from "Pelléas et Mélisande" and Ariane from "Ariane et Barbe-bleue" (1907).

In Jacques Offenbach's opera (1866), the five previous wives are Héloïse, Eléonore, Isaure, Rosalinde and Blanche, with the sixth and final wife being a peasant girl, Boulotte, who finally reveals his secret when he attempts to have her killed so that he can marry Princess Hermia.

Béla Bartók's opera A Kékszakállú herceg vára (1911), with the libretto by Béla Balázs names "Judith", which places her as wife number four, whereas Ariane would be wife number six, but fails to take Judith into account. Bartók's version does not name any of the wives that appear in it. Rather than retelling the original story, the libretto only uses the main characters and setting, and transforms them into a symbolist story.

Anatole France's short story "The Seven Wives of Bluebeard" names Jeanne as the last wife before Bluebeard's death.

Alfred Savoir wrote in the 1920s a play "La huitième femme de Barbe-Bleue" (Bluebeard's eighth wife) from which Sam Wood and Ernst Lubitsch produced two films, other than starting from the point of being a plus one wife of Bluebeard and that it considers Anatole France's count of his wives, this play or the films share nothing with a description or numbering of the duke's wives.

In Edward Dmytryk's film Bluebeard (1972), Baron von Sepper (Richard Burton) is an Austrian aristocrat known as Bluebeard for his blue-toned beard, and his appetite for beautiful wives. This film names an American beauty named "Anne", who discovers a vault in his castle filled with the frozen bodies of his previous wives.

Variations

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"Blue Beard" by Harry Clarke.

Other versions of Bluebeard include:

• Pantomime versions of the tale were staged at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in London as early as 1798, and famous editions there were by E. L. Blanchard in 1879 and starred Dan Leno in 1901. Many of these productions orientalized the tale by setting it in the Ottoman Empire, often giving the wife the name Fatima. The popularity of the pantomime made orientalized depictions of Bluebeard common in English illustrations throughout the 19th century and into the early 20th century.
• Ariane et Barbe-bleue by Paul Dukas
• Bluebeard's Castle by Béla Bartók and Béla Balázs
• Bluebeard by The Brothers Grimm
• Barbe-bleue by Jacques Offenbach
• Captain Murderer by Charles Dickens
• The Awful History of Bluebeard by William Makepeace Thackeray
• Bluebeard's Keys by Anne Thackeray Ritchie
• The Seven Wives of Bluebeard by Anatole France
• Bluebeard's Egg by Margaret Atwood
• Bones by Francesca Lia Block.
• Bluebeard (play), an off-Broadway comedy by Charles Ludlam
• Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut
• Strands of Bronze and Gold by Jane Nickerson
• The Bloody Chamber the eponymous story of Angela Carter's Collection
• Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi

In Charles Dickens' short story, the titular character is described as "an offshoot of the Bluebeard family", and is far more bloodthirsty than most Bluebeards: he cannibalises each wife a month after marriage. He meets his demise after his sister-in-law in revenge for the death of her sister, marries him and consumes a deadly poison just before he devours her.

In DC Comics' Fables series, Bluebeard appears as an amoral character, willing to kill and often suspected of being involved in various nefarious deeds. Bluebeard is also a character in the video game by Telltale Games based on the Fables comics, The Wolf Among Us.

In the Japanese light novel and recently adapted manga/anime Fate/Zero, Bluebeard appears as the Caster Servant, where his character largely stems from Gilles de Rais as a serial murderer of children.

Bluebeard appears as a minor darklord in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (2nd ed.) Ravenloft Accessory Darklords.

In Stephen King's The Shining, the story of Blue Beard is read by Jack to Danny as a 3-year-old, to his wife's disapproval.

In theatre

• Bluebeard, a ballet by the choreographer Marius Petipa to the music of composer Pyotr Schenk. Premiered 1896, Imperial Mariinsky Theatre, St. Petersburg, Russia.
• Bluebeard by the director and choreographer Staša Zurovac and the composer Marjan Nećak. The new ballet work in THE CROATIAN NATIONAL THEATRE IN ZAGREB is based on the famous legend of the Bluebeard finding inspiration in the novel The Seven Wives of Bluebeard of the French Nobel laureate Anatole France. The premiere - November, Friday 13, 2015.

In television

• Bluebeard is featured in Grimm's Fairy Tale Classics as part of its "Grimm Masterpiece Theater" season.
• The character Bluebeard is also featured as one of seven servants in the 2011 anime Fate/Zero.
• Bluebeard is featured in The Fairytale Detective Sandra as the villain in the episode The Forbidden Room.
• Bluebeard is featured in Scary Tales, produced by the Discovery Channel, Sony and IMAX, episode one, in 2011. Not related to the Disney collection of the same name. Revealing what might be the truth behind this scary fairy tale.

In other media

• Bluebeard featured as a villain in the comic series Fables.
• Bluebeard also featured in "The Wolf Among Us" a game based around Fables. He is voiced by Dave Fennoy.
• Bluebeard is mentioned in "Blackberry Picking", a poem by Seamus Heaney.
• Bluebeard is the title of and inspiration for a song by the Cocteau Twins. It was included on their 1993 album "Four-Calendar Café".
• Bluebeard was adapted for BBC radio4 in 2014 in a radio play called Burning Desires by Pier Productions.
• A crypt for Bluebeard and his wives is featured in the exit area of The Haunted Mansion at the Magic Kingdom park in Walt Disney World.
• In the Sisters Grimm series by Michael Buckley, Bluebeard is a minor villain and attempts to kill Ms. White.
• In the anime series FateZero, the heroic spirit Caster names himself as Bluebeard shortly after the senseless murder of a child.

In film

Several film versions of the story exist:

• Barbe-bleue (1902 film) (Blue Beard), a short film by Georges Méliès.
• Bluebeard (1944 film), a film directed by Edgar G. Ulmer, starring John Carradine.
• Secret Beyond the Door..., a 1948 contemporary adaptation by director Fritz Lang and produced by Walter Wanger, with Michael Redgrave making his Hollywood debut in the Bluebeard-inspired role and Wanger's wife Joan Bennett as Redgrave's new bride.
• Blaubart, released in the United States as Bluebeard, a 1951 German-French film directed by Christian-Jaque, starring Hans Albers
• Bluebeard (1972 film), a film directed by Edward Dmytryk, starring Richard Burton
• The French film Barbe Bleue, directed by Catherine Breillat, is modeled closely on the work by Charles Perrault.
• Monsieur Verdoux is a 1947 black comedy film directed by and starring Charles Chaplin.
• The Piano, a 1993 film directed by Jane Campion. The film also serves as a retelling of the fairytale "Bluebeard", which is hinted at further in the inclusion of "Bluebeard" as a piece of the Christmas pageant.
• Ochen' siniya boroda ["Very blue beard"] (1979 USSR animation film), modern satirical variations on the theme of blue beard
• La dernière femme de barbe bleue (1996 Urkraine-France animation film), parody where Bluebeard is victim of his wife
• Ex Machina, a 2015 film by writer/director Alex Garland, adapts the Bluebeard character as the reclusive CEO of a fictional tech company called "Bluebook" (a seeming amalgam of Google and Facebook described as having been named for Wittgenstein's Blue Book), dividing the role of Bluebeard's wife between a female-bodied AI and an unsuspecting Bluebook programmer summoned to evaluate it.
• Crimson Peak, a 2015 gothic horror film has plot similarities to the tale of Bluebeard

Further reading

• Hermansson, Casie E. (2009). Bluebeard: A Reader's Guide to the English Tradition. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi.
• Loo, Oliver (2014). The Original 1812 Grimm Fairy Tales Kinder- und Hausmärchen Childrens and Household Tales
• Ogden, Valerie (2014). "Bluebeard Brave Warrior, Brutal Psychopath" Palisades, New York: History Publishing Company.

External links

• Edwin Sidney Hartland "The Forbidden Chamber" The Folk-Lore Journal. Volume 3, 1885.
• Legendary Scottish bluebeard Sir John Cathcart
• SurLaLune Fairy Tale Pages: Heidi Anne Heiner, "The Annotated Bluebeard"
• Variants
• "Bluebeard and the Bloody Chamber" by Terri Windling
• Leon Botstein's concert notes on Dukas' Ariane et Barbe-bleue
• Glimmerglass Opera's notes on Offenbach's Barbe Bleue, the Bluebeard fairy tale in general, and operetta in the time of Offenbach.
• A Shakespeare reference
• (French) Bluebeard, audio version
• Translation of the German version of the fairy tale "Knight Bluebeard" by Ludwig Bechstein
• Game about Bluebeard
• Bluebeard at the Iroquois Theater