Search Results

This chapter analyzes Catherine Breillat's film Bluebeard. It argues that Breillat's filmic appropriation of Charles Perrault's “Bluebeard” is part of a memetic process that entails imitation, innovation, and transformation. Her interpretation of Perrault's tale is a contestation, and while she seeks to replace Perrault's version with a double rendition of his tale, she also emphasizes the significance of Perrault's tale and demonstrates how all Bluebeard tales are part of a singular discursive process within the larger genre of the fairy tale. Interestingly, both Perrault and Breillat become merely markers in the evolutionary history of a tale type about mass murders that continues to breathe and demand our attention through supernormal stimuli.

Known as the “anatomiste des courtisans” (the courtiers’ anatomist) for his instruction of the Dauphin, Duverney, unlike other members of the Academy, only dissected. This chapter examineshis collaboration with Perrault in the 1676 Histoire des animaux and inPerrault’s 1680 essay on animal mechanism, which employed evidence from Academy dissections to elaborate a theory of the animal body based on peristaltic motion and an innate immaterial soul. The 1676 volume also acknowledged the Versailles menagerie, where animal themes dominated, particularly in the Labyrinth designed by André le Nôtre and Charles Perrault. Charles contributed to his brother’s ideas about hearing, the ear, and the value of modern music, particularly opera. Duverney also wrote about the anatomy of the ear.

This chapter discusses the subversive potential of Charles Perrault's original conte, ‘La Barbe bleue’ (1697), a potential which is obfuscated in many German versions of the material. Commentary on this Märchen forms a fascinating body of work in itself, and to treat it as a primary, not secondary part of the tradition is highly productive.

The first English translation of Charles Perrault’s French fairy tale, “Bluebeard,” was provided by Robert Samber in 1729. Samber’s edition, entitled Histories, or Tales of past Times...with morals, by M. Perrault, Translated into English was followed by the publishing of a series of reprints, new editions, and bilingual versions throughout the eighteenth century. Moreover, it also strongly impressed itself on the “Bluebeard tradition” that continued to thrive throughout the Victorian period. English translations based on Perrault’s “Bluebeard” remained the norm even after the appearance of Grimm stories from Kinderund Hausmärchen (Grimm 1812–1815, 1819), which were translated (without any “Bluebeard” variant) into English as German Popular Stories in 1823–1826 (Grimm). Perrault’s “Bluebeard” was translated in editions of Mother Goose. In her book on English chapbooks, Margaret Spufford’s very first quotation from a reader includes a testimony to “Bluebeard.”

Even before he entered the Academy, Duverney’s anatomical skills had made him well known in the private academies and salons of Paris. In 1679 he was appointed anatomy lecturer at the Jardin du Roi, the King’s Garden, where he taught to large audiences of students and other spectators. Student notes detail the content of his lectures, and his eloquence contributed to the ongoing ancients and moderns debates about language and its uses, discussed by Charles Perrault in several works. After Claude Perrault’s 1688 death the Histoire des animaux project eventually ended, and the post-Colbert Academy turned to other projects. Duverney’s debates with Jean Méry led to his departure from the Academy in 1706, marking the end of an era.

The epilogue follows Charles’s children as they drifted away from the life of letters and into the court. Viewing the publication of the fairy tales as a family endeavor allows us to see their production in a different light: Charles sought to assist his son in the pursuit of a military career, which required connections at court. In the writing of the tales, Charles and his son drew on the literary resources that had come to define them in the eyes of their contemporaries to pursue a broader strategy. The epilogue also shows how Charles oriented his publications in a way that consolidated his brothers’ reputation. For him, literature was both a way to act in the social world and a crucial component of his family’s identity. The epilogue also explicates the methodological approach of the book.

In 1695, Charles Perrault wrote a French fairy tale, “La Barbe bleue” (“Bluebeard”). Published in 1697 and translated into English in 1729, it featured a character that had dominated international folklore and myth for centuries before he was given a blue beard and a magnificent castle by Perrault. That castle had one forbidden room with which to tempt and test the man’s wives. Despite being one of the grisliest in the canon, “Bluebeard” captured the English imagination and gave rise to a nexus of variants related by themes of curiosity, forbidden chambers, punishment, and serial wife murder. This chapter looks at the principal variants of Perrault’s “Bluebeard” fairy tale, along with the English variant “Mr. Fox” and versions of Bluebeard with animal grooms. It also considers the influence of the Thousand and One Arabian Nights on the Turkish Bluebeard, Bluebeard in Greek mythology and the Bible, and the alleged use of Bluebeard as a name by King Henry VIII of England.

In the story of Alcestis from Euripides, Alcestis volunteers to die in order to save the life of her husband King Admetus. When the hero Hercules discovers that Alcestis has died, he wrestles with Death, wins, and brings back something veiled to Admetus. But what or whom? This chapter follows the polemical texts around this question that appeared in the wake of the 1674 opera Alceste by composer Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–87) and librettist Philippe Quinault (1635–88). It considers texts from the champion of the modernists, Charles Perrault (1628–1703) and the defender of the ancients, Jean Racine (1639–99).

Charles Perrault’s French fairy tale, “Bluebeard,” initially rose to prominence through the eighteenth century in the form of reprints and pirated knockoffs of Mother Goose tales. Later, it was published in chapbook form, referring to small, cheaply printed books that are crudely illustrated and sewn. Chapbooks were in circulation throughout the British Isles by the hundreds of thousands between 1750 and 1850. By the late eighteenth century, “Bluebeard” was headlining many of them. Indeed, Bluebeard became a household name because of chapbooks, rather than the more expensive and elaborate printings of Mother Goose. Chapbooks, which were commonly pirated at the time, consisted of illustrations that formed a major advertising point for publishers.

This chapter demonstrates how mechanist physiologists such as Giovanni Borelli and Charles Perrault, who followed René Descartes in taking the machine as the model of intelligibility, nevertheless assumed the existence of an animal soul to supply to the bodily machine its motive force. Borelli and Perrault placed the nature of this animal soul beyond the bounds of their science. Borelli's De motu animalium, which was published posthumously in 1680 and 1681, is devoted to locomotion on earth and in water and air. Perrault's Mécanique des animaux begins by disclaiming the implication of its ambiguous title. Descartes succeeded in introducing mechanism into the study of living things, or rather the new mechanism and the new mechanics put forward by Galileo, Descartes himself, and others in the first half of the seventeenth century.

In Charles Perrault’s fairy tale, Bluebeard was never a pirate. Yet he is always linked to piracy, particularly to Blackbeard, Captain Edward Teach of Bristol. Captain Charles Johnson published an account of Blackbeard, A General History of the Pirates, in 1724. Another possible cause for the confusion between Bluebeard and Blackbeard is the fact that Teach had multiple marriages: he married his fourteenth bride, believed to be Mary Ormond, a sixteen-year-old planter’s daughter. Robert Lee also wrote a biography of Blackbeard, claiming that he was a victim of the women he could not resist. In addition to his wives, Blackbeard and other pirates are believed to have hidden treasure, making their stories conducive to intertextual connection with Bluebeard, who did not want his wife to examine his affairs too closely. This chapter examines Bluebeard’s connection to pirates and looks at a number of serial killers who were labeled in the contemporary media as “Bluebeard” or “lady Bluebeard.”

In the nineteenth century, Charles Perrault’s French fairy tale, “Bluebeard,” became popular in chapbooks and drama at a time when folk and fairy tales had a questionable status in England. The widespread presence of the Mother Goose tales is an indication of their popularity, but not their respectability. The release of the massive multivolume English translations of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments and Grimms’ Die Kinder- und Hausmärchen triggered antiquarian research into English folklore and made “Bluebeard” a staple of Victorian art and literature. Some examples are Charlotte Brontë’s “Bluebeard novel” Jane Eyre and the works of Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray. Images of Bluebeard also appeared in the popular art of Thackeray (inspired by George Cruikshank), Alfred Henry Forrester, and Walter Crane.

Different versions of Charles Perrault’s French fairy tale “Bluebeard” proliferated throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. From Max Frisch’s novel Bluebeard: A Tale (1982) to Charles Ludlam’s avant-garde play Bluebeard (1987) and Donald Barthelme’s story “Bluebeard” (1987), these referential texts are simultaneous with one another and foreground the reader’s own complicity and processes in reading intertextually. This chapter examines contemporary forms of “Bluebeard” in the Anglophone tradition and how they actualize self-reflexivity to explore various crises of artistic representation. These works include Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Bluebeard (1987), Edward Dmytryk’s film Bluebeard (1972), Cindy Sherman’s book Fitcher’s Bird (1992), the Mills and Boon/Harlequin romance Bluebeard’s Bride (1985), and Celia Fremlin’s story “Bluebeard’s Key” (1985). The chapter also analyzes the films The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and The Piano (1993), along with the works of the contemporary women writers Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter.

In Charles Perrault’s French fairy tale, Bluebeard is not only mistaken for a pirate but also often described as a beturbaned Turkish tyrant. But it was only in the eighteenth century that Bluebeard became a “three tail’d Bashaw,” and he certainly did not get any of his eastern cast from Perrault. The Irish composer and tenor Michael Kelly commissioned George Colman the Younger, then manager of the summer theater the Haymarket in London, to write a libretto inspired by André Modeste Grétry’s opera Raoul Barbe Bleue (1789), which he saw in Paris in 1790. Colman came up with Blue Beard, or Female Curiosity! (1798), which was set in Turkey and firmly orientalized Bluebeard as Abomelique. The opera was a success, cementing an enduring parallel English tradition that depicts Bluebeard as a Turkish tyrant. This chapter also discusses two works that allude to the Bluebeard tale: William Godwin’s political gothic novel Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are and George Colman the Younger’s play The Iron Chest.

The dramas made based on Charles Perrault’s French fairy tale “Bluebeard” often revolved around Bluebeard as an oriental grotesque; his wife, Fatima, was sold by her mercenary father Ibrahim to the “three tailed Bashaw” and rescued by her true love, Selim, along with her brothers and her sister Anne. This was the story set by Michael Kelly and George Colman the Younger in their play. After 1866, however, a rival “masterwork” appeared: Blue Beard Re-Paired; a Worn-Out Subject Done Up Anew. Adapted by Henry Bellingham from a French comic opera by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, this comedy has a plot that is radically different from that of Kelly and Colman’s work. All types of Bluebeard dramas make a reference to William Shakespeare’s Othello, which also features a wife murderer, a man “turned Turk.” There are many comic renditions of “Bluebeard,” which fall into three major subcategories: harlequinade and pantomime, extravaganza and burlesque (including opera bouffe), and amateur or parlor plays for home entertainment (usually as “children’s” theater).

Several versions of Charles Perrault’s French fairy tale “Bluebeard” exist today, such as the pantomime Bluebeard (2003) by Paul Reakes, S. P. Somtow’s novel Bluebeard’s Castle (2003), and Pierre Furlan’s short story “Blue-beard’s Work-shop” (2007), along with dozens of other pantomimes and harlequinades. Two of the most recent “Bluebeard” works are a collection of poetry, Bluebeard’s Wives, and a collection of short stories; both use the allusion to the fairy tale in their titles. Bluebeard seems unlikely to reenter English cultural parlance as a children’s nursery story. The vacuum left when Bluebeard the serial wife killer was censored out of fairy tale collections for children is now firmly occupied by the image of Bluebeard the “pirate.” But artistic engagement with the Bluebeard fairy tale is not going away anytime soon.

A number of pantomime renditions of Charles Perrault’s French fairy tale, “Bluebeard,” appeared at the advent of the twentieth century, including the Klaw and Erlanger burlesque Mr. Bluebeard (Solomon [ca.1903]). In addition, a slew of notable Bluebeard works that all problematize and challenge the traditional expressions of the Bluebeard story emerged. Georges Méliès’ film Barbe-bleue (1901); Maurice Maeterlinck’s play Ariadne et Barbe-bleue (Ariadne and Bluebeard 1901), an opera composed by Paul Dukas (1907); Béla Balázs’ psychological drama A kékszakállú herceg vára (Duke Bluebeard’s Castle 1907), an opera by Béla Bartók (1912); and Anatole France’s story “Les Sept Femmes de la Barbe Bleue” (“The Seven Wives of Bluebeard,” 1909). This chapter examines these works and their impact on the English modernist expression of the Bluebeard tale. In particular, it considers how the English and American modernists, including Sylvia Townsend Warner and Eudora Welty, and Hollywood films responded to them. The chapter also looks at the revival of interest in Gilles de Rais in the late nineteenth century, and how it led to the humanization of Bluebeard.

This chapter examines English modernist versions of Charles Perrault’s French fairy tale, “Bluebeard,” and how the authors used the story to comment on feminism. It looks at the emergence of detective fiction during the years of World War I and influenza pandemic of 1918, and the strain of misogyny evident in the crime stories about Bluebeard. The chapter discusses the works of three women writers who explicitly addressed the Bluebeard story as a vehicle to comment on gender relations and to issue a modernist challenge to the traditional narrative: Beatrix Potter’s novella Sister Anne (1932), Sylvia Townsend Warner’s short story “Bluebeard’s Daughter” in The Cat’s Cradle-Book (1940), and Eudora Welty’s novella The Robber Bridegroom (1942). It also discusses modern film versions of Bluebeard such as In Love from a Stranger (1937) and Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938), as well as the so-called “Bluebeard cycle” of films including Rebecca (1940), Suspicion (1941), Spellbound (1945), Monsieur Verdoux (1947), and Secret Beyond the Door (1948).