Literary critics on the Blue Beard story

For more information on our Barbe-Bleue Halloween party or to book your place, click here.

Want to read the original Blue Beard tale? Read the full Charles Perrault version or our abbreviated summary.

So fascinating is the Barbe-Bleue story that numerous critics have analysed the tale. Here are a few insights that we have discovered during our research:

Novelist Lydia Millet has pointed out in her essay, The Wife Killer (published in Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favourite Fairy Tales): “Blue Beard wanted his new wife to find the corpses of his former wives. He wanted the new bride to discover their mutilated corpses; he wanted her disobedience. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have given her the key to the forbidden closet; he wouldn’t have left town 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, this was a set–up.”

Maria Tatar, The Classic Fairy Tales: “Perrault’s story, by underscoring the heroine’s kinship with certain literary, biblical, and mythical figures (most notably Psyche, Eve, and Pandora), gives us a tale that willfully undermines a robust folkloric tradition in which the heroine is a resourceful agent of her own salvation.”

According to Terri Windling in the piece Blue Beard and the Bloody Chamber, the story can be seen as an “expression of young girls’ fears about marriage. Perrault was writing at a time, and in a social class, when arranged marriages were commonplace, and divorce out of the question. A young woman could easily find herself married off to an old man without her consent — or to a monster: a drunkard, a libertine, or an abusive spouse. Further, the mortality rate of women in childbirth was frighteningly high. Remarriage was commonplace for men who’d lost a wife (or wives) in this fashion, and ghosts from previous marriages hung over many a young bride’s wedding. (Perrault and other writers in the fairy tale salons were firmly against arranged marriages, and this concern can be seen in the subtext of many fairy tales of the period.)”

Marina Warner: “Bluebeard has entered secular mythology alongside Cinderella and Snow White. But his story possesses a characteristic with particular affinity to the present day: seriality. Whereas the violence in the heroines’ lives is considered suitable for children, the ogre has metamorphosed in popular culture for adults, into mass murderer, the kidnapper, the serial killer: a collector, as in John Fowles’s novel The Collector, an obsessive, like Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. Though cruel women, human or fairy, dominate children’s stories with their powers, the Bluebeard figure, as a generic type of male murderer, has gradually entered material requiring restricted ratings as well.”

Lydia Millet, The Wife Killer: “Blue Beard retains his charm by being what most men and women feel they cannot be: an overt articulator of the private fantasy of egomania. ..he is the subject that takes itself for a god. He is omnipotent because he accepts no social compromise; he acts solely in the pursuit of his own satisfaction…Between an egotist with high expectations and a sociopath stretches only the fine thread of empathy and identification….Bluebeard is a story about illusion, transgression, and the dark side of carnal appetites. It cautions us to beware of strangers in the wood. . .and of gentleman in the front parlor.”

For more information on our Barbe-Bleue Halloween party or to book your place, click here.

Want to read the original Blue Beard tale? Read the full Charles Perrault version or our abbreviated summary.