The art of killing: “Bluebeard” by Charles Perrault

Abstract

Charles Perrault’s fairy tales combine archaic plots and the realities of French life in the Louis XIV era, folklore formulas and literary play, reminiscences from ancient literature (Apuleius’ “Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass”, Virgil’s “Aeneid”). Considered as a single text, together they tell the story of girlhood and family life. It begins with an awareness of female (menarche) and male physiology (“Little Red Riding Hood”, “Sleeping Beauty”). Then the heroine has to avoid incest with her father (“Donkey Skin”, “Griselda”). To marry, she has to enter into a rivalry with her sisters (“Diamonds and Toads”, “Cinderella”, “Riquet with the Tuft”) and magically transform herself to seduce the prince (“Donkey Skin”, “Diamonds and Toads”, “Cinderella”, “Riquet with the Tuft”). Then it is necessary to destroy the ogre-mother-in-law (“Sleeping Beauty”) or the husband-killer (“Bluebeard”). If we consider “Bluebeard” from this perspective, it becomes clear that, as in the detective story, the wife, with the help of her sister, sets up the murder of her wealthy husband, presenting the crime as necessary self-defense. Her brothers in the military killed Bluebeard, leaving him no chance of escape. Like the suspense detective plot popular in the mid-twentieth century (Hitchcock, Boileau-Narcejac), the story is told from the point of view of the victim who engages in a duel with the perpetrator. In the verse fairy tale “The Ridiculous Wishes”, in the poem “The Apology of Women” and in the verse moral of the fairy tale “Bluebeard” Charles Perrault engages in ironic polemics with feminists (“précieuses”) and assures us that women command men. In the fairy tales “Diamonds and Toads” and “Riquet with the Tuft” he enters into competition with the late 17th century fairy tale writers (Marie-Jeanne “L’Héritier de Villandon”, Catherine Bernard) who used the same plot. It is possible that in “Bluebeard” he is taking aim at another storyteller, Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, who in her youth was convicted for plotting against her husband.