The Bluebeard

The basic structure of the Bluebeard tale is similar to traditional Gothic romances. A wealthy, powerful man brings his young bride to his castle and forbids her to open a certain door. Out of curiostiy, the bride insists on opening the door. As soon as she knows the secret behind the door, she dies. As usual, the heroine puts herself in danger but is unable to rescue herself. The villain’s identity is revealed and next comes the true hero / rescuer.

The heroine survives and marries again, to her Mr. Right. The rule of a happy ending is important in fairy tales even though the Bluebeard tale begins with events surrounding a murderous husband and a marriage trap. It was not until 1697 that the tale received its clearest codification in Charles Perrault’s fairy tale, “Barbe Bleue” (Grace 248). In Perrault’s version, the terrified wife asks her sister Anne to “go up… upon the top of the tower, and see if my brothers are not coming” (Perrault 109). In the end, the helpless woman is saved by her brothers who kill the villain-husband. The woman then inherits her husband’s wealth, rewards her brothers, and marries a good man. The final rescue, which restores the heroine to her place in the patriarchal structure by subsuming her to the hero in marriage, exposes the most fundamental source of violence in the story (Hite 154). That is, a society that defines all possible male-female relations in terms of masculine control, female vulnerability, and heterosexual marriage produces terror for women.

The Bluebeard tale alluded in Lady Oracle is the Grimms’ “Fitcher’s Bird” which has great influence on Atwood. Atwood admits that she loves the complete, unexpurgated Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which she read at six, and that one of her favorite stories was “Fitcher’s Bird” (Ingersoll 70-1). The Grimms’ “Fitcher’s Bird” is about a disguised wizard

(sometimes Death or the devil) whose touch forces pretty girls to leap into his basket. When he takes them to his castle, he gives them an egg to be carried everywhere and keys to every room but one, which he forbids them to open. This is a test before marriage. Most versions of the tale have three sisters: the first two cannot resist curiosity and open the door, discovering the former brides’ chopped-up bodies, and dropping their eggs in blood. As soon as the wizard sees the egg’s indelible blood stains, the two sisters join the corpses. The third sister is curious but more clever. When she enters the door, she does not carry the egg, which will be the evidence of her disobedience and transgression. She passes the test, deceives the wizard, and finally gains power over him. In the Grimms’ version, there is no rescuer for the sisters. In the end, the third sister puts her sisters’ bodies together and

disguises herself as a bird to flee. This time, it is not the bride but the groom (the wizard) that dies in a communal execution.

In spite of its simple outline, the Bluebeard tale implies the complexity of sexual politics.

The forbidden door embodies a prohibited space for women. They are asked to obey patriarchal rules and repress their curiosity. The prohibiton prevents women from having knowledge or experience which may be dangerous but worth the risk of acquiring it.

According to Anne Williams, “the Bluebeard’s secret is the foundation upon which

patriarchal culture rests: control of the subversively curious female, personified in his wives”

(41). A woman’s curiosity, or her desire for more knowledge beyond the domestic sphere threatens men and is regarded as social transgression. Furthermore, prohibition and female obedience in the Bluebeard tale shed light on the repression of sexuality in Gothic tales. For female characters, repression reveals either complete denial of sexuality and adoption of childish qualities or deep attraction to a powerful male figure, which is expressed as

daughterly love and obedience. On the one hand, both Gothic romances and the Bluebeard tale reveal female masochistic identification and female fear of male violence. Hence, the Bluebeard plot embedded in most Gothic romances is likely to disturb female readers and stir up their discontent with their own situations. On the other hand, just as the horrors of transgression sometimes become a powerful means to reinforce the value or necessity of social restrictions, the reading experience may forestall the readers’ subversiveness. After all, female readers of Gothic romances can experience fear and desire by identifying Gothic heroines without risk and leaving the house.

Compared with the heroines in fairy tales, Joan does not consider herself self-reliant and admits that she is never the clever third sister in the fairy tale:

[I]n any labyrinth I would have let go of the thread in order to follow a wandering light, a fleeting voice. In a fairy tale I would be one of the two stupid sisters who open the forbidden door and are shocked by the murdered wives, not the third,

clever one who keeps to the essentials: presence of mind, foresight, the telling of watertight lies. I told lies but they were not watertight. (LO182)

Represented as a strategic device for survival, deception is crucial for Joan to conceal socially unacceptable parts of her self in order to retain men’s love. While dealing with male

indifference, Joan inevitably fears a loss of identity connected to her uncontrollable doubling or reduplication (Fee 64). Therefore, Joan confesses that “I was more than double, I was triple, multiple, and now I could see that there was more than one life to come, there were many” (LO 298). In Lady Oracle, the notion of a coherent, unified self is called into question when Atwood highlights the protagonist’s self division as well as her duplicity.

According to the formula of the Bluebeard tale, Joan finally enters the labyrinth in her Gothic novel, Stalked by Love, and opens the door. In the center of the maze, she meets her

multiple selves and recognizes her Gothic fantasies about men. After opening the door, she at first believes the only way out of the maze is through male rescue: “There, standing on the threshold, waiting for her, was Redmond [the Gothic hero]” (LO 415). First, Joan believes that he is her rescuer. Then she knows: “Redmond was the killer. He was a killer in disguise, he wanted to murder her as he had murdered his other wives…. He wanted to replace her with the other one, the next one, thin and flawless” (LO 415, ellipses in source).

At this moment, Joan exhibits a typical women’s fear of male violence as the bride realizes that her husband is a murderer. At the same time, she is afraid to be replaced because she is not “thin and flawless.” This self-abasement results from her mental wound as a rejected child. In addition, the ending of Stalked by Love undermines Joan’s oversimplified

perception about men, or in Shuli Barzilai’s word, her “Bluebeard Syndrome” (250). Joan witnesses the transformation of Redmond / Bluebeard. The distinction between rescuers and villains is ambiguous because Redmond’s face in turn metamorphoses into the faces of the various men in Joan’s life, including her father, the Polish Count, the Royal Porcupine, the villain from her poetry, and Arthur. Atwood successfully rewrites the Bluebeard tale

because when the wife opens the door, what she finds is that a man, just like herself, has multiple identities. Most importantly, when the man wants to rescue Joan and promises that they will dance together forever, she refuses. After telling the man “I know who you are”

(415), Joan decides to dance alone and thus achieves self-deliverance. Although at first she identifies with the doomed wife in the Gothic, Joan ends up becoming the third sister in

“Fitcher’s Bird” to rescue herself.

In many versions of the Bluebeard tale, the wives are beheaded and their bodies are the husband’s collections and trophies. Similarly, Joan’s body rarely belongs to herself. It is for her mother’s expectations, for her aunt’s condition (to get her money by losing one hundred pounds), and for her lovers’ and husband’s visual satisfaction or desire. What is more, Joan’s mental wounds separate her from her mother and even from part of herself.

She fabricates a new life, creates different identities, and buries her past as well as all

memories about her mother. In addition to the theme of self-deliverance in “Fitcher’s Bird,”

Atwood also adopts the “re-membering” theme from this fairy tale. “Fitcher’s Bird” is about escaping from marital dismemberment and, in particular, physical dismemberment. In the end, the third sister rejoins the severed pieces of her sisters and disguises herself as a bird to flee. She succeeds in re-creating life and re-gaining freedom from a marriage trap. In Lady Oracle, the re-membering theme underscores Joan’s acceptance of her multiple

identities and reconciles Joan with her mother. Joan’s story testifies to women’s recognition of their multiple identities and their rebirth by “re-membering (re-discovering), speaking, and dancing their own texts as well as the old stories” (Wilson 122). Despite the fact that Joan finally refuses to dance with the man, Atwood draws our attention to her female artist’s doubts about dancing alone by evoking the dancing figures in Andersen’s fairy tales.