ABSTRACT
We like to point to Bluebeard as abnormal, repulsive, and criminal. We like to track the source of Charles Perrault’s invented text, “Bluebeard” (1697), to real history, mainly to the history of Gilles de Rais, a sadistic mass murderer of children in the fifteenth century. We want to know fully the causes of atrocious and scandalous behavior. Are monsters born monsters, or are they created by circumstances? Are men brutes by nature? Perhaps they become brutal because they are treated brutally when they are young, or they are too easily provoked by women? Perhaps some have insulted a fairy and been turned into a beast? Some scholars have traced motifs in Perrault’s tale to the Bible and Greek and Roman myths that deal with the curiosity of women such as the story of Adam and Eve or Pandora’s Box. Ute Heidemann, an astute German scholar, has maintained in her intertextual analysis, “La Barbe bleue palimpseste,” that Perrault was in dialogue with Vergil’s Aeneid (first century BC), Apuleius’s “Cupid and Psyche” in The Golden Ass (second century), and Paul Scarron’s burlesque Le Virgile travesty en vers burlesques (1648-1659).140 Folklorists have linked Perrault’s narrative to the oral tradition such as two tales in the Grimms’ Children’s and Household Tales (1812-1815), “The Robber Bridegroom” and “Fitcher’s Bird,” in which a clever maiden
printed text. Whether named or anonymous, fiends like Bluebeard thrive in oral and literary traditions, and most critics and folklorists are very astute in detecting how Perrault may have relied on them or generated great stuff for generations of storytellers, writers, and artists to come, not to mention filmmakers. But very few, with the exception of Philip Lewis’s highly sophisticated study, Seeing Through the Mother Goose Tales: Visual Turns in the Writings of Charles Perrault 141 have struck upon the heart of the matter-Bluebeard’s original sin.
