Bluebeard
.png) Bluebeard gives his wife the keys to his castle | |
| Original Title: | Barbe bleue |
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| Written by: | Charles Perrault |
| Central Theme: | Trust, and those who we give it to. |
| Synopsis: | A rich widower marries a young woman and entrusts her with a key that he explicitly orders not to use; she disobeys him and discovers that the man is a serial killer and self-made widower. |
| First published: | 1697 |
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"At first she saw nothing, for the windows were closed, but after a few moments she perceived dimly that the floor was entirely covered with clotted blood, and that in this there were reflected the dead bodies of several women that hung along the walls. These were all the wives of Blue Beard, whose throats he had cut, one after the other."
—Bluebeard
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An old French Folktale (online version here) [dead link] written as La Barbe Bleue ("The Blue Beard") by Charles Perrault in 1697, which later found its way into the Grimms' first edition of 1812 as König Blaubart ("King Bluebeard"). (In various versions of the fairy tale the eponymous man is a king, sometimes a knight or other rich person.) The story starts with a rich gentleman, who is a widower, asking for the hand of a fair young maiden in marriage. After the wedding, he gives her a key-ring with the keys to all the doors of his mansion (or palace), with the request that if she loves him she must never, ever, ever use the golden key to open a certain door in the house.
Then he leaves the house on business, sometimes for days at a time, and the woman gets bored and eaten up with curiosity about the door she is not supposed to open, so finally she goes and opens it. (In some versions, Bluebeard merely points out the key as forbidden, and the woman tries the key in all the doors of the house until she finds the right chamber.) When she opens the door, she finds the blood-spattered dead bodies of all the former wives of Bluebeard who he murdered for their money. She flees in horror and tries to act as if nothing happened, but when Bluebeard returns he invariably finds out what she has done, one way or the other (sometimes by finding traces of blood on her shoes or the key she dropped in fright), and threatens to kill her, too, for betraying his trust. Depending on the version of the tale, she is saved by the arrival of her relatives who kill Bluebeard, or, after having been locked up, manages to flee and alert the authorities.
A second Grimm variant, "Fitcher's Bird", indicates that the woman was only wrong insofar as she got caught. The heroine in "Fitcher's Bird" also "betrays his trust" to find the bodies of her sisters, but does so in a manner that he cannot detect, and therefore ultimately comes out on top.
An English version of the story, "Mr. Fox", has the heroine witness the villain murdering a previous bride, and confronting him at the wedding breakfast with the severed hand of the unfortunate lady. Shakespeare, in Much Ado About Nothing, makes a reference to the recurrent rhyme in this version:
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For it is not so, and it was not so, |
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This story has given name to a specific kind of Serial Killer, "The Bluebeard", who kills a succession of wives.
And no, he's not a pirate.
- An Aesop: If your male partner seems and acts shifty, trust your instincts because he probably is dangerous, and you may become his next victim. Back in the day, the moral was "wives, obey your husbands, or otherwise he will be justified in punishing you".
- Beard of Evil: The title character.
- Big Damn Heroes: The relatives, if they arrive in the nick of time.
- Captain Color Beard: Bluebeard isn't a captain, but his beard is colored.
- Deus Ex Machina:
- In some versions, the woman's relatives seem to show up out of nowhere to kill Bluebeard at the very last minute. In others she had invited her relatives ahead of time, and they just arrived with enough good timing; there is a version where a sister of the woman was visiting and was present at the gruesome discovery, and she escaped to bring their relatives while the woman distracted Bluebeard.
- In the Georges Méliès film adaptation, a good fairy brings the dead brides back to life.
- Damsel in Distress
- Family-Unfriendly Death: See the page quote.
- Faux Affably Evil: The title character. His charming demeanor quickly disappears when his wife discovers his dark secret.
- Forbidden Fruit
- Peek-a-Boo Corpse: Several of them.
- Rule of Three: In Fitcher's Bird, the heroine is preceded by her two sisters, both of whom are caught peeking and killed.
- Schmuck Bait: "You can open any door in the castle, but not that one." Right. Now, guess what she does next....
- Serial Killer: The titular character.
- Very Loosely Based on a True Story: Bluebeard may have been based on 15th century serial killer Gilles de Rais (or de Retz). When you can say that an adaptation in which someone has a roomful of dead wives and a basin full of blood in their locked-away torture room is Lighter and Softer...
- Wealthy Ever After: The wife is Bluebeard's only heir.
- What Could Have Been: Was almost a Disney film! It would have presumably been based on a Basque version in which the heroine ends up a princess. Though if you think about it, doesn't the whole forbidden room and key sound like it was borrowed by "Beauty and The Beast"?
- Which is ironic, since "Beauty and the Beast" and "Bluebeard" ultimately tell opposite morals: Bluebeard warns women not to take charming men by their first appearance, and trust their instincts to protect them from bad men; BatB tells women to give scary men a chance, since they can be good on the inside (though they need to prove it first). In fact, Disney's Beauty and the Beast seems to take the best elements of both stories, and merges it into a beautiful tale that develops both leads, rather than focusing on just the girl's story.
Comic Books
- Much like many other fairy tale/fable characters, Bluebeard was a prominent character in the comic book series Fables for several story arcs.
Film
- The 1972 film Bluebeard starring Richard Burton, Raquel Welch and Joey Heatherton, sets the story in 1930s Austria, with Burton playing Baron Kurt von Sepper, a hero of the First World War and apparently devout Catholic who is not only a serial killer of his own wives but also a proto-Nazi anti-Semite.
Literature
- "The White Road" by Neil Gaiman is a version of the "Mr. Fox" variant, with a twist.
- Kurt Vonnegut's 1987 novel Bluebeard takes the fairy tale as inspiration.
Live-Action TV
- The Grimm episode "Lonelyhearts" builds its main plot around a (very loose) interpretation of the Bluebeard story.
- Kim Jang-hyun, the villain of the South Korean drama series Strong Girl Bong-soon, demonstrates an almost sexual enjoyment of a play called The Seven Wives of Bluebeard in episode 7 of the series, and is in the process of kidnapping seven "brides", whom he is keeping in an underground prison.
Music
- Track 7 of Sound Horizon's Märchen is based on this fairy tale.
Video Games
- The Caster class of Servant in Fate/Zero is Gilles de Rais (the inspiration for the story), who refers to himself as Bluebeard.
Western Animation
- The Merrie Melodies short "Bye, Bye Bluebeard" has a Russian serial killer named Bluebeard who appears as a blue-bearded wolf. Porky Pig overhears from a radio broadcast that he's at large, and a hungry mouse exploits his fear for free food - at least, until they both run into the real deal.