Secrets beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives

Abstract

Secrets beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives. By Maria Tatar. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Pp. xiv + 250, introduction, illustrations, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $24.95 cloth, $17.95 paper) Secrets Beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives is an expansive but unpersuasive and problem-ridden monograph. In it, author Maria Tatar takes a second bite at the Bluebeard apple, having previously visited the larder in The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales (1987). Once upon a time, Tatar reviewed the various interpretations that folklorists, anthropologists, psychiatrists, and others have given to the tale of Barbe Bleue, who slays successive wives until he is finally himself killed (1987:156-178). The essential story, or perhaps the implicit moral, of the Bluebeard tale - what in today's business jargon is called the takeaway is about woman's curiosity. Is the heroine's discovery, her knowledge, an error, quite like Pandora or even the Biblical Eve; or, instead, is her newly discovered knowledge an opening of doors, a way to rescue and eventual happy marriage? (1987:3-4). As they say about carney games, you pays your money and you takes your choice. As with the tale itself, Tatar's work requires a willing suspension of disbelief for it to engage any but the most credulous. Critical scrutiny of any sort scorches her argument. Tatar claims that in both oral and written tradition, the curiosity of a male, such as Prometheus, is "celebrated as a life-giving force," while that of a female "is castigated as the death principle" (1987:3-4). How then to reconcile "How Toodie Fixed Old Grunt" in which die diird daughter - in the Germanic tradition of threes it is typically the third (Olrik 1909) - slays Bluebeard? (Randolph 63-65). How to fit into Tatar's schema the Kentucky tale "The Golden Ball," in which the protagonist is a litde boy, Johnny? (Roberts 30-32) . Tatar seems not to be bothered with cultural, geographical or chronological deviations such as these. She prefers to hew to "The Bluebeard," as translated from the French of Charles Perrault's Mother Goose; upon that text she plants the single standard against which all others are to be measured. There are many translations of Perrault's 1697 Contes de ma mere l'oye. I use Barchilon and Pettit's edition, from a 1729 translation. Significandy for the present discussion, this translation of the moral to the tale asks "which of the two, the man or wife, bears sway?" (Barchilon and Pettit 1960:17-31). Such fiats will not do in considering folklore or its unending derivatives, yet it seems Tatar ignores folklore in Secrets Beyond the Door, even as she quotes author Margaret Atwood, who cautions diat "die true story . . . [is] vicious and multiple and untrue" (15). Tatar ranges far and wide in popular literature and film, seeing the Bluebeard motif everywhere, ignoring anything - including plot and audior's intent - diat does not fit her predetermined formula. This is not scholarship but hyperbole, or fantasy. Curiously, in Secrets Tatar does not address the basic question: why does Bluebeard kill his wives seriatim) Why does he test each, in turn, warning her about the locked door, leading one after the other to her death? …