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Bluebeard is the title character in a famous fairy tale, a cautionary tale against the dangers of curiosity and feminine disobedience told by Charles Perrault. Bluebeard is a nobleman whose blue beard marks him as a figure of terror, but Fatima, the youngest of three sisters of a local lord, consents to marry him. Her fears are overcome by his spectacular household, silver plate, tapestries and carriages. She has the keys to all the chateau, even to one small chamber that she is forbidden to enter. As soon as Bluebeard is away, she is convinced to satisfy her curiosity to see what the chamber holds. Its floor reeks with blood, and Bluebeard's former wives hang lifeless upon the walls. Horrified, she locks the door, but blood will not wash off the key. Bluebeard returns unexpectedly and is about to strike off her head. The climax, as she and her sister Anne are at the top of a tower, with Bluebeard roaring for blood below, is condensed in her repeated plea
- "Anne, sister Anne, do you see anyone coming?"
True to fairy-tale gender-role stereotyping, the sisters cannot save themselves, but must wait for their brothers, who arrive at the last possible moment and dispatch Bluebeard.
Although best known as a fairy tale, the character of Bluebeard was actually based on a serial-killing Breton nobleman of the 15th century, Gilles de Rais, though some have seen the Marquis de Laval, who killed six of his seven wives in the 15th century, as an alternate inspiration. The character of Gilles de Rais appears in the play Saint Joan, by George Bernard Shaw.
The themes of the mysterious absent husband, the sumptuous palace, the sister who encourages illicit curiosity and the One Forbidden Thing (a central fairy-tale mytheme), all appear in the Hellenistic romance Cupid and Psyche. Though some have seen the Bluebeard story as a satire on men who kill their wives legally, notably King Henry VIII, Bluebeard is really a woman's tale, passed from mother to daughter, with a subtext that a kind and gentle husband from the familiar circle well-known to kith and kin, is far safer than a glamorous marriage to a mysterious nobleman.
The Perrault version reappears retold in Andrew Lang's Blue Fairy book.
Operatic versions of the Bluebeard tale have been made by Hungarian composer Béla Bartók— Duke Bluebeard's Castle (A Kekszakallu herceg Vara), from a heavily psychosexual libretto by Bela Belasz— and by Paul Dukas, Ariane et Barbe-Bleue ("Ariane and Bluebeard"), also a psychological tale (to a libretto by Maurice Maeterlinck), in a luxuriant chromatic polytonal post-Wagnerian idiom.
Bluebeard is also the title of a novel by Kurt Vonnegut
Bluebeard is also retold in Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber.
External links
nl:Blauwbaard
de:Blaubart
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