6/01/02

I have been in the grips of a strange fascination. And like a fever it washed over me, broke, and fell away leaving me lost and cranky, infinitely tired and unable to amuse myself.

The reason is Bluebeard. I've reimersed myself in fairy tales, begining with Joseph Jacob's Mr Fox and Charles Perrault's Blue Beard, moving into the Snake Bridegroom from a collection of jewish folklore, Francesca Lia Block's Bones (which is a very dissatisfying modern version of Bluebeard), the Tale of the Third Calender from the Arabian Nights, Our Lady Mother, Fitcher's Bird and the Robber Bridegroom from Grimms' fairy tales, and ending this afternoon with the Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter (also unfortunately unsatisfying). And of course various other tales (the good girl is rewarded, her selfish sister punished, the prince gets what ever the hell he wants) from various other books. Well, the same books; there's a limited number of books in the house.

And I have learned that decapitation is a punishment reserved almost exclusively for women unfaithful to their husbands. And that the original version of Bluebeard was a subversive story, for it rewarded the disobedience of the wife by handing her the wealth of her husband upon his death, which was unheard of in the seventeenth century. It gave her the opertunity to choose her own future.

The story in Bluebeard is an obvious (once you think of it) parallel to the story of Eve in Genesis (and obviously, not my idea, I get all my ideas from books). The young wife is given a set of keys and told that she can do anything but open one specific door. But the temptation is too great, and her husband is away. So she opens the door only to find the bodies of the previous wives of her widower husband. And in her horror, she drops the key into the pool of blood on the floor. She picks up the key and flees back upstairs, and tries to get the blood off the key, but it will not wash off. She can't hide from her master that she's broken his one rule.

You'll notice though, that God and the Devil are here one man, two sides of the same coin. And that when her brothers come rushing through the door to kill the man who will kill her, she is redeemed, she is rewarded for her transgression, for it is not so great a transgression as the murders her husband is committing. At least in the original version. And she marries again, a man who makes her forget the horror of her first husband. But the story leaves this question open. Is he such a prince, or is he simply better at hiding his own blue beard? Perhaps she's only learned it's better not to look under the surface.

It's a tradition in fairy tales, in literature, that the curious woman, like Eve, is punished severely for her curiousity. It's traditional that women who are presumptuous or poorly mannered end up dead, like the eleven sisters of the heroine in the Snake Bridegroom. In later versions of the story, even Bluebeard's last wife doesn't survive her husband. She's desposable, one of a million young ladies crawling out of the forest, meat before the monster.

And I'm thinking, why can't she refuse the test, and hand the keys back with a light laugh and a twinkle in her eye... but it's only because Eve can't not choose, by her inaction she's choosing not to try the fruit of the tree of knowledge, but there's always another day. Every moment of her life up to that point when the snake has finally convinced her, she is actively choosing not to disobey. And even when our heroine doesn't open the door when her husband is out of town, he can make any number of journeys to distant places. He would have to content himself with the idea that some day she will open that door, undoubtably. For the story would not end without it.

But I dream of the story where the girl has gotten herself out of one nightmarish engagement to a serial killer (Mr. Fox), and marries a nice guy only to discover that he's also a sick murderous bastard, but fights her way out of that, finds herself wealthy beyond imagining, marries a man more of her choice than for material expiediency, only to be handed a third set of keys, which she promptly pockets, but never uses.

Or alternately, she could club him to death with them, I guess. It would at least be more interesting that way.

But I would say that despite the prohibition of literature, the thing which I have been bereft which for most of my life, that which is growing now as a tender shoot of spring that I am nuturing carefully, as it is the thing most likely to make me a complete and interesting person, is a sense of curiousity.

kisses,

Cecily
e-mail: violivia@hotmail.com
AIM: astormorray
new hobby: racketball
new hair color: light brown
favorite Python: Terry Jones
number of jobs applied for: four
german word for wizard: hexenmiester
last movie seen: Star Wars, Episode Two.
opinions available upon demand.
main resource for this article: The Tale of Bluebeard in German Literature, Mererid Puw Davies.

writing nothing, reading nothing, hard to imagine where my dissatisfaction is coming from...