Bluebeard's Legacy: Death and Secrets from Bartók to Hitchcock

by Griselda Pollock (Editor), Victoria Anderson, Mieke Bal

The tale of the serial wife-murderer Bluebeard, his defiant, and surviving, final wife, a bloodied key and a secret chamber of horrors, has fascinated writers, composers, artists and film-makers throughout modern times. It is a unique story that dares to disclose and explore masculine the homme fatal. This transdisciplinary book explores the deep appeal of the Bluebeard story for twentieth-century culture. Its major focus is how the modernist imagination used the elements of Bluebeard’s tale to explore masculinity’s anxieties in the face of the emerging demands of women for redefinition and sexual anxieties also of ethnic and cultural difference, and fundamental disquiet about sexuality, pathology and violence in the masculine. Starting with investigations into Bartók’s opera 'Duke Bluebeard’s Castle', major cultural thinkers, including Elisabeth Bronfen, Ian Christie, Griselda Pollock and Maria Tatar, trace Bluebeard’s evolution from Perrault in the seventeenth century to the cinematic hommes fatals of Méliès, Fritz Lang and Hitchcock. The result is an intriguing kaleidoscope of sexuality, curiosity, violence and death.

Genres: Nonfiction, Fairy Tales, Essays

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 20, 2008

About the author

Griselda Pollock is a visual theorist, cultural analyst and scholar of international, postcolonial feminist studies in the visual arts. Based in England, she is well known for her theoretical and methodological innovation, combined with readings of historical and contemporary art, film and cultural theory. She is professor of social and critical histories of art at the University of Leeds.

Reviews

[samantha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bluebeard’s Legacy
[Preface-Pollock]
• In the opera, Duke Bluebeard’s castle, current wife Judith (biblical evocation) does not find a single, secret chamber filled with wives. Instead, behind each door she finds ‘aspects of Bluebeard that he wishes to claim—his wealth, strength, political dominion, love of beauty and so forth. But also discerns traces of blood—signs of suffering and violence—on all these glorious and glittering things for which the Duke wishes her to adore him.
• The penultimate door opens onto the deepest and unspeakable secret: his pain, vulnerability and fears. It is a lake of tears.
• Behind the final door, and seemingly connected to the previous revelation, Judith does come upon three former wives, imprisoned in a kind of suspended animation, decked with all their husbands wealth, not actually dead but effectively mortified. Judith’s fate is to join them in this ultimate chamber of silence and darkness that hides and houses the Duke’s impossible loneliness—the result of his inability to withstand the curiosity of women in their desire to understand a beloved other.
• Judith’s interrogative gaze perhaps stands for an emerging, and modern, demand for genuine reciprocity in marriage to displace the ancient destiny of the woman in a phallocentric culture who is cast only as the mirror reflecting man’s material glory and social presence. Thus, the Duke—masculinity—becomes, in effect, the real secret chamber within the fortress. “He” is hiding behind the façade that is but his projected, externalized, armour-image.
• If the theme of the femme fatale is based on the pairing of a beautiful and alluring surface that disguises a dangerous and horrifying—castrated and castrating—interior, cultural tales that deal with what is threatening in masculinity, rare as they are, disclose what Lacan called the phallic parade, as opposed to the feminine masquerade. Beyond boyh parade and masquerade, however, lies the threat posed by a more searching curiosity that Laura Mulvey has positively defined as feminine epistemophilia—the desire for knowledge that might expose subjectivity’s fragile foundations on a phallic illusion or, as Julia Kristeva has phrased it, on the illusoriness of the phallus.
• Stephen Heath elucidates the absent phallus behind Lacan’s parade: No one has the phallus but the phallus is the male sign, the man’s assignment; so Safouan talks about his benefit in having ‘the attribution of the penis to his person’. The man’s masculinity, his male world, is the assertion of the phallus to support his having it. To the woman’s masquerade there thus corresponds male display (parade is Lacan’s term), that display…of all the trappings of authority, hierarchy, order, position make the man. His phallic identity: If the penis were the phallus, men would have no need of feathers or dies or medals. Display [parade], just like the masquerade, thus betrays a flaw: no one has the phallus.
• The fairy story is a view of the world and society from below, from its powerless margins, where the imaginative recasting of the possible world allow us to glimpse anxiety, longing, danger, resilience, and hope in the face of power, written different forms, transcoded into stories that intend to create another, parallel universs…or to re-order the world, setting it upside down, or yet again to retell the actual world with the possibility of negotiating perhaps not social and economic change, but the rage, fear, or danger in it.
• Bluebeard story hinges on the prohibition uttered by the father/husband about using a key to enter a secret chamber: the chamber being so often a metaphor for the hidden interior and sexuality of women, the key functioning as a masculine sign, the phallus that the woman should not herself insert to gain knowledge. In this story, however, the interior of the man—his psychic space—is further suggested in an interesting reversal. Like Eve, the 8th wife must transgress the prohibition not to enter the secret chamber since the two—prohibition and transgression—are a co-dependent pair. Her discovery is, however, horrific. Shed but also irremobably staining blood introduces a counter-colour, transgressively associated not only with death, but with the femaly body, with menstruation, defloration and birth.
• There are various outcomes to the tale as we know it. Our book is not so much concerned with the origin of this tale, or of fairy tales themselves, complex and fascinating as that history is. We are focusing on the resilience and endless fascination exercizes by this one particular tale which has a number of themes: adult sexualities—mens and womens; initiation; repeitition; curiosity, marriage and its dangers.
[Introduction: A Perrault in Wolf’s Clothing; Victoria Anderson]
• Quote from movie: How many dead women does it take to make a good story?
• Bluebeard occupies a peculiarly central and yet ambivalent positioning in cultural history. La Barbe Bleue written by Charles Perrault in 1697, although predated by oral variants.
• The genesis of the European novel form itself was in the 17c French court, almost exclusively between female writesr and conteuses, amongst them the infamous precieuses and Madame Lafayette. The novel was, in a sense, born of the Salon.
• Perrault’s tale seemingly marks the intersection between oral and print culture as a dominant mode of dissemination, between epic and novel, and between women telling tales and men writing them; this, in turn, becomes the more interesting when one notes the peculiar violence committed in the tale
• “It was during Perrault’s time that the very use of representation was beginning to be seen as a political tool”
• It is possible to see in the tales of Perrault a ‘modern’ mythology, a downsized sub-pantheon of miniature heroes with a comparable purpose: that of culturing. These tales sold as Mother Goose tales (evokes feminine tradition of storytelling)
• Rich tradition of “Robber Bridegroom” stories. The girl is the heroine of these stories. Resourceful and independent. Perrault’s tale, despite claims for modernism, harks back to a more ancient patterning of narrative that turns on an injunction-transgression.
• Given Perrault’s place as a man within the decidedly feminine space of tale-telling, within the feminine space of child-rearing, as creator of a book fronted by the image of an invasion of female space, a book published anonymously under the subjeading Mother Goose, we can give credence to the idea advanced by Harries that Perrault simulates not only orality, but femininity itself, describing his actions as “narrative cross-dressing”
• Bluebeard story as “skeletal drama of female victimage flowing from a male monopolgy of reason and force”
• The rescue by the brothers is the defining feature of these tales, since in all corresponding tale-types she saves herself.
• Speculate that Perrault marked masculine usurpation and destruction of the feminine role through trickery and sexual murder.
• Perrault’s contes as both parodying the folktale and studying the novel: Perrault’s is the story of a story. As he does so he masculinizes—rather, re-inserts into the phallic domain—the novel form by eliminating women (amongst whom both the novel form and oral folk tale originate) from the storytelling arena. He does so by using a figured rape and, its logical extension, murder. Not so much a tale of warning, but a tale of threat.
[Bluebeard’s Curse: Repeititon and Improvisational Energy; Maria Tatar]
• Though it ends in marriage, it is more horror story than fairy tale, revealing that there may be more to the institution of marriage than happily ever after.
• The marriage of Bluebeard and his wife, haunted by suspicion, betrayal, andhomicidal impulses, troubles the serene marital bliss represented at the end of many fairy tales.
• Although few can recite its plot, Bluebeard lends a robust subterranean life, surfacing from time to time in explicit ways to remind us that it is a story that refuses to go away
• Willa Cather: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves fiercely as if they had never happened before. And yet, fairy tales have extraordinary cultural elasticity, expanding to accommodate new details and contracting to eliminate foreign elements. They rarely repeat themselves, for each new voice adds a new inflection or adds a new twist or turn to the traditional path. Each telling of the story recharges its power, making it hiss and crackle, but only when new narrative energy is added.
• Bluebeard is one of those stories that has fiercely repeated itself even as it indulges in narrative promiscuity, combining and commingling with other stories, splitting off from itself and merging with other plots to create new versions of itself, always changing as it reproduces itself. The tale’s transformative energy has guaranteed its survival but it has also led to a cultural afterlife that takes the form of repression, for the story often flashes out to us in nothing more than bits and pieces—a barbaric husband, a curious wife, a forbidden chamber, a blood-stained key, or corpses in a hidden chamber.
• Story continues to be recast, rewritten, and adapted. A certain cultural resilience. And yet most adults seem only dimly aware of the plot.
• The Bluebeard story, like the character whose life it stages, exhibits an uncanny repeititon compulsion.
• One of the fatal effects of the bluebeard story has to do with its habit of inspiring fascination and imitation rather than intervention and adaption.
[Hommes Fatales: Murder, Pathology and Hollywood’s Bluebeards; Pollock]
• Feminist cultural analysis works on a double axis: against sexism and for feminism.
• All culture, including feminist deconstructive work itself, is a technology of gender. The sex-gender system is both a sociocultural construct and a semiotic apparatus, a system of representation which assigns meaning (identity, value, prestige, location in kinship, status in the social hierarchy, etc) to individuals within society. If gender representations are social positions which carry differential meanings, then for someone to be represented and to represent oneself as male or as female implies the assumption of the whole of those meaning effects Thus, the proposition that the representation of gender is its construction, each term at once the product and the process of the other, can be restated more accurately. The construction of gender is both the product and the process of its representation
• Feminist cultural analysis must, therefore, also work for, that is produce, other ways of thinking and imagining that are not complicit with the dominant psycho-sociological structure of phallocentric configurations of gender and sexual difference such as are exposed in Bela Bartok’s monumental and ambiguous study of modern masculine subjectivity by the instrument of his final wife, Judith’s loving ivnestigations.
• One powerful cultural idee fixe of the phallocentric imaginary that we need to interrupt is that women are femme fatale. SO rarely reflected in reality, in statistics of crime.
• So where are the images, stories, myths and legends that incarnate and warn us of the much more widespread fact of the homme fatal?
• Almost no stories in the western canon of comparable longevity or cultural resonance that register the much more sinister, sociological and historical fact that women are systematically at risk from masculine violence and sexuality.
• The story of bluebeard is highly significant as a rare, if not the unique. Representation of the figure of the homme fatal.
• The gender inversion—hommes fatals—does itself violence to the prevailing notions of masculinity that are already complexly figured in and by the myth of the femme fatale that links femininity, sexuality, and death and projects these onto masculinity’s sexual other whose own sexuality and human agency is thus abolished, as she/woman is recast as a sign of what menaces the fragile integrity of masculinity. The difficulty of reconciling the strong man brought low by the sexual power of woman wit the acknowledgement of the ordinary and regular violence by (not all) men towards women leads to distortions and compensations in the manner in which such cultural forms as will asckolwedge the violence of masculinity negotiate what can only be treated as a deviation into masculine murderousness.
• While statistics tell us the sad and banal tale of the regularity of male violence towards women and girls, cultural representatiosn tend to make the murderous man exceptional, mad or deranged: he will be represented as an outcast from proper men. He will be othered by pathology, feminization and by his apparently incomplete accession to proper masculinity. He will be shown as damaged, a victim of circumstance, history, or, of course, a woman. The fatality of women thus often returns in disguise as the ultimate cause or source for the derangement that produces the abberant homme fatal.
• Whatever the story, it is the woman who will be punished by the cinema in the telling of the tale, even if, to confirm the exceptionality of the wicked man, he cannot survive the film itself. Thus does phallocentric culture admit, but also rid itself, of the burdern of knowledge signified by the rare admission of masculinity as bluebeard, the serial murdere.

[Lukasz Rogowski · Rating 3 out of 5]

Przemocowa baśń o Sinobrodym przemaglowana przez feminizm i psychoanalizę. Książka jest antologia i jest nierówna. Esej Griseldy Pollock brawurowy, dwa ostatnie teksty do wyrzucenia.