1 After Happy Ever: Tender Extremities and Tangled Selves in Three

Abstract: This article identifies a critique of popular romance plots through unstable identities and disingenuous narrative perspectives in three Australasian Bluebeard tales. In these works by female writers in Australia and New Zealand, Bluebeard’s key tropes of fragmentation, repetition and revelation are used to dismember popular understandings of romantic love. Confronting both the limits of knowledge and the power of story to shape romantic relations, Margaret Mahy, Sarah Quigley and Marion Campbell each in different ways refashion the Bluebeard tale’s central images to complicate romantic love as a site of self-realisation. The resulting works ask us to consider how narratives and expectations of romantic love might be better “re-membered ” to encourage relations of embodied compassion in contemporary Western culture. About the Author: Lucy Butler writes fiction and critical work in the area of popular culture. She has a PhD in Creative Arts from the University of Melbourne. She currently lives in New Zealand where she is working on a novel and researching self-help and celebrity in contemporary culture