FEMINISM AND BLUEBEARD

The story of Bluebeard (AT 312) has had an especially lively history in written literature since it was first published in 1697. One reason for the attraction may be that it is hard to decide whether Bluebeard is about a woman or a man: each sex reads, and therefore retells, Bluebeard very differently. Out of the extensive field of literary rewritings of Bluebeard1 this paper selects a number of stories by women writers whose response to the tale has been, by and large, a feminist response. The first of them is Victorian, and dates from 1874.2 The most recent of them, Jane Campion’s film The Piano, amply acknowledges the popularity of the story of Bluebeard in Victorian Britain while itself offering a very strange dream-reconstruction of Victorian pioneer society in New Zealand. In fact, it can even be argued that Bluebeard is not so much a story referred to in the film, as the film’s underlying story.3 The Piano begins with a young woman’s arranged marriage to an unknown man who may be wealthy and who is certainly acquisitive (like other Bluebeards, he goes away on business trips). It contains a kind of forbidden room scenario, i