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 Bluebeard 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