Tales of Bluebeard and His Wives from Late Antiquity to Postmodern Times

This project provides an in-depth study of narratives about Bluebeard and his wives, or narratives with identifiable Bluebeard motifs, and the intertextual and extratextual personal, political, literary, and sociocultural factors that have made the tale a particularly fertile ground for an author#xE2;#xAC;"s adaptation of the story. Whereas Charles Dickens, for example, expresses a sympathetic identification with Bluebeard, and a discernable strain of misogyny emerges in his recreation of the tale and recurrent allusions to it, his contemporary, William Makepeace Thackeray, uses the tale as a springboard for his critique of avarice, hypocrisy, pretension, and the subjugation of women in Victorian society.

List of FiguresAcknowledgments1. The Snake-Charmer's Wife in Genesis Rabbah, or Bluebeard Begins2. Charles Dickens and Captain Murderer3. Mr. Thackeray's Closet4. Miss Thackeray's Uses of Enchantment5. The Infernal Desire Machines in Anne Thackeray Ritchie's Bluebeard's Keys and Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber"6. The Bluebeard Syndrome in Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle: Fear and Femininity7. The Party Consciousness: When Texts Get Together in Margaret Atwood's "Bluebeard's Egg"NotesBibliographyIndex