Bluebeard—A Proto-Gothic Folktale

The Gothic literary movement may not have begun until the mid-eighteenth century with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, but it draws on much older wells of literary tradition. I have already explored the proto-Gothic elements of several of Shakespeare’s plays, which inspired many of the themes and tropes of later Gothic works. Another strong source of inspiration for the Gothic was folklore and fairytales. In many cultures, such tales can be considered one of the earliest forms of horror literature, as they often depict monsters, dark magic, and gruesome consequences for poorly considered actions. But few are quite so dark as the famous French folktale “Bluebeard.”

As is generally the case with tales that were passed down orally, there is no way to know quite how old the Bluebeard story is, but it was first written down and published by French folklorist Charles Perrault in 1697. Its oral nature also means that there are many different versions and variations on the story, but the general outline goes like this: Once upon a time, a very wealthy widower was looking for a new wife, but the local women considered him ugly or frightening because of his strange blue beard. He approached a family with two daughters, and one eventually agreed to marry him after seeing his vast wealth. Shortly after the wedding, Bluebeard tells his new bride that he has to go away from the house for a while. He leaves her a ring of keys and invites her to use them to explore the whole house—with the exception of a locked closet at the end of a long gallery that the smallest key opens. Despite his dire warnings, the young wife eventually gives into temptation and opens the locked closet. Inside, she sees the bloodied bodies of multiple previous wives who, like her, disobeyed Bluebeard’s orders. When Bluebeard returns earlier than expected, the bloodstained key reveals the wife’s disobedience. Just as she is preparing to meet the same fate as her predecessors, the young woman is rescued by her brothers. You can read an 1828 version of the story here on WikiSource.

The moral of the Bluebeard story has been hotly debated: Some suggest it is meant to scare young wives into being obedient and smothering their curiosity. But can you really read this story and come to the conclusion that the young bride would be better off going about her married life blissfully ignorant of her husband’s violent past and the bloody closet of her dead predecessors? Either way you read it, I think you’ll recognize some common themes and tropes that show up in later works of Gothic literature. First, we have the naïf, an innocent young woman who is made vulnerable when removed from her family and brought into a new environment, under the power of a dangerous man. Then we have the depiction of marriage as potentially bringing with it the threat of violence, and a male character with a dark and deadly secret. We can see the young bride reflected in later Gothic heroines whose agency and curiosity propels the plot of their novels. And the broader theme of the temptation of knowledge—knowledge that may itself be dangerous or detrimental to the learner—also shows up throughout the genre. But the most overt references to the Bluebeard legend in Gothic novels often show up as the trope of the first wife and/or a locked room or forbidden wing. Below are just a few examples of works that draw on the Bluebeard story:

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)

Charlotte Brontë’s classic Gothic romance actually contains a direct reference to “Bluebeard” in Chapter 10, when Jane is first being given a tour through the estate of her new employer, Thornfield Hall. As she passes through the third-floor corridor of closed doors, behind one of which she hears Bertha Mason’s unsettling laugh, the narration remarks that the passageway is “like a corridor in some Bluebeard’s castle.” The comparison is more apt than Jane knows at the time, considering that Mr. Rochester—like Bluebeard—is concealing an earlier failed marriage and the physical presence of a previous wife. Though Bertha has not been brutally murdered like Bluebeard’s wives, she has been cruelly imprisoned and her mere existence spells doom for Jane’s marriage. In another deviation from the folktale, instead of the new wife being given the key and sneaking into the locked room, in Jane Eyre it is the old wife who gets ahold of the key and periodically sneaks out. In both “Bluebeard” and Jane Eyre, the discovery of the secret concealed behind the locked door leads the protagonist to escape her marriage, although in Jane’s case, this escape is only temporary and the story ends with the death of the previous wife rather than the death of the husband.

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (1938)

Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca draws on Jane Eyre and thus also draws on the “Bluebeard” legend. In this book, however, there are no locked doors, only the disused and avoided west wing, where the bedroom of Maxim de Winter’s first wife is kept in pristine condition by the housekeeper Mrs. Danvers, exactly how Rebecca had left it before her death. The nameless narrator of the story, Maxim’s new bride, is not expressly forbidden from this room, but she does wait until the first time that her husband leaves the estate for an extended period of time to explore it. The room does not conceal the body of his previous wife—either living or dead—but it does contain a lingering sense of her presence. The untouched bedroom represents all of the ways that Rebecca seems to live on after her death: through the devotion of Mrs. Danvers, the habits of the household staff, Maxim’s reticence and volatile moods, and the narrator’s insecurity. And, indeed, Maxim is concealing a deep, dark secret about his previous marriage—and he is concealing his previous wife’s body, just not in the house. At the end of the novel, Rebecca’s boat is pulled from the lake and her body is found suspiciously closed up inside the cabin. Maxim’s secret is not just that he murdered his wife and covered it up as a boating accident, but that his marriage with Rebecca was not the blissful paradise that everyone else believes. Ironically, it is the discovery of his first wife’s body and Maxim’s subsequent revelations about the true nature of their relationship that finally allows the narrator to feel safe and content in her marriage. 

“The Bloody Chamber” by Angela Carter (1979)

Angela Carter’s titular story in her best-known collection The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories is, perhaps, the most direct retelling of “Bluebeard” in the Gothic canon. Carter’s story follows the beats of the original fairy tale, but with an overtly sexual edge. The “bloody chamber” of the title refers not only to the locked den where the serial widower keeps his instruments of torture and the bodies of his previous wives, but also metaphorically to the young bride’s “bloody chamber” when she loses her virginity in their marriage bed. Sex and violence are linked in this story, as summed up by the murderous husband’s favorite sentiment from Baudelaire: “There is a striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer.” Throughout the story, the young narrator feels a mix of both trepidation and desire for the cold and controlling older man she has just married. She feels similarly toward the forbidden den, which draws her to it even as she knows she should not defy her husband’s orders. This desire might suggest some complicity on the part of the young woman, and yet Carter’s story does not blame the victim. As in the original tale, the girl is rescued from imminent death, freed from her captor, and allowed to make use of his riches as she sees fit. In an extra feminist twist, Carter’s version of the story has the girl’s mother save the day rather than her brothers.

Have you read any other works of Gothic literature that draw on the story of “Bluebeard”? Let me know in the comments! And feel free to suggest any other texts or tales of folklore that you think might qualify as “proto-Gothic.”