Bluebeard: Why the grimmest of fairytales is still all-too-relevant

BBC culture / By Lillian Crawford,Features correspondent

The old French folk story about a young bride and her monstrous husband is a harrowing fable that continues to inspire powerful modern adaptations, writes Lillian Crawford.

“Once upon a time… Where did this happen? Outside or within?” Thus begins the prologue of Béla Balázs’s libretto for the 1918 opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, with music by Béla Bartók. It is an invitation to enter another realm, one of fairytale and horror. “The curtain that rises – or is it just our eyelids?” it continues. Seven locked doors appear around Bluebeard’s bedchamber, each of which his wife Judith begs him to let her see behind. Upon unlocking and entering the final door, she sees the reason for his secrecy – the Duke’s former wives petrified before her, whom she now joins, as Bluebeard moves away into “Darkness… darkness”.

The opera, based on the French fable about a young bride and her monstrous husband, continues to be a popular part of the repertoire. Its latest London revival is at English National Opera this week, where it is being presented as a semi-staged concert two-hander between mezzo-soprano Allison Cook as Judith and bass John Relyea as Bluebeard. In Bartók’s score, the music ebbs and flows between the newlyweds in imitation of their wedding-night lovemaking, Judith’s voice receding as Bluebeard grows bolder, and vice versa. It is a tumultuous story of domination and submission, the tension of the sexes and their respective mysteries.

Robbie Jack/Corbis via Getty Images / Bartok’s opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, seen here in a 2009 English National Opera production, is a powerful psychodrama (Credit: Robbie Jack/Corbis via Getty Images)

The psychological battlefield of heterosexual marriage has changed significantly in the century between the premiere of Duke Bluebeard’s Castle and today. As indeed it had over more than 300 years between two Hungarians taking up its narrative in the 1910s, and Charles Perrault penning his Contes du temps passé (Tales of Past Times) in1697, including one entitled La Barbe Bleue. It is a fairytale most parents are liable to skip over when reading the canonical stories to children, due to its harrowing imagery rendering it less familiar than Perrault’s Cinderella or Little Red Riding Hood. Instead it is more likely to resonate with the parents themselves – as proved by its continual reinvention, with new theatrical and literary adaptations over the past few months giving it contemporary resonance.

The original Barbe Bleue tells the story of a woman who marries a man with a repulsive blue beard and moves into his castle, wherein he gives her keys to every room but implores her not to enter his secret chamber. Inevitably, condemned by Eve’s original sin, the wife opens the door to find the floor and walls covered in blood, and Bluebeard’s murdered wives hanging from the walls. The moral? Perrault gives us two. The first is that women’s curiosity is not worth the cost. But the second says that this is a bygone fable, and that now, “Whether his beard be black or blue, / The modern husband does not ask / His wife to undertake a task / Impossible for her to do”. These appended morals reveal that La Barbe Bleue is not so much a condemnation of the wife as it seems. If it were, she would die at the end; instead her brothers arrive at the 11th hour and rip Bluebeard apart with their swords. Rather, it is a warning that a man should not blame his wife for her curiosity but share his secrets with her.

My take on Bluebeard is an anti-romance novel where the typical dark romance hero represented by such characters as Fifty Shades of Grey’s Christian Grey turns out to be the Bluebeard hes hinted to be after all – Anna Biller

Operatic adaptations of the story before Balázs and Bartók’s version brought a lightness to the ending, such as Jacques Offenbach’s 1866 opéra bouffe which reveals Bluebeard’s wives were merely drugged rather than killed and sees him marry a woman who manages to tame him. Another is Ariane et Barbe-bleue, a 1901 opera with music by Paul Dukas after a libretto by Maurice Maeterlinck. In this version, the new wife, Ariane, enters Bluebeard’s castle to free his five imprisoned previous spouses. She sings that a woman’s first duty to a man is to disobey “when the order of things is threatening and offers no explanation”, and because the other wives did not, they met their fate at their husband’s hands. Even when Ariane frees the other wives, they choose to stay at the castle, afraid of unknown freedom. As in the Bartók version, Bluebeard’s castle is really a psychological state, and the conflict between husband and wife takes place in the mind. It is not so much about physical dissonance, but the irreconcilability of masculine and feminine ways of thinking.

One interpretation is that it is out of fear that Bluebeard murders or locks away his wives – the threat of vulnerability that comes from proximity to a woman’s psyche. This becomes entwined with his fear of physical intimacy, the act of inserting key into lock steeped in obvious sexual imagery. In Bartók’s opera, Balázs uses the Symbolist device of the seven doors, each revealing a different room and colour to Bluebeard’s character – his red torture chamber, golden treasury, blue-green garden, a sentimental pool of tears. The demand to open each door represents Judith’s sexual demands on their wedding night. Bluebeard’s reluctance can be read as performance anxiety, his fear of making himself vulnerable to her.

It is significant that Balázs names the wife in his libretto Judith, after the Biblical heroine whose first husband was unable to consummate their marriage, and who beheaded the Assyrian general Holofernes to liberate her home city of Bethulia. Sigmund Freud described Judith in his essay The Taboo of Virginity (1917) as “the woman who castrates the man who has deflowered her”. In 1901 Austrian painter Gustav Klimt depicted Judith with the head of Holofernes in similarly alluring nakedness and expression to Salomé, she who danced the Dance of the Seven Veils to win the head of John the Baptist – a devious, dangerous temptress.

Steve Tanner / Emma Rice’s Blue Beard uses the story to comment on contemporary male violence (Credit: Steve Tanner)

Yet consider the rendering of Judith beheading Holofernes by Italian baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi, a more vengeful, bloodthirsty decapitation scene. It is typically read as an artistic expression of vengeance on her mentor Agostino Tassi, who was convicted of raping Gentileschi. This approach to the biblical Judith is echoed in more modern feminist retellings of Perrault’s story, by way of Bartók’s opera – first in Angela Carter’s 1979 short story The Bloody Chamber and more recently by Anna Biller, director of feminist horror comedy The Love Witch (2016), in her 2023 debut novel Bluebeard’s Castle. In both versions, Bluebeard’s wife is shown to have the last laugh over their violent husband.

I have become more and more haunted by the regular chime of women being attacked, murdered, and abused. With Blue Beard, I wanted to use my craft, my platform, and my experience to make a small difference – Emma Rice

“My book took a lot from Bartók’s opera,” Biller tells BBC Culture, including the name Judith for her protagonist. “I borrowed from the end when Bluebeard’s other wives are piled with jewellery that is so heavy it chains them to the castle.” The riches that Bluebeard offers his wives are central to Carter and Biller’s versions, which explore the fantastical allure of this man in greater detail. “Mine is an anti-romance novel,” Biller explains, “where the typical dark romance hero represented by such characters as Christian Grey [in Fifty Shades of Grey] turns out to be the Bluebeard he’s hinted to be after all. It’s about the horror of accidentally marrying a Bluebeard.”

‘Opening the door’

For Biller, new adaptations of Bluebeard are essential responses to widespread domestic and sexual violence in contemporary society. It is also the impetus for British theatre maker Emma Rice’s new play, Blue Beard, currently on tour around the UK, which takes Perrault’s moral of not blaming women for their curiosity further in its tagline: When someone tells you not to look, open the bloody door! “I have become more and more haunted by the regular chime of women being attacked, murdered, and abused,” Rice tells BBC Culture, citing the 2022 murder of Zara Aleena in East London in particular. “She was just walking home. A week later her family, friends, and people she would never know, met at the spot where she was killed and walked her memory home. This was the moment that I knew I wanted to walk Bluebeard’s victims home. I wanted to use my craft, my platform, and my experience to make a small difference.”

Music is the tool of expression for Bluebeard’s wives in these later versions. Music is central to Rice’s play, and Biller has her Judith write an opera based on Perrault’s story as a mise en abyme to catch the conscience of the Duke. The narrator in The Bloody Chamber is a pianist who muses, “It must have been my innocence that captivated him – the silent music, he said, of my unknowingness, like La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune played upon a piano with keys of ether”. The transmutation of bloodied door keys to piano keys is fully rendered in Jane Campion’s 1993 film The Piano, whose story about a newlywed woman fighting for agency echoes Bluebeard, in which music becomes the voice of mute protagonist Ada. Emphasising the parallels, one key scene sees a pantomime version of Bluebeard performed – but just as the Duke is about to stroke off the head of his seventh wife with his sword, a group of Māori tribesmen storm the stage and disrupt the performance.

BFI National Archive/The Film Foundation/The Ashbrittle Film Foundation / Michael Powell’s film of Duke Bluebeard’s Castle depicts Judith as triumphant (Credit: BFI National Archive/The Film Foundation/The Ashbrittle Film Foundation )

In that moment the retelling of Bluebeard becomes too real to its audience that they take on the role of the wife’s brothers in the original tale, saving her from her murderous husband. The scene raises the question again, coming back to Balázs’s libretto, of whether the action is taking place “outside or within”, a concept which the Hungarian writer later expanded on in his film theory, including the 1924 book Visible Man. His ideas influenced Michael Powell, who explored the feminine subconscious in films with Emeric Pressburger including Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948).

In 1963 Powell directed a film adaptation of Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle for German television starring Norman Foster and Ana Raquel Satre. Despite being funded by Foster as a vehicle for his own performance, Powell found greater interest in Satre’s Judith. She is incessantly inquisitive, refusing to acquiesce to Bluebeard’s masculine secrecy. When the fifth door opens, and the score calls for Judith to let out an enormous shriek, Satre does not, instead pushing through the threshold into Bluebeard’s “vast and beautiful kingdom”, the swelling score announcing her triumph rather than his.

Bartók’s opera and the films of Powell and Pressburger are favourites of Anthony, the cruel, enigmatic lover to protagonist Julie in Joanna Hogg’s 2019 film The Souvenir. The score plays when Julie enters her apartment to find Anthony there for the first time, and recurs throughout the film, including when they have sex. Julie is a more subdued Judith than Satre in Powell’s film, choosing to believe her lover’s lies, rather than opening the door and discovering the uncomfortable truth. When she does, her Bluebeard dies, but at last she finds her own means of expression, through her filmmaking in the film’s sequel – her film within the film being a remake of Hogg’s student film Caprice, a gauzy fever dream directly inspired by Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffmann. An exploration of the castle within.

In The Souvenir Part II, Julie enters a soundstage and sees a man sitting on an actor’s chair against a giant backdrop like those painted by Hein Heckroth for Powell and Pressburger’s films. It depicts a towering castle, a grave harbinger of another Bluebeard on the horizon. Hogg’s reimagining of Bluebeard differs greatly to that of Powell or Carter, Biller or Rice. It reveals the continuing resonance of Perrault’s fairytale, and the potential for new ways of presenting it across artforms. As long as there remains conflict in love, so too does the shadow of Bluebeard.

A semi-staged concert production of Duke Bluebeard’s Castle will be performed at London’s Coliseum on 21 and 23 March

Emma Rice’s Blue Beard is currently touring the UK

Bluebeard’s Castle (Michael Powell, 1963) is available now

—

If you liked this story, sign up for The Essential List newsletter – a handpicked selection of features, videos and can’t-miss news delivered to your inbox every Friday.

If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

Books/ Opera/Theatre