50 Shades of Bluebeard
In my last post, I mentioned
being pleasantly freaked out by a radio broadcast of the Bluebeard story on the
“Let’s Pretend” radio show when I was a kid.
The young actors kept pretty close to the classic version of the story, which
originated with Charles Perrault in the 17th century.
The short story
is online and easily read. Briefly it’s the tale of a very wealthy serial wife
killer with a blue beard, out hunting for a new spouse. His modus
operandi is always the same and always works: he offers his newest wife a
bunch of keys, and she is invited to use them to explore the treasures in the
castle’s various rooms, except for the room opened by the golden key, which is
forbidden. Naturally the new wife goes
right for the forbidden door, opens it, and finds the bodies of the dead former
wives within. She is, of course
confronted by Bluebeard, who kills her too, and throws her body with the
others. Perrault’s unnamed protagonist,
who turns out to be his last wife, turns the tables with the aid of her sister
Anne and her soldier-brothers, who rescue her in the nick of time. Bluebeard is
slain, and she inherits his entire fortune.
The
popularity of this story persisted for centuries. The folklorist Heidi Anne Heiner has found enough
variations of the story to write an 800-page volume about them, but she has
pointed out that its popularity had begun to fade around the middle of the 20th
century, except in Perrault’s home country, France.
This
doesn’t mean, of course, that we have lost our fascination with serial killers,
but the idea of anyone being so naïve as to fall for the key game now seems pretty
far-fetched. I don’t think that a guy
having a blue beard is even that weird now, given contemporary styles; as a
matter of fact, it’s possible that a millionaire who was punk enough to dye his
beard blue would be a kinky enticement! Perrault’s story seems to be in the
tradition of the weak female easily tempted, like Pandora and Eve. But in
reality who, male or female, could really resist the temptation to do something
they shouldn’t, particularly if the key is in their hands to do it?
Actually
though, Perrault really only supplies us with a template that can be modified
and updated in many ways. Only two of
his characters have names: Bluebeard and the heroine’s sister Anne. Never is it stated how many dead victims were
in that forbidden room, or how many keys there were, or an inventory of the
treasures behind the permitted doors besides general specifications of gold,
silver, furniture and jewels in vast abundance. And except for a mention that
the current wife is attractive, the reader doesn’t know if she is older or
young, curious but, in the end, cleverer and luckier than those who came
before.
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| Breillat's Barbe-Bleu and his Child Bride |
The reason
that the Bluebeard story has survived at all is probably for its shiver
factor—as the heroine goes for the forbidden door, we want to scream “Don’t GO there” in the same way we want
to tell those teenagers not go into that derelict house full of Vampires,
Zombies or Terrible Slashers. But of
course they always do.
“Let’s
Pretend’s” version followed the Perrault line and it succeeded—I think because
it was aimed at children, and radio allowed for a lot of shivery imagination,
For tender ears, they did change one thing in the story: the
wives in the forbidden room were still alive.
This meant that Bluebeard was merely a polygamist, who mistreated his
wives. In this version, the latest wife,
named Fatima, liberates them all.
A recent
film that followed Perrault’s story line to a T, was Catherine Breillat’s 2009 Barbe Bleue , perhaps proving Heidi Anne
Heiner’s contention of its continuing popularity in France. But Breillat’s version encloses the story
within a contemporary shell of two little girls reading the tale in an attic,
and one of these dies at the end from a fall.
By making the Bluebeard heroine, here called Marie-Catherine into a
flat-chested pre-adolescent, she also adds a possibility of potential of
underage, if marital sex to the mix, even if Bluebeard was supposed to wait
until she grew up some before consummation.
If this was the case, why did he give the keys to a child-bride? It thus adds potential child-murder to the
mix (and child death does occur in the shell story). There is some suggestion that the whole
Bluebeard story is being imagined through the eyes of the two young girls who
read it, but I can personally say that listening to “Let’s Pretend” as a kid
certainly didn’t make me interpret it that way.
Disney, I’m sorry to say, would have done a much better job, even if
they animated the keys and added songs.
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| Ulmer's Bluebeard |
Sometimes
the story is lost altogether, the name “Bluebeard” simply folded into a
serial-killer horror film, as in the case of the 1944 movie directed by my
favorite B-film maker, Edgar Ulmer.
Here, long-faced John Carradine plays the demented murderer, with no
castle, and no beard either, just an artist’s studio.
 |
| Burton and Heatherton |
Sometimes
the story is a pretext for S & M. A
skidding Richard Burton made an abysmal version of the story in 1972 with sexy
icons of the day Raquel Welch, Virna Lisi and Joey Heatherton, updated to the 1930’s,
where the villain, who does have a blue beard, is an Austrian Nazi Baron. He keeps his dead wives in a basement
freezer. The story is told to his
present victim in flashback of the death of his earlier spouses with a lot of
bare bosoms and tortures. It was a box-office bomb. ‘Nuf said.
And
sometimes the name “Bluebeard” can be the metaphor for a person’s apparent and
real inner nature. In Kurt Vonnegut’s
wonderful novel, Bluebeard is Rabo Karabekian, a failed abstract expressionist
painter, whose entire oeuvre in that
style was done with a house paint called “sateen duralux” that eventually fell
off all his canvasses. He has no beard, and just one eye, the other one a World
War II casualty. But his real talent is elsewhere, in a monumental 512 square
foot painting that he keeps hidden in an old potato barn, closed by 6
locks. And there is a curious lady, the
incomparable millionaires writer Circe Berman, wants to go in there. To her he says “I am Bluebeard and my studio
is my forbidden chamber as far as
you’re concerned.” But she finally persuades him to let her in there—and she
gets to go home. In this case, the
revelation is his, and it’s a liberating one.
It’s one of my favorite novels
Unlike Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, where the original novella remains the best version, the
bluebeard story lends itself to really interesting riffs—particularly in the
stylized realm of opera. Maybe the most
unconventional was written as a play by Maurice Maeterlinck in 1899 and
transformed into an opera by Paul Dukas in 1907. In this version, Bluebeard is already hated by the peasants of his estate; they are
well aware of the disappearing wives (here there were five). His latest wife, Ariane is fully aware of
Bluebeard’s unsavory history, and has a plan of action. Leaving her maid to explore the five chambers
filled with fabulous jewels (entire rooms of rubies, sapphires, emeralds, etc.,
and cutting through the sixth, which contains diamonds, she cuts to the chase
and opens the forbidden seventh portal.
There she finds Bluebeard’s wives, imprisoned but alive. Bluebeard comes in and tries to subdue her,
but she is undaunted, and the only thing he can do is lock her in with the
others.
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| Ariane comforts Bluebeard with rescued wives |
Ariane
figures out an escape route, and leads all of the girls out back to the main
part of the castle, where she dresses them up and drapes them with the jewels
from the other chambers. Meanwhile, the
peasants have formed a lynch mob, capture Bluebeard, and bring him back to the
castle for hanging. Ariane persuades them to hand Bluebeard over to her. She unties them, and leaves him with the
other restored wives in polygamous happiness; they don’t want to leave and are
content to care for him. She, on the
other hand, leaves (and presumably gets a divorce).
Austin B.
Caswell, who analyzed the opera, considers Ariane an early feminist, and
credits Dukas for the transformation of the heroine into a more active
protagonist from her somewhat less assertive figure in the Maeterlinck
story. But what is really unusual about
this treatment is that it is all about the wives; Bluebeard himself barely
appears. Maybe this is why the opera has
had revivals in the last decade or so.
The version
of the Bluebeard story that perhaps still resonates best, precisely because of
its potential ambiguity, is Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s
Castle. Written in 1911, it was
first performed in 1918. Barely an hour
long, with just two singing characters, Bluebeard and his latest wife-victim,
Judith, it has gained popularity only since the 1950’s, when its
psycho-dramatic score and libretto has become better appreciated, and as
technological possibilities of multi-media stagecraft continue to develop.
The plot
here plays out with Bluebeard reluctant to give Judith all the keys at once,
but leads her through six chambers: a torture chamber, an armory, a room of
gold and jewels, a garden, a panoramic view of his kingdom, and a pool of
tears. The first five are increasingly filled
with light, while the sixth is dark and sad, but each tainted with blood. Finally, in the seventh room, are Bluebeard’s
three other wives, still alive, but silent, weighted down by the jewels they
wear. Judith too is given these heavy
luxuries, and, zombified, follows the others, as Bluebeard shuts the door. Each room is different in color, and each
wife represents a time of day: dawn, midday, evening, and the last (Judith)
midnight.
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| Chihuly |
But
Bartok’s version, like Perrault’s, is a template. Over time, the staging and
even the nature of the characters has changed, from an innocent, but seductive
Judith in a 1963 film of the opera, designed and directed by Michael Powell
with strange, amorphous Dali-esque sets, through a production with sets
designed by Dale Chihuly, consisting of seven panels, six with colored glass
installations (one for each of the doors), that make the drama. Each one is
black on its reverse, turned to reveal its shapes and color as each door is
entered. Only the last one is completely
black. Presented at the front of the
stage with the orchestra behind the panels, it would be just a concert version if
not for Chihuly’s spectacularly colored and lit glass, that expresses the
emotion and symbolism of the text and music.
First produced in 2007, this one can still be seen (its next showing
will be in Norfolk, Virginia, next month).
But the most dramatic presentations are those that use projection, such
as a staging in Bartók’s home town, Budapest, in 2011, and the new production,
by the Metropolitan Opera, which I caught at their “Live in HD” series locally
last month.
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| Met Opera: Nadja Michael and Mikhail Petrenko |
This is a
very different production—not so much for the super-imaginative sets, that
included a view down an elevator shaft as our characters descend from chamber
to chamber, or the cold, Bauhausian architecture of the entry way and some of
the chambers, as in the characters themselves.
Judith here is no sweet beauty but rather has a very used,
down-on-her-luck bargirl, while Bluebeard seems to be a rather sinister gangster
type. Given the characters, this becomes
more of an elaborate kind of assisted suicide.
Bluebeard is a perpetually disillusioned suitor, and Judith certainly
doesn’t live up to whatever his diminished dream is. And yet, she is there of
her own free will, so the whole thing is a sort of expressionistic journey into
the circles of Hell. But what a
descent! This becomes a true tale of
horror, because the characters drive it, and they do what they do with their
own free will.
What’s left
for the Bluebeard story? Maybe a video
game app in which that last wife, whatever her name, rushes up and down the
castle, opening various doors with keys, getting prizes and points (or not) as
she moves through the various chambers, perhaps aided by Sister Anne. All the
time, she’s hotly pursued by Bluebeard, who, if he catches her will kill her,
or does she finally achieve the Forbidden Chamber level, liberate the captive
wives, while Bluebeard finally gets laminated by her soldier brothers, also in
the chase, armed with AK 47’s?
The
Original Perrault story is available at several Internet sites.
The
Let’s Pretend broadcast of Bluebeard
can be found in its entirety at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foSr-EnVeQo, It was originally broadcast on June 21, 1947.
For the 88+ Bluebeard Stories, see Heidi Anne Heimer, Bluebeard Tales From Around the World, Surlalune fairy tale series, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2011—and also as an Amazon Kindle download.
Film versions:
Edgar Ulmer’s Bluebeard can be accessed on Youtube, as are clipse of the 1972 Richard Burton version.
Kurt Vonnegut's Novel: Bluebeard, a Novel, Delta Fiction, Dial Press, 1998 edition. The quote is on p. 51.
For
Feminism in the Bluebeard story, see
“Maeterlinck's and Dukas' "Ariane et Barbe-Bleue":
A Feminist Opera? Austin B. Caswell. Studies in Romanticism, V.
27, No. 2 (Summer, 1988), pp. 203-20
Bartók’s
Bluebeard’s Castle:
Clips of
the 2011 Budapest Version is at:
Clips from the Met recent Live in HD are accessible on
YouTube, and entire
versions,
including the 1963 film, plus many others, also YouTube.
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