Abstract:
This thesis explores Charles Perrault’s seventeenth-century fairytale La Barbe bleue and a slice of its modern-day afterlife from the perspective of literary adaptation. In so doing it looks backwards through myth and culture for its sources, and forwards across the borders of culture, genre and form at the mutability of its adaptational reach. The Bluebeard-type folk tales circulating in Perrault’s day concern a serial wife-killer and his latest bride, who discovers his secret, but is saved from death at her husband’s hand by the timely intervention of her brother/s (ATU312). Power, temptation, and violation are central issues, as the Bluebeard figures always kill their wives after they disobey his prohibition. Perrault’s literary version has been variously read as a cautionary tale about the consequences of female curiosity, or an exemplary story about the downfall of a husband who abuses his patriarchal authority. Its two appended morals suggest a choice of one or the other of these readings: the first an admonitory caution to wives to resist the temptation of curiosity “which always costs dearly”, the second an ironic riposte that in effect questions the legitimacy of a husband’s absolute power over his wife. My claim is that La Barbe bleue offers a paradigm of how the literary archetypes of a fairytale can be used to comment of salient social issues in an adapter’s own culture. The thesis examines the readiness of the tale for adaptation, and the many ways it has been retold since its first dissemination in late seventeenth-century France , with focus on its diffusion though opera, ballet, literature and film in twentieth and twenty-first century modernity.
