Here and There: Is It Outside, or Inside?

An article from BDZ Hangoló magazine, autumn 2016. By Réka Ortutay.

Why do folklore, literature and many great musicians commemorate one of history’s first known serial killers? Why do they endow him with features such as a blue beard? Why does the story’s dénouement change from era to era? In this article we venture into the depths of history, myth, legend and folk belief — and into the depths of the psyche too — to explore why the story of a supposed womaniser and wife-murderer inspired so many writers, poets and artists to immortalise his figure for posterity. So let us set out on our journey and discover what the legend meant in the various ages of folklore and history, and how it reflected the most turbulent periods of human life, the human soul and world history.

Historical background and folk tradition

The figure of Bluebeard emerges from the mists of history and folklore, becoming ever more distinct over the centuries. According to researchers and scholars, his character was inspired by two historical figures. The first is the infamous Conomor the Cursed (or Comorre, in some sources), King of Poher in Brittany. Many believe he was the historical precursor not only of Bluebeard but also of Mark, the King of Cornwall known from the legend of Tristan and Isolde; folklore holds that his castle was the former castle of Bluebeard. The other figure we must certainly mention is Gilles de Montmorency-Laval (in some sources Gilles de Rais, or Retz; 1404–1440), whom historians regard as a loyal companion of Joan of Arc — according to some sources he even tried to rescue her.

Later he withdrew from the turmoil of war and became known for a much darker side: he abducted and murdered children in his castle. The Inquisition eventually arrested him; after a lengthy trial he was convicted and subsequently executed. Folk belief wove these two figures together to create the evil character of Bluebeard, who appears as a wife-murderer in the folklore of some fifteen European countries. The story is generally similar: Bluebeard seduces young girls and marries them; when they become a nuisance to him (in some tales they grow pregnant, in others the man simply finds a new wife) he kills them and keeps their bodies in one of the dungeons of his castle. In many legends the symbol of locked doors or forbidden rooms, and the motifs of the test and of curiosity, already appear.

The number of wives varies too; in some stories there are seven locked doors, in others only one secret one. Sometimes the heroine — for the heroine of stories handed down by the people is always a woman — kills her returning husband; at other times she escapes mortal danger with the help of her sister and brothers.

From motif to motif

It is not uncommon in the intellectual history of humanity for a historical figure to come to life in oral tradition, with one or another of their chief characteristics inspiring fabulous, fantastical or instructive tales; one need only think of King Matthias in Hungarian folk tales, who roams the country in disguise and dispenses justice among the people. Beyond all this, it gives cause for reflection that the story of Bluebeard appears in Tuscan, Icelandic, Greek, Estonian, German and even Zanzibari folklore; indeed, the Jungian psychologist Clarissa Pinkola Estés refers to a Hungarian version in her excellent book Women Who Run with the Wolves. Yet what are the motifs that make a story worthy of being ‘cherished’ by folk tradition for so many centuries — passed down, retold, and mined for lessons? What are the motifs that recur in every version?

First and foremost, let us discuss the Bluebeard motif itself. The beard is a symbol of masculinity; in mythology the blue beard is an expression of wisdom, power and strength. Zeus and Indra (the god of lightning, war and thunder in Hindu mythology) also have blue beards. Some sources identify Bluebeard with the darkness of night, which kills his wife — the light — day after day. Returning to the folk motifs, the first and most important is the forbidden room. A familiar tale: in the folk tale Szép Miklós (Fair Nicholas), for example, the hero is forbidden to open a single room of the castle’s 366. It is impossible to know what lies hidden in the room sealed with a thousand locks.

When, driven by curiosity, he opens it anyway, he releases the dragon (the monster) from its prison, and so begin his trials and tribulations, in the course of which he must endure a hundred ordeals to defeat the dragon (the evil within us). Through the struggle his character develops, and he learns from his mistakes. Another characteristic folk motif is curiosity, which is of course bound up with the forbidden room. In the tale of Fair Nicholas we also saw the protagonist driven to discovery by his curiosity. We meet this, for instance, in Hansel and Gretel, but the pursuit of secrets is a central motif in countless other tales. Just think of the ‘Cinderella’s slipper’ motif, or the tale of ‘The Most Beautiful Reed Maiden’, where the prince’s curiosity — as he cuts open the reeds one after another to reveal the maidens hidden within — nearly causes the princess’s downfall.

In the folk tales mentioned, just as in the Bluebeard stories, the motif of the trial also plays a significant role. The room must not be opened, the forest must not be entered, the reed must not be split — can the hero withstand this trial, this test of patience? And finally, I should like to mention the folk motif of wife-murder. According to László Bóka (1910–1964, an Attila József Prize-winning writer, poet and literary historian), the figure of the womanising wife-murderer can be found in the folklore of every nation. In our Hungarian ballad tradition this type is embodied by Márton Ajgó in the ballad of Anna Molnár. He is, if you like, the Hungarian Bluebeard, who lures Anna away from her husband and child. Here too the man issues a prohibition to the woman:

“Anna Molnár, my sweet treasure, look into my mind for a moment; look into my mind for a moment, just do not look up at the sky.”

Anna, however, looks up at the sky and sees the murdered women; her future is revealed to her, and to save her life she kills the man and returns to her family. The ballad of Anna Molnár can be linked to Bartók’s work, based on Béla Balázs’s libretto, not only through the motifs of the seduced bride, the murder of a wife, the forbidden room and curiosity, but also through the motif of ‘looking into the mind’. Peering into the mind is itself an ancient folk motif: we look into someone’s mind, penetrate their soul and come to know their true self. This motif recurs behind the doors of Bluebeard’s castle; yet whereas in the folk ballad this ‘peering into the mind’ guides the young woman onto the right path, in Bartók and Balázs’s aesthetic the impossibility of true understanding leads to complete alienation.

An interesting addition is the story’s fairy-tale psychological interpretation: in the book mentioned above, Clarissa Pinkola Estés reads the Bluebeard story as a female fairy tale, played out in the mind of a woman (not the story’s protagonist, but women in general). Its characters embody aspects of the female psyche: Bluebeard is the predator living within us, the rooms are symbols of a reality obscured by our naïvety, and the key is the key to realisation. Once that realisation has come, our helpers arrive (the heroine’s brothers and sister), who free us from the predator.

Bluebeard’s literary debut

The first literary depiction of Bluebeard appears in the writings of Charles Perrault1 in 1697, during the transitional period between the Baroque and the Rococo, in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France. Perrault’s work was later published under the title Tales of Mother Goose. The book contained eight tales, among them the stories of Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and Donkey Skin, as well as the legend of Bluebeard. The story’s heroine is Fatime, whom her brothers rescue from the wrath of her murderous husband. With this book Perrault unwittingly launched Bluebeard’s triumphal march through the arts; the figure of the wife-murderer has indelibly entered both literature and music.

From the publication of Perrault’s tale until the 1920s, the character of Bluebeard took shape some twenty times in the form of operas, pantomimes, ballets, fairy tales, plays, incidental music and storytelling; indeed, in 1960 János Kass created the illustrations for Bluebeard’s Castle, whose powerful palette and stark contrasts prompt those leafing through the book to reflect further. ¹ Charles Perrault: Histoires ou Contes du Temps passé, avec des Moralités — Stories or Tales of Times Past, with Moral Lessons. What does this story tell us? What does it whisper to us, and what can we learn from it? Just this: that it speaks differently to everyone and teaches everyone something different, for the interpretation of the story depends, on the one hand, on the adapter and the era in which they live, and, of course, on the reader and their individual and social motivations.

If we were to examine only the Bluebeard stories published over the centuries, we could easily sketch a cultural and social portrait of every age. Perrault himself — though he probably set down stories already on the lips of the people — shaped his storybook to the taste of the time, intending to serve the moralising society of the day: at the end of every tale he draws a so-called moral lesson in verse, containing the author’s message for the members of the salons of the period.

Revolution and satire: Barbe Bleue

The prevailing intellectual trend in the second half of the eighteenth century was the Enlightenment, which, alongside reason, placed human rights and the overthrow of tyranny at the forefront. This is reflected in the drama Raoul, Barbe Bleue by Michel-Jean Sedaine (1719–1797, a French playwright best known for his opera librettos), written in the year of the French Revolution. Here the character of Barbe Bleue is transformed into a cruel tyrant who tramples on people and on all moral norms. The play follows the story of his wife, Isaure, as she seeks to free herself from this tyranny. We are now in the mid-nineteenth century; by this time Europe has passed through the great bourgeois revolutions, the European monarchies have been shaken, and embourgeoisement has reached its peak.

The social transformation and upheaval that began with the Enlightenment continues; in contemporary France, hypocrisy, pretentiousness and snobbery become everyday phenomena. It is no coincidence, therefore, that a satirical tone emerges in art. Offenbach’s comic opera Barbe Bleue, from 1866, is a true social satire; like his other works (one need only recall the operetta Orpheus in the Underworld, which parodies the hypocrisy of the contemporary upper classes), it takes a swipe at the false norms of contemporary society. Bluebeard lives his life as a sort of pocket-sized Don Juan, and whenever he takes a fancy to a new woman — which certainly happens every week — he gets rid of the old one, locking her away in the cellar where the other women are imprisoned too.

The opera is a series of twists and turns, and in the end the imprisoned wives find their life partners; the current wife, Boulotte, remains Bluebeard’s wife, while the king and the royal authority that try to expose him are given a mixed reception by the creators, who show no mercy to the institution of bourgeois marriage either.

A bearded henpecked husband

The turn of the century gives rise to entirely new intellectual currents across the globe. The Great War is still a few years away, but Europe is already a powder keg. Noble estates are disintegrating, families are falling apart, and soon entire countries and nations will vanish from the stage of world history. The turn of the century already foreshadows the repugnant prototype of the new world order: the oppressed working class is in revolt, women’s movements are gaining momentum, social roles are shifting, and the world as we know it is collapsing. In literature and philosophy, conflicting trends perform their dance of death day after day; values hitherto known seem to be losing their meaning. The world is hurtling towards catastrophe. The alienation and isolation of the individual, and their drift away from values, finally reach their peak in the decadent trends of the 1920s.

But for now art is still fighting. The Romantic worldview is being replaced by Realism. In this era works emerge that highlight the hopelessness of the disintegrating world order and the void it leaves behind. The focus shifts to literary figures who cannot find their place in the world; a favourite theme is the conflict between the artist and the bourgeoisie, the artist’s loneliness, and alienation from the world. In this era the Bluebeard legend also adapts to social change. An excellent example is Anatole France’s short story Les sept femmes de Barbe-bleue (The Seven Wives of Bluebeard), which modernises the story so thoroughly as effectively to turn it on its head. The hero is Bernard de Montragoux, a true anti-Bluebeard, a modern henpecked husband whom the women simply fleece of his fortune, taking advantage of his good heart and boundless patience.

France’s narrative is also a kind of satire, so meticulously detailed that it reads like a police report, revealing the reality hidden behind Perrault’s fairy tale. The caricatures of the various types of women allow the author to expose the rot at the heart of modern bourgeois society and family life. Bluebeard is transformed from a fearsome serial-killer beast into a weak-willed, good-natured, infinitely naïve dupe — a victim of greedy, calculating, unfaithful women and of circumstance. The wives generally meet their end in accidents brought on by their own greed, but the last wife outdoes them all: she, her lover and her brothers lure Bluebeard into a trap and kill him, then spread the word far and wide that the husband was a cruel wife-murderer — and, lo and behold, several of his wives have already disappeared or died in unclear circumstances — so that the murder of her husband was merely necessary self-defence.

However ingeniously and wittily the author presents this well-known story, France’s disillusioned view of the possibility of romantic happiness still peeks through. Let us not forget that we are living in an age when women’s roles are undergoing significant transformation, taking on male roles, as women begin to engage in politics, study and work. We are living in the age of the self-aware, spirited, strong woman — when Bluebeard, as he appears in literature, tries to keep his secret to the very end and becomes the embodiment of the suffering masculine principle.

The motif of redemption

In Maeterlinck’s adaptation (and, eleven years later, in Béla Balázs’s), it is rather the intensification of the redemption motif that can be observed. At the same time the light–darkness and jealousy–curiosity motifs also appear. Another common feature of the two plays is that they place the new wife at the centre of the story — a woman who embodies the spirit of the new age: an autonomous, self-aware personality with firm convictions. Both plays work with fateful contrasts: light–darkness, jealousy–secrecy, man–woman. One of the deepest and most spiritually rich adaptations of the Bluebeard legend is Maurice Maeterlinck’s Ariane et Barbe-bleue ou la délivrance inutile (Ariadne and Bluebeard, or the Useless Deliverance) — Maeterlinck (1862–1949) being a Belgian playwright and poet, one of the most significant representatives of Symbolism — which he clearly intended as an opera libretto.

The play, written in 1899, was set to music in 1907 by Dukas (1865–1935, French composer and music critic). Maeterlinck’s work is marked by an exploration of the unfathomable depths and mysteries of the soul, and he often cloaks his message in a fairy-tale-like, symbol-laden guise (e.g. Princess Maleine, Pelléas and Mélisande, The Blue Bird). The character of Ariane paints a picture of a modern woman: self-assured, proud, the embodiment of clarity, light and true love. Her mission, too, is clear: to redeem Bluebeard and save his wives. (Even the choice of name is symbolic: in Greek mythology Ariadne uses her thread to show the way out of the dark labyrinth of the soul.) “The happiness I desire cannot exist in darkness.” And though Ariadne brings the light and opens the castle gates, she cannot redeem Bluebeard on her own.

She brings light into the lives of the old women, opening the castle’s seventh door before them — but to no avail; she cannot even free the women from themselves. The drama is a dark portrait of its era: its characters have become so alienated from the world that, even if salvation were to arrive from outside, they would be unable to escape their misery, remaining trapped in the shadowy existence of their own choosing.

Béla Balázs – Béla Bartók: The Castle of Bluebeard

It is 1910 when Béla Balázs’s drama is published. To quote Zoltán Kodály, the play “breaks open the shell of the old fairy tale and reveals the eternal insolubility of the man–woman problem.” György Kroó, meanwhile, offers this view of the work: “Starting from the sensibility of modern man, the text uses contemporary devices to create a genuine tragedy out of the ancient story: it extracts the most primordial motifs from the legend, and precisely through this brings it up to date.” Both the original text and the opera retain a folk-like, ballad-like character; the Regös’s (the bard’s) prologue suggests that the story emerges from the obscurity of the ballad. In setting the work to music, Bartók too uses elements of folk music, thereby underlining Balázs’s intention:

“I wanted to paint a modern soul with the unpretentious sincerity of a folk song.”

Just as in the Belgian author’s work, here too Balázs has chosen a telling name for his heroine: in the biblical story, Judith voluntarily undertakes to seduce Holofernes, the general besieging the city, and then, by beheading him, saves her people from destruction. Balázs’s Judith also voluntarily undertakes to save Bluebeard, and to this end, just like her biblical counterpart, she uses her seductive powers and beauty — but she fails. A clear parallel can be drawn with Maeterlinck’s drama, where the heroine’s aim is also to redeem her husband. What is new, however, is the drama’s conciseness: it features only two characters; it is not so much a story as a dialogue. The setting is new too: we are inside Bluebeard’s mind; it is unclear — as Regös also says at the start of the drama — whether we are outside or inside.

The whole narrative navigates the boundary between imagination and reality. For just this reason it raises many questions, to which everyone can find their own answers. The opera follows a strictly structured tonal plan (Bartók, incidentally, also marks the dramatic instructions strictly in the score), which expresses the events in a highly vivid and nuanced manner. Alongside the dramatic and tonal symbolism, the symbolism of light also plays a significant role: every door that opens is signalled by a beam of light which, after an initial rise, vanishes into eternal darkness. (More on this can be read in Ernő Lendvai’s book Bartók’s Dramaturgy.) Imre Palló (1891–1978) — a young member of the Opera House at the world premiere — recalled the stage design thus: “The stage design was also innovative: it depicted a dark, Gothic hall built of rough stones, the knights’ hall of Bluebeard’s castle.

It was a cave-like, austere hall with seven closed doors: four on the left, two on the right, and one at the front, in the centre. Above, at the back, steps led up to the entrance, an iron door. The music began during the last two verses of the prologue. I, the Regös, drew back the curtain and, as it parted, left the stage. A few seconds of silence, then suddenly the small iron door at the top swung open, and in the flood of light appeared the figure of Bluebeard.”

Letting go and healing

So that we do not see the relationship between man and woman as quite so dark, so hopeless, I should like finally to mention Kurt Vonnegut’s (1922–2007, American novelist and essayist) novel Bluebeard, which sheds new light on the story. In it, the painter Rabo Karabekian and Circe Berman, a young writer, find themselves at odds. The ageing artist, who abhors intimacy and emotional openness, finds his solitude shattered by the arrival of a vibrant young woman with an acute sense of life’s realities, who intrudes, almost unwelcome, into his life. In the course of their argument, which escalates to extremes, the woman confronts the man with the demons of his life and offers a way out of the guilt and sadness that shackle his soul. Vonnegut’s work highlights the healing aspect of the man–woman relationship, in which honesty and coming to terms with our past are the key to a happy future.

While Balázs and Bartók’s Judith ultimately become prisoners of the past and of eternal remembrance, Vonnegut’s heroine is able to redeem Bluebeard precisely by pulling him out of the captivity of the past.

Adaptations of Bluebeard

Literature Frederick the Great: La Barbe Bleue (1779) Ludwig Tieck: Ritter Blaubart (1797) Ludwig Tieck: Bluebeard’s Seven Wives, a True Family Story (1797) Ludwig Tieck: Bluebeard (drama, 1812) Alexander von Ungern-Sternberg: Bluebeard (1850) Henri de Régnier: Bluebeard’s Sixth Marriage (1892) Maurice Maeterlinck: Ariadne and Bluebeard (1899) Anatole France: Bluebeard’s Seven Wives (short story, 1909) Alfred Döblin: Knight Bluebeard (1911) Reinhard Koester: Bluebeard the Knight (poem, 1911) Louis Couperus: Bluebeard’s Daughter (1915) Angela Carter: Bluebeard’s Room (1979) Max Frisch: Bluebeard (1982) Peter Rühmkorf: Bluebeard’s Last Journey (fairy tale, 1983) Martin Mosebach: Bluebeard (dramma giocoso, 1985) Kurt Vonnegut: Bluebeard (1989) Margaret Atwood: Bluebeard’s Egg (1989) Karin Struck: The Shadow of Bluebeard (novel, 1991) Cornelia Funke: Without a Second Thought (novel, 2012) Amélie Nothomb: Bluebeard (2012) Opera Jacques Offenbach: Bluebeard (operetta, 1866) Paul Dukas (after Maeterlinck): Ariadne and Bluebeard (1907) Emil Nikolaus von Reznicek: Knight Bluebeard (fairy-tale opera, 1917) Béla Bartók: The Castle of Bluebeard (1918) Film Bluebeard (French; dir.

Georges Méliès, 1901) Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (USA; dir. Ernst Lubitsch, 1938) Bluebeard (German/French/Swiss; dir. Christian-Jaque, 1951) Bluebeard (Italian/French; dir. Edward Dmytryk, 1972) The Piano (French/Australian/New Zealand drama; dir. Jane Campion, 1993) Bluebeard (French fantasy drama; dir. Catherine Breillat, 2009) Visual arts János Kass: Triptych

Specialist literature

Music theory and music literature György Kroó: Bartók’s Stage Works (Zeneműkiadó, 1962) Ernő Lendvai: Bartók’s Dramaturgy (Zeneműkiadó, 1964) Psychology Clarissa Pinkola Estés: Women Who Run with the Wolves (Édesvíz, 1992) Mythology András Kányádi: The Topography of the Imagination (Komp-Press, 2010)