Fairy Tale and Film

Demon Lovers and Defiant Damsels 
95
story, the legacy enjoyed by ‘Bluebeard’ is remarkable, to say the least, 
adopting various forms as operettas, novels and films over the years, and 
the wife’s role has been interestingly expanded also.
Maria Tatar’s 
Secrets beyond the Door 
(2006) examines the way 
‘Bluebeard’ has altered in successive variations. As she notes, the story 
significantly confronts the fairy tale’s usual depiction of matrimony, for 
while marriage offers a means of escape from familial difficulty in the 
likes of ‘Cinderella’ or ‘Snow White’, the opposite is true in ‘Bluebeard’. 
Far from perceiving the wife as guilty of transgression or infidelity, 
Tatar challenges this version of events, reminding us that it is precisely 
through disobeying her husband that she discovers his true nature and 
consequently saves herself – with her family’s help. She also notes that 
in various related tales such as ‘Mr Fox’, ‘How the Devil Married Three 
Sisters’ (ATU 311) and ‘The Hen is Tripping in the Mountain’ the heroine 
proves to be even more intrepid in extricating herself from harm, using 
wiliness and cunning to delay and sometimes despatch her would-be 
killer, thereby joining ranks with other female characters that do not 
rely on others for salvation but acquire narrative agency for themselves. 
Far from censuring Bluebeard’s wife and her folkloric sisters, Tatar asserts 
that they have become championed in contemporary popular culture as 
figures to admire. As she puts it:
Some wives of Bluebeard are treacherous deceivers, guilty of moral 
and sexual betrayal; others are resourceful investigators who use their 
wits to get to the bottom of the dark secrets haunting their marriages. 
While earlier ages denounced Bluebeard’s wife for her ‘reckless curios-
ity’ and her ‘uncontrolled appetite,’ our own culture has turned her 
into something of a heroine, a woman whose problem-solving skills 
and psychological finesse make her a shrewd detective, capable of 
rescuing herself and often her marriage into the bargain. (2006: 3–4)
Oddly, this last point suggests that – far from serving as a means of expos-
ing and confronting domestic abuse – ‘Bluebeard’ and its variants might 
serve as a means of overcoming marital difficulties. This is pointedly not 
the case with Bluebeard’s wife, who is under no illusions about her hus-
band once she sees evidence of his crimes – a roomful of corpses marking 
her own likely fate. Far from seeking to understand him, or save their 
marriage, she helps put an end to his terror and finds herself a replace-
ment. However, some of the tale’s successors have sought to redeem the 
husband as misunderstood, rather than murderous, particularly Gothic 
romances which recast their Bluebeards as troubled Byronesque figures, 

---

96 
Fairy Tale and Film
haunted by past misfortune (that is, their former wives), redeemed by 
second marriages to markedly less threatening females, who manage 
to overcome their fears and live with their respective beasts. Observing 
the way in which ‘Bluebeard’ tropes inflect Gothic literature and their 
cinematic adaptations such as 
Rebecca 
(Alfred Hitchcock, 1940) and 
Jane 
Eyre 
(Robert Stevenson, 1943), Tatar argues that a number of other thrill-
ers might be considered ‘Bluebeard films’ – a sub-genre distinguished by 
marital disharmony and the threat of violence. 
Gaslight 
(George Cukor, 
1944), 
Secret beyond the Door 
(Fritz Lang, 1948) and 
Notorious 
(Alfred 
Hitchcock, 1946) are selected as key examples, yet very different stories 
are told in each film.