Bluebeard and the Bloody Chamber by Terri Windling

Though based on older folk tales of demon lovers and devilish bridegrooms, the story of Bluebeard, as we know it today, is the creation of French writer Charles Perrault — first published in 1697 in his collection Histoires ou contes du temps passé (Stories or Tales of Past Times). Perrault was one in a group of writers who socialized in the literary salons of Paris, collectively creating a vogue for literature inspired by peasant folk tales. These new stories were called contes des feés, from which our modern term "fairy tales" derives — but the contes des feés of the French salons were intended for adult readers.

Bluebeard," for example, has little to recommend it as a children's story. Rather, it's a gruesome cautionary tale about the dangers of marriage (on the one hand) and the perils of greed and curiosity (on the other) — more akin, in our modern culture, to horror films than to Disney cartoons. The story as Perrault tells it is this... >More>>>

Comments

[Nandakishore Varma]

A fine article. All my life I have been interested in the dark blue gloomy side of fairy tales; I'm a horror fan and I think I hide a monster-self inside my urbane exterior! Most fairy tales explore the dark underbelly of the human psyche, but they have been purged of their horror (and power) and "sanitised" by Disney and his inheritors.

Come to think of it, Agatha Christie's "Philomel Cottage" is Bluebeard in a British parlour...