78 The Writing Experiment
The key she has used becomes bloodstained, and is a telltale sign that she
has opened the room: she cannot remove the stain because the key is
bewitched. Her husband consequently finds out she has disobeyed him
and plans to murder her, but just in time her brothers arrive and kill Blue-
beard, she inherits all his money, and it all ends ‘happily ever after’.
Obviously there is a moral tale here about good triumphing over evil. But
there is also another patriarchal and sexist moral, which is that if a woman
disobeys her husband she may end up in difficulties. In this case disobey-
ing the husband turns out to be acceptable because he is evil, but the story
still reinforces the law of marital obedience.
Angela Carter keeps close to many aspects of the original fairytale, and
she certainly repeats the same story about the wife entering the forbidden
room, finding the former dead wives, and being left with a blood-stained
key. But she rewrites the narrative in a contemporary world: Bluebeard is
a rich and powerful man who travels on business, and his new bride chats
to her mother on the telephone. At the same time Bluebeard lives in a
castle, so there is an element of anachronism to the retelling: it contains
gothic elements and still adheres to certain features of the fairytale. In
reinventing the story Carter changes its ideological perspective in a
number of ways. She also adds a depth and subtlety which is not present
in the original: a heavily schematised story about good and evil, in which
good inevitably wins.
Carter revisits the story in ways which sexualise it, and also turn it into
a critique of patriarchy, wealth and class. In the fairytale the sexual element
is totally suppressed, but in Carter’s version Bluebeard is a lustful old man
whose sexual desires are sadistic and pornographic. Female desire, and its
contradictions, are also explored: the girl says ‘I felt both a strange, imper-
sonal arousal at the thought of love and at the same time a repugnance
I could not stifle.. .’ (Carter 1981, p. 15): her desires are eventually met by
the blind, poor and powerless piano tuner. While the fairytale hinges on
the triumph of good over evil, the rewriting questions the concept of
innocence. In the fairytale the heroine is simply nosy, but Carter’s rework-
ing implies that corruption is integral to human behaviour. The heroine is
not a conventional model of feminine virtue and innocence as she is in the
fairytale. She says, ‘I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption which
took my breath away’ (Carter 1981, p. 11), and is seduced in the first place
by Bluebeard’s wealth and power. So Carter reconceives the story from a
feminist point of view: it becomes a fiction about gender politics and
a power struggle between the sexes which the wife eventually wins. It is
salient that it is her mother who rescues the girl rather than her brothers
(as in the original fairytale), therefore reinforcing the importance of
female support systems.