Bluebeard Patriarchy

For generations, fairy tales have served as a source of wonder and horror in equal measure. For each moment of magical fantasy or romantic bliss, there is a terrifying monster or gruesome act of violence, and there are few monsters more terrifying than Bluebeard. On the surface, Bluebeard is the story of one man's gruesome test and the young girl who escapes the punishment of failing it, with a simple message of being careful with your curiosity. However, like all fairy tales, Bluebeard is a symbolic parable of larger, real-world ideas, specifically those dealing with obedience and gender politics. Bluebeard and his bride serve as representations of both the predator and the innocent, akin to the Grimm's tale of Little Red Riding Hood decades

The Bloody Chamber, like all the other pieces in the anthology was meant to "reveal the latent truths" within the original stories and put her feminist twist on them. While Bluebeard champions obedience and tempering the influence of the wife, The Bloody Chamber centers around dismantling the patriarchy and relationships between women. From the beginning, the structure separates itself from the folktale by being explicitly from the heroine's point of view. Whereas Bluebeard in the original is a horrifying monster in a cautionary tale, the modern Bluebeard more of a sexual deviant, who is displayed as more twisted and pathetic. Right before Bluebeard's attempt to murder the heroine, she even laments "the atrocious loneliness of that monster!" (Carter 35) However, the biggest change from the original was the addition of the heroine's mother, whose relationship with the heroine is the center of the story and is the one who ultimately saves her from Bluebeard. At the beginning, she is concerned about the marriage of her seventeen year-old daughter to a much older man, and continues to keep in contact with the heroine throughout the course of the story. Then, after getting called to come to aid, she rushes in on a horse as a "wild thing" and then "put a single, irreproachable bullet" (Carter 40) through Bluebeard's head. Throughout The Bloody Chamber, Carter takes the sexist conventions of Bluebeard's time and filters them through a lense that surfaces both their problems and