History's Bearer: The Afterlife of Bluebeard

Benson, Stephen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7175-9979 (2000) History's Bearer: The Afterlife of Bluebeard. Marvels and Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies, 14 (2). pp. 244-267. ISSN 1521-4281

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Abstract

Starting out from the idea of the past as a pervasive presence in Charles Perrault's "Bluebeard," this essay seeks to explore the interrelation of two sets of retellings of "Bluebeard," one operatic, one literary. The first set—Dukas/Maeterlinck's Ariane et Barbe-Bleue and Bartók/Balázs's Duke Bluebeard's Castle—can be read as situating the tale within fin-de-siècle discourses of gender and history, and it is to this particular contextualization that the second set of narratives—John Updike's "George and Vivian" and Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber"—returns. What emerges from the various historical and textual toings and froings, is a reading of "Bluebeard" which aligns the two central protagonists with particular attitudes to history, thus offering a representation of gender difference as a difference of historical perspective.

Item Type: Article
Faculty \ School: Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Literature and Creative Writing (former - to 2011)

Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing
UEA Research Groups: Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Modern and Contemporary Writing Research Group
Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Creative-Critical Research Group
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Depositing User: Katherine Humphries
Date Deposited: 19 Jan 2012 10:01
Last Modified: 12 Sep 2023 09:30
URI: https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/36266
DOI:

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