The library

Charles Perrault, ‘Blue Beard’ (1697)

The tale behind the title story, given here in the first English translation, Robert Samber’s of 1729. Read it beside ‘The Bloody Chamber’ and watch what Carter keeps, the wealth, the prohibition, the stained key, and what she changes, above all who does the rescuing.

There was a man who had fine houses, both in town and country, a deal of silver and gold plate, embroidered furniture, and coaches gilded all over with gold. But this man had the misfortune to have a blue beard, which made him so frightfully ugly, that all the women and girls ran away from him. The opening: wealth first, the husband’s strangeness second. Carter’s Marquis inherits both.

Open them all; go into all and every one of them; except that little closet which I forbid you, and forbid it in such a manner that, if you happen to open it, there will be no bounds to my just anger and resentment. The prohibition that is really an invitation: the test Carter’s narrator says she was set up to fail.

After some moments she began to perceive that the floor was all covered over with clotted blood, in which were reflected the bodies of several dead women ranged against the walls: these were all the wives whom Blue Beard had married and murdered one after another. The chamber itself. Carter slows this glimpse into a whole gallery of ‘murdered wives’.

In vain did she wash it, and even rub it with soap and sand, the blood still remained, for the key was a Fairy, and she could never make it quite clean; when the blood was gone off from one side, it came again on the other. The indelible stain: in Carter it leaves the key and marks the heroine’s forehead for life.

Perrault closes with a verse moral that blames the wife: ‘O curiosity, thou mortal bane! / Spite of thy charms, thou causest often pain / And sore regret, of which we daily find / A thousand instances attend mankind’… That is the judgement, female curiosity punished, that the whole of Carter’s title story exists to overturn.

Read the whole tale in The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault at Project Gutenberg ↗ (Samber’s translation, with Harry Clarke’s 1922 illustrations).

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)

The grandmother of the feminism Carter wrote inside. Wollstonecraft’s argument, that women are made ornamental by training rather than nature, and caged by marriage and idleness, sits behind both The Sadeian Woman and the collection’s brides. The cage, the ornament and the market: her images are Carter’s furniture, nearly two centuries early.

Taught from their infancy, that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison. Chapter 3. Set this beside the mirrored bedroom of the title story, and the countess in her cage of furs in ‘The Snow Child’.

I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves. Chapter 4. The collection’s quietest endings, the piano-tuner, the tiger’s bride choosing her own skin, answer to this sentence.

Business of various kinds, they might likewise pursue, if they were educated in a more orderly manner, which might save many from common and legal prostitution. Chapter 9. Marriage as a market in women: the economy the Marquis buys his bride inside, ruby choker first.

Read the whole essay in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman at Project Gutenberg ↗.

More of the sources

The Grimms’ collection, behind ‘The Snow Child’ and the wolf tales, in Margaret Hunt’s translation: Household Tales at Project Gutenberg ↗. Andrew Lang’s Blue Fairy Book (1889), with its own ‘Blue Beard’ and ‘Beauty and the Beast’: at Project Gutenberg ↗.