Volume 30, Number 14 · September 29, 1983
Shaggy Dog Fable
By Robert M. Adams
Bluebeard: A Tale
by Max Frisch, translated by Geoffrey Skelton
A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 134 pp., $10.95
The story of Bluebeard; who married seven wives and killed six of them, until the seventh went exploring behind a forbidden door, seems to have its roots in the folklore of Celtic Brittany. Perhaps the original Bluebeard was a sixth-century tribal chieftain named, delightfully, Comorre the Cursed; perhaps before that he was a priest, an order of priests, or a deity with a penchant for human sacrifice. (His blue beard, otherwise irrelevant, may recall the ancient practice of staining oneself blue with dyer's woad.) The story has dozens of analogies from dozens of different countries and cultures; it is evidently a deep female fantasy of which ripples are still felt in nineteenth-century novels like Jane Eyre and in the thousands of cheap romances which to this day rewrite with little or less literary skill this fable of female innocence and male villainy.
Review, 2178 words
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