Bluebeard

Don't use this unique and alluring key. Don't do it.

Hello, reader. This week's tale comes to us from France. Charles Perrault has written many of the versions of fairy tales that are common today and his telling of Bluebeard is probably the most common for that story. Click the link to read Bluebeard, and then continue below to think about it in depth with me.

It bothers me that this tale is often used as a warning about "women's curiosity". If the wife hadn't been so curious about that closet, Bluebeard wouldn't have tried to kill her, after all. There's one flaw with this theory, and that is Bluebeard himself. We don't know why he killed his first wife. Obviously, it wasn't finding the bodies of the other wives. Maybe it was over something petty, or maybe it was something serious. Either way, Bluebeard is a murderer and, apparently, killed his other wives to cover it up. Putting the murder of the first wife aside, there are many ways Bluebeard could have hidden these bodies, but he chose to leave them rotting in his house instead. He wanted his next wife to find the bodies so he could kill her, too. He didn't have to give her the magic key, after all. Furthermore, if the key is magic, maybe it let him know to return home the same night his newest wife failed her test. Otherwise, that timing is a little too coincidental. So, this woman married a serial murder who's had plenty of time to hone his craft and his timing.

I think it's a good thing the wife found that room. If she had passed that test, there would have been another and he would have set her up to go into that room against his orders again and again until she did. Bluebeard wants to kill his wives. However he got started down this path, he clearly will not change his ways. Imagine if our heroine hadn't looked in that closet when she did. Her brothers would have come to visit and she would have thought nothing of them leaving her alone with Bluebeard afterwards to be tested again and again until she failed. If she hadn't looked in that closet when she did, he would have ended up trying to kill her later, probably when help wasn't so conveniently close. In the long run, her curiosity saved her life.

The moral of this story is either: feed your curiosity at the right moment so you aren't murdered, or don't marry a man whose previous wives all mysteriously vanished.

Like this story? Have a different moral? Want to talk about this woman's friends and family who paid her no attention when she found a closet of bodies? Comment below!