Elements of Horror

In the stories of Bluebeard, the horrific secret hidden behind the door in each respective telling of the tale seems to address the question, "What is absolutely the most nauseating, terrifying thing the disobedient wife could find behind the door to the forbidden room?" That Bluebeard is a serial killer seems to be of less consequence than the young wife's indiscretion--he did specifically tell her not to open the door, didn't he? The horror in this story is not standalone. Bluebeard is not the terrifying tale of a mad murderer--it centers on the girl's bizarre experience in relation to Bluebeard, and how the horrors were brought on by her curiosity, defiance, agency, etc.

While the horror trope is basically the same in all the stories (horrific death of innocent girl witnessed by the heroine), where the stories differ is in the attitude the narratorial voice has toward what the girl sees. The Perrault version treats the chamber as something terrifying in and of itself. In the Grimm version (Fitcher's Bird), the bloody chamber and the murders of the heroine's sisters serve as more of a challenge for the third sister to overcome. And in the Jacobs version, the narrator is somewhat cavalier about the girl's macarbe discovery, as though she had just stumbled upon Mr. Fox's unsettling collection of Scientology literature rather than the mangled corpses of his victims.

We've talked a lot in this course about the tones of these stories as interpreted by at 21st century audience likely indoctrinated from the crib with the Disneyfied versions of fairy tales. The intermingling of horror and fantasy in the literary versions of fairy tales is a little bit jarring at first, and in this series of stories, we are seeing it from a different perspective: that horror in literature has a place other than blood and guts for the sake of blood and guts.