Bluebeard

At its simplest, the key to the little room operates as a rigged test for Blue Beard’s wife. As the only magical element in “Blue Beard,” it makes the text a fairy tale rather than purely a horror story, and neatly solves the question of how Blue Beard finds out about his bride’s disobedience. It represents the access to information that Blue Beard and men in general have thanks to Patriarchal Control, which they “forbid [women] to enter” (71), fearing the loss of their power.

Some analysts in the 20th century see the key as a phallic symbol, especially because it is inserted into the lock of the womb-like little room. Under this interpretation, the young bride has been given a masculine object that she should not use, but transgresses in doing so anyway. On the opposite side, other scholars see the key as symbolic of the young woman’s “innocence,” and that it being “stained with blood” (73) indicates her newfound sexual knowledge through the rupture of her hymen—or that the “stain” implies female infidelity from which she can never recover. Perrault would have been familiar with true incidents of women punished or executed for extra-marital sexual relationships.

The little room exists as a symbol in relationship to The Key, in that it too represents Transgressive Knowledge in addition to acting as the womb to the key’s phallus. Inside the little room resides a truth that the young bride cannot handle; she “regained her senses” (73) even in order to leave. The multiple bodies of Blue Beard’s former wives represent both the shocking erotic knowledge that a new bride must learn, having been sheltered from sexual awareness up until marriage, and the cycle of domestic subjugation or violence that a patriarchal society keeps secret.

Bolstering the story’s preoccupation with nobility is the fact that there is “clotted blood on the floor, and that in this were reflected the dead bodies of several women that hung along the walls” (73). “Noble blood” was the vessel for social hierarchy in Perrault’s time, and in fact the Grimms suggested that Blue Beard might bathe in the blood of his wives in an attempt to cure his blue beard and elevate himself. Moreover, if the little room does suggest a womb, the puddle of blood references menstruation, considered in various eras to be a sign of women’s original sin echoing the Christian story of the downfall of Eve.

The primary symbol of female vulnerability are the fragile necks of the women in “Blue Beard,” as “[a]ll the wives of Blue Beard, whose throats he had cut, one after another” (73) are silenced by this slashing of their windpipes, pinpointing the central idea under Patriarchal Control that females should not have a voice. Blue Beard plans to do the same to his newest bride: “seizing her by the hair with one hand, and with the other brandishing the cutlass aloft, he made as if to cut off her head” (76), thereby ending any possibility that she might repeat his secret to another. By contrast, the brothers “plunged their swords through his body” (77) in order to destroy Blue Beard, who does not experience that final indignity of partial decapitation.

The risk of being silenced is foreshadowed by the detail that the young bride runs to the little room after her husband’s departure “so precipitately that twice or thrice she nearly broke her neck” (72).