Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993) and Catherine Breillat’s Barbe Bleue (2009) are film adaptations of the tale Bluebeard, both of which have a seemingly bright closure — “and they all lived happily ...ever after”. “They”, as the female, are in the becoming process since “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” (de Beauvoir 1956: 273), which changes the nature of the film denouement. By looking at the female protagonists Ada McGrath in The Piano and Marie-Catherine in Barbe Bleue, this research aims to deal with how female “decisions” in attempting to accomplish themselves in the face of a crisis affect the understanding of the film’s ending. First, female characterisation and plot development are investigated with the construction of women’s feelings and perceptions at a given moment, influencing the subsequent outcomes. Second, the significance of narrative techniques is expounded with audience’s affective interaction with characters. The conclusion reached is that in both films, repressed female temperament allows women to make judgements and choices that predetermine the tragic core of the happy ending. The significance of this study is to draw attention to the plight of women in the undercurrent, to make it possible for the silent cries behind the beautiful fantasies to be heard.
In addition to its more well known literary and artistic origins,
the French surrealist movement drew inspiration from currents of
psychological anxiety and rebellion running through a shadowy side
...of mass culture, specifically in fantastic popular fiction and
sensationalistic journalism. The provocative nature of this
insolent mass culture resonated with the intellectual and political
preoccupations of the surrealists, as Robin Walz demonstrates in
this fascinating study. Pulp Surrealism weaves an
interpretative history of the intersection between mass print
culture and surrealism, re-evaluating both our understanding of
mass culture in early twentieth-century Paris and the revolutionary
aims of the surrealist movement. Pulp Surrealism presents
four case studies, each exploring the out-of the-way and
impertinent elements which inspired the surrealists. Walz discusses
Louis Aragon's Le paysan de Paris, one of the great
surrealist novels of Paris. He goes on to consider the popular
series of Fantômes crime novels; the Parisan press coverage of the
arrest, trial, and execution of mass-murderer Landru; and the
surrealist inquiry "Is Suicide a Solution?", which Walz juxtaposes
with reprints of actual suicide faits divers
(sensationalist newspaper blurbs). Although surrealist interest in
sensationalist popular culture eventually waned, this exploration
of mass print culture as one of the cultural milieux from which
surrealism emerged ultimately calls into question assumptions about
the avant-garde origins of modernism itself.
Using psychoanalysis as the primary model of textual analysis, Bluebeard Gothic focuses on the conjunction of religion, sacrifice, and scapegoating to provide an original interpretation of a ...canonical and frequently-studied text.
With its suspenseful atmosphere, mysterious and murderous male protagonist, and magical objects, it is hardly surprising that Charles Perrault’s conte bleu ‘La Barbe bleue’ (1697) was the inspiration ...for numerous Gothic tales in the nineteenth century. Some of these adaptations placed Gothic devices such as the representation of the terror experienced by Bluebeard’s latest wife within the broader nineteenth-century cultural discourse on female deviance, and its relations with masculine authority and dominance. By removing from the tale Perrault’s warning against female curiosity and imprudence and focusing on the wife’s feelings of fear and terror, these adaptations amplify the intrinsic Gothicism of the Bluebeard story, thus providing the female protagonist with a psychological depth that includes, as I demonstrate in this study, a display of a variety of abnormal behaviours. In these Gothic adaptations, the terror experienced by Bluebeard’s wife serves as a springboard for the representation of psychological and nervous disorders commonly diagnosed in the nineteenth century such as hysteria, monomania, female depravity, and masochism. Showing the interculturality and intermediality of these themes, this essay analyses rewritings of Perrault’s ‘Bluebeard’ from nineteenth-century Britain, France, and the United States, including Gothic bluebooks, poems, dramas, and short stories.
Jane Campion's films have repeatedly used the Bluebeard story as a myth underpinning their narrative structures. This article examines the way in which her 2012 TV series, Top of the Lake, both uses ...and moves beyond this myth, arguing that its central focus on mothers and daughters draws instead on another, related myth, that of Demeter and Proserpine. This story, Mary Jacobus has suggested, is the Greek myth that Freud does not select, indeed represses, in his search for a founding myth that would ground the psychoanalytic story of childhood development. It is also a myth which, in a gesture of "feminist nostalgia," feminists have repeatedly appropriated in their desire to recover a "lost," unalienated mother-daughter relationship. Top of the Lake, I argue, is both an exercise in and investigation of such feminist nostalgia. Campion's evocation of the myth of Proserpine/Demeter to underpin its complex mix of female Gothic and detective story counters the dominant cultural narrative of Oedipus. But like Jacobus it remains suspicious of utopian fantasies and the unalienated body.
The paper aims at disclosing the mechanism of genre memory, its ability to retain some persistent archaic elements due to their ongoing updating and renewal. The modern short story discussed appeals ...to the Bluebeard plot and is intended for grown ups. With scholars' inference about initiation rite as the underpinning of fairy tales and their symbolism hidden from children's eyes who are the common target audience now, the reinterpretation for adult readers is viewed as making symbolic truth less implicit, lifting of sexual taboos, and explication of inherent latent motifs related to initiation into adulthood.
Bluebeard is the main character in one of the grisliest and most enduring fairy tales of all time. A serial wife murderer, he keeps a horror chamber in which remains of all his previous matrimonial ...victims are secreted from his latest bride. She is given all the keys but forbidden to open one door of the castle. Astonishingly, this fairy tale was a nursery room staple, one of the tales translated into English from Charles Perrault's FrenchMother Goose Tales.
Bluebeard: A Reader's Guide to the English Traditionis the first major study of the tale and its many variants (some, like "Mr. Fox," native to England and America) in English: from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century chapbooks, children's toybooks, pantomimes, melodramas, and circus spectaculars, through the twentieth century in music, literature, art, film, and theater.
Chronicling the story's permutations, the book presents examples of English true-crime figures, male and female, called Bluebeards, from King Henry VIII to present-day examples.Bluebeardexplores rare chapbooks and their illustrations and the English transformation of Bluebeard into a scimitar-wielding Turkish tyrant in a massively influential melodramatic spectacle in 1798. Following the killer's trail over the years, Casie E. Hermansson looks at the impact of nineteenth-century translations into English of the German fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, and the particularly English story of how Bluebeard came to be known as a pirate. This book will provide readers and scholars an invaluable and thorough grasp on the many strands of this tale over centuries of telling.
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