Bluebeard's Legacy: Sexuality And Violence( Series - New Encounters: Arts, Cultures, Concepts )

The tale of the serial wife-murderer Bluebeard, his defiant, and surviving, final wife, a bloodied key and a secret chamber of horrors, has fascinated writers, composers, artists and film-makers throughout modern times. It is a unique story that dares to disclose and explore masculine violence: the homme fatal.

This transdisciplinary book explores the deep appeal of the Bluebeard story for twentieth-century culture. Its major focus is how the modernist imagination used the elements of Bluebeard's tale to explore masculinity's anxieties in the face of the emerging demands of women for redefinition and sexual equality: anxieties also of ethnic and cultural difference, and fundamental disquiet about sexuality, pathology and violence in the masculine.

Starting with investigations into Bartok's opera 'Duke Bluebeard's Castle', major cultural thinkers, including Elisabeth Bronfen, Ian Christie, Griselda Pollock and Maria Tatar, trace Bluebeard's evolution from Perrault in the seventeenth century to the cinematic hommes fatals of Melies, Fritz Lang and Hitchcock.

The result is an intriguing kaleidoscope of sexuality, curiosity, violence and death.

Perrault's grisly but perennially fascinating fairytale "Duke Bluebeard's Castle" has had an enduring presence across the arts. A tale of an "homme fatale" rather than a "femme fatale," it tells the story of the final confrontation between a blue-bearded serial killer and his eighth wife. The book is notable for corresponding to the facts of the social case: that men murder women far more frequently than women murder men. Looking at Bluebeard's representation in art and in cinema, from Melies to Hollywood, as well as opera and women's literature, "Bluebeard's Legacy" asks who is the real subject of the tale--the dangerous husband or the transgressive wife--and explores the complex relationships between curiosity, sexuality and violence.