In Bluebeard's Closet: Women Who Write with the Wolves

Document Type

Article

Department

English (Scripps)

Publication Date

1996

Disciplines

English Language and Literature | Literature in English, North America | Women's Studies

Abstract

Several aspects of the current cultural scene have inspired me to think again about the myth of Bluebeard. As will be clear, I am especially interested in the use of the myth by women writers, some of whom are drawn like Angela Carter's heroine, as though wound "on a spool of inexorability," through the castle of culture to Bluebeard's closet. What lies waiting in the bloody chamber? Is it simply the murdered wives, these mannequins of women's global history? What I am pondering here is why women have relished the telling of this barbed and grisly story, and how it is related to other stories strangely prominent now in journalistic political writing, stories of Joan of Arc and Lady Macbeth, for instance.

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© 1996 Taylor & Francis

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