Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Question 1
One of the main horror elements in most of the Bluebeard stories is the chamber filled with the chopped up body parts of Bluebeard's wives. This part functions as the climax and helps the story to move along because the heroine finally discovers the truth about her husband and the fate of his previous spouses. Also, this is the part of the story in which she finds herself making a mistake, so the rest of the story leads off of it as her punishment for this action. This part definitely startles the audience by showing them a terrible fate for a wife and sending a message to the young women who might be wives in the future - obey your husbands.
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Are you sure that the horror of the story just means to "obey your husband?" Reading this story as a child and again now, I never got that message. Instead, the graphic details of the story seemed to reinforce the young bride's unease for marriage, and it illustrates her fear of being left alone in a foreign home alone with a serial killer. I actually find Perrault's stress on obeying your husband quite funny and out of place... maybe that's because I'm American and I've been raised to believe that it's alright to question the authorities, but come on... if I were in the wife's position, I might have done a little investigating myself. In fact, I'm not sure how this story serves Perrault's target audience- the young ladies of the court. I guess it's kind of like telling a kid that the bugger man is going him if he misbehaves...
ReplyDeleteI see both the comment and the post to be viable reads for this story. It is all a matter of perspective. This perspective no doubt is one's upbringing, which has its implications on how one perceives the concept of trust. One that is more skeptical might go investigate, one more trustworthy would undoubtedly stay blissfully ignorant.
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