Full Description
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 Bluebearda??s tale to explore masculinitya??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. With chapters by Maria Tatar, Elisabeth Bronfen, Mererid Puw Davies, Ian Christie, David Cooper, Michael Hiltbrunner and the editors, the volume undertakes cultural, contextual and musicological analyses of Bartoka??s opera 'Duke Bluebearda??s Castle', tracing Bluebearda??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.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Preface
Griselda Pollock
Introduction: A Perrault in Wolf's Clothing
Victoria Anderson
1. Bluebeard's Curse: Repetition and Improvisational Energy in the Bluebeard Tale
Maria Tatar
2. Bluebeard, Hero of Modernity: Tales at the fin de siècle
Mererid Puw Davies
3. 'Béla Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle: A Musicological Perspective
David Cooper
4. The Tale of the Eye: Revealing the Jew in Duke Bluebeard's Castle
Victoria Anderson
5. Hidden Debates Under a Baroque Surface: Barbe-bleue by Georges Méliès (1901)
Michael Hiltbrunner
6. Hommes Fatales: Murder, Pathology and Hollywood Cinema's Bluebeards
Griselda Pollock
7. The Enigma of Homecoming: The Secret Beyond the Door
Elisabeth Bronfen
8. Dying for Art: Michael Powell, Duke Bluebeard's Castle and the filmic art-work of the future
Ian Christie
Authors' Biographies
Bibliography
Index
