Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale by Marina Warner

Author:Marina Warner [Warner, Marina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780198718659
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2014-10-23T00:00:00+00:00

This enchanted fortress conceals a torture chamber.

The bride is initiated into erotic pleasure by this Bluebeard, but rescued, in a rightly celebrated, exuberant twist at the end of the story, by the arrival of her sharp-shooting mother: ‘You never saw such a wild thing as my mother, her hat seized by the winds and blown out to sea so that her hair was her white mane, her black lisle legs exposed to the thigh, her skirts tucked round her waist, one hand on the reins of the rearing horse while the other clasped my father’s service revolver and … ’.

This vision owes something to the bewitched Highland crew, Cutty Sark and her ilk, whom Carter knew from her Highlander granny.

The heroine of Geneviève Breillat’s low-budget, art house movie Barbe-bleue (2009) also gets the better of her rich, obese, doting husband; this perverse rendering by a woman director, who has been censured for earlier pornographic work, deliberately evokes children’s pop-up story books in design and narration, and ends with a tableau of the bride contemplating Bluebeard’s head on a platter, a victorious Salome with the head of John the Baptist. This revenge eludes the protagonist of E. L. James’s sado-masochist sensation, Fifty Shades of Grey; in this case, the female author chooses to let Bluebeard have his way.

In the twenty-first century, the politics of the bedchamber communicate a different perspective on the dangers that sex presents to a young woman.

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