Week 14 Reading Notes - Lang's Fairy Tales II A

Bluebeard

For our final unit, we come to the stories and fairy tales that make up the canon that we in the western world know best: The stories of Europe. A majority of the people in the United States are European descended, thus most of the cultural tales hail from there. To that extent, I looked for a set of stories that could tell me new tales, instead of maybe alternative versions of what I knew already.
The primary story that caught my eye this week was the tale of Bluebeard. The story grips you tightly right off the bat, with the peculiar man with the Blue Beard and his inane wealth. His story to marriage builds him up as a pretty decent dude, one who parties extremely hard, but nonetheless someone who just wants companionship (in the still weird old French male dominated way). Turns out he has some major skeletons in his closet (literally), and his wife (told not to go into the closet and does anyway because this is how horror movies happen) is scared nearly to death. When Bluebeard returns, she tries to hide her disloyalty, then is caught, sentenced to death, and begs for a last moment to try to signal her military brothers to come save her, which they do in the very last moment. The moral of the story seems to be that even the nicest or most successful folk can be evil as hell, so don't piss them off or you'll need external support to not get beheaded. Or maybe it's that being evil eventually leads to death. Maybe both.
For my story this week, I may attempt an equally strangely moralled story, with a distinctly European twist to it, or maybe I'll turn a European story into one with a more interesting cultural background.
Bibliography: Bluebeard, Untextbook link