This set of fairy tales is much more gruesome and bloody and much more likely to be made into a horror movie instead of a cutesy Disney movie than any of the others we have read in previous weeks. (Apart from perhaps 'The Juniper Tree' - which had a similar gruesome death scene - a little boy's head being chopped off by the lid of a box...) Each Bluebeard tale depicts the horror in slightly different ways and some tales are more graphic in their depictions then others. However it is the tales of the Brothers Grimm that are the most graphic - in fact they are so graphic that as I was reading their tales, I felt a little ill. In "The Robber Bridegroom," the suspense is built throughout the story - from the girl being betrothed to an unknown man, to the ashes - a symbol of destruction - leading her to the house, to the bird singing the song:
Turn back, turn back, young maiden dear,
'Tis a murderer's house you enter here."
The robbers are particularly brutal in their killing of the girl and as we see it through our heroine's eyes (as she watches from behind a giant hogshead) it seems all the more real. We hear the girl's "screams and lamentations" as she is cut open and her wounds salted as she is prepared to be eaten.
In the 'Fitcher's Bird" the secret room is also quite gorily described - a basin of blood sitting in the middle of the room, filled with cut up mangled human body parts. This story is also perhaps more scary as the third sister discovers her older sisters among the remains. She knows the Bluebeard figure's victims personally, and decides to pull them out of the bloody basin to unite them. Yuck...
The other Bluebeard tales are also gruesome - just not as graphic as the Grimm tales. Even though the deaths of the seven wives are described in "The Seven Wives of Bluebeard" the descriptions are much more clinical "She drowned etc." and do not fill me with the same amount of disgust.
I can't really imagine Walt Disney making a Bluebeard movie - if he did, either the essence of the tale would be lost, or it would be an R rated Disney film - an oxymoron if ever I heard one.
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It is interesting to read your response to "Fitcher's Bird," because I was not all that struck by the story. I guess that is because it just seemed too over the top to me. It does have the visual stimulus for a more current horror movie with the basin of blood and body parts though. Is your disgust at the gruesomeness of the act, or just a physical response to how much detail is given?
ReplyDeletei agreed and thought that the Fitcher's Bride was rather graphic due to its detail and description of cutting the sisters heads off, the other stories don't have as much detail regarding the act of killing the sisters, so to respond to chester, for me it was definetly the details given
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