Tuesday, September 30, 2008

A comment on Bluebeard


On "Ryan's Mythically displaced blog," Ryan said something that made me wonder. In describing the moral of the story of Bluebeard he says, "perhaps that was simply a test of trust which each of the wives failed?" I don't know if this is really a fair assessment, because it makes it seem like the woman are the problem, that they just didn't trust their husband enough. I have to say, that this is entirely unfair. They seem to have had a good reason to mistrust Bluebeard. I have to believe that because the Heroin made it through the story that simple lack of trust is not the moral of this story. Perhaps the moral is more that when a man says you should leave something alone it is because he has something to hide. This brings to mind Professor Sexson said in class. He was talking about how within every story the character is told not to do something, but that they always do that something which they were told not to. Because, every story has a happy ending and action only occurs because of this disobedience, the moral becomes do what your told not to. I find this a very interesting and almost backwards reading of our literature. In short I'm not trying to rag on Ryan's analysis of Bluebeard more so I'm simply suggesting another way of reading into this tale.

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