Full text of DOI:10.1111/1468-0483.00233

German Life and Letters 55:4 October 2002
0016–8777
LAUGHING THEIR HEADS OFF: NINETEENTH-CENTURY COMIC
VERSIONS OF THE BLUEBEARD TALE
Mererid Puw Davies
abstract
The Blaubartmarchen rewards study because it encodes key notions about gender,
¨
order, and the nature of fairy tale. In contrast to comic French and English tra-
ditions, the canonical German Blaubartmarchen is serious and tragic. However, a
¨
rich, forgotten nineteenth-century tradition of popular German Bluebeard com-
edies exists.
Franz von Pocci’s Kasperliade (1859) seems to promote conservative authority
structures but subtextually evokes carnivalesque subversion. Alexander von
Sternberg’s Marchen (1850) involves transgressive gender roles, indeed an (albeit
¨
very limited) deconstruction of gender, before resorting to defensive reinscription
of conservative gender roles. F.W. Hacklander’s realist novella (1863) seems to
¨
lack subversive moments in its denial that Bluebeard is evil, but a closer reading
shows up its uneasy moments; and Roderich Benedix’s play (1861) is unique in
challenging the Marchen plot and established gender roles.
¨
Laughter here restores order and ridicules characters who transgress; but it is
also used in complex ways as an inoculation against fear. Despite seeming to share
cultural and political values with texts in the canon, these comedies are nonethe-
less excluded because they deviate formally from the Grimmian Marchen and ques-
¨
tion the canonical view that Marchen must be ancient and serious. Given that these
¨
texts were more popular than the Grimms’, a review of notions of the Marchen,
¨
folk and popular culture is required. Some of the texts also undermine canonical
values in dangerous ways by using laughter to rob Bluebeard of his terror and
power.
INTRODUCTION
In the Blaubartmarchen, a young woman marries a rich, older man with an
¨
unsettlingly blue beard and a history of disappearing wives. Bluebeard
forbids his new wife to enter a certain room in his home, and when she
succumbs to that temptation, she finds suspended inside the room the
murdered, often decapitated, corpses of her predecessors. Infuriated by
his bride’s transgression, Bluebeard prepares to murder her too; but she
is usually saved by her siblings, who kill Bluebeard. This tale rewards analy-
sis not only because it is a Marchen, that is, part of a genre which has
¨
traditionally encoded key cultural messages, but because, more specifi-
cally, it has functioned as a particularly sensitive seismograph of gender
relations through the modern period. And the mode – tragic or comic –
in which variants of the tale are told is crucial to an understanding of
what it has to tell us about such issues, and the often complex relationship
of those issues with literature.
Aspects of the Blaubartmarchen certainly lend themselves to tragic read-
¨
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2002. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK
and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

330
19TH-CENTURY COMIC VERSIONS OF THE BLUEBEARD TALE
ings, not least the compulsive repetition of violence. Yet the original Blue-
beard text, Charles Perrault’s ‘La Barbe bleue’ (1697), is a satire on con-
temporary mores, not a tragedy.1 The plot is melodramatic, with the classic
comedic conclusions of wealth, success and multiple marriages, for the
bride makes a new match and her siblings marry too. Also comedic are
the reversal of fortune and the triumph of an apparently weaker character;
the breaking of a cycle of violence; and the overthrow of a tyrant. Perrault
tells his conte with irony and wit; and it involves too the curious and gro-
tesque, as opposed to the tragic, an evident example being the ludicrous
blue beard.
Importantly, the comic features of ‘La Barbe bleue’ are linked to its
proto-feminist features, for the ending vindicates the rights of woman and
shows a lasting, liberating change in the social and family hierarchy. Such
features tally with the tale’s origin in the literate mixed company of French
salons,2 as opposed to the fantastic medieval patriarchy imagined by the
Grimms and others. Such associations between comedy and an emancipat-
ory message remind us that laughter has long been recognised as a force
which can challenge the very order of things, by turning it on its head,
or making it disappear into thin air by mocking it.3
But compared with the more comic English or French traditions, the
consistently serious and tragic tone of the German Bluebeard canon,
dominated as it is by the Grimms’ ‘Blaubart’ (1812) and Ludwig Bech-
stein’s ‘Das Marchen vom Ritter Blaubart’ (1845), is striking.4 While these
¨
tales apparently end happily, they are less comedies than didactic narra-
tives stressing punishment rather than utopian change, inculpating the
women and subtly exculpating the abuse of masculine authority.5 It seems
that the nineteenth century’s concern to establish bourgeois moral stan-
dards on the model of the patriarchal nuclear family was no laughing
matter. Thus, an early twentieth-century commentator on Franz von Poc-
ci’s comedy ‘Blaubart. Ein furchtbares Spektakelstuck aus dem finstern
¨
Mittelalter’ (1859), for instance, could identify the Bluebeard material as
‘geheimnisvoll duster’, and the introduction of comedy by a clown figure
¨
1 Charles Perrault, ‘La Barbe bleue’ (1697), in Contes, ed. Marc Soriano, Paris 1989, pp. 257–62.
2 Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers, London 1994,
pp. 249–52.
3 The classic account of subversive carnival laughter is Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans.
Helene Iswolsky, Cambridge, Mass. 1968; or from a feminist point of view, Helene Cixous and
´ `
Catherine Clement, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing, Manchester 1986, e.g. pp.32–3.
´
4 Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, ‘Blaubart’ (1812), no. 62 in Kinder- und Hausmarchen. Gesam-
¨
melt durch die Bruder Grimm. Vergroßerter Nachdruck der zweibandigen Erstausgabe von 1812 und 1815,
¨
¨
¨
ed. Heinz Rolleke and Ulrike Marquardt, Gottingen 1986, I, pp. 285–9; Ludwig Bechstein, ‘Das
¨
¨
Marchen vom Ritter Blaubart’ (1845), in Deutsches Marchenbuch, ed. Hans-Heino Ewers, Stuttgart
¨
¨
1996, pp. 374–7.
5 Cf. Hartwig Suhrbier, ‘Blaubart - Leitbild und Leidfigur’, in Blaubarts Geheimnis: Marchen und
¨
Erzahlungen, Gedichte und Stucke, ed. Hartwig Suhrbier, Cologne/ Dusseldorf 1984, pp. 11–79, here
¨
¨
¨
pp.24–5; Mererid Puw Davies, The Tale of Bluebeard in German Literature from the Eighteenth Century
to the Present, Oxford 2001, pp. 118–31.
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2002.

19TH-CENTURY COMIC VERSIONS OF THE BLUEBEARD TALE
331
as a novelty, stating: ‘Das Grauenvolle, das dem Stoff anhaftet, ist durch
die Einfuehrung Kasperls erheblich gemildert.’6 In the twentieth century,
the German Bluebeard became even more tragic in tone, with bleak texts
like Max Frisch’s novella ‘Blaubart’ (1984) increasingly obscuring the
happy ending. Commentary, too, on the German Blaubartmarchen has larg-
¨
ely ignored comedy.7
However, a forgotten, German, comic Bluebeard tradition does exist. It
includes Ludwig Tieck’s play Ritter Blaubart and his prose text, Die sieben
Weiber des Blaubart (both 1797); L[ouis] Angely’s ‘Herr Blaubart oder das
geheimnisvolle Kabinett. Posse in einem Akt, frei nach dem franzosischen’
¨
(1828); Armand Vestris’s Blaubart. Großes romantisch-pantomimisches Ballett
in drei Abtheilungen (1832); Pocci’s poem ‘Blaubart’ (1845) and ‘Blaubart.
Ein furchtbares Spektakelstuck aus dem finstern Mittelalter’ (1859); Alex-
¨
ander von Sternberg’s Marchen ‘Blaubart’ (1850); Roderich Benedix’s
¨
‘Blaubart. Lustspiel in zwei Aufzugen’ (1861); F.W. Hacklander’s novella
¨
¨
‘Der Blaubart’ (1863); E[ugenie] Marlitt’s novella ‘Blaubart’ (1866); Leo-
pold von Sacher-Masoch’s short story ‘Ein harmloser Blaubart’ (1873);
and F[riedrich] P[aul] von Westenholz’s Lustspiel ‘Blaubart’ (1895).8
There are compelling reasons for studying these texts and asking why they
should have been so forgotten, most notably because they were genuinely
popular. As such, they not only illuminate gender relations in the nine-
teenth century, but also cast new light on ‘Blaubart’, and the Marchen,
¨
comedy, popular culture and their possibilities in general.
DANGEROUS BLUEBEARDS
Franz Graf von Pocci, ‘Blaubart. Ein furchtbares Spektakelstuck aus dem finstern
¨
Mittelalter’ (1859)
Pocci’s Kasperlkomodie is set in a fantastical Middle Ages where the Raub-
¨
ritter Blaubart elopes with Berta. In Blaubart’s castle, Berta opens the for-
bidden chamber, but is saved by her sister Anna, Kasperl, and the knight
6 Georg Schott, Die Puppenspiele des Grafen Pocci. Ihre Quellen und ihr Stil (Ph.D. thesis, Munich 1911),
Frankfurt a.M. 1911, p. 18.
Exceptions are Suhrbier; Winfried Menninghaus, Lob des Unsinns: Uber Kant, Tieck und Blaubart,
7
¨
Frankfurt a.M. 1995.
8 Alexander von Sternberg, ‘Blaubart’ (1850), in Braune Marchen, Bonn 1977, pp. 127–39; Armand
¨
Vestris, Blaubart. Großes romantisch-pantomimisches Ballett in drei Abtheilungen, Berlin 1832; Franz Graf
von Pocci, ‘Blaubart. Ein furchtbares Spektakelstuck aus dem finstern Mittelalter in drei Aufzugen’
¨
¨
(1859), in Franz Poccis samtliche Kasperkomodien, Munich 1909, I, pp. 95–126; Roderich Benedix,
¨
¨
‘Blaubart. Lustspiel in zwei Aufzugen’, Die deutsche Schaubuhne, 7 (1861), 2–27; Friedrich Wilhelm
¨
¨
¨
Hacklander, ‘Der Blaubart’, Uber Land und Meer, 10, nos 38, 39, 40 (1863), 593–5, 609–11, 625–7.
¨
Further references appear in the text. Full bibliographical details are available in Suhrbier and/or
Davies, The Tale of Bluebeard. To discuss all these texts falls beyond the scope of this essay which
focuses on both exceptional and representative examples not examined elsewhere in secondary
literature. On Tieck, see Menninghaus; on Angely, Suhrbier pp.46–7; on Marlitt, Davies, The Tale
of Bluebeard, pp. 132–61.
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2002.

332
19TH-CENTURY COMIC VERSIONS OF THE BLUEBEARD TALE
Hugo von Hohenfels, whom Berta marries. With Kasperl, the play invokes
a long tradition of entertainment involving clowns and fools. An important
strand in that tradition involves the notion of the fool as a subversive
character who challenges social hierarchies, norms and codes, being the
lower-class representative of bodily and unconscious drives, and the
anarchic power of laughter and carnival.9 However, Richard Sheppard
points out that Pocci’s Kasperl embodied a particular evolution of the fool
figure during the nineteenth century in Germany, whereby precisely that
subversive potential was constrained:
the anti-authoritarian, proletarian descendant of Dionysos, Mr. Punch, was
[%] either transformed into the (miniaturised) hero of a bowdlerised chil-
dren’s entertainment, [%] or diabolised [%] or rendered more socially
acceptable by being turned into tamer figures like Pocci’s Kasperl.10
At first sight, Pocci’s play indeed seems to accord with the conservative
Catholic author’s project of providing inoffensive children’s entertain-
ment.11 That conservative intention is particularly evident with regard to
a woman’s role, thematised in the first dialogue between Berta and the
more conventional and obedient Anna, who attempts to teach her sister
more proper behaviour:
Anna. Du liest dir noch die Augen heraus; das ewige Lesen! Es kann dir
nicht gut sein!
Berta. Schwester, laß mich! Es gibt nichts Schoneres, Reizenderes als die
¨
alten Ritterromane. Ach, wenn mich nur so ein Ritter entfuhren wollte!
(p.104)
¨
Berta indicates that she is both foolish and potentially masochistic, and
therefore to blame for her own impending predicament. It is especially
interesting that these qualities are intimately linked with her reading,
clearly identified here as a damaging influence. Anna’s odd expression
‘Du liest dir noch die Augen heraus’ hints not only at the literal dismem-
berment with which Blaubart threatens Berta, but at the disfiguring, figu-
rative blindness which literacy brings to women. In short, Berta trans-
gresses the appropriate feminine role by indulging her intellectual,
9 Cf. e.g. Karl Riha, ‘Kaspers Wiederkehr: vom Grafen Pocci zu H.C. Artmann’, in Kasperletheater
fur Erwachsene, ed. Norbert Miller and Karl Riha, Frankfurt a.M. 1978, pp. 425–39; Manfred Nobel,
¨
‘Kasperl Redivivus? Zur lustigen Figur bei Franz Pocci’, in Pocci, Kasperls Heldentaten. Neunzehn
Puppenkomodien und Kasperliaden, ed. Nobel, Berlin, DDR 1981, pp. 6–36; Richard Sheppard,
¨
‘Upstairs - Downstairs - Some Reflections on German Literature in the Light of Bakhtin’s Theory
of Carnival’, in New Ways in Germanistik, ed. Richard Sheppard, Oxford 1990, pp. 278–315; Reinhard
Valenta, Franz von Poccis Munchener Kulturrebellion: Alternatives Theater in der Zeit des burgerlichen
¨
¨
Realismus, Munich 1991.
10 Sheppard, p. 302. Further references appear in the text.
11 Cf. Riha, p. 426.
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2002.

19TH-CENTURY COMIC VERSIONS OF THE BLUEBEARD TALE
333
imaginative life, such that a commentator in 1911 could compare her
unfavourably with ‘ihre natuerlicher empfindende Schwester’.12
Not only is Berta literate, she is also highly articulate, being apart from
Kasperl the play’s most talkative character. She muses, regarding the pro-
hibited room:
Ich werde gewiß stets meine Pflichten als Gattin streng erfullen; ob es aber
¨
auch zu ihnen gehort, Launen und Willkur zu ertragen, das ist wohl sehr
¨
¨
die Frage. [%] es ist [%] eine Tyrannei meines Mannes, die ich am ersten
Tage unserer Ehe [%] nicht dulden darf; denn wie ging’s dann weiter mit
mir? Seine Tyrannei wurde zunehmen von Tag zu Tag und ich ware dann
¨
¨
bald nicht mehr Blaubarts Gattin, sondern seine Sklavin. [%] Es ist wirklich
schandlich, wie [die Manner] uns Frauen behandeln! Gerade, als wenn wir
¨
¨
nur Magde waren. (pp.117––18)
¨
¨
But such apparently consistent reflections are undermined by the presen-
tation of Berta’s judgements as dubious. And because Berta’s argument
moves from the particular to the general (‘die Manner’, ‘uns Frauen’),
¨
this speech mocks emancipatory rhetoric on the part of women. Thus,
Berta’s characterisation discredits feminine articulacy as well as literacy.
By contrast, once Berta has opened the chamber, both her faith in her
cognitive powers and her language break down: ‘Wie ist mir! War’s ein
Traum?’ (p.188). Subsequently, she barely speaks coherently. That is,
Berta is divested of her status as a speaking and, implicitly, reasoning
being. If Berta’s speech patterns are an index of her moral character and
autonomy, the silence imposed on her goes hand in hand with the correc-
tion of the former and the limitation of the latter, in preparation for a
more conventional marriage with Hugo.
In line with her intellectually transgressive nature, Berta seems morally
suspect too. Blaubart says: ‘Ha, Schlange [%] Du warst ungehorsam, du
warst neugierig [%] Weh dir, Treulose’ (pp.119–20). Blaubart’s words
allude to God’s pronouncements in the Garden of Eden, but in his
account, the woman is doubly evil, both Eve and serpent, a shift which
obscures Bluebeard’s role as the real tempter. And while the villainous
Bluebeard’s words are not necessarily credible, they are subtly confirmed
by other features in the play. For instance, Berta’s moral status is under-
mined by her illicitly and voluntarily leaving her father’s protection, and
by the most extraordinary fact that Blaubart’s and Berta’s wedding cer-
emony is never mentioned, so that Berta seems to be living in sin. Most
importantly, Kasperl elaborates a valedictory moral: ‘Diese Geschicht’ ist
12 Schott, p. 21. While in European literature at large, it is not only women characters who are
likely to be misled by inappropriate reading (Cervantes’s Don Quixote is a case in point) the
German Marchen tradition in general and the Blaubartmarchen in particular seek to discredit
¨
¨
especially the feminine quest for knowledge, which is often associated with literacy. This view is
borne out by the strikingly consistent gendered use of the motif of reading and writing in the
texts discussed here.
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2002.

334
19TH-CENTURY COMIC VERSIONS OF THE BLUEBEARD TALE
zwar gut ausgegangen; aber wer weiß, was ein andermal geschieht, wenn
man der Neugierd’ nicht widerstehen kann! Nehmen S’ Ihnen’s zur Lehr’’
(pp.125–6). Kasperl is reproducing Blaubart’s view that women’s curiosity
is the real vice displayed in the play, not serial murder; but unlike Blau-
bart, Kasperl is the audience’s interlocutor and a figure of identification
whose statements direct the audience’s responses. In other words, while
Bluebeard is dead, his moral judgement lives on.
With this statement, Kasperl seems to support a stabilising, conservative
message. Indeed, while Kasperl leaves a door open for Hugo to come and
rescue Berta, and thus maintains the audience’s affections, his position
throughout is ambivalent with regard to his mistress. Kasperl’s part in
Berta’s predicament is not innocent, for it is ultimately he who persuades
her to open the chamber:
Kasperl: [%] Was ist denn das fur ein wundernettes goldnenes Schlusserl?
¨
¨
Das gehort g’wiß zum Geldkasten, wo die Dukaten drinliegen.
¨
Berta: Das ist der einzige Schlussel, von dem ich keinen Gebrauch
¨
machen darf.
Kasperl: [%] Ja, warum hat ihn nachher der g’streng’ Herr Ritter nit lieber
in sei’m Gilettaschl b’halt’n?
Berta: Das ist seine Sache, er will es einmal so.
Kasperl: [%] Das hielt ich nit aus, wenn ich den Schlussel dazu hatt’! So,
¨
¨
jetzt machen S’ was wollen. G’horsamer Diener. (Ab).
¨
Berta: Eigentlich hat Kasperl so unrecht nicht. (pp.116–17)
Kasperl’s intervention catalyses Berta’s transgression and thus, Kasperl rep-
licates Blaubart’s role as tempter.
And Kasperl’s ostensibly sympathetic responses to Berta’s predicament
are at best limited, and at worst passively complicit with Blaubart. He says:
Jetzt heißt’s aber den Kopf hangen! Arme Berta! [%] – Ich lauf davon! Das
¨
heißt: ich tat’s, wenn ich konnt, aber der Kerl laßt mich nit fort; eher schlagt
¨
¨
er auch mich noch tot, wie er’s seiner Frau angekundigt hat. Sein großes
Ritterschwert hab’ ich ihm schon schleifen mussen heut. (p.121)
¨
¨
Kasperl’s thoughts are less of rescuing Berta, or joining the sisters in
resisting the man who is oppressing all parties, than of fear for his own
position. Therefore, while Kasperl and Blaubart might at first sight appear
to be opposites, in fact Kasperl’s behaviour subtly echoes Blaubart’s, so
that the supposedly tame, sympathetic clown affirms the abuse of patriar-
chal authority practised by Blaubart. The message therefore is that social
order is not to be disrupted, either by a wife’s disobedience, or a servant’s
insubordination. Berta is indeed like a ‘Magd’ and Blaubart can only be
challenged by his social equal and fellow man Hugo, who will control
Berta in future.
And yet, a more complex reading is possible, for the play remains part
of that clowning tradition which has an ambivalent relationship with the
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2002.

19TH-CENTURY COMIC VERSIONS OF THE BLUEBEARD TALE
335
dominant order.13 Kasperl’s traditional role of undermining and mocking
high culture and authority is muted here, but vestigially present in the
mockery of Berta, and with her, of a whole aristocratic class which has
leisure to indulge in reading, marrying and murder, while Kasperl must
submit to the tyranny of that class in order to keep body and soul together.
As is typical of such figures, the downtrodden Kasperl is concerned with
eating, drinking and survival, rather than escape or overthrowing the
tyrant. As a result, he is an amoral character, unconcerned, and thus
implicitly in conflict, with the lofty moral values associated with many
nineteenth-century Marchen.
¨
And despite Kasperl’s alignment with authoritarian values, he simul-
taneously and paradoxically fulfils a disruptive role. As Berta’s tempter,
Kasperl reproduces Blaubart’s role and authoritarianism; yet that temp-
tation provokes the incursion into the text of rampant, demonic vices and
desires. Kasperl’s intervention prompts, too, Berta’s feminist reflections,
and her transgression of gender roles. In other words, Kasperl catalyses
the brief challenge to authority which occurs when Berta appropriates
Blaubart’s phallic key (albeit a diminutive challenge, given the play’s sta-
bilising treatment of both the clown and the Bluebeard material, a dom-
estication which is symbolised by the little key, ‘das kleine goldene Schlus-
¨
selchen’ (p.114), in contrast to the expressively large key often imagined
by illustrators of other Bluebeard texts). Kasperl introduces disorder in
other ways too, for example in his typical ‘blodeln’ or distortion of langu-
¨
age:
Blaubart: Du sollst mir eine Braut holen.
Kasperl: ’s Kraut soll ich holen? (p.102)
In the first instance, Kasperl is mocking his superior’s speech, but there
are other implications here too. By consistently reducing authoritarian
language to nonsense, Kasperl is interfering with the common, and cul-
turally weighty, perception of language as a transparent, normative vehicle
of communication, power and authority.14
It is also possible that the text is undermining high culture on a generic
level. What is evident here is, inter alia, interference between two power-
fully recognisable genres, the Marchen and the Kasperliade; or more pre-
¨
cisely, the subordinating and undermining of the former by the latter. For
instance, for Berta and the other Marchen characters, the plot ends with
¨
the strong closure (death, marriage) frequently associated with the
Marchen. However, while Kasperl too has been liberated from Blaubart,
¨
he is not affected by that closure. Viewers know that the play belongs in
a series of Kasperliaden, and expect Kasperl to proceed to further, open-
ended adventures. That lack of closure is part of the play’s limited satire
13 Cf. Valenta, who emphasises the subversive and carnivalesque in Pocci’s plays.
14 Cf. Valenta, p. 145.
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2002.

336
19TH-CENTURY COMIC VERSIONS OF THE BLUEBEARD TALE
on the upper classes, since it implies that happy endings are luxuries
unavailable to the servant. Moreover, closure in Marchen is often associated
¨
with social and symbolic stabilisation. For example, the Grimms’ ‘Blaubart’
closes firmly with the permanent disenfranchisement of the potentially
disorderly heroine and the desirable re-establishment of patriarchal auth-
ority.15 By contrast, the fact that the closure of this Kasperliade is patently
temporary holds open the possibility of a recurrence of disruption in a
manner which contradicts the crucial closure of the Grimmian version
and perhaps, subtly, the values associated with it.
Finally, the process of performing this play would relativise the printed
text’s apparently more rigid, serious statements. Above all, the puppets
constitute a ‘Verfremdungseffekt’. The physical threats take on a different
value, become more grotesque, comic even, than sinister, since they are
not perpetrated on human bodies. Moreover, just as Kasperl’s ‘blodeln’
¨
challenges the rational language which seems to guarantee the order of
things, the puppets too challenge another guarantor of the stable world.
Sheppard argues that for a certain middle-class, cultural milieu in
nineteenth-century Germany, clown figures were implicitly problematic,
since they may be read as becoming, on a deep and non-conscious level,
offensive to bourgeois culture because, far from being characters in the indi-
vidualistic sense, they were masks, types, insolent reminders of the illusory
nature of the individualised bourgeois ego and its claim to exercise control,
and, conversely, pointers to the raw power of the primitive, pre-individual-
ised roots of the human personality. [%] Where folly appears, the bourgeois
ego is made aware of its fragility (p.303).
This statement would be doubly true of clowning marionettes.16 Thus,
while Pocci’s bowdlerised Kasperl does not have the Dionysian power to
invoke any alternative, carnivalesque, sense of being, his presence hints at
the fragility of the modern subject at which the morals of the Grimm
Marchen were aimed.
¨
In conclusion then, Pocci’s furchtbares Spektakelstuck contains mixed
¨
messages. This play apparently fits neatly into that nineteenth-century
Bluebeard tradition which sought to cement bourgeois patriarchal social
norms. However, the play carries vestiges too of other traditions which,
15 Cf. Davies, The Tale of Bluebeard, pp. 118–25.
16 The fascinating ambiguities which result from allowing puppets or other non-human actors to
play out the moral scenarios of ‘Blaubart’ - on the one hand, the imagery of violence and authority
can be exaggerated dramatically, on the other, it is undermined - help account for the general
popularity of presenting ‘Blaubart’ in non-realist media. Examples include Georg Trakl’s puppet
play of 1910; Alexandre Boubnov’s animation La derniere femme de Barbe-bleu (France, 1996); Henk
`
Schut’s adult puppet play Bluebeard, Little Angel Theatre, London, 1999; the shadow-puppet version
of ‘Barbe-bleue’ shown at Gilles de Rais’s (a putative historical Bluebeard) castle in Tiffauges,
France, 2001; Thomas Mierau’s puppet play versions, including Der Blaubart, Theater Mirakulum,
Berlin, 2001.
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2002.

19TH-CENTURY COMIC VERSIONS OF THE BLUEBEARD TALE
337
while they do not favour the woman protagonist, none the less destabilise
values traditionally linked with Marchen.
¨
Alexander von Sternberg, ‘Blaubart’ (1850)
In this text, Blaubart marries and disposes of seven sisters. When the
eighth sister, Suse, is put to the test of the forbidden chamber, she finds
in it not only her imprisoned sisters, but more unusually, her husband’s
cosmetics, glass eyes, false teeth and so forth, which had given him the
deceptive impression of being a ‘vollkommenster Kavalier’, an epithet
which is even inscribed on the walls of his castle. Suse literally unmasks
Bluebeard as a fraud, and the sisters are rescued by their father. Initially,
this text challenges masculine authority in unusual ways; and subsequently,
it reasserts it.
Suse is a far more resolute heroine than is usual in the nineteenth-
century Blaubartmarchen. She intends to find out the truth about her sis-
¨
ters’ disappearance, but also enjoys the material benefits of her marriage,
unconcerned with the moral and sentimental obligations on which the
high nineteenth-century tradition insisted. She is brave, quick-witted, and
has moral fortitude, for she shows no sign of submitting to the allegedly
feminine vice of curiosity, entering the room due not to a lack of self-
control, but to reasoned detective work. And Suse does not attempt to
hide her transgression, as is invariably the case in this tradition, but rather,
paints out the inscriptions describing ‘der vollkommenste Kavalier’ and
openly challenges her husband on his return.
As in Pocci’s play, language and writing are sites of gendered contest.
Traditionally, Bluebeard’s chamber contains his secret knowledge, that is,
privileged knowledge, and therefore power. Here, Blaubart claims that his
chamber contains books and papers. In other words, that claim hints that
written texts embody the secret of patriarchal power. Suse explodes that
power by showing it to be illusory (there are no books and papers), and
divesting it of secrecy in a very public, explicit way by vandalising the
inscriptions, although she does not seem to be capable of appropriating
the power of writing for herself.
Not only does Suse defy conventional expectations of womanhood, and
therefore seem potentially threatening, but the tale’s treatment of Blau-
bart is even more startling. Suse discovers that Blaubart has not just one
secret, but two: the abuse of women, and the use of cosmetics, and it is
the latter which seems to outrage her most. Blaubart’s major crime is his
deviation from conventional masculinity, so that what is truly horrifying
about him is less his cruelty than his effeminacy. Thus, Sternberg’s ‘Blau-
bart’ makes explicit the sub-text of gender trouble implicit in the Blaubart-
marchen, whereby the woman’s appropriation of the keys can be under-
¨
stood as an act of mimetic rivalry which undermines clear gender roles.
The shocking secret of Bluebeard’s chamber is no longer murder commit-
ted on stereotypically gendered models, but the instability of apparently
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2002.

338
19TH-CENTURY COMIC VERSIONS OF THE BLUEBEARD TALE
reliable gender identity, and the revelation that Blaubart’s masculinity,
which seems at first sight natural, is (in part at least) a masquerade.17
But such revelations are followed by a call to order. Suse is unable to
resist physically or verbally as soon as Bluebeard utters a threat. Suse’s
sisters too are paralysed, despite the fact that the women outnumber Blau-
bart by eight to one. It is only the arrival of the women’s father which
saves them, and it is he who takes Bluebeard’s fortune. The text closes
with the sisters’ stereotypical wish to gossip about the event:
‘Verschweigen! riefen alle achte mit einer Stimme; unmoglich Papa! Das
¨
ist ja eben unsre Genugtuung, daß wir alles, was uns geschehen, und was
uns nicht geschehen, in der Nachbarschaft haarklein erzahlen konnen.’
¨
¨
(p.139) The women’s account is described as lies (‘“ausbundig [%]
¨
¨
lugen”’), despite the reality of their experience. It seems that Suse’s detec-
tive work has set in train a disruption so strong that accounts of it must
be equally strongly discredited. The threat here is eightfold, for we have
eight unmarried (and therefore potentially less controllable) women with
shocking stories to tell, and who must be ridiculed in a manner which
recalls Pocci’s discrediting of Berta’s articulacy.
In its light tone, doggerel verse and absurd events, this tale mocks the
serious moral tone and darker content of canonical versions a la Grimm.
`
The text contains, too, some echo of the subversive carnival spirit latent
in Pocci’s text, in the slipping of gendered boundaries, and with them,
hierarchies. Not only is Suse an unusual heroine, it is unprecedented in
this tradition for Bluebeard’s masculinity to be questioned. In other words,
the Marchen drops subversive hints about gender roles, indeed, gender
¨
itself. However, the text ultimately reacts to the profound threat to order
involved in such suggestions by reasserting conventional stereotypes and
strictures.
ILLUSORY BLUEBEARDS
Friedrich Wilhelm Hacklander, ‘Der Blaubart’ (1863)
¨
One distinctive strand in the nineteenth-century German Bluebeard tra-
dition proves that Bluebeard’s secret, or even his very existence, is a fic-
tion.18 Such texts are generally given a contemporary, realist, setting. In
Hacklander’s novella the unmarried Sophie develops suspicions regarding
¨
her new brother-in-law Barenberg, when her sister Elise mentions in a
¨
letter to her family that she is forbidden entry into one room in her hus-
band’s house, and subsequently stops writing. Sophie becomes convinced
17 Wth this horrific possibility, Sternberg’s text prefigures many distinctively modern Bluebeard
texts of the early twentieth century which thematise an endangered masculinity. See Davies, The
Tale of Bluebeard, pp. 162–201.
18 Cf. Suhrbier, pp. 46–52; Davies, The Tale of Bluebeard, pp. 132–61. Other comedies in this strand
are those by Angely, Marlitt, Sacher-Masoch and Westenholz.
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2002.

19TH-CENTURY COMIC VERSIONS OF THE BLUEBEARD TALE
339
that Barenberg-Bluebeard has murdered Elise; but it is finally revealed
¨
that Elise had stopped writing due to pregnancy and confinement, and
that the secret room was a nursery, kept secret from her as a surprise until
her son’s birth. As a practical joke, in order to punish Sophie for her
slanderous thoughts, Barenberg imprisons her and leads her to think that
¨
she too will be murdered, but a joyful finale follows.
Hacklander’s novella expresses conservative gender ideals, for example
¨
when Barenberg discusses the forthcoming visit of his in-laws to his castle:
¨
Das Zimmer fur den Kriegsrath [the father of Sophie and Elise] [%]
¨
bestimmte Herr Barenberg neben der Bibliothek, wo sich eine Auswahl klas-
¨
sischer Werke, besonders der Kriegskunde, befande [%] Die Mutter [%]
¨
[sollte] ihre Wohnung im Erdgeschoß haben, wo [sie] den Wirthschaftsrau-
¨
men, sowie dem ansehnlichen Kuchen- und Gemusegarten nahe ware. (no.
¨
¨
¨
38, p. 594)
That is, Barenberg’s library is masculine territory, and the kitchen femi-
¨
nine. Sophie looks forward to her visit as follows:
Auch sah sie sich wohl auf der Zinne des alten Wartthurms sitzend, und
versetzte sich traumend in jene Zeit zuruck, wo das zarte Burgfraulein dort
¨
¨
¨
geharrt tagelang [%] ‘Doch wurde ich nie da oben sitzen,’ dachte Sophie,
¨
‘ohne Geibel’s Gedichte bei mir zu haben,’ diesen Seelentrost fur junge und
¨
alte verliebte Madchenherzen. (ibid.)
¨
This fantasy is derived from reading, implicitly characterised as inferior
to that available in the library. The illegitimacy of Sophie’s reading is
stressed too by the marginal, exposed position outside the domestic
interior. Indeed, this location illustrates the spinster’s position as an out-
sider to the bourgeois family; and the symbolic impossibility of the intellec-
tual woman’s obtaining a room of her own.
The relationship of woman and language is discredited too because
Sophie’s suspicions are bolstered by a talkative old woman servant, a figure
who in the nineteenth century was often responsible for demonised narra-
tive.19 Thus the name Sophie, which in the classical tradition suggests wis-
dom, becomes ironic. So despite the fact that Sophie is true to her name
and uses her reason critically, she is ridiculed. And as in Pocci’s play, an
excess of feminine imagination goes hand in hand with feminist polemic.
Sophie says: ‘O, diese Manner! Keiner hat ein Herz, selten ist einer im
¨
Stande, das zarte Gemuth eines weiblichen Wesens zu verstehen, und es
¨
schonend, wie es sein soll, zu behandeln’ (no. 39, p. 611). Here too, a
connection is made between foolishness and feminine use of literacy, lang-
uage and emancipatory argument.
Elise, however, is Sophie’s idealised opposite, progressively moving away
from the sphere of literacy and language as she embarks on marriage and
19 Cf. Davies, The Tale of Bluebeard, pp. 18–33.
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2002.

340
19TH-CENTURY COMIC VERSIONS OF THE BLUEBEARD TALE
motherhood. Indeed, it is the fact that Elise stops practising literacy by
no longer writing letters that provokes Sophie’s suspicions in the first
place. Sophie says:
‘Elise, [%] die so gerne schreibt, meine starke und gesunde Schwester, sollte
in wenigen Monaten so weit herunter gekommen sein, daß es ihr Muhe
¨
macht, die Feder zu halten,’ [%] Die Kriegsrathin [%] gab [%] ihrer
¨
Tochter zur Antwort: ‘Es gibt Dinge, die man Dir bei Deinem gewiß nicht
kleinen Verstande dennoch nicht genugend erklaren kann’. (no. 40, p. 626)
¨
¨
Feminine ‘Verstand’ is shown to be useless and blind. And at the end of
the novella, Elise says: ‘Ich bin [%] namenlos glucklich’ (no. 40, p. 627).
¨
Not only is Elise no longer literate, the adjective ‘namenlos’ suggests that
she is altogether becoming inarticulate.
By contrast, Barenberg’s very name suggests power, strength and a natu-
¨
ral, positively connotated aggressiveness. Barenberg is a ‘Direktor und Mit-
¨
betheiligter eines großen Hammer- und Schmiedewerks in einem rei-
zenden Thale des Gebirgs’ (no. 38, p. 594), that is, in the vanguard of a
masculinised, technological, capitalist and phallic (‘Hammer’) progress
which is driving back the frontiers of the wild, represented by that Freud-
ian symbol of the unconscious, and of feminine nature, the wooded valley,
the physical opposite of the factory.20 Just as Hacklander describes the
¨
authority of the husband in a bourgeois marriage as natural, the work of
the factory and its setting too are presented in harmonising, naturalising
terms: ‘der vielstimmige Gesang der lustigen gefiederten Waldsanger
¨
[%] – zwischen diesen Harmonieen klang als Grundbaß das Rauschen
der Muhlwerke und das Klappern der Streckhammer’ (no. 39, p. 609).
¨
¨
Barenberg’s home too is a physical correlative of his masculine power,
¨
containing not only a library, but also a phallic tower in which the forbid-
den room is located and Sophie imprisoned. The suggestion is that the
tower is the locus of Barenberg’s power, and that women cannot enter
¨
except as prisoners or mothers, that is, until they have taken up a subordi-
nate place in a patriarchal order. Once Elise has given birth to Barenberg’s
¨
son, she says:
‘das Zimmer hier war schon fur mich und den Kleinen eingerichtet, lange
¨
vorher, ehe ich es wissen durfte – das verstehst Du doch, Sophie?’
Nun sind wir freilich nicht ganz uberzeugt, ob Sophie das vollkommen
¨
verstand, aber sie war klug genug, zu thun, als habe sie verstanden (no.
40, p. 627)
Elise is expressing joyful submission to a law ordained by her husband
which she is only allowed to grasp once she has entered the state of
motherhood. The spinster Sophie is not in a position to understand that
20 Cf. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, New
York 1983.
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2002.

19TH-CENTURY COMIC VERSIONS OF THE BLUEBEARD TALE
341
law, for she can only think intellectually, a process which does not allow
her understanding of the situation to be ‘vollkommen’. The implication
is that the independent use of reason is inferior to an intuitive mode of
understanding available only to a woman who has fulfilled the high pur-
pose of marriage and motherhood (which involves submission and the
loss of independence).
The implication is that Sophie must be punished for her vivid imagin-
ation and reading; and that any doubts as to the benefits of marriage and
motherhood for a young woman must be the product of ignorance and
superstition. In other words, Hacklander apparently demystifies fantasies
¨
of marriage and childbirth as being dangerous to young women. As such,
he is affirming the order represented by Barenberg. Given which, it is
¨
difficult to identify subversive aspects in this text. However, it may be that
in seeking to cover over fear and danger, Hacklander inadvertently reveals
¨
the darker side of Barenberg’s order. The withdrawal of Elise from society
¨
and articulacy into the chamber of motherhood, where she can no longer
communicate with her worried sister, is funereal. And while Elise does
return alive, it is no longer as a reasoning being, but as a passive body.
And perhaps the characterisation of Sophie as being ‘klug genug’ not to
challenge the patriarchal family structure may be read in more than one
way. While that characterisation, on one level, suggests that Sophie, too,
acquiesces in the family hierarchy, it might also be read, against the grain,
as a hint that in fact Sophie recognises some more ominous truths about
the situation which she dares not speak. In other words, the novella’s
impact is complex. On the one hand, it teaches women submission by use
of subtle threat; on the other, it may be that the emergence of a happy
ending, seemingly against the odds, would have served the purpose not
(only) of imposing order by showing how quiescent women are rewarded;
but also of reassuring them, in the face of the very real dangers of con-
finement, that women may yet get away unscathed.
An exception: Roderich Benedix, ‘Blaubart’ (1861)
Benedix’s Lustspiel contrasts sharply in its treatment of gender roles with
the texts discussed so far. Here, the young bridegroom Arnold brings his
bride Hermine home. They meet Arnold’s former tutor Wander, who
warns Arnold that all women are deceitful and unfaithful. Wander and
Arnold arrange a test for Hermine whereby she is forbidden entry to one
room in his house. If Hermine fails this test, Arnold will have to abandon
her. The next-door neighbour is Hermine’s old friend, the beautiful,
clever and confident Rosamunde. Rosamunde is now engaged to Leon-
hard, Hermine’s brother, who is unjustly jealous. Rosamunde discovers the
plan against Hermine and is shocked at its pettiness and double standard.
Rosamunde in turn, then, engineers a test of curiosity to entrap Arnold
and Wander, and Leonhard too, in order to correct his jealousy by show-
ing it to be unfounded. Therefore, when Hermine walks into the men’s
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2002.

342
19TH-CENTURY COMIC VERSIONS OF THE BLUEBEARD TALE
trap, and is cruelly treated by them, Rosamunde is able to expose the men
as equally curious, but also as hypocrites. However, the moral which she
extracts from the story is less judgmental, and more liberal and generous
than the one proposed by Pocci’s Kasperl: ‘Merkt Euch die Lehre. Wird
nur der rechte Koder aufgestellt, laßt sich Jeder verlocken. [%] Also neh-
¨
¨
men Sie mich in Acht!’ (p.27).
While Hermine is an innocent like Elise, the charming and kind Rosa-
munde is the opposite of the negative stereotypes which Hacklander was
¨
to unite in Sophie two years later. Unlike Sophie, she understands the
ways of the world better than those around her; and is materially inde-
pendent, as yet unmarried, and highly intelligent. While Sophie’s desire
to rescue her sister proved misplaced, and Berta’s feminist rhetoric foolish,
Rosamunde strikes a successful blow for feminine solidarity, by using pre-
cisely those media which Sophie and Berta could not deploy properly:
language and written text. Rosamunde precipitates her intrigue by writing
Arnold a note, and tempts the antiquarian Wander with valuable manu-
scripts and letters. And Wander’s submission to this temptation under-
mines the link between text, intellectualism and masculine authority which
Hacklander presented as positive and natural.
¨
Strikingly, the denouement takes place in Rosamunde’s own house.
Without exception, nineteenth-century (and most later) Bluebeard texts
take place in the husband’s home, underlining his legal and material auth-
ority. Here, however, Rosamunde brings all the characters into her house
and says: ‘Mir steht hier die Gerichtsbarkeit zu’ (p.26). This shift is extra-
ordinary for two main, related, reasons. First, it runs counter to the huge
symbolic importance the tradition ascribes to Bluebeard’s house as a sym-
bol of his power, and to the lack of rights accorded his wives within it.
Second, it challenges the real legal and material position of German wives
in the nineteenth century. At a time when, by law, marriage ended a wom-
an’s status as an autonomous legal subject and her control of her own
property, transferring these to her husband, Rosamunde’s insistence on
her rights as individual and home-owner would have seemed radical. Inter-
estingly, according to legal codes of the time, a wife’s (extremely limited)
financial authority in domestic matters was known as ‘Schlusselgewalt’.
¨
‘Blaubart’ itself can be read as an intriguing game with that term, and
Benedix’s version as a challenge to it. Indeed, not only does Rosamunde
see herself as a full legal subject, but she claims the authority of a judge
too, in evoking her own ‘Gerichtsbarkeit’ or jurisdiction.21
This ending represents not only a challenge to gender roles which is
not immediately crushed, it also challenges generic conventions, since by
hinting jokingly at possible future transgressions of her own, Rosamunde
21 Cf. William H. Hubbard, Familiengeschichte: Materialien zur deutschen Familie seit dem Ende des 18.
Jahrhunderts, Munich 1983, pp. 45–60; Petra Malsbender, Die rechtliche Stellung der Frau im ehelichen
Guterrecht vom ALR zum BGB, Frankfurt a.M. 1991, especially pp.195–6 on ‘Schlusselgewaltge-
¨
¨
schafte’.
¨
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2002.

19TH-CENTURY COMIC VERSIONS OF THE BLUEBEARD TALE
343
ensures that the traditional closure of marriage is held open to question.
The comedy certainly derives from such conventional business as intrigue
and multiple entrances and exits; but from a feminist point of view too it
has a more utopian aspect, suggesting liberation for women from subordi-
nate gender roles, the possibility of successful solidarity between women,
and a lack of closure – and thus, of foregone conclusions.
Or at least, so it would seem on a modern reading. In fact, the
impression the play made on its contemporary audience may well have
been more complex. Once the depths of mistrust between the couples
have been revealed, their final reconciliations are, at best, uneasy, and at
worst, a desperate self-deceit, an outcome which would have been at odds
with expectations of a romantic comedy. Rosamunde’s conclusion that
anyone may be tempted, even after marriage, flies in the face of any essen-
tialist notions of natural feminine virtues like fidelity. And while it can be
argued that Rosamunde does not lose her status as heroine, for she has
maintained the moral high ground, and that her charm, wit and devotion
to Hermine preserve her attractiveness for the spectators, such a reading
involves possibly over- simple assumptions about the homogeneity of the
audience, and anachronistic ideas about the qualites which nineteenth-
century spectators would have valued in a young lady. Rosamunde’s appar-
ent moral triumph is bought at the price of leading male characters into
temptation, before exposing their weaknesses, an operation which makes
her tread a fine line between the roles of heroine and (implicitly demonic)
temptress. Similarly, her solidarity with Hermine shows up and deepens
gender divisions, rather than occluding and idealising them, as polite
nineteenth-century society expected. Or, put another way: while Rosa-
munde rights the injustice done to Hermine, by the standards of her time
and class, she may thus be doing wrong herself.
CONCLUSION
The function of comedy
In most of these texts, in classic comic style, a state of order is disrupted
and then restored. Comedy emerges too from mockery of those who do
not recognise their place in that order, like Sophie or Berta. As Marina
Warner puts it in a recent study of comically violent literature:
Humour takes part in [the] making of likenessess and differences. The per-
ception of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, writing at the beginning
of the twentieth century, is blazingly acute: ‘Our laughter is always the laugh-
ter of a group % the comic will come into being [%] whenever a group of
men concentrate their attention on one of their number%’22
22 Warner, No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock, London 1998, pp. 328–9.
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2002.

344
19TH-CENTURY COMIC VERSIONS OF THE BLUEBEARD TALE
Warner also quotes William Gass: ‘Laughter is social % and the laugh is
a social corrective like a curtsy or the guillotine.’ With reference to Blue-
beard texts, that remark is chillingly apt; laughter directed at these her-
oines corrects them just as Bluebeard’s threat of decapitation does. As
such, the laughing spectator or reader comes to be aligned with Blue-
beard. Such authoritarian laughter seems to be at odds with the possibility
of subversive, disorderly laughter, which is perceptible only in a domesti-
cated manner in Pocci’s play, or Sternberg’s Marchen. It is no coincidence
¨
that these texts have a fantastic setting, suggesting that the nineteenth-
century parlour in which most of the other tales are set was especially
resistant to disorderly laughter.
However, it may be that comedy is playing a more complex game here,
for these texts subtly reveal precisely those disturbances and fears which
the ostensibly stabilising happy endings are supposed to cover over and
deny. Such disturbances and fears include that of the authoritarian hus-
band who controls the unknown world of marriage and silences his wife;
or of the woman who refuses to be tamed by marriage. Or the texts may
address fear of the obscure physical dangers of sexuality or childbirth
which for women followed marriage; or, literally, fear of the body, a har-
binger of mortality often metonymically imagined as being feminine and
grotesque, like Bluebeard’s grotesque display of corpses. The fear might
be of the revelation of the very oppressiveness and fragility of the bour-
geois institution of marriage, or the frailty of (gendered) identity itself.
On the surface, the texts seek to deny such fears by making them seem
ridiculous. But covertly, laughter also functions as an inoculation against
fearful things, which are exposed just enough to be mocked and made
harmless.
The possibility that the texts simultaneously deny and expose fear may
help explain why so many of these texts are plays. Sacher-Masoch writes
in the prologue to the volume of short stories which contains his theatrical
tale ‘Ein harmloser Blaubart’ that the stage is a locus of transformation
and ‘Verfremdungseffekte’: ‘Falsch ist hier die Liebe wie der Haß, [%]
es gibt hinter der Rampe kein echtes Laster und keine echte Tugend.
Und wenn es einmal etwas Echtes gibt in dieser Welt, wird es mindestens
fur falsch gehalten; denn Niemand glaubt daran.’ (pp.1–2) On stage, the
¨
good husband can be laughingly transformed into Bluebeard, and then
back again, and the harmless empty room into a chamber of horrors and
back, just as Kasperl’s inaccurate repetition of his master’s orders turns
them from cruelty into harmless nonsense.
Paradoxically, the stage may have been chosen, too, to deal with secret
fears because of its very public nature. The scandal of the Bluebeard
material lies in the fact that what is supposed to remain secret – the con-
tent of the forbidden chamber – is made visible and public. The stage is
a medium in which the physically visible is of key importance, and so the
fact that no gruesome secret becomes visible is a particularly effective
means of denying its existence. That denial is powerfully conveyed in front
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2002.

19TH-CENTURY COMIC VERSIONS OF THE BLUEBEARD TALE
345
of the largest possible group of witnesses – a theatre audience, or indeed
the readership of a popular magazine. At the same time, however, the
audience’s awareness that the stage is an artificial world, as Sacher-Masoch
reminds us, allows a frisson and serves as a reminder that perhaps, like
Bluebeard’s wife, the spectator is not seeing everything.
The relation of the texts to the canon
There are evident similarities in plot and setting between the first group
of texts discussed here and the canonical versions of the Grimms and
Bechstein. But the second group of contemporary, realist comedies is
more noticeably distinct from the canonical texts, in changing the settings,
genre and plot, and most of all, in making Bluebeard vanish. At first sight,
it seems that such texts in which Bluebeard disappears constitute a serious
challenge to the values of the canonical texts. In fact, however, they can
be read as a logical extension of the canonical tendency of exculpating
Bluebeard, a necessary move in the German nineteenth century with its
advocacy of the bourgeois patriarchal nuclear family.23 Such texts reveal
not the end of Bluebeard, but his transformation into more subtle, con-
temporary forms.
This development corroborates what Norbert Elias called the ‘process
of civilisation’, whereby the modern state and the modern subject
emerged in tandem, and whereby social control came to be enforced by
the internalisation of control by the individual, as opposed to physical
control by society’s rulers.24 Therefore, Bluebeard need no longer exist
in person in order to control women, because he lives on in Sophie’s
mind. Hacklander describes Elise’s and Barenberg’s son as ‘der kleine
¨
¨
Blaubart’, the heir not only to Barenberg’s wealth, but also to the psycho-
¨
social order his father represents. It is no concidence either that the baby
is also described as a future, masculine, pillar of the state: as a new ‘Staats-
burger’ (no. 40, p. 627). Thus, Barenberg’s moral standards may enforce
¨
¨
order more powerfully than the sword; and the intellectual decapitation
of women, by depriving them of language, may be as effective as physical
decapitation. It seems, then, that the use of contemporary settings permits
a more modern analysis of civilisation than canonical texts set in the past.
What most of these comedies have in common is that they ordain that
women must submit to men, even cruel or deceptive ones, as legitimate
masters. The persistent theme of language and writing is most interesting
here, since these are identified as masculine property and women’s use
of them discredited. Such suspicion of women’s language echoes through
the nineteenth-century Marchen canon too, for instance in the Grimms’
¨
‘Blaubart’. When the heroine is under her father’s tutelage, she is silent;
23 Cf. e.g. Ruth B. Bottigheimer, ‘The Face of Evil’, Fabula, 29 (1988), 326–35.
24
¨
Norbert Elias, Uber den Prozeß der Zivilisation: Soziogenetische und Psychogenetische Untersuchungen
(1939), Frankfurt a.M. 1997.
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2002.

346
19TH-CENTURY COMIC VERSIONS OF THE BLUEBEARD TALE
but once she has left that protection she becomes articulate, vicious and
dangerous.25 And the revelation in some of these texts that Bluebeard’s
secret does not exist helps discredit the feminine search for knowledge
further, by making it doubly difficult. By being rendered invisible, Blue-
beard’s secret has been hidden even more safely from women. It seems,
then, that most of these comedies reinscribe dominant conservative values
even more emphatically than canonical texts do. However, for comedies
to be excluded so thoroughly from the canon suggests that there are also
distinctions between them and more canonical texts.
First, most of these texts present (near-)contemporary comedies of man-
ners. As such, they challenge the Grimms’ mystificatory, anti-modern nos-
talgia, for the Grimmian tradition, in its project of privileging the Marchen,
¨
has sought serious, purportedly ancient meanings in the form. That tra-
dition has characterised Marchen not as products of the nineteenth-century
¨
imagination – which they undoubtedly were – but as ancient wisdom. Such
readings have sought to elaborate deep, serious meaning from Marchen in
¨
order to attach appropriate gravitas both to the tales themselves and to
the political or cultural agendas which the Marchen could be used to pro-
¨
mote. These popular comedies may have offended against the need to
make Marchen appear both ancient and serious, by making them appear
¨
modern and light-hearted.
Second, none of these texts corresponds formally to what is now
imagined as the classic (but retrospectively constructed) Marchen model,
¨
which is monological, short, in prose, with paratactic sentences. The texts
are either novellas or plays, and Sternberg’s Marchen is linguistically most
¨
eccentric. While the texts use a broad range of comedic devices, what they
share is a rejection of the diction and generic conventions of canonical
Marchen.
¨
Third, these comedies belong in the comic theatre and the illustrated
magazine, very different types of demotic culture from that authentic, folk-
narrative community imagined by the Grimms and fiercely promoted
since. Therefore, these texts compete with traditional notions of popular
or ‘folk’ culture and reveal that they are highly idealised stylisations. Thus,
the fact that these texts would have been more popular than the Kinder-
und Hausmarchen at the time of their production means that a revision of
¨
the Marchen canon, of formal perceptions of the Marchen itself, and of
¨
¨
perceptions of indigenous or popular culture at large, is called for.
Moreover, these texts may communicate more subversive messages than
canonical tellings. On one hand, they seem to uphold traditional gender
roles and reassert authoritarian social structures. It might be argued that
the authoritarian nature of the texts is due to the very real cultural, sym-
bolic, legal and material constraints on nineteeth-century bourgeois
society. In this respect it is notable that most of these texts date from the
25 Bottigheimer, Grimms’ Bad Girls and Bold Boys: The Moral and Social Vision of the Tales, New Haven/
London 1987; Davies, The Tale of Bluebeard, pp. 121–2.
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2002.

19TH-CENTURY COMIC VERSIONS OF THE BLUEBEARD TALE
347
period of restoration following the upheavals of 1848, which included the
rise of an early feminist movement, the rhetoric of which is certainly satir-
ised by Pocci in Berta’s speech. In other words, it could be said that the
popular nineteenth-century imagination was simply unable to envisage
alternatives to the status quo, and limited to reproducing it. On the other
hand, a more careful examination shows that some of these texts do, at
least partially or vestigially, challenge or subvert precisely those values
which they at first seem to support, by echoing the anarchy of carnival,
unmasking the masquerade of gender or imagining alternative gender
roles. Such mixed messages are, again, alien to the alleged simplicity of
canonical Marchen. And more striking still is the unconventionality of
¨
Benedix’s play. It proves that a more explicitly defiant, comedic rewriting
of ‘Blaubart’ is possible, if rare. This exception demonstrates the ideologi-
cal flexibility available to the imagination of popular fiction, and that
established narrative paradigms, and even the law of the land, are open
to literary alteration or subversion.26 Such insights in turn allow a re-evalu-
ation of popular culture, not as an affirmative mode of culture, but one
which may hold more challenging possibilities than a higher-class avant-
garde.
Finally, many of these texts may take excessive liberties with Bluebeard
himself. The German Marchen tradition has assigned great authority and
¨
power to such dominant patriarchs as Bluebeard, even when their power
is unjustly used. Bluebeard’s power and authority derive from the terror
he practises, but these comedies show that terror to be illusory. In Pocci’s
play Bluebeard is nothing but a puppet; in Sternberg’s Marchen he is an
¨
unnatural fraud; in Hacklander’s novella and many other texts, there is
¨
nothing to fear from him physically. Despite their upholding of socially
stabilising messages, such as the affirmation of gender norms, the texts
may simply go too far in their diminishing of Bluebeard’s power to take
their place in a canon which values that motif so highly. Or, expressed
more pointedly: in a culture as authoritarian as that of nineteenth-century
Germany, the ambivalent treatment of the authority figure here, evil as
he is, may have been too audacious. For if Bluebeard’s authority is not
sustained by terror, there is nothing to stop such characters as Rosamunde
from simply walking out of his home and setting up her own; and the
traditional Blaubartmarchen itself from imploding.
¨
26 Why Benedix’s play should be so exceptional seems mysterious, for his contemporary reputation
was as a conservative entertainer; see Paul Lindau, ‘Roderich Benedix’, in Gesammelte Aufsatze:
¨
Beitrage zur Literaturgeschichte der Gegenwart, Berlin 1975, pp. 1–14; Adolf Große, ‘Benedix - Moser -
¨
Blumenthal’, Monatsblatter fur deutsche Literatur, 8 (1903–4), 169–72. However, a contemporary
¨
¨
remarked that Benedix sometimes wrote plays for specific actors, and so we may speculate that he
may have created Rosamunde to allow a particular woman actor to shine. See Adolph Kohut,
‘Roderich Benedix (Zum 100. Geburtstag). Mit ungedruckten Briefen und Tagebuchblattern’,
¨
Buhne und Welt, 13, 1 (1910–11), 316–27 (here 318).
¨
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2002.