Tales of Bluebeard and His Wives from Late Antiquity to Postmodern Times

<p>This project provides an in-depth study of narratives about Bluebeard and his wives or narratives with identifiable Bluebeard motifs and the intertextual and extratextual personal political literary and sociocultural factors that have made the tale a particularly fertile ground for an author’s adaptation of the story. Whereas Charles Dickens for example expresses a sympathetic identification with Bluebeard and a discernable strain of misogyny emerges in his recreation of the tale and recurrent allusions to it his contemporary William Makepeace Thackeray uses the tale as a springboard for his critique of avarice hypocrisy pretension and the subjugation of women in Victorian society. </p>