A young woman marries an ugly, but kind nobleman only to discover that he has murdered his numerous wives and she is going to be his next victim. Luckily for her, she is saved by deus ex machina in the form of her two brothers, a dragoon and a musketeer, inherits her husband's estate and lives happily ever after with husband number two.
But did she deserve her happily ever after?
Bluebeard was not Perrault's only tale about a beautiful woman who marries an ugly man, but the two stories have very different messages. In Beauty and the Beast, the heroine is able to look past the Beast's exterior and love the man beneath it. In Bluebeard, the heroine ignores the outward appearance of her husband at her own peril. One story warns young women not to judge a man solely on his appearance, the other warns to beware a man who proudly displays his villainy.
The stories seem similar on the surface, but there are a few key differences between them. The first being the motivations of the heroines. Beauty came to the Beast to save her father, and truly fell in love with him. Bluebeard's wife fell in love with his wealth, the parties he threw and the fine things he could buy. It was his money that made his appearance bearable to her, not his personality.
In fact, Bluebeard purposefully cultivated ugliness, both interior and exterior. After all, his beard is the only feature mentioned as being unattractive. It seems odd then that the man, so desperately in want of a wife but finding his ugly beard a hindrance to this endeavor, did not shave.
In addition to her greedy nature, Bluebeard's wife committed another sin of virtue for the time: Disobedience. He told her not to use that key or go into that room.
Characters of other fairy tales who disobeyed a person of authority (and, let's face it girls, at the time this story was written, husbands were very much an authority figure), may still have received their happily ever after, but at a greater cost. Even Cinderella stayed completely obedient to that wicked step-mother of hers until a supernatural manifestation of another authority figure (her true mother) stepped in and gave her permission to go to that ball.
Obedience was a highly prized trait in a wife, and fairy tale heroines who displayed it were rewarded. Even if they suffered mightily for it. Now the tales of Perrault were often geared toward young women of a marrying age, as cautionary tales in choosing a husband, such as Bluebeard and Beauty and the Beast, being obedient and meek, like Cinderella, or avoiding the social death of premarital sex, like Little Red Riding Hood.
So, the question remains, did Bluebeard's wife deserve to live happily ever after when she displayed such a lack of virtue? The modern woman would say yes, that a wife has a right to know what her husband is hiding in the closet, but the women of the seventeenth century for which this tale was written might not have agreed so readily.
Given the morality of the times, Bluebeard's wife acted inappropriately, and while killing her might have been a little extreme, she is not as obviously deserving of her happy ending as heroines like Cinderella. That said, it was commonly believed at the time that women were dangerously curious creatures, and Bluebeard did give her the temptation of the key. Did he want her to find his dead wives so that he could kill her? That is a post for another day.
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