Bluebeard's Betrayals Of Marriage

When thinking about marriage, the first thing that comes to mind is a huge wedding, family party, and dropping thousands to make it happen. Bluebeard kind of lead us into another direction of marriage, the trials and tribulations inside marriages. We ought to read Bluebeard as a warning against marriage because Carter, Perrault, and Oates present the idea that marriage don’t always go as planned: betrayal, trust, and secrets are in play as well. It takes responsibility, patience, and love in order to have a functioning marriage, without these factors, problems will follow. Every marriage/relationship goes through their share of trials and tribulations. There’s no such thing as a perfect marriage, but there is such a thing as “happy living”.

In Charles Perrault’s rendition of Bluebeard, he shows an example of betrayal within a marriage. The young wife in Charles fairy tale story could not resist but to open the door, “At first she could not see, after some time she began to perceive the floor was covered in blood, on which lay the bodies of several dead women” (Perrault 2). Although curiosity gets the best of the young wife in this fairy tale, it was the betrayal that sets Bluebeard off. The moment she stepped foot in the door she was told not to, it was game over. It took one wrong move to mess everything up and entering the secret room was just the first thing, “She thought she should have died for fear, and the key, which she pulled out of the lock, fell out of her hand into a pile of blood” (Perrault 2). Bluebeard was bound to find out and sure enough he did. After getting back from his trip, he asks his wife for his keys and all but one was missing. The key to the door. Bluebeard snaps at his wife demanding the key, only to find that it’s been used. In fear, the young wife tries to make up a lie to scrub off the blood stain but it was too late. The man who she thought was a “civil gentlemen” was actually a beast behind his blue beard. All this time no one knew where his previous mistresses had gone and now it’s been discovered. Bluebeard was a murderer! The naive young wife, blinded by money and riches, was wrong all along and should’ve

Nothing is worse than being told something that has been kept from you, “Secrets”. The world is full of secrets and as soon as you get your mind wrapped around one, it’s hard to let go. Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, give us another perspective of trials and tribulations, this time dealing with secrets. In Carter’s fairy tale, she introduces a seventeen year old pianist and her journey to the “Castle of Murder”. Being half her husband’s age and he already going through three marriages, the girl’s mother couldn’t help but to respect her decision. Her mother was a warrior, fierce one to be exact, “My eagle-featured, indomitable mother; what other student at the Conservatoire could boast that her mother had outfaced a junkful of Chinese pirates, nursed a village through a visitation of the plague, shot a man-eating tiger with her own hand and all before she was as old as I” (Carter). The bride is later sent away to her husband’s castle to escape into womanhood, or marriage. After countless amounts of sex and lust, Marquis, her husband, takes her virginity and proposes to her. There was no way she could say no to a fat rock of a ring plus a huge castle of a house. During their honeymoon, Marquis gets a business call to travel New York leaving his bride skeptical. He leaves the keys to all the doors with his bride making it clear to use all but one key, the key to his “enfer”, or as Marquis would call it. The young pianist, loved to play the piano, and as soon as her