A literature scholar revisits Bluebeard for what it says about couples today
In a new essay, Jennifer Tamas reads Perrault's fairy tale of the murderous husband as a mirror for present-day debates on gender roles, according to an interview published by Télérama.
Jennifer Tamas, a scholar of literature, has written a new essay that returns to Charles Perrault's tale of Bluebeard, the nobleman who murders his wives, to ask why the story still unsettles readers three centuries after it was written. According to Télérama, which published an interview with Tamas, she argues the tale remains far from a museum piece.
Tamas's essay, as described in the interview, treats Bluebeard less as a horror curiosity than as a lens on fear, desire and predation within couples. Télérama notes that Tamas draws a parallel between the contested gender roles of Perrault's own era, the end of the seventeenth century, and the debates of the present day.
The source material gives no title, publisher or publication date for the essay beyond the interview itself, and no further detail on Tamas's argument is available at this time.
Sources
This article was written from these reports.
