Mystical systems
Bluebeard
Direct answer
Bluebeard is the French fairy tale, published by Charles Perrault in 1697, of a rich man who forbids his new wife one room, where she finds the bodies of the wives before her.
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At a glance
- Also called
- la barbe bleue
- Found in
- Mystical Systems
- Related
- Pandora, Forbidden Fruit, Tree of Knowledge, Hubris
Bluebeard is the French fairy tale, published by Charles Perrault in 1697, of a rich man who forbids his new wife one room, where she finds the bodies of the wives before her.
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What is the story of Bluebeard?
A wealthy man with a blue beard, already several times married, takes a young wife. Called away, he gives her the keys to all his treasures and one small key that she must not use. She opens the little room and sees the floor covered in blood and the former wives hanging on the walls. The key falls, and the stain on it cannot be washed off. He returns, sees the key and sentences her to die; she wins time to pray, and her brothers arrive and kill him.
The tale is the classic of the forbidden chamber. Perrault's own printed moral blames curiosity. Later readers pointed out that the wife's curiosity is what saves her, since the room holds the truth about the man she has married, and that the test was a trap from the start. Among the stories of forbidden knowledge it is the one in which the prohibition itself is the wrong.
On the tree of the hidden arts: Forbidden knowledge.
What sets Bluebeard apart
Its distinguishing device is the key that tells. In Eden and in Pandora's story the act is seen by a god; here an object carries the evidence, a stain that reappears on one side when scrubbed from the other. The forbidding is also of a different kind. It is issued by a husband with something to hide, and it is handed over together with the means of breaking it, so that the command works as bait. That is why the tale reads so easily as a study of coercion.
- Author and date: Charles Perrault, Stories or Tales of Times Past, 1697
- French title: La Barbe bleue
- Tale type: ATU 312; the related Fitcher's Bird is ATU 311
- The telltale object: a small key whose bloodstain cannot be washed away
- Rescuers: the wife's two brothers, a dragoon and a musketeer
- Noted retellings: Bartók's opera, staged 1918; Angela Carter, 1979
Often mistaken for something else: Pandora opens a jar and looses harm on everyone; Bluebeard's wife opens a door and uncovers harm already done, and the knowledge is what lets her survive.
The story behind Bluebeard
Perrault included La Barbe bleue in his Stories or Tales of Times Past in 1697. Folklorists class it as tale type 312 and its relatives, such as the Grimms' Fitcher's Bird, as type 311. Two historical models have been proposed, the Breton nobleman Gilles de Rais, executed in 1440, and the sixth century Breton ruler Conomor; neither fits well, and both are conjecture. Béla Bartók's opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle was first staged in 1918, and Angela Carter retold the story in The Bloody Chamber in 1979.
Why Bluebeard matters
Bluebeard turns the usual lesson over: here looking is right and the ban is the danger, a needed counterweight to Eden and Pandora.
How to read Bluebeard
The name stands for the tale, for any forbidden-room plot in fiction, and in criticism for stories of secrets within a marriage.
Bluebeard in practice: an example
Someone told by a new partner never to open a certain drawer, and troubled by the demand itself, might think of Bluebeard's key.
Where readings of Bluebeard go wrong
Bluebeard is a literary fairy tale, and the link to any real murderer is unproven; its morals have shifted with its tellers.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Mystical Systems
- Aliases
- bluebeard meaning, bluebeard fairy tale, bluebeard story, la barbe bleue, bluebeard forbidden room
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
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Common questions
What is the story of Bluebeard?
A rich man forbids his young wife to enter one room of his house. She enters, discovers the bodies of his earlier wives, and is betrayed by a bloodstained key. He is about to kill her when her brothers arrive and cut him down.
What is the moral of Bluebeard?
Perrault printed two. The first warns that curiosity costs dear. The second, tongue in cheek, says that husbands of that kind are no longer found. Modern readers more often take it as a warning about controlling partners and hidden violence.
Was Bluebeard based on a real person?
Nobody knows. Gilles de Rais, a fifteenth century Breton lord executed for murder, and Conomor, an early Breton ruler said to have killed his wives, have both been suggested, but no evidence ties Perrault's tale to either.
