Bluebeard's Legacy: Death and Secrets from Bartók to Hitchcock(New Encounters: Arts, Cultures, Concepts)

The tale of the serial wife-murderer Bluebeard, his defiant, and surviving, final wife, a bloodied key and a secret chamber of horrors, has fascinated writers, composers, artists and film-makers throughout modern times. It is a unique story that dares to disclose and explore masculine violence: the homme fatal. This transdisciplinary work identifies the deep appeal of the Bluebeard story for twentieth-century culture. Its major focus is on how the modernist imagination used the elements of Bluebeard's tale to explore masculinity's anxieties in the face of the emerging demands of women for redefinition and sexual equality, as well as anxieties of ethnic and cultural difference. It also examines fundamental disquiet about sexuality, pathology and violence in the masculine. With chapters by Maria Tatar, Elisabeth Bronfen, Mererid Puw Davies, Ian Christie, David Cooper, Michael Hiltbrunner and the editors, the volume undertakes cultural, contextual and musicological analyses of Bartók's opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle, tracing Bluebeard's evolution from Perrault in the seventeenth century to the cinematic hommes fatals of Méliès, Fritz Lang and Hitchcock. The result is an intriguing kaleidoscope of sexuality, curiosity, violence and death.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Preface Griselda Pollock Introduction: A Perrault in Wolf's Clothing Victoria Anderson 1. Bluebeard's Curse: Repetition and Improvisational Energy in the Bluebeard Tale Maria Tatar 2. Bluebeard, Hero of Modernity: Tales at the fin de siècle Mererid Puw Davies 3. 'Béla Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle: A Musicological Perspective David Cooper 4. The Tale of the Eye: Revealing the Jew in Duke Bluebeard's Castle Victoria Anderson 5. Hidden Debates Under a Baroque Surface: Barbe-bleue by Georges Méliès (1901) Michael Hiltbrunner 6. Hommes Fatales: Murder, Pathology and Hollywood Cinema's Bluebeards Griselda Pollock 7. The Enigma of Homecoming: The Secret Beyond the Door Elisabeth Bronfen 8. Dying for Art: Michael Powell, Duke Bluebeard's Castle and the filmic art-work of the future Ian Christie Authors' Biographies Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Griselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art and, since 2001, Director, Centre CATH (Cultural Analysis, Theory & History) at the University of Leeds, UK. Known for her critical interventions in feminist, social, Jewish and postcolonial studies in art's histories, her work ranges from nineteenth and twentieth century fields to that of contemporary art and cinema, museum studies and cultural theory. Her publications include Old Mistresses, Vision and Difference, Avant-Garde Gambits, Generations and Geographies, and Differencing the Canon.