Casie E. Hermansson’s Bluebeard: A Reader’s Guide to the English Tradition lives up to its promise—it is an effective, useful guide for the reader. Hermansson anticipates the questions that surround the Bluebeard story for the English-language reader (questions like, “Is Bluebeard a pirate or not?”), and her book addresses those questions immediately and clearly. (And yes, Bluebeard has recently become conceived of as a pirate.) The clarity, accessibility, and thoroughness of this reader’s guide make it a useful tool for the instructor of folklore, theater, literature, history, or film studies, as well as for the casual reader. Hermansson has struck a happy balance, blending scholarly discourse with readable and engaging prose that makes the book a pleasure to read.

Chapter by chapter and century by century Hermansson takes the reader on a tour, exploring the ways the Bluebeard story has been used in different contexts as a tool to talk about social and cultural issues of gender, power, ethnicity, seeing, and knowledge. The preface lays out an overview of the story, its origins, its metamorphoses, and the critical approaches historically applied to the story, and would be of great use for anyone planning to teach a version of the Bluebeard story, as well as for the artist who finds inspiration in the tale.

Part 1, “Variants and Variations,” introduces the tale of Bluebeard from its first appearance in print in Perrault’s France as “La Barbe bleu,” in Grimm’s Germany as “Fitcher’s Vogel,” and in England as “Mr. Fox,” and describes older versions of the story. Chapter 2, “Pirates and True Bluebeards,” is a clever and engaging chapter that explains the recent conflation of Bluebeard and the historical pirate Blackbeard (Captain Edward Teach) and explores historical “Bluebeard” figures, including H. H. Holmes, George Joseph Smith, and Ed Gein (the number of whose trophy heads is given incorrectly in this text—a slight technicality. Had I not grown up in Wisconsin with a grandfather who was Ed Gein’s social worker, I never would have known that Gein actually had nine human skin faces and ten human heads). This chapter would, I think, work well as a stand-alone reading in the undergraduate classroom.

Part 2, “Bluebeard in the English Eighteenth Century,” traces English-language translations of Perrault’s “Bluebeard” and gives some very nice close readings of two foundational English translations. Chapter 4, “A Three Tail’d Bashaw,” explores how Bluebeard becomes Turkish in eighteenth-century British versions (primarily on the stage), and while Hermansson draws on ideas of “orientalism,” a more thorough use of postcolonial theory and political context would probably deepen this chapter.

Part 3, “Bluebeard in the English Nineteenth Century,” first surveys the Bluebeard story in chapbooks and juvenile literature and focuses insightfully on the illustrations in all their gore, and then in chapter 6, turns to analyze the use of the Bluebeard story on the comic stage. Hermansson’s prior scholarship on Bluebeard’s intertextuality shines here as she examines how the Bluebeard story was used in nineteenth-century pantomime, extravaganza, burlesque, and harlequinade, reinforcing and making use of the clichés now inherent in the performance. Hermansson surveys the role of Bluebeard in Victorian art and literature, beginning with translations of The Arabian Nights and the Grimm tales and settling in to analyze the ways Thackary and Dickens, as well as Charlotte Brontë and other Victorian women writers, drew on the Bluebeard story.

Finally, Part 4, “Bluebeard in the English Twentieth Century,” begins with the chapter “Bluebeard in Crisis,” which explores the ways that the Bluebeard story was altered to fit the needs and anxieties of modernity through early film, revisionist literature, and opera as an extremely effective vehicle for social commentary. Hermansson goes on in chapter 7, “Modernist Bluebeard,” to consider antifeminist backlash expressed through the tale, as well as feminist rewriting of the story (including Beatrix Potter’s Sister Anne, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s “Bluebeard’s Daughter,” and Eudora Welty’s The Robber Bridegroom), and finally the cycle of Bluebeard psychodramas of 1940s cinema. The final chapter, “Contemporary Bluebeard,” focuses on the ways the Bluebeard story has been used to comment on self-reflexivity, aesthetics, postmodernism, deconstructionism, and feminist revisionism, and contains a gratifyingly insightful reading of two under-studied Shirley Jackson short stories. Hermansson effectively ends the book here, asserting, “The tale cannot be emptied or neutralized by its many postmodern deconstructions. Instead, its enduring themes have been recast to reflect changing preoccupations and forms of expression, and the Bluebeard tale has earned its permanent place in the English artistic landscape” (176).

One question I have about this text is what Hermansson means by “the English tradition.” At times, the study seems to focus on Bluebeard in English-language contexts. At other times, her study seems to focus solely on Bluebeard in geographic England and the United States. For example, Parts 2 and 3 of the book, “Bluebeard in the English Eighteenth Century” and “Bluebeard in the English Nineteenth Century,” spend a great deal of time talking about the Bluebeard story in American contexts. The absence of Canada, Australia, and other English-speaking nations in the survey seems like an oversight in that case, and it is difficult to ascertain the geographic or linguistic parameters of this book.

There are a few instances where Hermansson could give the readers more context—for example, what is a three-tailed bashaw? (Per the OED, a bashaw, or pasha, was a high-ranking officer of the Ottoman Empire; a three-tailed bashaw meant a particularly high-ranking officer, denoted by the three horse tails on his standard.) But, overall the book is carefully researched and the footnotes are detailed and painstaking with one exception: the footnote on Ed Gein doesn’t actually lead where it needs to—likely a publisher’s error.

All in all, Bluebeard: A Reader’s Guide to the English Tradition stands at a multidisciplinary crossroads as a valuable resource for the teacher, researcher, writer, reader, and artist. The wide-ranging collection of illustrations and color plates, as well as the meticulous bibliographies, deepen the broad appeal of the text.

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[Review length: 1002 words • Review posted on September 8, 2010]