Abstract
In Charles Perrault’s 1697 tale of ‘Bluebeard’, a beautiful young woman marries an apparently eligible bachelor only to discover that he has murdered previous wives and secreted their bodies in a locked room in his home. In Wilkie Collins’s 1875 novel The Law and the Lady, a newly married young woman discovers that her husband was earlier tried for the murder of his first wife and was not found innocent; instead, an ambiguous verdict of ‘Not Proven’ was returned by the Scottish court. Collins’s novel introduces an innovative approach to the Victorian tradition of retelling Perrault’s ‘Bluebeard’ by positively characterizing the curious wife who seeks to overturn the verdict and showing her to be resilient rather than victimized. We discuss Collins’s narrative in relation to fictions ranging from cognate folktales to Bluebeard recensions by such authors as Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackeray.
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