Something borrowed, something blue: Bluebeard dismembers romance in Australasia and beyond

Abstract

Abstract This article surveys a range of relatively recent works in which the Bluebeard figure of fairy tale appears to cut to the paradoxical ‘heart’ of the mythology of romantic love in popular culture. Creative practitioners in Australasia and beyond are using the sinister figure of Bluebeard to critique romantic mythology, probing, in particular, the fraught intersection of love, knowledge and artistry. In the works of Jane Campion, Nick Cave, Sarah Quigley and others, Bluebeard comes to signify the violence that can accompany the lover and/as artist’s attempts to define the self through the other and the other through the self. In recent times, Bluebeard and his wife are doubled in their pursuit of penetrative knowledge of the other in the name of love, and this romantic quest is here equated with an erasure of the beloved’s subjectivity and the reduction of love’s potential. Bluebeard, in the hands of these predominately female creators, lends himself to an exploration of the contemporary dilemmas of love, encouraging us to question the demands we make of each other and ourselves in the realm of romance. This article focuses on Bluebeard in recent Australasian works read in an international and historical context.