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Article Excerpt
"Argument"
Between 1866 and 1874 Anne Thackeray Ritchie (1837-1919) published nine revisions of well-known fairy tales. The first four stories ("Sleeping Beauty in the Woods," "Cinderella," "Beauty and the Beast," and "Little Red Riding Hood") and the novella lack the Giant-Killer appeared over a two-year period in The Cornhill Magazine and were collected in Five Old Friends and a Young Prince (1868). (1) Four more such revisions (Bluebeard's Keys, Riquet a la Houppe, Jack and the Bean-Stalk, and The White Cat) were subsequently serialized and collected in Bluebeard's Keys and Other Stories (1874). (2)
The two collections differ in several notable respects. Most of the tales in the 1868 volume are relatively short and draw on fairy-tale classics that Ritchie's narratorial persona, Miss Williamson, expressly attributes to "good old Perrault" and the "old French edition" ("Little Red Riding Hood" 160). (3) However, in the last of the "five old friends," Jack the Giant-Killer, Ritchie departs from Charles Perrault both in the length (more than 150 pages) and in the plotted complexity of her tale. She also chooses to retell a tale whose earliest-known print edition, The History of Jack and the Giants, was published by "J. White of Newcastle in 1711" (Opie and Opie 48). (4) Jack the Giant-Killer marks a turning point in Ritchie's fairy-tale writings. The stories in the 1874 volume are all short novels or novellas, and only two of the four texts, Bluebeard's Keys and Riquet a la Houppe, derive from the tales included in Perrault's late seventeenth-century collection. The literary history of the beanstalk-climbing Jack, like that of the giant-killing Jack, begins in Great Britain (Opie and Opie 162). The last tale in Bluebeard's Keys and Other Stories is a retelling of Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy's "The White Cat," which appeared in her Contes nouveaux; ou, Les fees a la mode (1698). (5) Ritchie was evidently familiar with these Contes many years before she agreed to write an introduction to the English-language edition of The Fairy Tales of Madame D'Aulnoy. (6) Moreover, in rewriting fairy-tale plots for the entertainment of adult readers, Ritchie may be said to carry on the tradition inaugurated by Madame d'Aulnoy and other French women writers who transformed existing Italian, Oriental, and oral tales into literary fairy tales that were "serious commentaries on court life and cultural struggles ... in Versailles and Paris" (Zipes, Why Fairy Tales Stick 68). In both her short and novella-length revisions, Ritchie, too, engages the social and political issues of her day.
Yet another substantive difference demarcates the two collections. The novellas in the 1874 volume are all heralded by a prose poem titled "Argument." These epigraphic texts present a canonical version of the fairy tale that serves as a blueprint or model against which the reader may measure Ritchie's departures. Her tales are thus dialogically structured from the outset; they "talk back" to the old familiar stones that precede them. The "Argument" of Bluebeard's Keys, for instance, reiterates the usual prohibition and warning. As the husband hands over the keys before taking leave of his bride, he intones: "evil awaits her, / Curious, who shall look"; and shortly after, the narrator similarly declares: "Ah, what a vast ill on earth is caused by curious wifehood! / Quick she leapt ... through gallery windings / Straight to the chamber door" (2). The cardinal sins of curiosity and disobedience will undergo a thorough reexamination in Ritchie's version. In fact, all four novellas in the later volume may be subtitled "Counter-Argument."
It is not only in Ritchie's increasingly subversive, and sometimes openly critical, commentary that the influence of Madame d'Aulnoy and her contemporaries may be found. In keeping with the custom of these earlier storytellers, Ritchie also almost invariably frames her fairy tales. (7) The novella Bluebeard's Keys is no exception to this practice. The opening sentence announces, "Old keys have always had a strange interest for me," and then there follows a preamble about various types of keys: "There are dream keys and real ones" (3). The "dream" ones immediately become cognates of metaphoric usage, and this distinction between keys as tropes and keys as objects is vital for coming developments. Among the keys singled out--keys that are "hidden away" for various reasons--the narrator refers to these: "the key of a heart's secret ... and the key of the cupboard, where the skeleton is hidden" (3). The allusion here is to a favorite expression of the author's father, to the "skeleton in the cupboard (or closet)" that entered into popular literary usage largely due to its recurrence in his writings (Urdang 601). Thus the deceased father-mentor, William Make-peace Thackeray (1811-1863), who himself wrote a story titled "Bluebeard's Ghost," returns at the outset of a Bluebeard story whose narrator's name denotes "Miss Son-of-William." (8) Tellingly, after the mention of the skeleton, her inventory continues: "besides all these ghost keys, there are the real keys in the iron" (3; emphasis added).
Real keys, of course, are an identifying feature of the classic Bluebeard plot. But they appear only midway through the story, after the bride has come to her oppressor's dark castle. In Bluebeard's Keys, however, the male key--specifically, the paternal ghost who holds the "key of a chamber / Into the which thou mayst not look," as the "Argument" expounds (2) (9)--is present from the opening until the final movement of the story The literal and symbolic dead father haunts Ritchie's tale in different guises. To anticipate the argument of my essay, Bluebeard's Keys is not only one of the more subversive narratives among these old/new friends. It may also be considered the most personally inflected fairy tale its author ever undertook to rewrite. In the next two sections, I examine the extratextual reality that informs Bluebeard's Keys and its revisionary relation to Perrault's story of Bluebeard and his wives. The following four sections focus on the intertextual grid in which Angela Carter's well-known variant, "The Bloody Chamber" (1979), converges with diverse particulars in Perrault's and Ritchie's versions. Among the main points to be considered in this comparative analysis are the distinct ways that an illicit erotic dimension of experience leaves its mark on a range of situations in Bluebeard's Keys and "The Bloody Chamber."
A Lady of Quality
After the preamble on keys, Ritchie's Bluebeard story begins by introducing a small, unhappy, fatherless family: Mrs. de Travers, a poor British army widow, and her marriageable daughters, Fanny and Anne, reside in a rented apartment in Rome. The dead father is presenced through his family's need to economize by living abroad. The plight of unmarried women without gainful means of support, or what is known today as the "feminization of poverty," is a recurrent theme in Ritchie's writings. In the case at hand, "When Mr. de Travers died, he left his widow and daughters the price of his commission and an insurance on his life, which ... gave them something to live upon. The widow struggled valiantly on this slender raft to keep up her head in the fashionable whirlpool, to which she had been promoted by marriage" (Bluebeard's Keys 8-9). This situation partly corresponds to Perrault's account, which also presents a family of three women: "Now, one of [Bluebeard's] neighbors, a lady of quality, had two daughters, who were perfectly beautiful, and he proposed to marry one of them" ("Bluebeard" 732). Jack Zipes adds a footnote to this concise exposition: "This lady was undoubtedly of the nobility, but she was probably either widowed or poor, and thus she was eager to have one of her daughters marry a rich man" (732nl). Although Perrault leaves the mother's exact circumstances out of his compact tale, Ritchie expands hers along the lines surmised more than a century later in Zipes's comment. Mrs. de Travers is widowed and impoverished, and desperate to have her daughters--or at least the beautiful elder Anne--make advantageous marriages. It would seem as if Ritchie had somehow read the explication of Perrault's pre-text in Zipes's subtext; however, it is not necessary to play with time (and relationships) to explain her amplification. There were examples closer to home to which she apparently turned for her account.
When Ritchie's maternal grandfather, Lt. Col. Matthew Shawe, died in 1825 in India, he left his widow and five children, including two daughters (Isabella, who would marry an aspiring writer named Thackeray, and Jane), the scant provision of his savings and army pension (Ray, Buried Life 17-18). After returning to England, Mrs. Shawe found that her income was insufficient to support herself and her children, and therefore resettled abroad, in Paris, where the cost of living was lower. As Thackeray's biographer Gordon Ray explains, "Not only was she reduced abruptly from careless affluence to stringent economy, but also she suffered an equally abrupt drop in social position. She was no longer ... the wife of a distinguished officer on important service; she became instead simply one more unit in the great horde of army widows that spread over England and the Continent in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century" (Uses of Adversity 181). In describing the privations of the Travers family, Ritchie portrays both a pervasive socioeconomic phenomenon and the predicament of her own grandmother after her husband's death. It is almost needless to add that Mrs. Shawe, like her counterpart in Bluebeard's Keys, had no profession, skills, or appropriate venues for employment outside the home. The biographer's statement that Mrs. Shawe "looked forward to the day when her daughters would retrieve the family fortunes by great marriage" is equally applicable to the fairytale character reconstructed many years later: "Mrs. de Travers looked to Anne to redeem the fortunes of the family" (Ray, Buried Life 18; Ritchie, Bluebeard's Keys 24-25).
In this manner Ritchie grounds the Bluebeard story in the details and the ills of her contemporary reality. Where in Perrault's tale the mother does not feature beyond the passing reference to "a lady of quality," Ritchie amplifies with the portrait of a suffering (but also insufferable) materfamilias, (10) which serves to draw the reader's attention to a widespread social problem. Analogously, in Ritchie's retelling of "Cinderella," the stepmother has a name and a life prior to her entry into the customary plot. Miss Williamson and her companion H. make the acquaintance of Mrs. Garnier in Paris, where she is raising two little girls on a next-to-nothing income: "H. never liked her; but I must confess to a very kindly feeling for the poor, gentle, beautiful, forlorn young creature, so passionately lamenting the loss she had sustained in Major-General Gamier. He had left her very badly off" ("Cinderella" 38). Yet another British army widow forced to live abroad, Mrs. Garnier differs from Mrs. de Travers in age and prospects. Her daughters are too young to serve as potential capital income, and so she herself ventures forth to find a husband: "she began telling me she had determined to make an effort for her children's sake, and to go a little more into society" (39). The future Mrs. Henry Ashford is calculating, hypocritical, duplicitous--but, then, what choices has she? Circumstances do not offer her a range of brilliant careers. "The little Garniers," as Miss Williamson observes after the widow's enterprise succeeds, "certainly gained by the bargain, and the colonel sat down to write home to his little daughter [Ella], and tell her the news" (42). (11)
The father be he dead like Mr. Garnier, or alive like Mr. Ashford--thus shadows forth and shapes the lives of his dependents. In particular, the women he has engendered (in both senses of the word) find themselves constrained by the sociosexual and economic structures of his symbolic order. Ritchie reflects these structures through the poetics of her fiction. Images of frustration, confinement, and entrapment abound in her descriptions of women's lives. To cite an example from Ritchie's first novel, at the conclusion of The Story of Elizabeth (1863), the narrator reconstructs the eighteen-year-old heroine's inability to adapt to the insular and inflexible religious community in which she finds herself living after her widowed mother's remarriage to a Calvinist pastor: "I could fancy Elizabeth a prisoner within those walls, beating like a bird against the bars of the cage, and revolting and struggling to be free" (194-95). (12) The novel explores, in order to expose, the social system that stifles and subjugates the bright, free-spirited Elly. "This uncongenial atmosphere," the narrator observes, "seemed to freeze and chill her best impulses. I cannot help being sorry for her, and sympathizing with her against that rigid community" (46). (13) Introducing another trope of confinement, the narrator compares Elly's life within this encaging community to the diminutive shoe in "Cinderella," and her plight to that of the stepsisters, who "could not screw their feet in" without crippling themselves. Invoking the Grimms' canonical version, Ritchie's narratorial persona recalls how the "poor sisters cut off their toes and heels" in their desperate attempts to fit or subordinate themselves to idealized standards of femininity (43). Happily, however, Elly's story eventually ends in marriage. (14) Nonetheless, despite the conventional romance closure that puts the heroine in Cinderella's place, in the embrace of her Prince Charming, and despite the abbreviation of her name to "Elly," suggesting a contiguity with Cinderella, the position she occupies throughout most of the narrative is that of the sisters whose feet are too big. Even after amputation, they cannot measure up to what is required in the Grimms' tale about an inflexible golden shoe.
In Bluebeard's Keys the poetics of confinement introduced in The Story of Elizabeth recurs and develops in unexpected directions. Most directly, the image of a caged bird serves as a metonym for the central protagonist: "all day long Fanny Travers's bird has been chirping, piping, whistling in a cage" (Bluebeard's Keys 5). The residential space...
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