Female Strategies of Self-representation in Variants, Versions, and Revisions of “Bluebeard”

This essay, which is drawn from a much longer study of contemporary revisions of the tale of "Bluebeard", proposes a feminist approach to the problem of self-representation in literature and art. The essay ana¬ lyzes how a visual representation within an oral tale or literary text and in "Bluebeard", in particular, a visual representation that eerily resem¬ bles the protagonist raises larger questions about the way that that narra¬ tive frames, duplicates, and represents itself. More precisely, the essay shows how, in "Bluebeard", both words and images demonstrate a female-authored strategy of clever, artful self-representation that links some of the tale's earliest variants to its most recent feminist revisions.