Although the opera version of "Bluebeard" only very loosely follows the narrative of the more traditional tales, it presents, at least in my opinion, a more interesting social dilemma. The more traditional tales generally fall into the horror genre and present chilling warnings against women being overly inquisitive, in particular when it comes to their husbands' secrets. However, the opera focuses on the psychological aspects of human intimate relationships, rather than presenting a horror story of a murderous husband.
In the opera, Bluebeard presents his wife with seven doors, representative of the elements of his psyche or soul. These seven doors mirror the seven dead wives of the traditional tales, but serve a much different purpose. Although the scenes presented by the doors vary from macabre torture chambers to gentle gardens, Bluebeard freely presents them all to his new wife - up to a point. When they reach the sixth and seventh doors, Bluebeard is reluctant to reveal their contents, urging his wife to be content with what she has already seen. Nonetheless, much like the wife in the tales who insists on opening the forbidden door, the wife in the opera insists on seeing the last two rooms. Their contents - the husband's deepest sorrows and his blissful memories of former loves - are the undoing of the couples' marriage, and the new wife joins the women of the seventh room, yet one more memory of love gone by.
The obvious, although somewhat pessimistic, moral is that there are certain things that are best kept hidden. Rather than hiding the corpses of past wives, the operatic Bluebeard is hiding the much more mundane memories and sorrows that all humans hide - however, because his wife insists on unearthing these hidden parts of his soul, their marriage is compromised. In this case her curiosity does not lead to her death or near-death, but nonetheless it does destroy a relationship that otherwise would have been happy and fruitful.
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I think this opera is so much more real than the original story. While the denying of access into the bloody chamber seems simply a test or a trick for the "bad" wife, this wish to keep the final doors secret has very human motivations and consequences. This man loves this woman and understands that although it is important to trust each other completely, it is critical that one remains an individual. The wife's desire to comprehend the deepest elements of the man's personal psyche destroys the part of the man meant only for him. Thus the wife has so much information that she knows her husband as much, if not more, than he knows himself, stripping him of his sense of identity. This interpretation of Bluebeard plays with the dangerous balance of knowing one's significant other without becoming the other. I would love to see this opera.
ReplyDeleteI disagree with the notion that the two would have ever been able to live happily ever after. It is the character of the man that is hidden already behind the doors such that the act of seeking and idealizing the unatainable desires of pasts unfulfilled is an inherent quality of his identity. He prudently chooses to keep this hidden from nimself as well as his wife, but according to psychoanalytics, it would still be there, an insurmountable barrier, an integral aspect of his id, which would in turn control the movements that he was bound to make, which caused the need to create these idealized pasts as unrealized and unrealizable possibilities. The mere fact that he has this drive is the cause of the end, and it is not even necessarily that the wife was tying to find it that brought it to the surface. Time would inevitably have done the same and it could be easily imagined that the wife's opening of the doors, one by one was not a process of days but possibly even years and that the wife need not have been an active seeker to have come upon each of the rooms and attained the knowledge but that she quite equally in passing could have passively come accross these doors to his soul in the process of loving and naturally becoming more and more acquainted with him as time went by. According to psychoanalytic thought, the id is the creator of need and desire, entirely subconscious and the true pupeteer of motives and motions. Only the existence of such an id was necessary to create the situation, onne which had clearly played out historically for the man time and time again. It may even be said that the wife's seeking was the only possibility for him to overcome this drive, but his inability to accept the truth of who he is inevitably lead to his losing himself to his id and the collapse of the love that had existed so that he could not help but to repeat the past and turn her into a memory.
ReplyDeleteI like what your saying. I feel that in this situation, he provides her some truth or reality of his past but asks her to forgive him of it. A kind of my past is my past and it has no relation to you so can we leave it where it belongs, that being in the past, type thing. Destruction comes when she judges him by what he can not change rather than the fact that he is being open about what he can not change in hopes to bring about a better future with her.
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