Tales of Bluebeard and His Wives from Late Antiquity to Postmodern Times

Shuli Barzilai

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781138868731
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136096662
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This project provides an in-depth study of narratives about Bluebeard and his wives, or narratives with identifiable Bluebeard motifs, and the intertextual and extratextual personal, political, literary, and sociocultural factors that have made the tale a particularly fertile ground for an author's adaptation of the story. Whereas Charles Dickens, for example, expresses a sympathetic identification with Bluebeard, and a discernable strain of misogyny emerges in his recreation of the tale and recurrent allusions to it, his contemporary, William Makepeace Thackeray, uses the tale as a springboard for his critique of avarice, hypocrisy, pretension, and the subjugation of women in Victorian society.

1 The Snake-Charmer's Wife in Genesis Rabbah, or Bluebeard Begins

LEADING QUESTIONS

In Genesis 3, verse 10, Adam responds to God's question “Where art thou? ” with telltale proof of his disobedience: “I heard Thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself” God then demands, as the medieval scholar Rashi explains, with “astonishment”: “Who told thee that thou wast naked? From the tree whereof I commanded thee that thou should not eat of it, hast thou eaten?” (Gen. 3:11).¹ These several questions—Where are you? Who told you? Did you eat?—may well generate astonishment in the reader. God's questions raise the implicit but resonant question: why does He need to ask in the first place? And then: if the All-Knowing does not know all, where does that leave us? The exchange between God and Adam may be construed as a sign of a fundamental flaw in a cosmological system created by an imperfect divinity.

It is such a mistaken construction, a wrongheaded reader's response, that Genesis Rabbah, the midrashic commentary on the Book of Genesis, sets out to redress. The midrash annotates the interrogation of Adam with a folktale qua parable. Rooted in the Palestinian Amoraic Midrash literature of Late Antiquity (200–500 CE),² this folktale reflects the narrative poetics and the moral-social ethos of that distant period:

Said R. Levi: “The matter may be compared to the case of a woman who wanted to borrow a little yeast, who went in to the house of the wife of a snake-charmer. She said to her, ‘What does your husband do with you? [How does he treat you?]’³

She said to her, ‘Every sort of kindness does he do with me, except for the case of one jug filled with snakes and scorpions, of which he does not permit me to take charge.’

She said to her, ‘The reason is that that is where he has all his valuables, and he is planning to marry another woman and hand them over to her.’

What did the wife do? She put her hand into the jug [to find out what was there]. The snakes and scorpions began to bite her. When her husband got home, he heard her crying out. He said to her, ‘Could you have touched that jug?’

So: ‘Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?’ (Gen. 3:11)”. (Genesis Rabbah 1: 210)⁴

The tale transports us from the awesome scene of interrogation in Eden to an ordinary household setting: a kitchen or indoor space cluttered with storage casks and jugs. This shift from the divine to the domestic clearly fulfills an explicative function—that is, the parable is used to “flesh out” the highly condensed biblical passage and present an answer for the reader perturbed by God's questions.⁵ Accordingly, the midrash explains that just as the husband knew the woman had transgressed as soon as he heard her cry out and, nonetheless, said (amar,

) to her: “Could you have touched that jug?” so God said (amar,

) to Adam: “Have you eaten?” Rabbi Levi teaches that in both instances the question is an accusation and reprimand rather than a request for information. The question, therefore, could be recast in the exclamatory mode as: “How dare you touch (eat) that which I commanded you not to touch (eat)!”

Nonetheless, although the parable provides an obvious gloss on the biblical scenario—bringing it down to earth, as it were—it also raises further questions. Directly after the re-citation of Genesis 3:11 with which this midrash concludes, Jacob Neusner, translator of the Scholars edition of Genesis Rabbah (1985), comments on a difficulty entailed by its exegetical expansion: “The interesting question is why the woman borrowing leaven serves as the metaphor for the snake. Perhaps we have an allusion to the notion that man was the dough offering of creation, the best part. So the serpent wanted to take away the best part of man. If so, it is an effort to link the details of several stories into a single fabric” (1: 210). Using a midrash-like technique, Neusner associatively links one story to another; his intervention replicates and accrues to the dynamic intersection of rabbinic statements. In doing so, however, he swerves away from his own question about the figurative role of the borrowing woman to an androcentric frame of reference in which man—both the specific male earth-creature Adam, from adama (

), meaning earth, and the universal representative of humanity—becomes the focal interest of the tale.

Refocusing on the function of the woman or, rather, the two women in the parable, I would pose another question concerning the precise nature of the item that the one asks to borrow from the other. In the Soncino edition of Genesis Rabbah (1939), H. Freedman translates the commodity called khometz (

) in the midrash as “vinegar”: “Imagine a woman borrowing vinegar”; and, in a footnote, he cites an explanation parenthetically attributed to Radal, an acronym for Rabbi David Luria (1798–1855): “Poor women would go borrowing or begging vinegar, into which they dipped their bread (Radal)” (1: 156 and note 2).⁶ The hermeneutic difficulty may thus be restated: what exactly did the woman want? Did she ask for vinegar or yeast (leaven)? If vinegar, it would seem that Neusner's midrashic linkage to man as “the dough offering of creation, the best part” is undone or, at least, disputable. Moreover, if she is a poor woman begging for vinegar, then her metaphoric correlation with the radical principle of evil, the Prince of Darkness in Milton's phrase, is also weakened. Other texts and contexts may be interwoven, perhaps more persuasively, into “a single fabric” in the attempt to explore the question of why a woman who visits another to borrow leaven (or beg for vinegar) takes the place of the snake.

In what follows I propose to explore both the motive for this metaphor and the broader motivational question of the redactor's choice of this particular folktale (in which a disruptive visitor is only one of several components) from an abundance of materials. My investigation will require expanding the parameters of the parable to include other early and modern rabbinic texts. In narratological terms, I shall treat the tale of the snake-charmer's wife as an embedded narrative that constitutes part of a larger literary cycle. The tale will be read as an independent narrative unit, on the one hand, and as a segment in the continuous exposition of the Hebrew Bible as well as of Judaic laws and traditions, on the other. Before proceeding any further, however, I want to register a twofold qualification. First, the texts to be introduced into this discussion are synecdochical themselves and represent a partial reading—in both senses of the word “partial”—of an immensely complex canon. The contexts surrounding Genesis Rabbah are so inexhaustible (rabbah signifies “great” or “vast”), and so opaque to a contemporary reader's perception, that any interpretation is inevitably limited and incomplete. Second, many of the rabbinic texts to be cited here are indubitably, and sometimes acutely, misogynistic. Nevertheless, the heterogeneity of opinions about women or wives voiced in this literature repeatedly challenges or “deconstructs” (as a latter-day rabbinic descendant has taught us to say) categorical determinations of its ideological position.⁷

It is not necessary to go far to illustrate such heterogeneity. Directly after the parable in which the disobedience of the snake-charmer's wife is painfully exposed, another midrash responds to Adam's response to “hast thou eaten?” with biting contempt:

“The man said, ‘The woman whom you gave to be with me gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate’” (Gen. 3:12):

There are four on whose pots the Holy One, blessed be he, knocked, only to find them filled with piss, and these are they: Adam, Cain, the wicked Balaam, and Hezekiah. (Genesis Rabbah 1: 210)

Again, an abrupt transposition from the divine to the domestic, from upper to lowly spheres, occurs in the midrash. The homely image of the Holy One knocking on pots apparently derives from the practice of tapping on a clay or earthen pot—and here the origin of “Adam” in adama may be recalled—to hear its ring in order to decide if it is worthy of holding wine. In current Hebrew usage, the expression “to assess or gauge someone's pot (

)” still denotes taking in the measure of a person's character. From Adam's answer to God, we learn that he turned out to be a pisspot. Implicitly, the midrash says, Adam's failure to “measure up” or, in canonical Christian terms, his fall from grace was not simply due to his eating of the Tree of Knowledge. His response to the interrogation in the Garden displays several character flaws at once: stupidity, arrogance, ingratitude, and abnegation of moral responsibility. Adam is stupid because he totally misses the meaning of God's discourse; arrogant, because he answers back as if God were actually in doubt or did not know what had happened; ungrateful, because the woman was God's gift to man to assuage his loneliness; and dishonest, because instead of assuming the burden of guilt he tries to shift it onto his wife. Instead of pointing at himself, he accuses her—and the Lord: “The woman whom you gave to be with me, etc.” The midrashic exposition is concise but resonant; later commentators spell out its implications.⁸ And the point of my divagation is to show that while early rabbinic culture, like the culture of its wider geopolitical surroundings, was patriarchal and misogynist, it was not evenly or univocally so.

To preview later developments: in the last two sections of this chapter, the contexts brought to bear on the parable attributed to Rabbi Levi in the preceding two sections will lead me to propose that the intertextual connections of this tale should be considerably extended in time to include a literary configuration that emerged many centuries after the compilation of Genesis Rabbah. The triangulated structure of husband-wife-interloper (snake) serves not only analeptically, pointing back to what happened in the Garden of Eden, but also proleptically, pointing forward to the Bluebeard tale-types. In looking at the trajectory of this narrative tradition, I would also bear in mind Graham Anderson's substantiated observation: “it often requires the assembly of a good many hybrid outlines before we are in a position to see that most of the features now known in a tale already exist in antiquity in some sort of stable relationship to one another” (102).

Anderson, a classicist and fairy-tale scholar, suggests a different prototype for the figure of Bluebeard. Going back to ancient mythography, he argues that the story of this serial wife-killer has a number of significant connections with the legends about King Minos of Crete, including the curse of his being fatal to women with whom he has had sexual relations, his labyrinthine (and now excavated) palace at Knossos, which may well have contained a secret chamber or two, and the purple lock of hair he obtains during the course of one of his adventures. These narrative filiations between Minos and Bluebeard notwithstanding, Anderson himself acknowledges that in the mythological tradition “there is no single simple narrative thread, and no single source that preserves the tale intact” (98–99). It is such a single but also intricate storyline that will be traced in my exploration of the midrashic tradition that intersects with the misadventures of Bluebeard and his wives.

TWO TYPES OF CURIOSITY

A structural approach to the question of the redactor's choice suggests that the principal motive for adapting the specific folktale as a gloss for Genesis 3 is analogical. First, the “plot” of both stories unfolds in three parallel stages: prohibition—transgression—punishment. Second, there is a direct correlation between two of the parties involved: God, who treats Adam with every kindness, is parallel to the snake-charmer husband, and Adam to the errant wife. The identity of the third party is less straightforward. As the character who instigates the action, the evil neighbor, “a well-known stereotypical figure of the European and Mediterranean folktale,” has a dual representational status: “on the exegetical level, the mean neighbor woman takes over the role of the snake, but she could also be understood … as a parallel of Eve, who entices Adam” (Hasan-Rokem 33, 35).⁹ That the woman may be a figural substitute for the serpent or for Eve anticipates the possibility of their conflation.¹⁰ Perhaps the difference between them is no difference at all.

Drawing on verbal correspondences of almost untranslatable complexity, the midrashic commentary on Genesis 3:20—“And the man called his wife's name Eve because she was the mother of all living”—argues that the name “Eve,” Hava...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Studies in Folklore and Fairytales
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The Snake-Charmer's Wife in Genesis Rabbah, or Bluebeard Begins
• 2 Charles Dickens and Captain Murderer
• 3 Mr. Thackeray’s Closet
• 4 Miss Thackeray’s Uses of Enchantment
• 5 The Infernal Desire Machines in Anne Thackeray Ritchie's Bluebeard's Keys and Angela Carter's “The Bloody Chamber”
• 6 The Bluebeard Syndrome in Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle: Fear and Femininity
• 7 The Party Consciousness: When Texts Get Together in Margaret Atwood's “Bluebeard's Egg”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index