Bluebeard's Legacy - Death and Secrets from Bartok to Hitchcock

This  transdisciplinary book explores the deep appeal of the Bluebeard story for twentieth-century culture. Its major focus is how the modernist imagination used the elements of Bluebeard’s tale to explore masculinity’s anxieties in the face of the emerging demands of women for redefinition and sexual equality: anxieties also of ethnic and cultural difference, and fundamental disquiet about sexuality, pathology and violence in the masculine.

Starting with investigations into Bart?k’s opera 'Duke Bluebeard’s Castle', major cultural thinkers, including Elisabeth Bronfen, Ian Christie, Griselda Pollock and Maria Tatar, trace Bluebeard’s evolution from Perrault in the seventeenth century  to the cinematic hommes fatals of Méliès, Fritz Lang and Hitchcock.

The result is an intriguing kaleidoscope of sexuality, curiosity, violence and death.