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Bluebeard's female helper: the ambiguous role of the strange old woman in the Grimms' "Castle of Murder" and "The Robber Bridegroom."
Folklore, Annual, 1997 by Daniela Hempen
As Maria Tatar has demonstrated in her study The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales, "Bluebeard" has almost always been interpreted and used didactically as a tale cautioning against female curiosity, while Bluebeard's murderous deeds have been played down and sometimes even been blamed outright on his female victims (Tatar 1987, 156-78). Especially when female curiosity is imbued with sexual meaning and then regarded as the first step to female infidelity, the young woman's trespass serves to exonerate even the gruesome deeds of a Bluebeard, as becomes especially obvious in Ludwig Tieck's drama Riffer Blaubart. Here, the heroine herself is appalled by her inability to resist curiosity, while Bluebeard, in a tirade against this specifically "female" sin, blames women as the instigators of the terrible crimes committed by men (Tatar 1987, 158-9). Yet I would argue that even the (re)tellers' and critics' moral judgements on the heroine's curiosity cannot mask the fact that the corpses behind the forbidden door serve as a mute but compelling indicator that something is dreadfully wrong with Bluebeard and his (sexual) relationship to women. The bodies furthermore act as a reminder that the heroine would do well to find ways to save her own life. The victims of Bluebeard's former marriages not only bear testimony to woman's vulnerability in the patriarchal world of the Marchen, where marriages are usually arranged by men but, through the power of their ghastly presence, these bodies ultimately help save the heroine's life. Thus the almost unanimously criticised "vice" of female curiosity proves to be crucial for the heroine's survival: it opens the door to a wife's contact with former wives, and thus to the (often gory) secrets awaiting the brides of a Bluebeard.
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What has been constantly overlooked in "Bluebeard" criticism, however, is that behind the forbidden door sometimes lurks a secret of a different kind. The Grimms' two little-known "Bluebeard" versions "The Castle of Murder" (Das Mordschloss) and "The Robber Bridegroom" (Der Rauberbrautigam) confront the heroine with an old woman who fulfils an ambiguous role in the two Marchen. Yet even Tatar, who explicitly refers to these versions, makes no mention of the nature of the heroine's discovery behind the secret door (Tatar 1987, 170). Nor will the reader find significantly more information in either the Grimms' own commentary on their collection (KHM ed. Rolleke 1984, 80, 459 and 530-2) or in Bolte and Polivka's Anmerkungen zu den Kinder-und Hausmarchen der Bruder Grimm (Bolte and Polivka 1963, 370-5 and 407-9). This is the more astonishing since, I would argue, the discovery of the old woman behind the secret door described in "The Castle of Murder" and "The Robber Bridegroom" throws an even more ambiguous light on Bluebeard's own attitudes toward women and marriage: it problematises the different roles women (have to) play in some of the "Bluebeard" versions, and, equally important, points to possible reasons for Bluebeard's eventual downfall.
Neither "The Castle of Murder" nor "The Robber Bridegroom" mention the prohibition to enter a specific room, yet in both Marchen the heroine's finding and exploration of the secret chamber is regarded as an illicit act. In the Grimms' "The Castle of Murder," the heroine's curiosity prompts her to extend her sightseeing of the house to the cellar, where she makes a dreadful discovery:
Als er [=der Herr] fort war, ging sie durch das ganze Haus, und fand alles so schon, dass sie vollig damit zufrieden war, bis sie endlich an einen Keller kam, wo eine alte Frau sass und Darme schrappte. "Ei Mutterchen, was macht sie da?" - "Ich schrapp Darme, mein Kind, morgen schrapp ich eure auch!" (KHM ed. Panzer ?1961, 254).
[When the master was gone, she went through the entire house and found everything so to her liking that she was entirely satisfied; until she eventually came to a cellar, where an old woman was sitting and scrubbing intestines. "Oh, dear mother, what are you doing there?" - "I'm scrubbing intestines, my child, and tomorrow I'll scrub yours, too!"].
Here, the heroine is spared the sight of the corpses, yet she stumbles upon an old woman scrubbing intestines, which, as the woman's answer ("tomorrow I'll scrub yours, too") indicates, probably come from previous female victims. By entering the forbidden chamber deep down in the cellar, the heroine has come upon a sight more grisly still than the bloody and mutilated corpses of Bluebeard's female victims: she has encountered Bluebeard's female helper.
What role does this strange old woman play, so busily scrubbing the intestines of other women? This is the question that the heroine and, with her, the listener/reader immediately ask. At first sight, she seems to be a character out of a nightmare scenario. Yet, as the story unfolds, the old woman's role becomes more ambiguous. On the one hand she answers the heroine's horrified question, and even finds a way to save the heroine's life by advising her to hide on a passing haywagon. And yet at the same time the reader knows that the heroine's two older sisters have already died in this castle, as well as even more gory details of the old woman's work. After she helps the heroine to escape from the castle, the old woman conceals her escape by pretending to the master of the house that the intended victim is already dead, and thereby she reveals the exact nature of her gruesome toil:
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