Corpse Hoarding: Control and the Female Body in "Bluebeard," "Schalken the Painter," and Villette

In the above quotation from Charlotte Brontë's  Villette  (1853), pensionnat instructor Paul Emanuel resists association with the fairy tale wife-murderer Bluebeard, but his allusion compels attention. Ordering fellow-teacher and  Villette  narrator Lucy Snowe to memorize lines for a school play that evening, Paul drags Lucy to the pensionnat's attic and locks her in alone, secretly listening to her rehearse. When he finally unlocks the door and Lucy explains she is hungry, Paul pulls her "down-down-down to the very kitchen. I thought I should have gone to the cellar," where he overcompensates for starving Lucy by force-feeding her (1:190). However, Bluebeard's wife is never physically starved in Charles Perrault's 1697 fairy tale "Bluebeard," the earliest known text to specifically use the name "Bluebeard." 2  Instead, she lives decadently in a luxurious castle, and it is her curiosity that requires satiation rather than her body. Though Bluebeard warns his wife against opening a locked chamber door, she does so once Bluebeard leaves home (145). This forbidden chamber harbors Bluebeard's previous overly-curious wives' corpses arranged like a gruesome tableau symbolizing Bluebeard's past secrets (murders and corpse hoarding) and present ones (desire for repetitive discovery of the corpses, his current wife's horror, and his uxoricide) (146-47).