In a 1977 interview, Margaret Atwood speculated that her childhood reading led to the emphasis on evolution and transformation evident in her adult fiction. As a child, Atwood said, she read legends, fairy tales, and religious stories, all involving “miraculous changes of shape” (Sandler 14). The influence of these tales on Atwood's fiction is a largely untouched area of scholarship. However, the publication of her collection of short stories, Bluebeard's Egg, which overtly uses fairy tales and legends to make a statement about modern life, calls for a further examination of this influence. The story that gives the collection its title is particularly fascinating because it is based on a legend everyone knows—the tale of Bluebeard. Also, the story uses the lesser—known version of the Bluebeard story recounted by the Brothers Grimm. In the interview mentioned above, Atwood singled out the one book from her childhood that affected her later writing: “I would say that Grimm's Fairy Tales [sic] was the most influential book I ever read” (Sandler 14).

The tale that Atwood uses in “Bluebeard's Egg” can be easily identified because her short story contains a story within a story. The inner story is Grimms' version of the Bluebeard tale, as recalled by the main character, Sally. This tale is included in Atwood's story because Sally is taking a writing course and has been assigned to write “a five—page transposition [of the legend], set in the present and cast in the realistic mode” (156). Sally never writes this transposition. However, Atwood's short story—the outer story—is the fulfillment of Sally's assignment. “Bluebeard's Egg” is longer than five pages (it runs 33 pages), but it does successfully transpose the Bluebeard legend into a modern, realistic setting.

The Grimms' tale included in Atwood's story is entitled “Fitchers Vogel.” Atwood's use of this particular tale as the source for her short story cannot be explained entirely as the result of her childhood reading, however. The Bluebeard legend has been passed down in several different versions. The most widely known is Charles Perrault's “La Barbe Bleue,” in which the character actually is called Bluebeard. Although Perrault's character lends his name to the title of Atwood's story, Atwood rejects his well-known tale in favor of Grimms' version. The writing teacher in Atwood's story gives one reason why Perrault's tale is not used: it is too “sentimental” (156). A comparison of Perrault's tale and Grimms' tale with each other and with Atwood's story, however, reveals several reasons why Atwood uses Grimms' version. In addition, such a comparison highlights Atwood's ability to take an idea from a fairy tale, transform it, and make it her own.

In Perrault's “La Barbe Bleue,” Bluebeard is a rich man who has a difficult time finding a wife because his beard is blue, making him unattractive to women, and because his previous wives have disappeared without a trace. His wealth—not he himself—attracts women. Grimms' character is not called Bluebeard because he does not have a beard of that color; moreover, he has no trouble attracting women because he is a wizard and can cast a spell on any woman so that she must follow him. The husband in Atwood's story, Ed Bear, is the wizard—type, but he is realistic. His ability to attract women is not supernatural. At parties, women flock to Ed because he is “a heart man, one of the best,” and “they want him to fix their hearts” (139). The phrase “heart man” is deliberately ambiguous. Realistically Ed is a doctor, perhaps a cardiologist, who specializes in treating heart problems. The legendary figure Bluebeard is also a kind of heart man—the kind that steals women's hearts. And Ed fits this mold too. Just like Grimms' wizard, who goes through two wives in the tale until the third wife uncovers his murders, Ed is married to his third wife, Sally. Sally is perplexed because Ed cannot (or will not) tell her what went wrong with his previous marriages, which both ended in divorce. She worries: “What if he wakes up one day and decides that she [Sally] isn't the true bride after all, but the false one? Then she will be put into a barrel stuck full of nails and rolled downhill, endlessly, while he is sitting in yet another bridal bed, drinking champagne” (136). Sally married Ed not for his wealth but because she is under a kind of spell—love. Using Grimms' version of the tale allows Atwood to explore the power politics of a love relationship, a theme that runs throughout Atwood's poetry and prose.

Another striking difference between Perrault's and Grimms' tales is who saves Bluebeard's wife from death. In Perrault's tale, the woman is saved with the help of her sister, who signals their brothers to hurry on their way to Bluebeard's home. The brothers arrive just in time to prevent Bluebeard from cutting off his wife's head. They kill Bluebeard, who dies without an heir, thereby leaving his fortune to his only surviving wife. In Grimms' version of the tale, the third wife is more clever that her two deceased sisters. She saves herself and brings her sisters back to life through her cunning and curiosity. She, like her sisters, enters the forbidden room, but only after she has put Bluebeard's egg in a safe place. (Her two sisters had carried the egg with them into the room and dropped it into the blood-filled basin out of shock, whereupon it became the indelible mark of their disobedience.) Thus, the third wife learns that her husband-to-be is a murdered without revealing her transgression. She also puts the severed parts of her sisters back together, and they miraculously revive. She then outwits the wizard and burns him and his friends in the house while they are waiting for the wedding to begin.

Atwood's Sally follows the role of the third wife in Grimms' tale. She does not revive Ed's previous wives, but she does raise their children. Even though she finds it difficult to be a mother to these children who are close to her own age, the narrator says “Considering everything, she hasn't done badly. She likes the kids and tries to be a friend to them, since she can hardly pretend to be a mother” (150). Sally is also depicted as the kind of woman who can take care of herself. She does not need a man to help her out of her predicament, as does the wife in Perrault's tale. Sally's self-sufficiency is a quality emphasized by the narrator. Sally is capable at her job: “her job is supposed to be full-time, but in effect it's part-time, because Sally can take a lot of the work away and do it at home, and, as she says, with one arm tied behind her back” (140). Sally can even manage her incompetent, alcoholic boss. He lets her run the show, and she lets him take the official credit. Sally can cook gourmet meals. She can set up a dinner party and make sure everyone has a good time. She can entertain Ed's associates with her clever stories and remarks. She takes night classes: medieval history, cooking, anthropology, geology, comparative folklore, forms of narrative fiction. In these classes, Sally is always the “star pupil” (153).

But the one thing that Sally cannot control is her heart. Sally depends emotionally on Ed. Her dependence on him is dramatically illustrated in one scene in which Sally talks Ed into showing her how a new piece of medical equipment operates. Using sound waves, the machine projects a picture of a person's heart onto a black-and-white television screen.

“There,” he said, and Sally turned her head. On the screen was a large grey object, like a giant fig, paler in the middle, a dark line running down the centre. The side moved in and out; two wings fluttered in it, like an uncertain moth's.

“That's it?” said Sally dubiously. Her heart looked so insubstantial, like a bag of gelatin, something that would melt, fade, disintegrate, if you squeezed it even a little.

Ed moved the probe, and they looked at the heart from the bottom, then the top. Then he stopped the frame, then changed it from a positive to a negative image. Sally began to shiver.

“That's wonderful,” she said. He seemed so distant, absorbed in his machine, taking the measure of her heart, which was beating over there all by itself, detached from her, exposed and under his control.

(146–147)

This scene dramatizes Atwood's ambiguous portrayal of Ed as a “heart man.” Ed has the power as a doctor and, by implication, as a husband to control Sally's heart. For Atwood, Bluebeard is not the blood-thirsty villain of the traditional legends, but a power-hungry man who “severs” his wife's heart from her body and her control. By portraying Bluebeard in a realistic setting, Atwood also broadens the implications of the Bluebeard motif: the predicament faced by Bluebeard's wives and by Sally is an archetypal situation resulting from their belief in romantic love. Atwood's story shows that women who fall blindly in love relinquish control over their hearts and their lives.

Another way in which Atwood modernizes the Bluebeard tale is by using a limited, third-person unreliable narrator. Even though this is Sally's story, it is not told in first person. Use of the third-person narrator emphasizes Sally's loss of control over her relationship with Ed. The reader is allowed to see into Sally's mind, but the narrator never confirms whether Sally's feelings and fears about her relationship with Ed are genuine or the result of paranoia. Consequently, we start to wonder if Sally's perceptions are accurate. The use of an unreliable narrator (or, at best, one who is not necessarily reliable) adds to the realism of Atwood's transposition. In both Perrault's and Grimms' tales, Bluebeard is clearly identified as an evil husband; the wives' bodies are tangible evidence of his villainy. But in Atwood's tale, as in real life, the villain is hard to recognize. Is Ed Bear indeed a Bluebeard type of husband? Or is Sally just an insecure wife who is imagining things? Since Ed has not murdered his two former wives, how can Sally—or any woman—determine if he is the loving husband he seems to be or a man who, by preying on women's affections, kills them spiritually if not literally?

The moment of recognition comes when Sally asks her best friend, Marylynn, to show Ed the antique keyhole desk that Sally has just purchased. Up until this point in the story, Sally has remarked that Ed is too stupid to be devious, that he is so dumb he needs her to protect him, that he is too innocent to know when women are trying to seduce him. At the same time, however, Sally admits that “Ed is a surface, one she has trouble getting beneath” (152). Yet, when she mulls over her writing assignment, Sally thinks, “Ed isn't the Bluebeard: Ed is the egg. Ed Egg, blank and pristine and lovely. Stupid, too. Boiled, probably” (159). The fact remains, however, that Ed's last name is not “Egg”; it is “Bear” as in Bluebeard. And Ed cannot be completely stupid; he is, after all, a successful doctor.

The scene at the keyhole desk, however, changes Sally's perceptions of Ed. As Sally enters the alcove where the desk is,

Marylynn is bending forward, one hand on the veneer. Ed is standing too close to her, and as Sally comes up behind them she sees his left arm, held close to his side, the back of it pressed against Marylynn, her shimmering upper thigh, her ass to be exact. Marylynn does not move away.

It's a split second, and then Ed sees Sally and the hand is gone; there it is, on top of the desk, reaching for a liqueur glass.

(163)

In this instant, Sally realizes that Ed might not be a faithful, loving husband. This realization takes place at a keyhole desk in Atwood's story; in the Bluebeard tales, the key is the means of entering the forbidden room where the wife finds out what kind of man she has married. Atwood, however, does not include much incriminating evidence because her story aims for realism and because the important matter in the story is the change in the woman's perception of her husband. After the scene at the desk, Sally, for the first time, gets upset with Ed for not calling their cleaning lady—who has worked for them for three years—by her proper name: Mrs. Rudge. He calls her “the woman.” Then Sally remembers that he called the previous cleaning lady, Mrs. Bird, “the woman” too—“as though they are interchangeable” (165). This detail shows the change in Sally's perception of Ed; she realizes he might not be the person she thinks he is. In fact, his resemblance to Bluebeard, for whom women and wives are also interchangeable, becomes more apparent as the story draws to a close. Later in the evening, Sally goes to bed after Ed. As she crawls in beside him, she notes that Ed “is breathing deeply as if asleep. As if” (165). She no longer trusts him completely and admits that her version of Ed might not be “something she's perceived but something that's been perpetrated on her, by Ed himself, for reasons of his own” (164). Once she admits this possibility, Sally is in a position to regain control of her life and emotions. The image of the egg is the principal means by which Atwood conveys this transformation.

The image of the egg brings up another difference between Perrault's and Grimms' Bluebeard tales. In Perrault's tale, the key to the forbidden room becomes indelibly stained with blood, telling Bluebeard that his wife has disobeyed his command. In Grimms' tale, not the key but the egg becomes stained. In none of the other variants of the Bluebeard motif does and egg become stained. As the title of Atwood's short story suggests, the egg is the most important symbol in her reworking of the legend. Exactly what the egg represents in this story is not easy to decide, however. Sally identifies Ed as the egg, but as mentioned before, the narrator is not necessarily reliable and the evidence indicates that Ed is not as simple, dumb, and passive as Sally thinks he is. Sally herself rejects three other meanings for the egg: in this story, it is not a fertility symbol or something the world hatched out of or a symbol of female virginity.

To illustrate what the egg symbolizes in this story, we can turn to Atwood's poem cycle “True Romances,” published in the volume True Stories. This poem cycle contains allusions to the Bluebeard legend, and the egg appears as an image in two of the poems. The first prose-poem/romance tells of a man who chops up his wife and leaves her in garbage cans all over Barcelona. He is obviously a modern-day Bluebeard. The second prose-poem relates the feelings of a woman who was once “desperately in love” (41)—in other words, she fell victim to a painful, romantic love. The egg image is found in poems 4 and 5, but is most significant in the former. In poem 4, the egg represents the ego:

Most people in that country don't eat eggs, she told me, they can't afford to; if they're lucky enough to have a chicken that lays eggs they sell the eggs. There is no such thing as inside, there's no such thing as I. The landscape is continuous, it flows through whatever passes for houses there, dried mud in and out, famine in and out, there is only we.

(43)

The egg can be seen as a symbol of the ego in “Bluebeard's Egg” also. The meaning of the egg eludes Sally until the very end. Meanwhile, the narrator relates Sally's fears about having no identity: “Sometimes Sally worries that she's a nothing, the way Marylynn was before she got a divorce and a job. But Sally isn't a nothing; therefore, she doesn't need a divorce to stop being one” (140). Sally's reasoning clearly begs the question; she evades the issue because she subconsciously knows that she is not her own person emotionally. In addition, the use of the third-person narrator shows Sally's selflessness.

The egg also symbolizes a person who, by himself, is whole. The country described in poem 4 of “True Romances” is a place where “They cut off the hands and heads to prevent identification.” The narrator of the poem adds, “Among those of us who still have heads and hands there are no marriages” (43). In other words, marriage is a place where the individual does not exist whole; he must sever part of himself to be married, in which case he also loses his identity. This same situation is found in “Bluebeard's Egg,” where Sally spends most of her free time thinking about Ed. At her dinner party, Sally admits that “Although she never looks directly, she's always conscious of Ed's presence in the room, any room” (163). In another place, Sally says that her motivation to take so many night courses is to concentrate on something besides Ed for a while. But when her writing teacher asks the students to explore their inner and outer worlds, Sally rebels: “she's fed up with her inner world; she doesn't need to explore it. In her inner world is Ed, like a doll within a Russian wooden doll, and in Ed is Ed's inner world, which she can't get at” (152). Neither can she picture herself as a person distinct from Ed. In short, Sally is not a whole person, and she realizes it.

By emphasizing the egg from Grimms' version of the Bluebeard legend, Atwood creates a new moral for this story: romantic love—the kind that makes a woman emotionally dependent, the kind that puts her heart under a man's control—is dangerous. This moral is suggested by the narrator's inclusion of Grimms' tale in the story, as Sally remembers it. Sally stops at the point when the third wife has looked into the forbidden room, revived her sisters, and deceived the wizard. Because the egg is spotless, according to the legend the wizard no longer has any power over his wife. Here Sally ends the story even though Grimm goes on to tell how the wife arranges for the wizard and his friends to be killed. The point of Atwood's story is not that an evil person gets his just rewards, but that a woman whose eyes are opened can gain control of her life and her heart.

The theme of Atwood's story is much different from Perrault's. Perrault added a moral to the end of his fairy tales. “La Barbe Bleue” got not only one moral, but two. The first moral is the often-repeated warning against curiousity as a female vice that always brings about unhappiness and misery. Bluebeard's wife in this view is just another Pandora. Atwood's story acknowledges that curiosity can cause unhappiness, but only because it can lead to a moment of insight for a person who is blindly in love. The second moral Perrault added to his tale is meant to appease husbands: “cette histoire / Est un conte du temps passé; Il n'est plus d'Epoux si terrible” (29). Atwood, of course, would disagree with this “moral.” True, husbands who dismember their wives are not common today. However, husbands who want to control their wives (and wives who want to be dominated) are not only part of ancient history, but present in today's society. Throughout Atwood's fiction, the female characters struggle—not always successfully—to to get out of destructive relationships with men who want to control or dominate them. The volume of poetry Power Politics, of all of Atwood's works, perhaps best portrays the sado-masochism that is intrinsic in many male/female relationships.

Atwood's story affirms the idea that curiosity—leading to painful insight—can transform a woman's life. The change in Sally's perception of Ed is symbolized at the end of the story by the merging of the egg and heart images. First, the image of the heart controlled by Ed—the black-and-white heart—recedes into the distance.

Sally lies in bed with her eyes closed. What she sees is her own heart, in black and white, beating with that insubstantial moth-like flutter, a ghostly heart, torn out of her and floating in space, an animated valentine with no colour. It will go on and on forever; she has no control over it.

(165)

A valentine heart represents romantic love. It floats away from Sally as she lets go of her blind romanticism. Then Sally sees the egg transformed:

But now she's seeing the egg, which is not small and cold and white and inert but larger than a real egg and golden pink, resting in a nest of brambles, glowing softly as though there's something red and hot inside it. It's almost pulsing; Sally is afraid of it. As she looks it darkens: rose-red, crimson.

(165–166)

The image of the egg takes on the blood-red color of a heart, and it assumes the rhythmic pulsing of a living, beating heart. The egg—representing the ego, a whole person—merges with the heart only when Sally's perceptions of Ed are transformed, enabling her to regain control of her life and emotions.

Unlike the egg in Grimms' tale, in Atwood's story the egg is spotted to show that Sally's transformation will be a painful, active process. The ending of Grimms' tale is, of course, happy; in contrast, Atwood's ending is more cautious: “This is something the story left out, Sally thinks: the egg is alive, and one day it will hatch. But what will come out of it?” (166). Atwood leaves Sally on the verge of positive movement much like she leaves the narrator of Surfacing at a moment of decision. In Atwood's myth, neither is assured of living happily ever after.

The success of “Bluebeard's Egg” ultimately rests not on its borrowings from Grimms' legend, but on Atwood's ability to shape Grimms' material to her own purposes. As Atwood commented to one interviewer, “I think the thing to do with a mythology is not to discard the mythology at all, but to transform it, rearrange it and shift the values” (Van Varseveld 67). In the process of stripping the supernatural elements from the Bluebeard legend, Atwood uncovers a universal archetype: Bluebeard can be any man and his wife, any woman. While fulfilling Sally's class assignment, Atwood's short story reaffirms the value of legends and fairy tales to depict a timeless, essential part of the human condition.

Works Cited

Atwood, Margaret. “Bluebeard's Egg.” Bluebeard's Egg. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Ltd., 1983. 133–66.

———. “True Romances.” True Stories. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981. 40–44.

Perrault, Charles. Popular Tales. Ed. Andrew Lang. Oxford, 1888. Rpt. New York: Arno Press, 1977.

Sandler, Linda. “Interview with Margaret Atwood.” Malahat Review, 41 (1977): 7–27.

Van Varsveld, Gail. “Talking with Atwood.” Room of One's Own 1.2 (Summer 1975): 66–70.