- Accidental Aesop: In some versions of the story the young maiden admires Bluebeard for being wealthy; this in turn leads to the moral that being a Gold Digger can get you killed if you're not lucky.
- Alternate Aesop Interpretation: Various versions of the story have disagreed about what the actual moral of the story is. Ravenloft, for instance, reframed the moral around Bluebeard himself, suggesting that it was Bluebeard's insane paranoia and complete inability to trust others that's the real cautionary tale.
- Alternative Character Interpretation:
- In the Edna St. Vincent Millay sonnet "Bluebeard" (here
), Bluebeard is a regular man, the bride is selfish, and the room is merely an empty room for Bluebeard to gather his thoughts. The bride, not being able to bear the thought of her husband keeping secrets from her, opens the room, and when Bluebeard finds out, he merely divorces her. - There is also an absolutely hilarious Soviet cartoon called A Very Blue Beard in which the Bluebeard gets to tell his own side of the story to a detective. One wife was fashion obsessed, the other health obsessed, the third believed in an open relationship - well, sorry, love, that's the way it turned out. Brides #1 and #2 were literally Too Dumb to Live, and Bride #3 did poor Bluebeard in after he caught her with another man, presumably making up the classic fairy tale to save face. He's somehow alive, however, since he is telling all this to the narrator. The obvious solution being that he’s lying.
- In the Edna St. Vincent Millay sonnet "Bluebeard" (here
- Broken Aesop: Perrault tries to explain that the curiosity is a flaw... but in almost every version the lady survives, finds out her husband is a serial murderer, escapes him and ends up marrying a better guy.
- The text itself also makes it clear that the lady has a gut feeling that something is off about Bluebeard, but allows his courtly graces to convince her she should discard these instincts and marry him anyway. And when he first gives her the key, she has another gut feeling that something is wrong, and she has to open the door to find out what it is. Doing so saves her life in the long run. The obvious moral seems to be, "Trust your instincts," yet the stated moral at the end seems to take the opposite view.
- The moral of the story is that Bluebeard's wife should have been obedient to her husband and she would've been okay. Except that had she been obedient and not looked in the room she would never have discovered that her husband was a Serial Killer and probably would've been killed, so in this case the wife not being obedient to her husband was a very good thing.
- Common Knowledge: The Grimms brothers did not write this tale - it was actually put to text by Perrault, but was told enough that the Grimms brothers collected a version of the tale.
- Complete Monster: The titular Bluebeard seems to be at first a rich gentleman who wins the heart of a young maiden. In truth, Bluebeard is a Serial Killer who selects his victims by seducing them into marriage before cutting open their throats and hanging their bodies in his mansion. When the young maiden's curiosity leads her to find the one forbidden room in Bluebeard's mansion filled with the bodies of his previous victims, Bluebeard attempts to slaughter her as well in a fit of rage. With little motivation to couple his murders aside from occasionally being depicted as greedy, the original incarnation of Bluebeard defined, and still stands as the most infamously brutal incarnation of, one of the most terrifying modern serial killer tropes.
- Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory: Clarissa Pinkola Estés wrote a Jungian analysis of the tale, where the Bluebeard figure is a person's self-destructive inclinations prowling in their psyche and eating away at their mind, the key is self-discovery through questioning oneself, the brothers are primal instincts coming to destroy those unhealthy tendencies before it destroys the person, and Bluebeard being thrown to the birds at the end is a destruction and then recycling of those mental patterns into a healthier form.
- Fanon: Due to the popularity of a British pantomime by George Colman, Bluebeard was frequently depicted as Turkish or Middle Eastern throughout the nineteenth century. His last wife was given the Arabic name Fatima. Modern depictions have done away with this and given the last wife names such as Catherine, Judith, or Josephine.
- Fridge Logic: Why did Bluebeard murder his very first wife? No versions of the story are forthcoming with any explanation...
- The first wife was disobedient in some other (perhaps even minor) way, considering that Bluebeard kills all the subsequent wives for disobeying his strict edict about not opening the door, and yet gives her the keys.
- Does a serial killer really need a reason to kill someone? The first wife was probably killed to give him an excuse to kill the others.
- Maybe there just weren't any bodies in there the first time, but she looked anyways?
- In The Seventh Bride (a retelling by Ursula Vernon under her pen name T. Kingfisher), the Bluebeard figure steals something from each of his wives—sight, voice, life, etc. While he doesn't necessarily intend to kill them, he certainly doesn't seem to care if they don't survive the process.
- Realism-Induced Horror: Part of what gives the story its staying power is the universal experience of discovering a loved one isn't what they seem to be, with updates and new takes on the story changing very little about the premise to remain effective and relevant. Adding to is that, unlike other fairy tale villains, Bluebeard is a monstrous human instead of an ogre or other creature.
- Values Dissonance:
- In some versions, the interpreted moral is "curiosity killed the cat"... because the woman provoked Bluebeard when she looked in the room and if she hadn't, she'd have been fine, you see. Never minding that living with a murderer is not known to be a safe activity to begin with.
- Once-popular pantomime depictions of Bluebeard as Turkish or Middle Eastern have since fallen out of favor, partly due to the story by and large no longer being used in pantomime and partly due to the nature of the story making such elements uncomfortable. Andrew Lang insisted that Bluebeard was European and objected to his illustrator including oriental elements in the illustrations for The Blue Fairy Book, although because he thought he could be polygamous if he was a Turk.
- What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: Perrault did not write Bluebeard or any of his other stories for children, yet they were commonly marketed to children for centuries. Bluebeard frequently appeared in fairy tale collections for children until the early twentieth century. This is Lampshaded in The Shining when one night Jack drunkenly read the story to Danny - scaring the ever-loving shit out of him and making Wendy furious.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/YMMV/Bluebeard
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