What’s in Bluebeard’s closet? In his tale, published in 1697, Charles Perrault places the slaughtered and bloody bodies of the monster’s former wives there. We understand, under these conditions, that the latter forbade his new young wife to go and see there, even if he gave her the key to the place to test her loyalty.
If we accept the thesis of the psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim according to which “the characteristic of fairy tales is to pose existential problems in brief and precise terms”, one can only wonder what to understand from such a macabre story.
Bettelheim, so often inspired in his formidable essay Psychoanalysis of fairy talespublished in 1976, seems a little flat in its interpretation of this story. The blue Beard, he suggests, would be “a tale about sexual temptation” that would show “the destructive aspects of sex”, while acknowledging the normality and universality of temptation and condemning the monster’s jealous love. It’s good, but unsatisfying.
In Bluebeard’s office (Leméac, 2023, 102 pages), novelist and essayist Thomas O. St-Pierre sees a more subtle metaphor in this tale that fascinates him. Bluebeard’s study, he writes, “is the place where we hide what we think might prevent others from loving us.” The corpses of the tale are the symbol “of all that we don’t like about ourselves”.
The thesis is stimulating and St-Pierre explores it skilfully, with great sensitivity, in what he presents as a “little essay on psychological prospecting”, mainly irrigated by literary and philosophical references.
I had little taste of the previous test of St-Pierre, Miley Cyrus and the unfortunate of the century (Atelier 10, 2018), in which he criticized the slayers of today’s youth. So I wouldn’t have read his new essay if I hadn’t received an email from the writer André Major bragging to me about its merits. St-Pierre’s book, wrote my correspondent, is “an essay in the truest sense of the word, an interior journey, but addressed to the reader”. I trusted him and was not disappointed.
Bluebeard’s study would therefore be the place of our embarrassments and our anguish. But where do these problems come from? To understand this, St-Pierre turns first to Freud. In 1930, in Discomfort in the civilization, the latter explains that life in society requires us to repress our impulses, which is not without a certain frustration. The child understands, at the time of the Oedipus complex, that he must silence some of his desires, or rather sublimate them.
Life, in this logic, therefore resembles a battle waged against oneself, with in the permanent background “the idea that in each of us there slumbers a latent Bluebeard”, notes St-Pierre. Also, finely adds the essayist, when we meet someone who could love us despite everything and appease our conscience, “we tell him not to look in our office, at the same time as our behavior, our silences like our lies, our failings, like our impulses, give him the key”. Happy are we when that person does not run away.
What to do now, when the child comes, when the hour of transmission arrives? St-Pierre admits to not having had an easy childhood. His pathological shyness locked him in “a world of solitude and frustration”. This makes him unable, today, “to conceive [la vie de ses enfants] with the necessary lightness”.
He would like not to bequeath this sad heritage to his children, but he is forced to note that we do not only transmit our noble values; we also transmit “our way of being”, including our faults piled up in the “cabinet”.
Moved by the vulnerability of his children, by their powerful desire to be loved, St-Pierre evokes his inevitable moments of impatience as a parent, his loss of composure in banal situations, and the powerful remorse that ensues. Even if he tries, like many of his fellows, to relativize his “parental guilt”, he cannot help but be overwhelmed by the fear of transmitting to his posterity “the part of himself that he does not do not like “. Parents will find here a heartbreaking reflection on the exhilarating and overwhelming complexity of their role.
St-Pierre’s only misstep in this book is to abuse the animal metaphor to designate his infants. I don’t like babies being referred to as “talkative little animals” or as little beasts, which the author can’t help but do more than a dozen times in this essay. A baby is a human, and a human is not first and foremost an animal. This beautiful Bluebeard’s Cabinet is precisely the striking proof of this.