My journey to writing the novel “The Hunt” began with a newspaper article by journalist Caroline Overington, published in the Saturday edition of the Melbourne newspaper, The Age in 2003. Bluebeard” and the general trajectory of the Gothic novel, from the Mysteries of Udolpho to The Turn of the Screw and beyond” (111). She further points out that “all the conflated props that would be identified as Gothic (the mansion, the chamber of secrets, the murderous patriarch, our beautiful heroine) already existed in the 'Bluebeard' type stories. (112).
I will seek to place my novel in a creative context with other works that deal with themes of power, violence and captivity of the type I explore in "The Hunt". In my chapter on "The Hunt," I will examine some of the challenges I faced in writing a novel about the kind of captivity outlined above. For my novel, "Bluebeard" was truly a "weapon of understanding and change", where the old tale unlocked the narrative potential of the contemporary story I was trying to write.
Later versions of "Bluebeard" began to further emphasize the young wife's "fatal curiosity" or disobedience to her husband's orders as the moral of the story. In his retelling of the Bluebeard story, even Bluebeard's wife is scolded for her actions. I will describe this part of the process in more detail later in this exegesis, but "Bluebeard" became instrumental in helping me find a way out of the creative impasse I found myself in with my novel.
Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber” and feminine disobedience
In Carter's version of "Bluebeard", "The Bloody Chamber", the story is told not only from the young woman's point of view, but also in her own words, as Carter writes it in the first person with the young woman as narrator . In "The Bloody Chamber," the man is both predator, and ultimately, prey to the pistol-wielding mother. This thread of sado-masochistic sexual desire runs through "The Bloody Chamber" and was an interest of Carter when she wrote the collection.
Atwood argues that "The Bloody Chamber" is an exploration of the possibilities of the kind of synthesis that de Sade himself could never find, because he wasn't even. In "The Bloody Chamber" she allows the young woman to experience the stirrings of masochistic erotic desire, while at the same time being horrified by it. While the young girl in "The Bloody Chamber" is the marquis's wife, she is bought by him as if at a market, with a.
In "The Bloody Chamber," the Marquis strips his wife of her virginity and then sets in motion the denouement, her murder.
Bargaining with Bluebeard: Miranda and Clegg in John Fowles’ The Collector
In the closed world of the novel, Miranda's fate is never discovered and only the reader and Clegg know her story. The narrative structure of the novel allows us to hear both protagonists in the story. While the core of The Collector is written from the perspective of captive Miranda in the form of her diary, which Clegg found and read after her death, it is Clegg's first-person narrative written in the past tense that encapsulates this.
Apart from the central interlude in the novel taken from Miranda's diary, his voice narrates the events from beginning to end. Clegg's narrative, told in the first person, begins the novel and describes the events leading up to Miranda's capture and captivity to the point of her illness. Without warning, we are in Miranda's world as she recounts her experience in the form of a diary kept in a notebook that Clegg gives her on the seventh day of her captivity.
Although she also writes in the first person, her diary is more personal and inward-looking. Much of it is written in present tense, giving the impression that she is writing it at the time the events are happening, rather than after the fact, as in the case of Clegg's story. Miranda's diary is clearly not intended to advance her point of view, to claim ownership of the story, as Clegg's story does.
Her diary takes up more than half of the novel, and yet it ends with her last wild notes written in the delirium of her illness, leaving the reader unaware of her fate. This structure mirrors the entrapment described in the novel: Miranda's story is trapped between the bookshelves of Clegg's version of events. In her analysis of the Bluebeard theme in the works of Fowles, Atwood, and Bartok, Grace argues that “Clegg's professed love for Miranda is a static anime figure that will benefit his crippled psyche.
In the final pages of the novel, it is clear that Clegg will abduct again, but this time we know it. Fowles gives her no opportunity to grow or change, and she remains trapped within the confines of the story, unable to act or develop beyond the prison walls.
Voice from beyond the grave: Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones
As in Perrault's tale, Sebold shifts the narrative power away from Bluebeard and allows the victim to speak. He's a silent, lurking presence in the narrative: a serial killer posing as the most ordinary suburbanite. As such, Susie acts as a cipher in the narrative, where the focus of the novel is on her murder and the effect it has on her family and community.
In this way, she resembles The Collector's Miranda, whose role in the narrative was to play the role of the murdered victim. There is little character development or progression, and Susie doesn't change over the course of the book, but remains stuck, in the same place she started. This is certainly true for Suzie as she watches the events unfold on "Earth" after her murder.
Although the narrative is written in the first person, Susie's special position of being in the Inbetween means that she is capable of much more insight than is usual in a first person narrator. I first began writing my novel using first-person narration, in the voice of my central protagonist Alice, a thirteen-year-old girl. Plot, characterization, and even setting had to be traversed through the narrator's point of view, as the novel's sole point of reference.
In the case of having a teenage girl as the central protagonist, I felt limited by her lack of maturity and limited understanding of adolescence. Sebold's approach avoids these limitations and allows her to craft a novel that, while told in the voice of a teenage victim of sexual violence and. In the end, I chose to sacrifice the intimacy of the first-person narrative and write my novel in the third person, allowing me a bird's-eye view of an omniscient perspective and yet maintaining Alice's point of view as the primary one in my novel.
In The Lovely Bones, we've come a long way from Angela Carter's rich marquee, to a suburban setting filled with families, identical duplexes, and high schools. Here is a truly modern Bluebeard, whose crime is indistinguishable from those we read about in the newspapers and on the.
Escape from Bluebeard’s Castle: Alice’s quest for freedom in “The Hunt”
The calm face staring out from the photo in the newspaper was beautiful and very young. As the sinister figure of the older male predator looms from the "Bluebeard" story, he seemed to walk neatly into the contemporary story I'm writing. Christina Bacchilega, in her analysis of the influence of "Bluebeard" in Margaret Atwood's "Bluebeard's Egg", Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber" and Jane.
I sought to create a growing sense of unease in the reader, which would lead to the revelation of the horror that existed in Bluebeard's chamber. In my novel, I wanted to create a sense of duality: where the familiarity of everyday life could co-exist with another, darker place. Marie Mulvey-Roberts, in her analysis of the intersection between "Bluebeard" and women's Gothic tales, points out that: "The bloody chamber is a haunted place to which both reader and writer endlessly return" (98).
Mulvey-Roberts adds: "Its predecessor can be found in the fairy tale 'Bluebeard', which is a reworking of the archetypal narrative of female disobedience. There is thus a long-standing common ground between women's gothic novels and the "Bluebeard" type stories, which date back to the early work of women writers in the late eighteenth century. So it seems that the old woman is both a prisoner and an accomplice of a murderous band of robbers.
As my knowledge of the fairy tale "Bluebeard" deepened, I became interested in this fictional figure. As with the other elements of the Bluebeard story discussed earlier, I began to feel that it could also bridge the seemingly separate worlds of fact and fiction. My deepening understanding of the story of Bluebeard, along with the repeated cases of kidnapping and imprisonment of young girls in the media, took place at the same time as writing the novel.
An even more recent case involving American girl Jaycee Lee Dugard only came to light within the last twelve months. In conclusion, the two strands of the fictional fairy tale "Bluebeard" and the contemporary newspaper reports on child captivity merged and formed the basis of my novel "The Hunt". My novel "The Hunt" arrives at a new definition of captivity, where I seek to "engage readers in the co-creation of the text; and remythify intertexts distorted or amputated by.
Bluebeard's Female Sidekick : The ambiguous role of the strange old woman in The Grimms' Castle of Murder and Robber Groom.
