Bluebeard's Ghost

(edit: ha, forgot to add the title of the story I'm talking about...)
I was pleasantly surprised by this story, and by Thackeray’s ingenuity in using a horrific fairy tale as a springboard for a humorous, entertaining, and complex social drama. It’s clear from the last paragraph (“Psha!”) that the author certainly enjoyed himself while writing this one, and I have to say that his brand of thoughtful playfulness shines through on every page. The story very quickly establishes that it is NOT, like the story it’s based on, a fairy tale—there are nuanced characters that Thackeray slowly characterizes through dialogue and oblique descriptions (Mr. Sly “never drinks anything stronger than tea,” sister Anne is hilariously often referred to as a “minx” or “hussy”). We have not quite left the realm of magic, to be sure, but the otherworldliness here is of the same sort found in, say, Irving’s Sleepy Hollow; the plot veers into a “spookiness” of natural origin, not the uncanny horror of the other Bluebeard stories. Thackeray thrills us rather than terrifying us, for by the time the “ghost” appears we’ve already been conditioned by the multiple foiled suicide attempts not to take even the serious things too seriously. (At times this approach to humor gets a tad too dark: Doctor Sly wonders why his nephew hasn’t tried to commit suicide again after being rejected for the last time.)

The shift in genre also allows the story to offer a different sort of commentary than the very primal/psychological take on male-female relationships in the original Bluebeard fairy tales. The apparent Stockholm Syndrome (this probably isn’t the right term) going on with Mrs. Bluebeard in the beginning of the story is particularly interesting, as there wouldn’t really be any need to venerate the old murderer if all she cares about is money (as hinted by the narrator’s line about throwing a grand funeral for whoever left him a fortune). The scene with Mrs. Bluebeard and her sister going through the former’s late husband is comical, of course, but I wonder if Thackeray is playing her “condition” for more than just laughs. There’s a similar conundrum in the character of Mr. Sly—his morbid attempts to win Lady Bluebeard’s heart are very funny, but there’s also something poignant and pathetic in his efforts to put on false masculinity (both figuratively and literally, with the Bluebeard costume). Even as I laughed, some surprisingly sober thoughts of gender constructions couldn’t help but bubble up in the back of my head.