WHEN WE THINK ABOUT STORIES in our lives - the stories we tell ourselves about what our lives seem to be - then we have to be careful. So many of us tend to tell stories of defeat before we have even realized what we've said. Someone says: "It's just my luck", and most of us smile in recognition because we all know the feeling. Yet, if we say it often enough we'll internalize it, and we'll believe that somehow the universe does not want things to work out well for us. That's a dangerous belief to inflict on yourself.

"Just my luck" is a statement that invites helplessness and gloom, so I'd like to focus on a story of hard luck that has been in our history and culture for centuries and which seems to be about exactly this, and how we can change it. It's the legend of Bluebeard. This is a story that has many variants in Europe, and it goes like this. Bluebeard is a lord who marries a young girl in an arranged marriage and since she is now the lady of the house, gives her the keys to his castle. She has keys to all the rooms, but she is forbidden to go into one room. Bluebeard leaves to go on a journey and the new bride for a while looks after the castle and nothing more. At a certain point, though, after struggling against her curiosity, she decides to peep into the forbidden room. There a ghastly sight awaits her. She finds the bodies of many women - clearly Bluebeard's brides who did not obey his orders. She does not panic, however: she sends for her brothers, and when Bluebeard returns she gets them to help her kill him. It's quite a tale.

Some people have seen this as a tale that urges women not to put up with abusive husbands, and that would be true. But it's more than this. Let's look at it from the point of view of the six archetypes of spiritual growth and ask whether or not anyone in the tale moves through those six stages, from Innocent to Orphan, Pilgrim to Warrior-Lover, and from Monarch to Magician. Bluebeard, the villain of the piece, doesn't seem to grow or change, so we can rule him out. That leaves the bride. Let's take a look at her.

The bride arrives at Bluebeard's castle as a virgin and is totally unsuspecting - she's an Innocent if ever there was one. She attaches herself to her husband as a dutiful wife was expected to back then. She's like an Orphan who has to fit in with her new husband's way of doing things. But he demands something from her that no real person could ever achieve, total obedience and a complete lack of curiosity about the locked room. No one who is even half-way alive could ever agree to this. And yet - think about that in today's terms. There are plenty of women who deny that their husbands have drug problems, or who prefer not to believe they are having affairs. Some even choose to overlook child abuse and incest. Instead they attach to their spouses as a lost Orphan might attach - desperately.

When the bride discovers the room full of corpses she is forced to wake up and enter into a moral world. She can't overlook this! And so she faces a dilemma. She can't pretend she doesn't know what she's seen, and she can't be the quiet wife any more. Her dilemma is what we can observe in many women and men today when they find they can no longer ignore what their spouse is up to and they know that no matter how much they love that person their own lives will be destroyed if they continue to remain silent. Ask anyone who has had a spouse with a serious addiction. The addict is, in effect, choosing the addiction over the loving spouse every time. It may take years before the long-suffering spouse realizes this, but it will happen eventually. Under these circumstances, if one is honest, it's no longer possible to be an Orphan any more.

So what does the young bride do? The story tells us she sends for her brothers. In the version recorded by Grimm her brothers are a soldier and a lawyer. Some people have seen this as the bride giving up her autonomy, handing over power to men, but one could make a stronger case for the fact that as a woman who was an Orphan she has been propelled into a moral realm she has to fight for. She's been a Pilgrim searching for the truth about Bluebeard by opening that locked door, and this now turns her into one who will fight for what she believes; this is when she knows that she's going to need to engage some help. In this case the 'brothers' are the stereotypically male aspects of herself that she had to suppress when she agreed to become a submissive bride. Siblings are, in a mythic interpretation, aspects of oneself one could in all probability have developed under other circumstances. The 'brothers' are a way for the story to tell us that she has to claim her own inner strengths. These are the courage and determination of the soldier, and the sense of right and logic of the lawyer. Obviously, there are corrupt lawyers and cowardly soldiers, so the tale urges her to pull out of herself the productive and wholesome parts of these figures.

What does this mean in our world today? As women in my counseling practice have told me, sometimes they've had to take on very 'male' roles in the workplace and at home in order to make sure they're not ignored. Women face this struggle all the time, and while it is often a very good idea to get good help and advice it also depends upon the person concerned standing up and saying: I deserve to be treated properly! This is what lies at the heart of this tale's detail. And it's something I see fairly frequently. Often we're afraid to ask for help, since we see it is weakness. Perhaps the tale is letting us know that having the courage to ask for help is praiseworthy, as well as being an important growth point. One woman I worked with, for example, was trying to handle on her own the arrangements for a divorce from an abusive husband. When she realized that despite all her excellent work she was still being abused, she decided to get a lawyer. From that point on she didn't have to handle everything - but she did have to take that first courageous step of hiring the lawyer (with money she didn't think she could afford) and so ensure the best interests of her children.

When the bride in this story connects with that sense of determination she becomes a Warrior-Lover, fighting for what she values, and loving the moral values she fights for.

In the folk tale we're told she has to fend off the ever more suspicious Bluebeard, risking her life until the brothers arrive, and we see from this that she has to use her courage and her sense of what is moral. After all, she could have run away. But that wasn't a good tactic in medieval Europe where a woman would probably be dragged back to her husband's home. And anyhow, Bluebeard would just have gone on murdering other women, so how moral is it if she saves only her own life? Of course, she could have given up and accepted death as the other brides had. That's the "It's just my luck" hopelessness that we've already looked at. Instead she accesses her own courage and intelligence, holds off Bluebeard until her brothers arrive and see her danger, whereupon the soldier shoots Bluebeard dead, and she inherits his lands. She becomes, in effect, the Monarch of the kingdom because she has demonstrated the moral strengths necessary to be in charge of a moral kingdom. And this brings us back to the woman who was trying to arrange her own divorce. When she finally did get the divorce she knew she'd worked hard for her children, and she felt good about what she'd been able to do. Instead of settling for a mere pittance and feeling she deserved nothing more she had taken hold of self-empowerment with both hands. And one aspect of this was that she no longer found herself dealing with the behavioral problems of her two children. They saw that she was going to put up with no more nonsense from anyone. They were proud of their mother, and respected her more. In fact, at the deepest level, her actions allowed them to love her more because they could se she was fighting for them as much as anyone, while the extra money certainly made all their lives better.

And the husband? He learned that he couldn't push his ex-wife around any more. He gained new respect for her. He wasn't able to reconcile fully with her (like Bluebeard, he really didn't want to learn from this experience) but he saw that depriving his kids of adequate support was a truly stupid thing to do if he wanted a loving relationship with them.

In fact we could say that this woman had mobilized the skills in herself that allowed the whole situation to be transformed from a disaster to something much better. She had allowed a near-miracle to happen. And that's the role of the Magician.

As for Bluebeard, he may look like a lord, but he's actually a sham. He seems to marry these women expecting them to be something they cannot possibly be, and when they insist on being human he has a perfect excuse (he thinks) to punish them. We've all come across men like this. They start a relationship with a booby trap already in place. This is the man who says that if you love me you'll accept that I have to go out and gamble away all our money every couple of months. Or the man who says that if his significant other can't accept his inability to hold a steady job then she clearly isn't the right one. Notice how his inability to hold a job becomes her problem in this way of looking at things!

There are plenty of Bluebeards out there. And the story tells tell us one more important detail, here. He has no children. So this indicates that he can't get close enough to any one woman for long enough so that he can have children with her. That's a pretty strong statement about how he can't handle intimacy and doesn't want to. The booby-traps, the locked room, these are all ways of ensuring the relationship cannot work, so he can move on to the next 'bride'. I think we all have seen enough of that behavior over the years. Bluebeard is the man who cannot stand intimacy and always has an excuse that puts him in the right. The bride is the woman who refuses to put up with this, and as a result she grows in stature while he remains frozen in an addictive pattern of serial relationships, each of which he destroys when the woman shows signs of being a real person who wants to know who he is. That's what the locked door is all about.

It's a powerful tale, and it's also a legend that is centuries old from which we can extract real wisdom - if we chose to. Bluebeard is contented that it's 'just his luck' that (in his view) women can't be trusted. It's a view that suits him because he's afraid to trust them. And the bride could have settled for her 'luck' too. The difference is that she doesn't accept it. She takes action.

When we stop accepting a limited view of ourselves and our 'luck' we become capable of causing real change. To do so we need to call up our courage and decisiveness, though, and the dead women in the locked chamber suggest just how difficult that can be for some people. In the tale they are actually dead, but the hint is that they agreed to kill their spirits first, to accept that Bluebeard's problems demanded their deaths, not his.

Bluebeard is a tale that is not just about women's empowerment. It's about how relationships can go wrong and what we can do about that. It's a change from the more usual prince and princess and happily-ever-after tales, but its value to us, today, is as strong as ever.

© Dr. Allan Hunter, 2008

Allan's most recent book is Stories We Need to Know (Findhorn Press, 2008). It examines how time-honored tales have deep wisdom we can use today, if we pay attention.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Allan Hunter was born in England in 1955 and completed all his degrees at Oxford University, emerging with a doctorate in English Literature in 1983. His first book was Joseph Conrad and the Ethics of Darwinism. In 1986, after working at Fairleigh Dickinson University's British campus and at Peper Harow Therapeutic Community for disturbed adolescents, he moved to the US. For the past twenty years he has been a professor of literature at Curry College in Massachusetts, and a therapist. He has produced two books specifically aimed at using writing and drawing exercises therapeutically - The Sanity Manual and Life Passages. Both books are based on his revolutionary interactive writing exercises, tried and proven in counselling sessions and classes. While working with clients in this way he began to uncover the presence of a series of archetypes within their writings. This led to his present work with the formulation of the six archetypal stages of spiritual development.

Four years ago he began teaching with the Blue Hills Writing Institute and he has remained with it ever since, working with students to explore the memoir and life-writing. His own experience of this medium is reflected in From Coastal Command to Captivity; The Memoir of a Second World War Airman, a project on which he worked with his father up to the time of his death. It required extensive reworking to bring this memoir to completion. As in all his books, the emphasis is on the healing nature of the stories we weave for ourselves if we choose to connect to the archetypal tales of our culture.