This is a thesis comprising two components: a portion of my novella and a dissertation. My work of fiction, Turning Road, draws loosely on the Bluebeard fairytale, as well as theories of identity and nation, as a means of exploring a young Australian woman’s journey to London, a journey which is both symbolic and psychological. The second component is the critical essay, which considers the extent to which Australian women’s expatriate fiction can be read as a variation of Bluebeard. Australian women’s expatriate fiction has been characterised as a journey involving a doomed love affair with a self-centred male in London.1 To date, most critical attention on the genre has focussed on the extent to which it employs the Odyssean myth to consider gender and colonial identity. It is my contention that reading Bluebeard in The Transit of Venus highlights issues of identity and power in relation to gender and nation. Through its central themes of threat, sexuality, secrecy, self-knowledge and seriality, Bluebeard warns against prescribed gender roles/relations and limiting identifications, and works towards depicting a new liberating space between contrasting spaces identified as home and abroad.

The story of Bluebear has been the center of many theatrical and musical works. From its mystery-shrouded origin, the legend and its principal characters have experienced numerous transformations. Charles Perrault’s tale, the first known published version of the story, served as a basis for all succeeding treatments of the theme, which have handled the various characters differently -- at times stressing Bluebeard, and at other times, the heroine. The theme of the Bluebeard legend has appeared in literature in delightful fairytales and in several dramas, both tragic and comic. Musically, the legend has been employed in numerous operas and as a ballet-burlesque. The treatments of the characters, the keys, and the doors have been as varied as their many settings, culminating in the intense symbolistic drama, Bluebeard’s Castle, by Bela Balazs. His one-act drama was suggested by the three-act tragedy, Ariane et Barbe-Bleue, by the great Belgian symbolist, Maurice Maeterlinck. The symbolism in Balazs’ version is the salient force of the drama. It is this feature that Bartok exploits in his musical treatment for the text. To better understand Bartok’s works, it must be realized that it was his purpose to revitalize the already exhausted, over-refined music of Europe with a transfusion of new blood from the peasant music of Hungary. Characteristic traits of Hungarian folk music are present in his music -- ornamental arabesques, rapid passage work, trills, ostinatos, leaps into strange intervals, unsymmetrical construction, irregular bar formations, frequent changes in meter, and sudden juxtaposing of quick and slow motion. Bluebeard's Castle, a work of high importance in the development of Bartok's musical style, in the opinion of the present author, does reveal the accomplishment of that synthesis.

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When European childrens literature is adapted to North American film, parts of the stories are removed and changed in the hopes of producing something that will be considered acceptable in the target culture. Much of what is educational and cultural in the stories to begin with is removed through the process of adaptation leaving the finished product devoid of its originality and cultural authenticity. These oversimplified stories are what children in North America grow up with and believe to be original. This thesis examines the adaptation of the following classic childrens stories to film: Charles Perraults Bluebeard (1697); Lewis Carrolls Alices Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871); and Carlo Collodis Le Avventure di Pinocchio (1883).

Often overlooked in the study of nineteenth-century American literature, the New England writer Rose Terry Cooke elicited great popular appeal during the peak of her career. The admiration Cooke received from her readers and fellow writers compels one to question Cooke’s present-day obscurity. Cooke’s fiction and poetry seem inconsistent with the attitudes she express in her non-fiction, particularly concerning religion and women’s suffrage. She portrays women in miserable marriages, desperately looking for an escape. These “brides of Bluebeard” find different ways to cope with their predicament. While most never truly escape, many use (1) religious devotion, (2) masochism, and (3) homosocial relations as “coping mechanisms” in their plight. I identify each of these reactions to Bluebeard figures in Cooke’s writing in order to understand the contradictions in her works, for, like Cooke, these brides were products of their culture, torn between duty to self and duty to others.

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