The tale of the serial wife-murderer Bluebeard, his defiant, and surviving, final wife,
a bloodied key and a secret chamber of horrors, has fascinated writers, composers,
artists and film-makers throughout modern times. It is a unique story that dares to
disclose and explore masculine violence: the homme fatal.

This transdisciplinary work identifies the deep appeal of the Bluebeard story for
twentieth-century culture. Its major focus is on how the modernist imagination used
the elements of Bluebeard's tale to explore masculinity's anxieties in the face of the
emerging demands of women for redefinition and sexual equality, as well as
anxieties of ethnic and cultural difference. It also examines fundamental disquiet
about sexuality, pathology and violence in the masculine.

With chapters by Maria Tatar, Elisabeth Bronfen, Mererid Puw Davies, Ian Christie,
David Cooper, Michael Hiltbrunner and the editors, the volume undertakes cultural,
contextual and musicological analyses of Bartók's opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle,
tracing Bluebeard's evolution from Perrault in the seventeenth century to the
cinematic hommes fatals of Méliès, Fritz Lang and Hitchcock. The result is an
intriguing kaleidoscope of sexuality, curiosity, violence and death.