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Bluebeard Gothic: Jane Eyre and Its Progeny. By Heta Pyrhönen. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. 277 pp.
Heta Pyrhönen's Bluebeard Gothic: Jane Eyre and Its Progeny offers an extremely intelligent understanding of the functions and processes of literary adaptation. Building upon the work of scholars such as Anne Williams and Michelle Massé, Pyrhönen points out that "Bluebeard," with its motifs of the threatening patriarch and the mysterious house that conceals a terrible secret, embodies central elements of the Gothic. Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, a selfconsciously Gothic narrative, expands upon the "Bluebeard" story by granting the fairy-tale characters complex psychological motivations and justifications. While many scholars have identified "Bluebeard" as a key intertext within Jane Eyre, only Sandra Gilbert and Maria Tatar (2004) have treated the subject at any length. Pyrhönen has expanded admirably upon Gilbert and Tatar's arguments, offering not just a nuanced reading of Jane Eyre as a reworking of "Bluebeard" but also a stellar examination of how Jane Eyre itself has been reworked by writers such as Jean Rhys, Jeanette Winterson, and Angela Carter.
Pyrhönen identifies the category of what she calls "Bluebeard Gothic" - Gothic narratives that center on the question of a young woman's marriage and the secrets of the house and of her husband (6). In her estimation this category consists of texts that respond both to "Bluebeard" itself and to Jane Eyre's specific adaptation of "Bluebeard"; these works include Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, and Carter's "The Bloody Chamber" and "The Fall River Axe Murders," among many others. In the tradition of much scholarship of the Gothic, Pyrhönen uses the lens of psychoanalysis to illuminate "the intimate link between physical and mental space in the topography of Bluebeard Gothic" (22). The results are often fascinating, such as her application of psychoanalytic theories of hysteria - the physical embodiment of mental distress - to...