Secrets beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives

[...] fiats will not do in considering folklore or its unending derivatives, yet it seems Tatar ignores folklore in Secrets Beyond the Door, even as she quotes author Margaret Atwood, who cautions diat "die true story . . . [is] vicious and multiple and untrue" (15). Never does our author give a serious thought, even a paragraph, to the fact that the contemporary scholar cannot equate a seventeenth-century French tale to one collected in mid-twentieth-century Kentucky, or that Bluebeard (AT 311 and 312) has traveled the oceans to be adapted by and to differing cultures and different media.