To what ends do interdictions function within the fairytale tradition?

Abstract

This essay examines the ideological functions of interdictions in Charles Perrault’s Bluebeard and Giovan Francesco Straparola’s Biancabella and the Snake, arguing that they operate not merely as instruments of patriarchal societal control but as politically charged mechanisms that expose the instability of authority detached from noble hierarchy. In Bluebeard, the unnamed wife’s confinement to prescribed behaviours and the arbitrary violence that enforces them reveal bourgeois patriarchy as fragile and self-destructive; her disobedience is simultaneously pathologised—rendered as hysteria and uncontrollable urge—and legitimised by the deeper illegitimacy of Bluebeard’s bourgeois order, ultimately precipitating its collapse. In Biancabella, interdictions are mediated through female bonds, yet Samaritana’s authority reproduces patriarchal logic, wielding surveillance and punishment in ways that render female power generative but ultimately contingent on serving noble patriarchal structures. Drawing on scholarship by Jack Zipes, Marcia Lieberman, and Suzanna Mananini, this essay contends that both tales deploy the cycle of interdiction, disobedience, and restoration to stage and then contain social deviance, reaffirming noble patriarchy as the only stable order.