The most common trope of one strand of domestic thriller is the murderous spouse, nearly always a husband.
In a milder version of the story, he’s merely untrustworthy: a liar, a con man, a bigamist (arguably, Jane Eyre‘s Rochester is all three).
But from Hitchcock’s Suspicion to the gaslighting husband of The Girl on the Train, there is a recurring portrayal of the husband who is too good to be true: a gallant suitor who proves to have a hidden and murderous agenda.
Gaslight, first a play and then a film, is often cited as the ur-story here.
Suspicion, in turn, is based on a 1932 novel by Frances Iles, Before the Fact, and some commentators seem to prefer the book’s ending to the film’s. I’ve added Iles to my TBR list because of this wonderful opening: “Some women give birth to murderers, some go to bed with them, and some marry them. Lina Aysgarth had lived with her husband nearly eight years before she realised that she was married to a murderer.”
Well. That will make your reader sit up and pay attention.
Apparently the characterization of the wife differs significantly in the original work: Iles’s Lina is more intelligent and less easily duped.
But she’s also hyper-fixated on managing the bad behaviour of a man she continues to adore even after she realizes that he’s a liar, thief, and adulterer. Her illusions that he’s brilliant and kind are thoroughly dispelled, and he even eventually admits that he never loved her and married her because of the money she’ll inherit.
And she still loves him, and wants to fix him.
In Suspicion, Fontaine plays Lina as at first skeptical of Cary Grant’s charm and then thoroughly seduced and betrayed. But the telescoping of events means that there’s a much shorter gap between her dawning recognition of her husband’s machinations and the resolution of the plot (which is, admittedly, weak for a Hitchcock film, due to studio intervention; this isn’t Vertigo, where tragedy is allowed to play out).
So I didn’t pick up a sense from the film that Lina has a pathological attachment to her husband or any messianic belief that she’s the only one who can save him. But I’ll read the novel in full and then re-watch the film.
This is on my mind because of fairy tales and the two most obvious precursors of the Very Bad Husband figure in contemporary suspense thrillers: the Robber Bridegroom and the better known Bluebeard.
And there’s a third story, that I’ve only just learned about: “Fitcher’s Bird.”
Let’s start with Bluebeard.
And it’s impossible to write about these two archtypes, as a Canadianist, without thinking of Atwood who, as usual, got here first and did intriguing work in both the story “Bluebeard’s Egg” and her gender revisionist Robber Bride, where Zenia, devilishly seductive and untrustworthy Zenia–once reputed to be based on journalist and writer Barbara Amiel–goes through men like a warm knife through butter.
Other women’s men.
Other women’s butter, most likely. I kinda love Zenia. I incorporated her into my first-ever conference paper and then, a couple of years later, int the first substantive chapter of my dissertation. By the time I finished revising, most of my analysis had been edited out, in favour of a close look at the dynamics traumatic memory and testimony/witnessing in Alias Grace. A pity.
The story, in brief, per Perreault, rather than the Grimm Brothers, since scholarship suggests that the story has Breton origins:
A man whose hideous blue beard drives away women despite his great wealth wishes to marry one of his neighbour’s two daughters. The sisters are repulsed and wary: notably, several previous wives remain unaccounted for, but the younger sister is eventually persuaded.
Soon after their marriage, he tells his new wife that he will be away for some weeks and gives her a set of keys: “Open them all; go into each and every one of them, except that little closet, which I forbid you, and forbid it in such a manner that, if you happen to open it, you may expect my just anger and resentment.”
But like Eve, her temptation overcomes her, and she opens the forbidden chamber only to discover the corpses of the missing wives in a room washed with blood. Some gets on the key, which is stained, so when Bluebeard returns, he discovers what she’s done and plans to murder her.
And here’s where story traditions diverge: in the Grimm Brothers’s “Fitcher’s Bird” story, often treated as a Bluebeard variant (I learned five minutes ago), one sister dies and it’s up to the surviving sister to outwit Bluebeard and literally re-member her sister’s body, thus miraculously bringing her back to life.
Perreault is characteristically gentler: the bride saves herself, with the assistance of her sister. Bluebeard is done away with, and she inherits and shares his wealth.
Bluebeard has been endlessly revised, but I’m most interested in how it’s become an archetype of the untrustworthy suitor or husband: the man you think you know but who hides a dark secret. Versions of this appear everywhere from 50 Shades of Grey to the stacks of romance-suspense novels with lurid covers that are featured on drug store book racks.
And the figure, of course, turns up in film, as director Anna Biller describes. She was drawn to both the “classic women’s pictures where a woman has to navigate a terrifying husband or boyfriend, who may be a Bluebeard—movies like Gaslight, Rebecca, Sudden Fear, Rosemary’s Baby” and the gothic fiction that ranged from “Jane Eyre, Dracula, Frankenstein, Rebecca, Wuthering Heights; different literary iterations of the “Bluebeard” tale, especially Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories” to “female writers such as Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Shirley Jackson, and Jean Rhys.”
This is an extensive and intriguing lineage, and I think she’s absolutely right to group Plath, Woolf, Jackson, and Rhys alongside the earlier works. Woolf is perhaps the less intuitive choice (as the least obviously gothic writer). But in some of her creepier short stories, which I’ve been re-reading, her extensive reading of the genre comes through clearly.
Husbands aren’t terrifying, in Woolf. But they’re not altogether pleasant, either. Mr. Ramsay is no Bluebeard, but he does crush some essential parts of his wife’s radiance, surely.
I worked through the rainy weekend, so today is devoted to the most restful parts of research: watching film adaptations and reading classic crime novels in front of the fire, starting with Iles.
And, with thanks to NetGalley and the publisher, I’m also reading the new Nita Prose novel, The Maid’s Secret, which has an April 8th publication date.
It opens with an invented fairy tale.
But that, as they used to say at the conclusion of each episodes of Tales of the Riverbank, is a story for another day.
The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction 
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