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Fifty Shades of Bluebeard? Dukas's Ariane et Barbe-Bleue in the Twenty-First Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 November 2018

LAURA WATSON
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Abstract

With the appearance of opera videos in 2013 (DVD) and 2015 (YouTube), Paul Dukas's Ariane et Barbe-Bleue (1907) has been revived for twenty-first-century audiences. Not only has this formerly obscure work migrated to a mass-media landscape of personalized digital consumption, but its cultural recontextualization has also been extended to the interpretations staged in those opera videos. Both challenge historical, feminist readings of Ariane. Updating the action to modern scenes of abduction and captivity, these productions recast Ariane as victim and reframe the opera as part of the present discourse on sexual violence. As these recent productions of Ariane resonate with broader aesthetic tendencies in current popular culture, I trace parallels between the opera and three such examples from 2015. Selecting works that exemplify the trend of repackaging the Bluebeard tale as contemporary drama, I cite the films Fifty Shades of Grey and Room, and the Netflix series The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

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Articles
Information
Twentieth-Century Music , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , October 2018 , pp. 399 - 438
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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Footnotes

I wish to thank the anonymous readers of this article for their feedback and my colleague Christopher Morris for his comments on a preliminary draft.

References

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