Male Perspectives in Atwood’s “Bluebeard’s Egg” and Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus

Postmodern revisions of fairy tales have influenced several discourses and disciplines especially during the second half of the twentieth century. At the basis of the speculative and ideological approach to postmodern fairy tales lies primarily gendered-based implications, which have helped decipher and interpret the multiple metamorphoses that this literary genre has undergone throughout the centuries. In particular, in the course of postmodernism, the rewriting of classic fairy tales has contributed to the subversion of their stereotypal structures, thus advancing alternative re-readings. This work proposes an investigation into the gender discourse in two postmodern re-writings of Bluebeard, i.e. Margaret Atwood’s “Bluebeard’s Egg” and Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus, especially focussing on male/queer perspectives that, to present time, have not been taken into consideration. Starting from an overview on the diverse conceptualisations of the terms “gender” and “sexuality” in modern and contemporary times, this research analyses the birth and evolution of male studies and, subsequently, it explores the ways in which they have influenced the interpretation of classical tales. Furthermore, by taking into account the theoretical structure mentioned above, this work fosters possible intertextual interpretations of the ever-changing dynamics that the gender discourse entails and guides the reader along the discovery of the characters’ identities as examined in the works. By means of an intertwined and shifting process, which enables the characters of these contemporary revisions to “disguise” their identities within the pages and beyond their texts, the figure of Bluebeard reveals himself as the “in-between” pattern for contemporary gender conceptualisations.