Blog Entry 9

There are two stories, “The Robber Bridegroom” and “Fitcher’s Bird” that are somewhat similar to the story “Bluebeard.” Each story deals with a girl who has an arranged marriage with an unattractive guy. Eventually curiosity got the best of the girl and she ventured into a place where she would find death and destruction. In “Fitcher’s Bird” and “Bluebeard,” this place was a room that their husbands had forbidden them to go in, but when their husbands were away, they went in them anyway. In the rooms, they found dead bodies and then were caught by their husbands and destined to die. However, the girls were able to save their lives by buying themselves time.

Other than the basic plot, “The Robber Bridegroom” is much different than the other two stories. In this story, the girl never actually gets married to her arranged husband-to-be. She visits his house where she hides in the basement and watches him and his friends kill an innocent girl, where as in the other two stories, the girls never see women being killed, they only see their dead bodies. In “Fitcher’s Bird,” when the girl opened the door to the forbidden chamber with the key, she also had an egg which she dropped. The egg was permanently stained with the blood from the chambers floors and that’s how the arranged husband discovered she had betrayed him. Similarly, the girl from “Bluebeard” had permanently stained the key.

These three stories are unique because, unlike the stories we have been reading, there is no prince charming, instead there are ugly old men that the girls are forced to be with at the beginning of the story. In the end, the men try to kill the girls, but the girls are cunning enough to save themselves and instead kill the men.

I liked “The Robber Bridegroom” the most because at the end, the girl shows her whole family what a horrible person the man is by telling the story of how she found out and even showing the finger for proof. Since they were surrounded by her whole family, the man had nowhere to run and was killed by her family members. She was very smart and witty to wait all that time to expose the man of the kind of person he really was.