Perrault and His Stupid Morals

 So I was thinking this morning about Perrault, and his annoying tendency to ruin perfectly good stories with self-righteous moralizing.

If you haven’t read a lot of Perrault before, what he does is tell his story, and then at the end he tells you the moral of the story. Sometimes two morals. And, okay, these are good stories, fully capable of standing on their own. So I’m already annoyed that Perrault has so little faith in our reading comprehension that he has to tell us what each story is about. But the other thing is, that’s not even what the stories are about. His morals are garbage!

I have two specific examples, which fill me with rage every time I think of them:

Bluebeard:

Summary: Girl married to skeevy older dude, already widowed several times. He leaves her home alone and tells her not to go in a specific room. She goes in anyway, and finds the corpses of all his previous wives. He finds out and tries to kill her too, but her brothers save her.

Moral 1: Don’t snoop

Moral 2: At least your arranged marriage probably isn’t to a serial killer, so suck it up.

Donkeyskin:

Summary: Beautiful queen on her deathbed makes husband promise not to remarry unless new girl is as hot as her. Tragically, she was the hottest. Until their daughter grows up to look exactly like dead mom. King has the brilliant idea to marry his own daughter! Daughter, grossed out and freaked out, flees, undergoing much trauma before eventually marrying a foreign prince. Her dad is invited to the wedding, and they reconcile, all the unfortunate incest business magically forgotten.

Moral: Do the right thing (i.e. don’t marry your dad) even when it’s hard.

Now, is it just me, or do these moral seem a little victim-blamey? How about “don’t murder”? “Don’t store rotting corpses in a closet”? “Incest is bad”?

Bluebeard dies at the end, sure, but Donkeyskin’s dad is facing zero consequences for his actions. And yeah, Donkeyskin did the right thing by not marrying her dad, and Perrault acknowledges that, but honestly? She’s a young woman being groomed/manipulated/threatened by the one person in her life that she should absolutely be able to rely on and trust unconditionally. If she did marry him, I would not blame her. Because she’s young and she’s scared and she’s tried, she’s tried to reason with him, but it’s not working, and what is she supposed to do? This particular girl didn’t panic, and was smart enough to find an escape route. But a different girl in the same situation might not have seen a way out, might have wound up marrying him, and that wouldn’t be her fault. It would be her dad’s.

Yeah, Donkeyskin did the right thing, even though it was hard. So what? That’s not the moral of the story! There are a lot of potential morals here, but Perrault can shut up unless he wants to call out the evil dad, and preferably kill him off in the most painful and gruesome way possible.

And Bluebeard? Let’s go back to Bluebeard. “Don’t snoop”? Don’t snoop? Seriously? If I’m ever forced to marry a skeevy older dude with several dead wives, I’m absolutely going to snoop. That’s, like, preemptive self-defense. And I will complain about being forced to marry a skeevy older man as much as I want, whether or not he’s a serial killer, and I have every right to; screw you, Perrault, you insufferable jerk.

Why do you have two morals calling out of heroine for perceived bad behavior and nothing to say about the actual literal serial killer? Stop scolding girls for being in a terrifying situation you’ll never experience and can’t possibly understand. Start scolding Bluebeard for being a serial killer who keeps rotting corpses inside his house. Like, let’s be real here; how much snooping was even involved? Girl probably followed the smell. And smelling dead bodies absolutely trumps all “do not open this door” instructions.

I love Perrault’s actual stories, but his stupid morals just kind of make me wish he was still alive so I could strangle him.