Estés Extends von Franz on Bluebeard

In an endnote to her Bluebeard chapter, Estés cites Marie-Louise von Franz directly: “von Franz, for instance, says Bluebeard ‘is a murderer, and nothing more…’” (von Franz, Interpretation of Fairy Tales, p. 125, cited in Estés 2017). She marks the citation precisely because she means to depart from it.

For von Franz, working in the Zurich textual-interpretive tradition, Bluebeard names a malign archetypal energy whose only proper destiny is recognition and exile. For Estés, the natural-predator is not redeemable as a person but is renderable as an energy. “The predator’s rage can be rendered into a soul-fire for accomplishing a great task in the world. The predator’s craftiness can be used to inspect and understand things from a distance. The predator’s killing nature can be used to kill off that which must properly die in a woman’s life” (Estés 2017). The procedure is alchemical rather than juridical: “we drive it down into the layer of the psyche where all creation is as yet unformed, and let it bubble in that etheric soup till we can find a form, a better form for it to fill.”

This is a productive disagreement inside the archetypal lineage. von Franz reads as analyst at the desk; Estés reads as cantadora at the cookfire. Both are working with the same tale; the difference is methodological — and therefore concerns the amplification tradition itself.

Sources

• clarissa-pinkola-estes: Bluebeard’s energy is to be rendered into “soul-fire” for the woman’s own great task
• marie-louise-von-franz: Bluebeard is “a murderer, and nothing more” (Interpretation of Fairy Tales, p. 125)