| Feminist intertextual fictions reveal through negotiations with the Bluebeard fairy tale not only motivations for its continuing popularity but also a practical redefinition of what constitutes feminist intertextuality. The Bluebeard story metafictively illustrates two types of intertextuality: monologic (Bluebeard's plot) and dialogic (the heroine's plot revision). Feminist intertextual rewritings demonstrate that their revisionist focus is in fact on intertextuality itself; they are "meta-intertextual.";Primary among the tenets of intertextuality theory revised through the Bluebeard intertext is "presupposition" and its implications for the reader. Feminist intertextual fictions reveal that intertextuality's presupposed reader is a monologic textual construct. Presupposition is the intertextual reader's Bluebeard.;Following an extensive introduction, three chapters perform close readings organized around the concepts of presupposition as a textual haunting, the mise en abyme, and the detective hermeneutic, respectively. The first juxtaposes William Godwin's Caleb Williams and Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey to demonstrate Gothic metafictional treatment of presupposition. Chapter two considers Bluebeard's depiction as a death-artist and his uncanny mise en abyme of the female reader in Bluebeard fictions by John Fowles, Peter Ackroyd, and Kurt Vonnegut, constrasting this with the reader's "escape artistry" in Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop and Nights at the Circus and Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills. Third, the detective hermeneutic thematizes presupposition in the intertextual reading process. Casting the Bluebeard story as a mystery defamiliarizes presupposition in Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride and Emma Cave's Bluebeard's Room. Detection is a thematized reading strategy in Atwood's "Bluebeard's Egg" and in Max Frisch's Bluebeard. The enigma-solution model of presuppositional reading is dramatized in Donald Barthelme's "Bluebeard," and "Instructions for Navigating the Labyrinth" by Canadian Meira Cook.;Contemporary appeal in the Bluebeard story as an intertext may derive from the fairy tale's own metafictional use of intertextuality and revisionism. Fictions reading the tale foreground the different strategies of Bluebeard and his reader, demonstrating feminist intertextual theory in practice. In contrast to intertextuality theory, the status and strategies of the female reader are of utmost importance to feminist intertextual fictions. |
