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[email protected] 71 CHAPTER The Attractions of “Bluebeard”: The Origins and Fortunes of a Folktale You had the sense to see you were caught in a story, and the sense to see that you could change it to another one...for many things may and do happen, stories change themselves, and these stories are not histories and have not happened. —A. S. Byatt, “The Story of the Eldest Princess” here are only two or three human stories,” Willa Cather once declared, “and they go on repeating themselves fiercely as if they Thad never happened before.”1 Although each of us might have different candidates for those two to three tales, many of us would come up with the usual suspects: the stories of Oedipus or Hamlet, Eve or Cas- sandra, Odysseus or Jack, Cinderella or Snow White. Much has been written about the seemingly timeless and universal nature of these master narratives, which we encounter in print, on screen, and in performance as poems, myths, films, operas, fairy tales, and plays.