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Ha Seong-nan (author), Janet Hong (translator), Bluebeard’s First Wife, Open Letter Books, 2020. 230 pgs.

Ha Seong-nan is a rather prolific South Korean writer, with five short story collections and three novels currently under her belt. Three of her short story collections—Flowers of Mold, Bluebeard’s First Wife, and Wafers—are available in English translations by Janet Hong, and all three are published by Open Letter, a non-profit-making literary translation press operating under the aegis of the University of Rochester.

Bluebeard’s First Wife, published by Open Letter in 2020, was my first encounter with Ha Seong-nan’s fiction, and what pulled me in was the title. I’m a huge lover of fairy tales—they speak volumes about our cultural memory. I am also very much interested in modern reworkings and reinterpretations of traditional fairy tales, which show how we are now engaging with that cultural memory and the legacy of fears and expectations that have been handed down for generations through these stories.

Rather than fairy-tale reinterpretations, however, the eleven stories in Bluebeard’s First Wife are more like fairy tales inside out—or deconstructed fairy tales, if you will. Reading them feels like dissecting the fairy tale, getting to the core of the darkest aspects of human nature that form the basis of these types of stories. In A Short History of the Fairy Tale (Oxford University Press, 2014), Marina Warner has pointed out that traditional fairy tales “capture deep terrors” and “unspeakable acts”, while also offering potential coping mechanisms and the stable promise of a happy ending. In her stories, Ha zeroes in on the “deep terrors”, but happy endings remain elusive or, if they do come, they are accompanied by a sense of unease.

It also seems to me that each of them casts the “Bluebeard” archetype—the innocuous monster—into a different light: ultimately, there are many different types of “Bluebeards” in society, and some of them, some of these stories seem to suggest, may even reside within. In this way, they do take on what Warner terms “the siren function” of fairy tales—that is, “saying the unsayable and tolling a warning” about all the ways in which society can go amiss.

The first story in the collection, “The Star-Shaped Stain”, reckons with the loss of an only child in a freak accident. This in itself is harrowing, but the story is also haunted by other kinds of absences. In true fairy tale fashion, the story doesn’t name any of its protagonists—the mother is only “the woman”, the father is “the woman’s husband”, and the lost child is only ever referred to as “the woman’s daughter” or “her child”. What this kind of artifice typically does in fairy tales is turn the characters into archetypes, symbols that are universally recognisable and applicable. Here, however, the anonymity takes some troubling turns and comes with uncomfortable implications. The opening paragraphs of the story set the mood for all that is to follow. The woman is looking at class photos, seeking the face of her daughter among her classmates, and struggling to find it:

The children’s faces came out so small they were difficult to make out. The woman had trouble picking out her own child among the tiny faces. To make matters worse, they were dressed in the same yellow uniform, marked with the name of the kindergarten. She moved the tip of her finger over each face until she came to a girl standing at the end of the last row. Only her eyes and nose were showing, the bottom half of her face hidden by the children in front.

Not only this, but as it turns out, none of the photos show her daughter clearly, her face out of focus seemingly in every shot. This frustrating happenstance takes on more troubling connotations when the woman herself fails to recall her daughter’s features: she recalls her child merely as absolutely “ordinary”, possessing no distinguishing traits. Even to this bereaved mother, the daughter does not, has never stood out from the crowd.

“Bluebeard’s First Wife”, the title story, comes next. In most versions of the Bluebeard tale, the newlywed young woman is cautioned by her husband not to open that one door, under any circumstances. Curiosity, of course, gets the better of her, and behind the door she finds the corpses of Bluebeard’s many former wives, whose fate she is now in danger of sharing. But Ha’s main character isn’t Bluebeard’s latest—or last—wife. Instead, as the title indicates, she is cast in the intriguing role of his first wife. What of this young, handsome and rich Bluebeard, then? What motive lies behind his compulsive femicidal tendencies? This is precisely the question that this story aims to answer, from a more modern angle. The motive becomes apparent as soon as the “first wife” of the story opens the forbidden door. Without giving too much away, the “Bluebeard” of this tale—who, unlike his forever-archetypal wife, receives a name and a personality but still manages to embody the “catfish” par excellence—is perhaps as much a victim as he is a perpetrator, unwilling to choose between the veneer of “respectability” and his true self. Themes of coercive control and financial abuse are finely woven into the story, placing it firmly into the realm of present-day concerns.

“Flies”, the third story in the collection, is also the one closest to the horror genre. It follows a police officer who has transferred to a remote town that seems to be permanently swallowed by fog and inhabited by a close-knit community suspicious of strangers. From the outset, the police officer is viewed with mistrust by everyone he encounters, and, to the end, it remains unclear whether or not that suspicion is warranted. His reason for transferring to a place in the remote countryside from the lively Seoul is never revealed, and his character remains elusive. The town is “as quiet as the inside of a fish bowl”, and the inhabitants largely avoid interacting with the new police officer. The narrative is haunted by symbols of death and decay—maggots and flies—and the fog, “a natural part of the town”, makes the settlement difficult to navigate, at least for newcomers. Our main character moves as though through a nightmare, slowly, painfully, and in a disoriented fashion. In the end, it is up to the reader to decide the answer to the questions: “Is this man a victim of circumstance and misplaced fear, or has he always been a perpetrator?” and “What makes a monster?”

There is a fairly smooth transition between “Flies” and the next story, “Night Poaching”. If “Flies” is, in many ways, a story about predators, “Night Poaching”, which shares many of its themes, is a story about prey. In it, another police officer from the big city—a detective—is sent to the countryside; this time, to investigate a tricky murder case. The detective is headed to a place favoured by amateur hunters and surrounded by treacherous woods. In fact, as in any good fairy tale, the first warning that he gets is “not to go in the woods”. As Marina Warner notes, in traditional fairy tales, “enemies lurk in the woods” and the symbolic “wolf” always “comes in disguise and looks […] sweet and gentle” at first. That is certainly also the case in Ha’s story, where the detective will soon find that not everyone is who they appear to be, and that unwanted and unexpected “transformations” of a sort take place in the woods at night. As the title immediately suggests, hunters become poachers, but their sport is of an even darker nature than the reader might be led to expect. The driving force behind all the criminal goings-on is money, which offers seeming immunity to those who have it, and may strip those who don’t of their very humanity.

Human nature, with all its complexities, also lies at the core of “O Father”, a complicated tale about father-daughter relationships, whose premise is set from the opening paragraph. The narrator, speaking of her childhood, confides:

Back then, I had two fathers. One was my biological father, who, on a whim, quit his job at the company and lounged around all day, lying on his belly on the heated floor […] Then there was Father God, whose countless eyes roamed the earth, watching over his people’s every move from heaven above.

As “the oldest of three daughters”, the character-narrator strives to be her father’s favourite, but as the favourite, she ends up finding out more about her father’s life than she would have liked, “learning all his secrets”, which make her question her identity and her place in this small family world. The dual timeline—past and present—of this story renders it more complex, such that the strange memories of the heroine’s childhood are magnified, casting her present-day reflections in an uneasy light. Both in the past and in the present, mothers remain trespassers and foreigners to the father-daughter world, even where the father disappoints.

The next story, “Joy to the World”, takes the “Bluebeard” theme of the collection to a different level. A young woman has got engaged to her long-term partner, an expected and banal enough premise. Everything about their relationship seems solid and peaceful. However, she can’t shake off the feeling that there is something wrong about their ideal-seeming relationship:

Something seemed off. Not once had we ever fought, and we even liked the same foods. If anything, the fact that we didn’t have any problems seemed a problem.

Sure enough, she soon stumbles over the root cause of her unease: her fiancé’s circle of friends, all male, who she had no idea even existed. She comes home one evening to an impromptu get-together of the four men, who share an unspoken bond, and resemble nothing so much as a pack of wolves. The events of the night will alter her relationship with her fiancé and, very likely, the course of her life, as the “Bluebeard” of this tale turns out to be none other than, you’ve guessed it, toxic male friendship.

The theme of the “deadbeat man” from “O Father”, and that of uneasy romantic relationships from “Joy to the World”, are carried over into “The Dress Shirt”, the seventh story in the collection. Here, a young wife overhears her husband admitting something troubling to his male friends—that “he had always wanted to become a deadbeat”. His friends’ subsequent toast, “To deadbeats!”, renders the whole exchange all the more tasteless. From here on, in almost magical realist manner, the story reveals the husband’s descent into unemployment and increasing mood instability until he suddenly disappears from her life. But while he is physically gone, his presence is still felt in ghostly fashion, often through the unwanted presence of the shirts he left behind:

[His wife] pushed his shirts to the back of the closet, but for some reason, she continued to wake in the middle of the night. A chill, a kind of presence, lingered on her forehead. What had grazed her skin?

There is much more to this story than the disappearance of a deadbeat husband, but to tell more would be to spoil it. Suffice it to say that the ending is as heartbreaking as it is chilling.

“On That Green, Green Grass” is perhaps my favourite story of the lot, maybe because it is also the closest to a fairy tale in tone, atmosphere, and imagery. With subtle references to the Pied Piper of Hamelin, this is the story of a young family obsessed with perfection to the point of (self-)destruction. A young married couple yearns after that Hallmark-movie, picket-fence life, with a picture-perfect house, picture-perfect garden, and an adorable child to enliven that picture. They buy the house with the garden. They have the child. And yet, once all the pieces of the Hallmark postcard have been arranged: “The yard was curiously inert, as if something were missing. We tried rearranging the rocks, this way and that, but the yard felt empty all the same.” We are soon told, in a vague manner, that the problem lies with the much-wanted child, who does not meet the parents’ expectations: “What we had imagined was a child who would giggle and ride a bicycle, who would play ball on the grass. But our child sat under the parasol like a rock or sapling, more like a still-life object.”

For many pages, the reason behind the child’s seeming passivity is not revealed, but when it is, the story takes a truly dark turn. An even darker turn, that is, since, to “fix” the “picture” of their home, the parents had adopted an energetic rescue dog who had become the centre of their universe. Tragedy strikes when the dog gets stolen, along with all the other dogs in the neighbourhood, potentially to be sold as meat in certain restaurants. The child cannot compete for attention—he is too quiet and troublesome, as his parents obviously perceive him. His neglect stands at the core of this story, making it a hard read at times. Whether the ending is a happy or a sad one depends on where the reader chooses to stand. Ha certainly takes a lot of familiar fairy-tale elements—the witch, the evil stepmother, the “young prisoner in the tower” trope—and turns them inside out and upside down with much dexterity to uncover the dark realities that can (and undoubtedly sometimes do) underlie that picture-perfect life.

By contrast with this story, “A Quiet Night”, which follows it, is tame and palatable, yet it harbours its own disturbing implications. Still, it may also draw a wry smile of sympathy from the reader, as it is a story about coping (or failing to cope) with obnoxious neighbours, and who among us has not had to deal with such at one point in life? A couple’s new apartment is not the peaceful haven they had expected—all they can hear every night are the loud noises of the boisterous family living upstairs. When neither entreaties nor threats lead to any improvements, the husband—who, like the other deadbeat male characters in this collection, seems to have nothing better to do with his time—decides to take the issue into his own hands, leading to increasingly dramatic outcomes. This story also references the Pied Piper of Hamelin, though opting for a lighter tone, and focusing on the more sordid aspects of toxic social dynamics.

“Pinky Finger” is the only tale in the collection that features an explicit element of magic or the fantastic. This fantastical element works as a tension-diffuser in a plot in which the tension gradually escalates to an unexpected climax point. The premise of this story will resonate with any female-presenting person: Is it safe to get into a taxi by yourself, late at night, after having had a few drinks? The finger of the title is symbolic of the tension that pervades the narrative, and reminiscent of other lost or misplaced body parts that end up playing crucial roles in fairy tales. The strangest story in the collection, in my opinion, “Pinky Finger” has the psychedelic atmosphere of a dream that may or may not turn into a nightmare.

The final story, “Daisy Fleabane”, closes the circle that opened with “The Star-Shaped Stain”. The two stories are, in many ways, parallel, and many images and themes from the opening tale are repeated here, no doubt on purpose. From the very first sentence—“The fisherman is trying to drag me to the riverbank”—we know that this is going to be another tragic tale. The reveal is slow, skilfully dragged out, and as unsurprising as it is unsettling: here is another senseless tragedy, like so many we read about in the news, day in, day out. The initially mysterious character-narrator keeps telling us that “something’s wrong with the river”, that it’s “rotting”, and that sense of having to navigate a rotten world underlies the entire collection.

Marina Warner makes a very apt point when she writes that “this is the true spirit of the uncanny: the banal holds terrible secrets”.

The stories in Bluebeard’s First Wife are so enthralling precisely because they all successfully make this point. It is the small evils of life that can easily reach monstrous proportions if left unchecked—and, in today’s societies, they are often left unchecked, as even a cursory glance at the daily news will demonstrate. “Is this how we (still) want the world to go?”, Ha Seong-nan seems to ask us. Are we really OK with evil, with the dark side of human nature, having become so banal and easily accepted? Her anti-fairy tales speak against our desensitisation to these poorly kept “terrible secrets” of mundane harms.

How to cite: Cohut, Maria. “Fairy Tale, Dissected: Ha Seong-nan’s Bluebeard’s First Wife.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 2 Oct. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/10/02/first-wife.

Maria Cohut is a writer, journalist, and independent researcher living in Brighton, UK, with her collection of typewriters and her colony of Giant African Land Snails. She has a special interest in the Gothic, the weird, cross-genre literature, and topics surrounding themes of migration, identity, defamiliarisation and alienation. Her creative writing has appeared online and in print at Cephalopress, Flights, The Hyacinth Review, and The Hellebore, among others. Her first poetry pamphlet, Spatter Pattern, out from back room poetry in 2023, addresses the issue of gender violence by reimagining detective fiction tropes. Maria occasionally blogs about things unusual, forgotten, and obscure at Encyclopaedia Vanitatum: a dictionary of spectral curiosities. She can be followed online on Instagram at @mariac_phd. [All contributions by Maria Cohut.]

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