Bluebeard In Bret Easton Ellis American Psycho

The fictive, Bluebeard has been categorised as a fairytale belonging to the Grimm’s Fairytale Classics, but yet the narrative content of murder and horror would suggest otherwise, when compared to more modest and cliché fairytales such as Thumbelina. However, by nature fairytales do tend to have a slightly darker tone given the mistreatment of some characters (Cinderella), or even their entrapment in a tower (Rapunzel). But Bluebeard’s murder of his six wives goes beyond the boundaries of a classical fairytale. Despite the text lacking the horrific detail of such modern and transgressive fiction, such as the lengthy descriptions in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, the content of each of these texts, at their lowest level is virtually the

But the most significant aspect to the structure is, how similarly fairytales mostly follow the same systematic structure in each tale, the range of themes in American Psycho follow a pattern, a pattern which is repeated throughout the text only with slight variations. The pattern falls in a way that gory or horror images appear regularly, and so when reading the text, a reader somewhat expects it, and the images lose their shocking value, so much so that the reader potentially ‘[starts] to perceive it as yet another tiresome, albeit disturbing, component of Patrick Bateman’s life.’ This pattern can also successfully be seen in the exercise, as she again suffers the same fate as most of the women in Bateman’s

In Bruno Bettelheim’s Uses of Enchantment, he notes that from a social theory perspective fairytales somewhat ‘legitimised violence’. He even further suggests that this legitimisation of the violence represented in these fairytales could potentially ‘provoke aggression and fear in children’, rather than the stories being used as a tool to console them. He also comments on the parental side of this argument, that this was or still is, a prevalent parental belief that children should be diverted from what troubles them most; ‘their formless, nameless anxieties, and their chaotic, angry or even violent fantasies’, fantasies that are somewhat put to action in American