safe now, unsafe later vs unsafe now, safe later
[ID: excerpt from the essay, "Bluebeard and the Beast: The Mysterious Realism of Jane Eyre" by Jessica Campbell. text reads:
"“Bluebeard” and “Beauty and the Beast” came to nineteenth-century British readers in chapbooks, gift books, and collections along with other seventeenth- and eighteenth- century French fairy tales; allusions to them appear relatively frequently in Victorian texts. In Jane Eyre these two tales drive both the plot structure and the characterization of Edward Fairfax Rochester as some combination of a Beast figure and a Bluebeard figure. Whereas the Beast is a character who initially appears beastly but is ultimately desirable to the heroine, Bluebeard is a character who is less obviously menacing at the outset but ultimately beastly on the inside. Fairy-tale terms, in other words, can articulate Jane Eyre’s dilemma. “Is he a Beast figure or a Bluebeard figure?” is a concrete, vivid way of asking, “Should I trust him? Should I stay with him?” Jane Eyre enacts a contest between “Bluebeard” and “Beauty and the Beast” paradigms in that Jane legitimately struggles to answer these questions about Rochester. And readers and critics are likely to answer them in conflicting ways—as, indeed, they do. The conflicting influences of these two fairy tales can account for some scholarly disagreement about the novel."
/end ID]
