The five child-like wives have been thrust by Bluebeard into the familiar dark caverns under his castle; and, since they are the passive creatures of the former plays, they endure their incarceration without the least attempt to effect an escape. They merely wait, praying, singing, and weeping. They could not flee, they say; they have been forbidden to.
They are joined by Ardiane, the strong, wise woman of Maeterlinck's second period; and she delivers the poor little limp creatures. When they have the monster at their mercy, however, they are more inclined to fondle him than to harm him; and when Ardiane throws the door open, announces her intention of returning to freedom, and invites them to follow her, they remain at Bluebeard's side. The play has for its sub-title La Délivrance inutile (The Vain Deliverance); and it is to be interpreted as meaning that women are in great need of emancipation,[2] but that it is their nature to cling to the brute who oppresses them.
An unmistakable motive of the play is that sanctification of the flesh which emblazons the breviary of the second Maeterlinck. Ardiane bares the arms and shoulders of the timid wives. "Really, my young sisters," she says, "I do not wonder that he did not love you as he ought to have done, and that he wanted a hundred wives ... he had not one.... We shall have nothing to fear if we are very beautiful."[3]
Sister Beatrice is another work which is variously interpreted. To Mieszner, Sister Beatrice represents "the human soul prisoned in prejudice." To many who have read The Treasure of the Humble it will suggest itself that we have here a spectacle of the human soul remaining pure while the body it dwells in is steeped in sin. To Anselma Heine, the nun is "one who has been made richer, one who has lived"; and it may indeed be the poet's intention to show us that the flesh is holy and is not contaminated by fulfilling its functions. If the latter interpretation is correct, Maeterlinck has not enforced his meaning so convincingly as Gottfried Keller, the great Swiss writer, did in his short story "Die Jungfrau und die Nonne" (one of his Sieben Legenden).
In Maeterlinck's play the nun flees from the convent, seeks love and finds degradation, and returns, after twenty-five years, to find that her duties have all the time been performed by the Virgin Mary. In Gottfried Keller's story, Beatrice, the door-keeper of the monastery, feels her heart turn sick with longing for the world outside. "When she could no longer hold back her desire, she arose in a moonlit night of July ... and said to the statue of the Virgin Mary: 'I have served You many a long year, but now take the keys, for I cannot endure the heat in my heart any longer.'"
She goes out, and rests till dawn in a dim glade in an oak-forest. When the sun rises, a knight in armour comes riding along. He asks her whither she is bound, and she can only tell him that she has fled from the cloister "to see the world." He laughs at this, and offers, if she will go with him, to put her on the way. He lifts her on to his saddle, and merrily they gallop along; and when they come to his castle, Beatrice lies with him and stills her longing, and after some time he makes her his lawful wife, and she bears him eight sons.
But when the eldest son is eighteen, she arises one night from her husband's side, goes to the beds of her sons, and kisses them gently one after the other; she kisses her sleeping husband also; then she shears the long hair that had once folded him in flame, dons the nun's gown in which she had come to the castle so many years ago, and wanders in the howling wind and through the whirling autumn leaves to the convent. Here the statue of the Virgin tells her that She Herself has taken her place all the time; she has only to take up her keys and resume her duties where she had laid them down when she fled.
Ten years after her return the nuns make preparations for a great festival, and agree together that each one shall bring an offering to the Virgin. One of them embroiders a church banner, another an altar-cloth. One composes a Latin hymn, and another sets it to music. They who can do nothing else stitch a new shirt for the Christ-child, and the sister who is cook bakes Him a dish of fritters. Beatrice alone gets nothing ready: she is tired of life, and living more in the past than in the present. But when the festive day arrives and the nuns begin their chant, it happens that a grey-haired knight comes riding past the convent door with his eight stalwart sons, all on their way to the Emperor's wars. Hearing the service in the chapel, he bids his sons dismount, and enters with them to offer up a prayer to the Virgin. In the iron old man and the eight youths like so many angels in armour, Beatrice recognises her husband and her sons, and runs to them in the presence of all; and when she has confessed her story all agree that her gift to the Virgin is the richest offered that day.
Gottfried Keller's story is a glorification of family life. His nun is a healthy girl who needs children; and so does Heaven if the truth were known. In his story Beatrice never "falls." Her only mistake is when, driven by morbid superstition, she deserts her real duties to return to her imaginary ones. We never lose our respect for her. Maeterlinck's heroine, on the other hand, sinks lower than harlotry: when her body is beyond buying she sells her hand. She is a depraved being. It would be humbug to make out that the depravity of men forced her into such dirt. If she had been good, she could have died; if she is not good, what feelings is the drama to awaken in us? Feelings of pity perhaps, but not of sympathy; and when we have no sympathy for the subject of a drama, the drama is wasted. To glorify this woman's debasement, as Maeterlinck's play might seem to do, would be to wallow in morbid Christianity. But that would be a strange charge to bring against so anti-Christian a writer; and it is no doubt preferable to interpret the play by the theory of the soul's immunity from the body's pitch.
Maeterlinck's immediate source may have been a translation of the old Dutch version of the legend by L. Simons and Laurence Housman, which appeared in The Pageant for 1896, the year in which this now extinct magazine printed the poem Et s'il revenait and Sutro's translation of the Death of Tintagiles. Adelaide Anne Procter had made a poem out of the legend; John Davidson's splendid ballad (worth all Maeterlinck's play) is well known. The story was brought home to tens of thousands of spectators in London in 1911-12 by Max Reinhardt's staging of Karl Gustav Vollmoeller's wordless play The Miracle.