SOURCE: Weigel, Marga I. “‘I Have No Language for My Reality’: The Ineffable as Tension in the ‘Tale’ of Bluebeard.” World Literature Today 60, no. 4 (autumn 1986): 589-92.

In the following essay, Weigel explores the role of communication and speech in Bluebeard.

Following acquittal on charges of murdering a prostitute, Felix Theodor Schaad, M.D., begins to search for the reasons why his life has been a failure. The public cross-examination in the courtroom is followed by Schaad's private cross-examination, an attempt to determine his guilt which ultimately drives him to confess the murder and shortly thereafter to attempt suicide. In the last analysis he is indeed convinced that he is guilty, although he has consistently maintained, both to the court and afterward to himself, that he did not commit the murder.¹

It may be of interest and perhaps not unimportant for Frisch's literary development that a variant of this...