Scheherazade and Bluebeard

‘Bluebeard’ arrived in England not long after T he Thousand and One Arabian Nights in theearly 1700s; and both ‘Bluebeard’ and the Arabian Nights came to England from the samesource: France. By the 1800s, ‘chapbook illustrations for ‘Bluebeard’ and for Arabian Nights were literally interchangeable’ between the two (Hermansson 2009, 58) . These storiesexemplify the transnational origins of the gothic trope of woman as ‘dead’ in marriage(Wallace 2016) and that Arab women are ‘survival writers’. This chapter traces motifs fromthese conflated tales onto contemporary Arab women’s instances of ‘bloody chambers’ whichregister the world-system and revive other (supressed) women’s stories.