Sheltering: Zan Romanoff Takes on the Myth of Bluebeard
On this episode of Sheltering, Zan Romanoff talks to Maris Kreizman about her new novel, Look, a coming-of-age story about a young woman in Los Angeles dealing with the spotlight of social-media, and the Internet’s facades of intimacy. Romanoff talks about missing out on giving a talk at her undergrad alma-mater, studying fairy tales, and what’s getting her through quarantine (it’s mainly frozen brownies). Romanoff’s local indie is Skylight Bookstore in Los Angeles; please order Look through their website or through Bookshop.
From the episode:
Maris Kreizman: I love that a big central point of your book focuses on the Bluebeard myth, and how that story is told, and in what contexts. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?
Zan Romanoff: It’s funny we were just talking about college, because that myth came back into my life when I was a freshman at Yale, in an intro course where we read fairy tales. So I guess this myth had been sitting in my mind for a long time—I’d been thinking about it forever and it was only when I started writing that I realized I didn’t even know why I was interested in that story or why it seemed important. So it was good to have to work that out, to understand how we tell stories about violence about women, but also about women’s curiosity.
There are a lot of questions around that story, and one of the big ones is, is it meant to be a warning to women? Is the moral of the story actually, don’t be so curious? Just follow your husband’s rules and live a peaceful life in the castle? So I was interested in how we tell these stories and how we have different messages encoded for different groups within them: a woman hearing that story could hear “don’t be so curious” but also, Bluebeard is not the hero of the story, so how could he be the one to set the moral?
