Reinventing "Bluebeard": A Sociopragmatic Study of the Folktale Genre

The transmission of folktales epitomizes social and cultural evolutions across time and place. Accordingly, tracing the journey of one folktale across different ages is bound to reveal much insight about the social and historical settings in which they were produced. This study attempts a sociopragmatic study of the folktale genre, which is an effective tool of binding the social and pragmatic dimensions of a text. In this study, Suzanne Eggins’ Systemic Functional Linguistic model of genre, “Genre: Context of Culture in Text”, is adopted as a sociopragmatic linguistic tool that illustrates how the genre schemata and realization patterns differ across the various versions of the same text. The folktale chosen for this study is ‘Bluebeard’, which was first documented in Charles Perrault’s (1697) collection of Fairy Tales: Stories or Tales from Past Times, with Morals. The study also traces how the folktale appears in The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm first published in 1812 and in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, first published in 1979. With almost a century separating each production, the genre of the folktale witnesses new adaptations and appropriations to suit the social setting and the authors’ communicative messages. The study concludes that social factors definitely play an important role in influencing the schematic structure and the communicative message intended. This shows that while the same folktale may be told and retold across the ages, it is a different story of different people.