| Summary: | This article identifies a critique of popular romance plots through unstable identities and disingenuous narrative perspectives in three Australasian Bluebeard tales. In these works by female writers in Australia and New Zealand, Bluebeard’s key tropes of fragmentation, repetition and revelation are used to dismember popular understandings of romantic love. Confronting both the limits of knowledge and the power of story to shape romantic relations, Margaret Mahy, Sarah Quigley and Marion Campbell each in different ways refashion the Bluebeard tale’s central images to complicate romantic love as a site of self-realisation. The resulting works ask us to consider how narratives and expectations of romantic love might be better “re-membered” to encourage relations of embodied compassion in contemporary Western culture.
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