This finery from Bluebeard is not only a confinement for Carter’s narrator, it is a way for Bluebeard to dehumanize her. He dresses up his new wife in all this excess because he wants to own her. And if he owns his wives, he then has even more of a right to brutally destroy them. Throughout Carter’s version of myth, there are the motifs of red rubies and white lilies, which Bluebeard showers upon his potential next victim. He makes his new wife wear them before they first have sex and even “kissed those blazing rubies…he kissed them before he kissed [her] mouth.” (125). Both pieces of finery also forebode her death. We see that he orders her to place the red rubies around her neck before he intends to decapitate her and there are so many lilies
