"Writing Her/Self in Text and Image in Anglophone Women’s Life Writing" Texte, image et écriture de soi dans les récits de vie féminins de langue anglaise 28-29 September 2018, Université Nanterre Organizers: Amiens (Corpus), Évry (SLAM), Paris Nanterre (Crea), 2 Jean-Jaurès (Cas), Paris 8 (TransCrit), Paris Sud. Paper proposal Verbal-Visual Discourse and Counter-Discourse in Daphne du Maurier's 1977 Autobiography Xavier Lachazette*, Université ([email protected])

A picture, they say, paints a thousand words. But, as shown by the 33 photographs in Daphne du Maurier's autobiography Growing Pains: The Shaping of a Writer, visual elements have a way of conveying conflicting discourses that make textual analysis necessary for the reader to perceive their hidden layers of meaning and to question their seeming truthfulness. Thus, the touching or humorous quality of the first few pictures showing the three du Maurier girls and their parents is soon replaced by a feeling of unease when the writer reveals the chronic shyness which marked her early childhood, the cool antagonism which she felt on her mother's part, and her father's loving but increasingly prying authority. Likewise, if the various cars and boats pictured point to the modern and privileged lifestyle which the du Mauriers enjoyed, they also underline the writer's challenging of gendered roles and attitudes, together with her visceral need to be free and (literally) at the helm of her own life. As for social expectations of femininity, one senses du Maurier's ironical inclusion of two pictures, in which the "real" self which has just hooked a conger-eel in Cornwall bears no resemblance whatsoever to the striking beauty of the "social" self that she is expected to put forward in London1. Conversely, bearing out the complex relationship between text and image, the last picture in the autobiography resists the fairy-tale ending abruptly imposed by du Maurier after she has barely published her first novel, aged 25. How a free, self-reliant female long distressed by gender dysphoria will fare in marriage to a soldier is unclear and points to tensions within herself which du Maurier wishes to tone down. It is this interplay between verbal and visual elements, between discourse and counter-discourse, that I propose to study.

1 "[W]hen someone from a newspaper came up to Cannon Hall to photograph me I felt a fool. Was this the sort of thing most writers enjoyed?" Daphne du Maurier, Growing Pains: The Shaping of a Writer, London, Gollancz, 1977, p. 167.

*I teach 19th- and 20th-century British literature at , . I am a member of my University's 3L.AM research group, and an associated member of the ' CIRPaLL (formerly known as the CRILA), which focuses on short forms. I have read and published papers on short stories by Daphne du Maurier, W. Somerset Maugham, E.M. Forster, or Richard Ford at various universities (Panthéon-Sorbonne, Le Mans, Angers, Lille, , Orléans, Saint-Étienne, Avignon, etc.) I am currently at work on a book-length study of the short stories and war-time narratives of Daphne du Maurier.

