Romance with Daphne Du Maurier: Revisiting the Ruins of Englishness in Rebecca 5

Romance with Daphne du Maurier: Revisiting the Ruins of Englishness in Rebecca 5 Feminist Studies in English Literature Vol.19, No. 3 (2011) Romance with Daphne du Maurier: Revisiting the Ruins of Englishness in Rebecca* Youngjoo Kim (Sogang University) I. Romance with Daphne du Maurier Daphne du Maurier, a prolific British woman writer of the twentieth century, has long enjoyed national and international fame, particularly for her bestselling Rebecca.1 This novel, first published in 1938 and the most famous of du Maurier’s works, was soon adapted for stage and film and has fascinated readers and viewers alike. It * This work was supported by the Sogang University Research Grant of 2010. 1 Du Maurier’s novels have been translated into many languages and her stories have been adapted into renowned films including Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) and The Birds (1963) and Nicolas Roeg’sDon’t Look Now (1973). Many of her works were continuously dramatized for television, radio, and stage, all of which have enhanced her fame to a global reputation. She still remains one of Britain’s most popular novelists. The recent BBC reading campaigns, the Big Read in 2003 and Women’s Watershed Fiction in 2004, proveRebecca’s continuing popularity (Hansen 336-37). 6 Youngjoo Kim went through twenty-eight printings in four years in Britain alone. It has never been out of print since its first publication (Beauman 49). The novel was dramatized by du Maurier for stage in 1939, and the stage version ran for 380 performances in London’s West End after a first performance in Manchester in 1940 and went successfully on provincial tours throughout the duration of the Second World War (D’Monte 142). The Oscar winning success of Alfred Hitchcock’s film version of Rebecca in 1940 further fueled the enthusiasm of a mass audience. The novel was again dramatized in 1978 for a BBC TV series, contributing to the revival of the cult of the English country house in postwar Britain.2 Du Maurier is also known as a writer whodiscovered a romantic geography in Cornwall, the far west region of England. She describes the rustic landscape of Cornwall by the sea with a strong sense of place and presents it as a territory of the imagined Englishness of the past. In recent British culture, Fowey, a small town in Cornwall that London-born du Maurier adopted as her own, is now known as “du Maurier Country.” The Daphne du Maurier Festival of Arts and Literature, established in 1996, attracts literary tourists into the region, Menabilly in particular, a mansion in Cornish woods that is known to be transmuted into Manderley in Rebecca.3 The enduring popularity of du Maurier and her novels is 2 It was also adapted to the screen for the U.S. TV viewers in 1962 for NBC and again in 1997 for Masterpiece Theater on PBS. 3 According to Margaret Forster’s biography, Daphne du Maurier found Menabilly, a landed estate in Cornwall, in the late 1920s and, fascinated with its rugged, inhospitable landscape, she wrote to the absent landowner and asked permission to walk in the grounds. Many years later, du Maurier acquired the Romance with Daphne du Maurier: Revisiting the Ruins of Englishness in Rebecca 7 suggestive of her status as a classic cultural icon in the fields of publishing industry, media practices, and English heritage industry. Sally Beauman aptly observes that Rebecca has “passed from bestseller, to cult fiction, to cultural classic status”(50). The overwhelming commercial success and immediate appeal to the wide readership of Rebecca, however, are not matched by literary critical attention. Until recently the patronizing tag of romance novelist and parochially regional writer has been attached to du Maurier, leading to the critical neglect of the generically varied and discursively complicated nature of her writing. Superficially read, Rebecca is a cliché-ridden love story in which a young, innocent, faithful woman triumphs over an older, immoral, promiscuous woman by winning a man’s love and redeeming him from a treacherous past. A young, plain, and poor woman who is the narrator of the novel marries a rich aristocrat widower, Maximilian de Winter, and faces the dark secret of his past. Manderley, the stately ancestral home of the de Winters, becomes a house of secrets where the young bride is haunted by the ghostly presence of the first wife until she discovers that Maxim murderedRebecca to vindicate the authority and the respectability of the old aristocracy threatened lease of the house and restored the derelict mansion, making it her home for more than twenty years. As for Manderley, the house in Rebecca, two different country houses, Menabilly in Cornwall and Milton in Northamptonshire, provide the inspiration. Du Maurier explains that the site and the landscape of Manderley“was very much where Menabilly stands, but the interior, the rooms, the gallery, the ‘feel’ was . Milton,” a grand country house where she stayed as a child during the First World War (Enchanted Cornwall 19). 8 Youngjoo Kim by her sexual and moral licentiousness. This version, with echoes of fairy tales such as Cinderella and Bluebeard as well as Jane Eyre, emphasizes the elements of the very genre to which reviewers and critics consigned the novel to -- Gothic romance. On publication, Rebecca was promoted to booksellers as an “exquisite love story” with a “brilliantly created atmosphere of suspense”(qtd. in Beauman 49). Upon her death in 1989, du Maurierwas still hailed as “the last of the great romantic writers” and Rebecca as “the archetypal romantic novel”(Daily Telegraph, 20 April 1989; Guardian, 20 April 1989. qtd. in Light 158). From a close reading, however, Rebeccafails any attempts to consign the novel to a neat category of genre studies; it blurs the category of romance with elements of fairy tales, the Gothic, the family saga; it has elements of crime-novels, mysteries, and possibly ghost-stories; it can also be read in the lines of the tradition of the country house literature as well as the novel of domesticity and Bildungsroman. Despite her sophisticated engagement with various generic forms of the literary past, du Maurierwas not taken seriously until recently because she is mainly regarded as a popular authoress of romance for women. Considering the enduring popularity and cultural significance of Rebecca, du Maurier deserves a further critical revision for a place inliterary criticism and in wider cultural concerns.4 In Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism, 4 Public interest in du Maurierhas continued since her death in 1989, as proven in a series ofpublications of her biography, including Judith Cook’s Daphne: APortrait of Daphne du Maurier(London: Bantam, 1991), Margaret Forster’s Daphne du Maurier(London: Arrow, 1994), and FlaviaLeng’sDaphne du Maurier: A Daughter’s Memoir (Edinburgh and London: Mainstream Publishing, 1994). Alison Romance with Daphne du Maurier: Revisiting the Ruins of Englishness in Rebecca 9 Alison Light acknowledges generically subversive strains in Rebecca that involve “a reinterpretation of the idea of the woman’s novel”(159). Light redeems du Maurier as a writer who resists modern cultural connotations of the genre shaped between the warsand who writes “a better class of romance”(164). She argues that du Maurier returns to the romantic writing of the nineteenth century and “re-stage[s] a literary romanticism” by reviving the “language of sensibility” with “the primacy given to her protagonists’ thoughts and desires, to the idea of a tumultuous inner life and to a language of a developing selfhood”(165). From a materialist feminist stance, Light examines thoroughly du Maurier’s imaginative terrain of romance and offers one of the most inspirational studies of du Maurier’s writing. Light’s study of du Maurier in Forever England takes on great significance as it studies middle-class women writers’ share in reflecting and creating a literary response to modernity in Britain in the interwar years and paves a way for a further extended critical concern in redrawing the map of English literary culture with a focus onwomen’s domestic novels of the interwar years. In The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism, Nichola Humble rehabilitates the term “middlebrow” fiction as applied to the body of literature, mostly written and consumed by Light offered the pioneering analysis of du Maurier and established du Maurier’s work as a worthwhile subject for critical discussion in the 1980s. Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik also contributed to the study of du Maurier by presenting a fully extended reading of her Gothic fiction. Recently Ina Harberman considered du Maurier’s novels as middlebrow fiction that reveals the process of shaping mythical Englishness through memory and fantasy. 10 Youngjoo Kim women, that dominated the publishing market in the first half of the twentieth century but was neglected by literary critics and historians. Noting the nexus between gender, genre, and class, Humble observes that the feminine middlebrow in the period is “also very much the literature of the middle classes, paying a meticulous attention to their shifting desires and self-images”(3). Humble further argues that the feminine middlebrow, a product of the interwar years, renders a “powerful force in establishing and consolidating, but also in resisting, new class and gender identities”(3). She contends that the feminine middlebrow acquired a generic identity of its own that is established through a complex interplay between texts and the desires and self-images of its readers. Although Humble does not include du Maurier in the discussion of the body of middlebrow writing, the issues involved in the reassessment of the middlebrow women’s fiction during the interwar years offer valuable insights in examining du Maurier’s contestation of conflicting categories of female sexuality in the domestic space of the country house in Rebecca, a novel that certainly displays the generic hybridity.

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