The Gothic in Daphne Du Maurier's Fiction
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Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Bc. Nikola Havlová The Gothic in Daphne du Maurier’s Fiction Master’s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: prof. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., M.A. 2017 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………….. Author’s signature Acknowledgement I would like to thank my supervisor prof. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., M.A. for her helpful guidance and encouragement in those moments I was lacking confidence in my writing. I would also like to thank my parents for their constant support during my studies. Table of Contents 1. Introduction ................................................................................................................. 1 2. The Gothic Genre ........................................................................................................ 5 2.1 The Development of the Genre in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries ............ 5 2.2 The Twentieth-Century Gothic Criticism: Male and Female Gothic ....................... 11 2.3 The Woman’s Gothic Historical Novel: Contextualising Daphne du Maurier ........ 17 2.4 Daphne du Maurier and the Gothic ............................................................................. 21 3. The Gothic in Daphne du Maurier’s Fiction .......................................................... 26 3.1 Jamaica Inn: Revisiting the Nineteenth-Century Female Gothic .............................. 26 3.2 Rebecca: Becoming the ‘Other’ Woman ...................................................................... 37 3.3 My Cousin Rachel: Merging Male and Female Gothic ............................................... 47 3.4 The House on the Strand: Reconciling the ‘Unconscious’ Past .................................. 58 4. Conclusion ................................................................................................................. 67 5. Bibliography .............................................................................................................. 73 6. Summary .................................................................................................................... 77 7. Resumé ....................................................................................................................... 78 1. Introduction “How many selves do we contain, like Russian dolls concealed within one another?”1 Daphne du Maurier was a British woman writer born in 1907. She published her first novel at the age of twenty-four and continued writing for the nearly following fifty years. The range of her literary works is fairly wide and by 1989, the year she had peacefully died in her sleep, she had managed to finish numerous novels and short stories, a couple of biographies and plays and, last but not least, several useful companions concerning her life both as a person and a writer. Despite the great enjoyment of du Maurier’s works by the public that has lasted up until the present days because of the continued relevance of their subject matters, her name is indisputably remembered for her Rebecca (1938). On the one hand, this novel brought her a large commercial success and is now considered a modern classic; but on the other, the critics have labelled du Maurier as a writer of romance and they averted their attention from her subsequent works which, according to them, might have been enjoyable, but worth of no serious critical studies. It was not until the feminist re-establishment of Gothic studies in the 1970s which called for the re-evaluation of the major Gothic works written by female authors that has brought the critical interest also to du Maurier’s writing at last; for until the intervention of feminism, the dismissal of the Gothic genre since its origins in the eighteenth century as mere literature of popular taste led to its marginalization. In general, feminist criticism believed that women writers had been using the Gothic genre to express their equally marginalized female experience: they found the genre’s primary preoccupations with the distortion of various sorts of boundaries with its emphasis placed on the introspection of characters to suit their intentions perfectly. Yet most 1 Hill, Susan. Mrs de Winter. 1993. London: Vintage, 1999. 253. Print. 1 importantly, the feminist critics irretrievably gendered the Gothic genre and divided it into two sub-categories – Female and Male Gothic – that were defined by the author’s sex. The traditional Female Gothic plot then introduced a young heroine who struggled under the patriarchal dominion. Subsequently, for their focus on the introspective interpretations of characters, the feminist readings of Female Gothic were oftentimes combined with the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freund, Jacques Lacan, and others. As a writer, du Maurier has naturally adopted the Gothic genre which consciously manifests itself in her writings to a lesser or greater extent and it is the key determinant for the understanding of her works. The aim of this thesis is to show how du Maurier adapts the traditional Gothic plots in four selected novels by her in order to address her anxieties about her conflicted female identity that du Maurier relates to the questions of the female experience in general. These issues are discussed through her main characters who are subjected to their introspective searches for identity. Du Maurier’s main interest resides in the exploration of the relationship dynamics between the female and the male. She studies these two socially-constructed principles by writing both from the female and the male perspective – a skill that, on the one hand, makes her unique as a writer, but on the other, hard to categorize. Du Maurier’s combination of Male and Gothic plots can be linked to her personal life: her ambiguous sexuality and uncertainty about her female identity resulted in the creation of male and female protagonists that are haunted by the past, they possess an alter-ego personality and struggle to establish their identity – all of which are characteristic attributes of the Gothic genre. The thesis is divided into two main chapters. The goal of the first – theoretical – part is to explain the connection of the Gothic genre with women’s writing: it answers why women writers including Daphne du Maurier have readily adopted the genre in 2 their works and how their fiction subsequently became viewed as historical records of their female experiences. Moreover, this chapter consists of four sub-chapters. In sections 2.1 and 2.2 the development and literary criticism of the Gothic genre are traced from its beginnings in the eighteenth century to the time du Maurier was publishing her works. The following sections 2.3 and 2.4 offer a contextualisation of the literary experience of women writers in relation to Daphne du Maurier. The second main chapter is then devoted to the four selected novels written by du Maurier – Jamaica Inn, Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel and The House on the Strand – to which the method of close-reading is applied, with the focus on the main characters from the individual novels. The literary research combines various feminist and psychoanalytic approaches to the Gothic genre and employs them in the analyses of the aforementioned books. There are three secondary sources important for the close- reading of du Maurier’s works. Anne Williams’s Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic concerns itself with the nature of Gothic and defines Gothic plots as family plots, providing detailed study of Female and Male Gothic. Subsequently, Eugenia DeLamotte’s Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic explores Gothic literature – which primarily deals with the distortion of boundaries – in terms of the boundaries of self, with a special focus on female Gothic texts. Lastly, Avril Horner and Susan Zlosnik’s Daphne du Maurier: Writing, Identity and the Gothic Imagination interprets several of du Maurier’s works, drawing on du Maurier’s personal experiences that, in all probability, spurred her Gothic imagination in her writing. The four selected novels are listed chronologically in the thesis in order to map du Maurier’s development as a writer which underwent a shift away from the nineteenth- century influence of the Brontës apparent in Jamaica Inn and Rebecca. These two are clear examples of the traditional Female Gothic that follow the journeys of young 3 heroines in patriarchal worlds. On the contrary, My Cousin Rachel and The House on the Strand are narrated by male protagonists; while the former introduces a male counterpart to the female narrator of Rebecca and mixes Female and Male Gothic plots, marking a gradual deviation from the standard Female Gothic that ‘otherizes’ the female, the latter is loosely inspired by a topical issue of drug use with an added Gothic twist to it where male characters dominate the story, yet the female does not represent an explicit main threat here, as opposed to the other three novels. In the concluding part the thesis summarizes the findings and compares the individual novels, highlighting both their similarities and differences. This chapter furthermore presents the answers to the arguments proposed earlier in the introduction and finishes with the explanation of the significance of du Maurier’s works in terms of women’s writing in the twentieth century. 4 2. The Gothic Genre 2.1 The Development of the Genre in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth