The Gothic in Daphne Du Maurier's Fiction
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.
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2. The Gothic Genre
2.1 The Development of the Genre in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth
Centuries
The Gothic as a literary genre is a category that is hard to delineate. The quest for a single definition of the Gothic might become quite a strenuous process because there are as many definitions of the genre as there are its critics and interpreters. As Fred
Botting argues in The Gothic, the reason for this assumption stems from the fact that
Gothic is a hybrid form which disperses its features across different historical periods and literary works, where it undergoes various changes and adapts itself to other writing modes (9). Alternatively, as David Punter explains this phenomenon, “Gothic exists in relation to mainstream culture in the same way as a parasite does to its host . . .” (qtd. in
Wolfreys 66). In other words, the Gothic genre permeates through other literary forms and thus resists the establishment of an invariable set of conventions.
The origins of the Gothic genre date back to the eighteenth century. With his publication of The Castle of Otranto in 1764 Horace Walpole laid the groundwork for his successors who used their Gothic fiction to express their dissatisfaction with the current socio-cultural and political situation. In the Age of Enlightenment the existing political order became threatened. The French Revolution broke out in 1789 and a decade of fighting and uncertainty followed. As Julian Wolfreys suggests, “one aspect of the Gothic was its expression of inner fears, of fantasies, of visions, and of hauntings” (64). In this sense, the anxieties of the era have translated themselves metaphorically into many important works written at the time that are now classified as
Gothic; Ann Radcliffe published, among others, The Mysteries of Udolpho and The
Romance of the Forest and Matthew Lewis wrote The Monk. Furthermore, the haunted
5 castle surrounded by a wild landscape became the central feature of a Gothic story, and within its walls a horrifying secret was concealed.
However, despite the eager reception by its readership, the Gothic genre was not ascribed any serious literary value during the eighteenth century. With the rise of the
English novel a certain literary standard was established: the novel was supposed to contain the morals and instructions that would guide its readers to become decent citizens. On the contrary, the Gothic texts opposed everything what the novel stood for because they “subvert[ed] the mores and manners on which good social behaviour rested” (Botting 3). Therefore, due to its engagement with the supernatural which blurred the boundaries of reality and defied reason and its anti-establishment beliefs, the
Gothic genre could be interpreted as “the genre of negativities, of the un-real, the anti- rational, [and] the im-moral” (Becker 22). As such, the genre assumed the antagonistic position to the promoted novel of morals.
Undoubtedly, the marginalization of Gothic writings also originated in the fact that their targeted audience consisted mainly of female readers. These women were usually middle-class and reading represented a past-time activity for them. Literature was produced in masses during the eighteenth century and women, by reading the repugnant Gothic stories in large numbers, thus unintentionally contributed to building the genre’s negative reputation. The reason for their great enjoyment of Gothic works resided in the fact that the Gothic novel was primarily a Gothic romance. The crossing of genres came into play here, as suggested earlier, and the two literary traditions –
Gothic and Romantic – became intertwined. Unfortunately, this interconnection brought the ultimate downfall to the Gothic, until the genre was re-evaluated at the end of the twentieth century.
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As Brendan Hennessy explains, “the term ‘romantic’ has been obscured and devalued by its loose application to literature of all ages that emphasizes imagination and the subjective at the expense of the rational and the ordered, which follow rules”
(337). Moreover, a romantic tale commonly featured a young heroine in striving for the male protagonist’s affection. This premise of an alleged superficial love-story discouraged the critics from paying closer attention to such work that, according to their beliefs, would only appeal to the popular taste. Consumed mainly by female audience who took pleasure in the genre’s preoccupation with the individual’s feelings, the
Gothic was rendered “an idle waste of time” (Botting 6).
However, Gothic’s affinities with Romanticism were of a greater significance than the critics were willing to acknowledge at first. In the late eighteenth century, the great poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth set off the Romantic literary tradition in England. Some of the ideas of Romanticism as presented in their poetry and in the works of their contemporaries (Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley,
John Keats and William Yeats) were favoured by the Gothic authors; consequently, the
Gothic novel went through “a widespread shift away from neoclassical ideas of order and reason, toward romantic belief in emotion and imagination” (Hume 282). The emphasis was put on the protagonist’s introspection. In addition to that, the authors used their imaginative powers to describe the beautiful, yet wild settings of the story. Their aim was to create a chilling atmosphere that would hold the readers’ attention and make them invested in the characters’ internal struggles.
Indeed, atmosphere, as Robert D. Hume observes, is the key element of any
Gothic novel (286). As it supposes to involve the reader on the emotional level, the
Gothic tale usually invokes either the sense of terror, or horror. In her article “The
Supernatural in Poetry” Ann Radcliffe, one of the leading figures of Gothic literature in
7 the eighteenth century, clarified the distinction between these two sensations; while the former “expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life,” the latter
“contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them” (168). In other words, terror anticipates some frightening experience that causes one to become anxious, while horror is rather a physical reaction of revulsion that comes over an individual after experiencing something horrifying.
In fact, both Gothic and Romantic writers employed this narrative technique, yet with a different goal in mind; “whereas the [Gothic] novelists exploited the characters for dramatic and horrific effects, the romantic poets philosophized about the ways in which beauty associates with suffering” (Hennessy 336). Robert D. Hume explored the links between the Gothic and Romantic forms more closely. He arrived at the conclusion that even though the two traditions share certain characteristics and they also emerged around the same time, the main conflict of these ideologies lies in providing answers to the questions both the Gothic and Romantic author proposes; while the
Romantic poet offers an imaginative solution to the doubts about the “insufficiency of reason” and “complexities of life” by creating a higher order, the Gothic novelist leaves these questions unanswered (290). Indisputably, this polarity constituted one of the chief reasons of why Gothic works remained merely the fiction of popular taste, while the Romantics were deemed “great poetry” (Williams 4).
After the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1818 and Charles
Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer in 1820 one period of Gothic’s development has come to its end. In the nineteenth century when the socio-cultural situation of the
Victorian England was shifting again, the Gothic novel lost its wide range of followers from the preceding century. With the rise of industrialism and materialism and increased class-consciousness the city became the threat instead of the haunted
8 mansion; the central motifs became the haunted minds of individuals and family histories. As a result, the Romantics’ preoccupation with reason and Gothic’s wild settings fell by the wayside (Botting 74). Their place was taken up by the appearances of doubles and ghosts2 as a response to the interests of the Victorians in science. Some of the most important works produced during this historical period were Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights (1847), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), R. L. Stevenson’s The
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian
Gray (1891), Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) and Bram
Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Other authors associated with the engagement of Gothic such as Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Edgar Allan Poe were also publishing during the nineteenth century.
Concurrently, the question of sexuality was paid attention to in Victorian writings because, as Andrew McLaren suggests, sexuality came to be “a key determinant of one’s own personality” (qtd. in Davison 125). In this sense, the position of women in society came to be under closer scrutiny than it had been up until that point. Davison studied Victorian Gothic in relation to gender and divided the nineteenth-century literature into three categories: Gothic Social Realism (127), Gothic Sensation fiction
(132) and Fin-de-siècle Fantastic Gothic (136). Each of these categories dealt with the individual’s personality in a different manner, but they were all drawing on the newly arisen ideologies and movements that concerned the notions of identity and sexuality, such as the Woman’s Question, the first-wave feminism, the ‘New Woman’ and the dismissal of same sex desire. These theories challenged the concept of the nuclear family much valued by the Victorians.
2 The ghost story enjoyed its fame in the nineteenth century in particular and it could be categorized as a sub-genre of the Gothic novel. The ghosts existed in various forms in the stories, such as doubles, zombies, or a supernatural entity, which remained unexplained, thus blurring the boundaries of reality.
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As established in the beginning of this chapter, the Gothic genre is a hybrid form not easily defined. Unquestionably, the Gothic blurs the boundaries not only of the genre itself but also in many other aspects; it unsettles the line between reality and supernatural, past and present, and the individual and society/family; last but not least,
Gothic deals with the boundaries of self that shape one’s perception of identity and sexuality. Furthermore, writers of different historical periods worked with the genre differently; “for the images and figures that are reiterated constitute a place where cultural fears and fantasies are projected. Thus similar figures have different significances, depending on the culture that uses them” (Botting 13). Yet, one connecting characteristic of all Gothic writings can be distinguished: Gothic fiction crosses the boundaries in order to point out certain socio-cultural issues with the aim to provoke some type of a reaction in its readers.
As Ardel Thomas suggests, “[t]he strength of Gothic rests upon its being a liminal genre . . .” (142-3). In this sense, the marginalization and depreciation of the Gothic novel since its origins provided the Gothic writers with a certain level of freedom to express ‘the unspeakable’. Assuming the position of the “alluringly undomesticable
‘[o]ther’ of a petrified cultural order” (Baldick and Mighall 269), the Gothic is a genre of dualities that exist in the text to upset both the socially-constructed and literary norms. One of the opposing concepts takes up the position of ‘the other,’ which stands for the rejected, the unacceptable. In result, Gothic becomes defined in general terms as
“encounters with ‘otherness’” (Meyers 2).
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2.2 The Twentieth-Century Gothic Criticism: Male and Female Gothic
The early twentieth-century Gothic fiction carried over the forms and styles from the late nineteenth century: haunting pasts, scientific experiments and the concerns about human identity still prevailed and they enabled the Gothic horrors and terrors to manifest themselves in such writings (Botting 103). During the two World Wars, such anxieties were intensified. In the 1930s, Gothic criticism entered the academic sphere.
Two prominent figures who influenced this change were Montague Summers, a vampirologist, and a surrealist Andrè Breton. Both of them based their arguments around modern romanticism and ascribed no relevance to Gothic fiction because it was built on fantasy and dreams (Baldick and Mighall 269). Thus the Gothic genre continued being discarded. Additionally, Anne Williams observes that twentieth- century prominent literary critics such as F. R. Leavis, Ian Watt and Wayne Booth exclude any notion of Gothic from the English canon, approving only of realistic forms and plots (1). It was not until the 1970s with the intervention of feminism that new topics of interest originating in unequal approaches to male and female Gothic texts were brought up to light. Thus, the major classic Gothic works needed to be re- analysed.
In 1976, Ellen Moers published her Literary Women where she claimed the authorship and propriety rights for women writers; moreover, she stated that their authentic female experience was documented in their writing and, most importantly, it is worthy of critical studies. In her chapter titled “Female Gothic” Moers ascribed the origins of Gothic to Ann Radcliffe, making the genre relentlessly female. Moers defined
Female Gothic as “the work that women writers have done in the literary mode, since the eighteenth century, [which] we have called the Gothic” (90). She completely inverted the popular belief that Horace Walpole was considered the father of Gothic
11 because to Moers, every work written by a female author was Gothic in its essence; it captured the fears and anxieties felt by women throughout the centuries that were shaped by specific historical circumstances.
Fear, indeed, she perceived as the one defining feature of the Gothic texts.
However, this interpretation is quite vague and needs further exploration. In her study of
Female Gothic, Moers focuses on four women writers whose female experience was unique in their writing – Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë and Christina
Rossetti. Radcliffe, according to Moers, established Gothic in one of the modes that would be followed henceforth: a young girl at the centre who is both “persecuted victim” and “courageous heroine” (91). Shelley’s Frankenstein is a ‘birth myth’ narrated as “Gothic fantasy” (93). Brontë’s Wuthering Heights becomes a story of terror, ghosts, family doom, the revenge motif and the incest (100). Lastly, in Rossetti’s poem “The Goblin Market”, as well as in Wuthering Heights “childish cruelty and sexuality come to fore” (105).
Publishing her study in the 1970s on the background of the Women’s Liberation
Movement in America and the second-wave feminism, Moers determined the course in which the Gothic criticism was to continue. Gothic has become irretrievably gendered, thus the sex of the author would play a significant role in a critical analysis.
Undoubtedly, the feminist critics represented the most active group out of all. They readily supported Moers’s arguments proposed in her Literary Women, and the female
Gothic texts served them as the most authentic source for their discourse.3 Primarily,
3 Some of the major contributions to the Female Gothic debate were Juliann Fleenor’s The Female Gothic (1983) exploring how women used Female Gothic to describe their female experience within the patriarchal society, Kate Ferguson Ellis’s Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (1989) concerning the relation of gender and domesticity to capitalism, Eugenia DeLamotte’s Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic (1990) placing the boundaries of self in the centre of Gothic, and Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (1977) tracing the women writers’ experience since the nineteenth century.
12 they mapped the history of Gothic starting with Ann Radcliffe and re-visited all the major Gothic works that have been either undermined by the previous literary critics, or they were praised for the wrong reasons.4 As such, feminism helped institutionalize the
Gothic studies (Fitzgerald 14) because for the entirety of its two-century existence the
Gothic genre has been disregarded for its alleged inadequacy. The feminist interest in
Gothic works during the 1970s have brought the academic attention of not only feminist critics themselves, but also those newly established fields such as gender studies, queer studies, post-structuralism, semiotics and many others.
However, during the 1990s, doubts about the relevancy of Female Gothic studies begin to arise. The stereotypical concept of the naïve heroine that has to defy the patriarchal dominion, which represented the principal concern for Gothic feminism, appeared to exhaust itself and become repetitive. Some of the feminist critics as Diane
Long Hoeveler warned against the ideology of ‘victim feminism’ which was interpreted by her as “female power through pretended and staged weakness” (qtd. in Fitzgerald
20). Alternatively, Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik argued that “by 2002 the categorization of Female Gothic was being seen in some quarters as reductive in its tendency . . . to psychologically universalize female experience . . . (Horner and Zlosnik
2006, 113). By perceiving the heroine as a helpless and passive character incapable of escaping her fate predestined by her biological sex these feminist readings unintentionally projected this image onto a contemporary woman – an image they were so vigorously attempting to fight.
Gothic feminism with its focus on the characters’ internal and emotional processes drew on psychoanalysis and these two approaches became inseparable when
4 Most frequently, the biggest misjudgement of women writings was to recognize them merely as a popular tale of ‘romance’ that would appeal to a female reader only, but would not be worthy of an academic analysis.
13 applied to the Gothic texts. Psychoanalysis shares the same interests with Gothic fiction because it investigates how one’s assumptions about the world are oftentimes irreconcilable with what one experiences. The feminist interpretations of Gothic followed the psychoanalytic studies of Sigmund Freud, mainly the theory of the
‘uncanny’. Gothic takes delight in creating the atmosphere of darkness and isolation which the ‘uncanny’ thrives in; those motifs are central to the Gothic.5 Furthermore, as suggested by Michelle A. Massè, Freud gathered information from works of literature and clinical experience, and he named certain character types – the most popular archetype was the ‘Persecuted Maiden’ who became the essence of Female Gothic
(312). This character of the young heroine embodies all the difficulties caused by the patriarchal ideology of the world; and in result, the woman is placed into the position of
‘the other.’
The theory of ‘abjection’ examined by Julia Kristeva deals with the female ‘other’ as well. She proclaims that this perception of a woman resides in the pre-oedipal myths.
Kristeva goes on to argue that our society is inhibited by two powers which try to exist in mutual agreement; one of them, the masculine, apparently victorious, confesses through its very relentlessness against the other, the feminine, that it is threatened by an asymmetrical, irrational, willy, uncontrollable power” (70). The “other” power is a woman whose influence must be suppressed. That woman also experiences ‘abjection,’
“an Other [that] has settled in place and stead of what will be [‘her’]”. As such, the
‘abject’ represents something that the woman does not identify herself with; it
“precedes” and “posseses” her (Kristeva 10). Thus, the female ‘other’ is a culturally
5 The ‘uncanny’ in Freudian theory symbolizes an idea of something familiar which becomes foreign (or unheimlich) and it is triggered by one’s repressed memories. One experiences the ‘uncanny’ in adulthood when one is reminded of events that had happened earlier in one’s life. Moreover, it stresses the importance of ‘the unconscious’ that plays a vital role in one’s psyche. In Gothic literature, ‘the uncanny’ imitates the mysterious.
14 inherent idea which has been thoroughly explored by Gothic women writers who try to explore their experience from the position of their ‘abjected’ selves.
Moers’s establishment of Female Gothic naturally led to the definition of its male counterpart. The gender of the writer provided the primary distinction between the two traditions. Nevertheless the traditions also varied in their narrative strategies, types of plots and the handling of the supernatural. Anne Williams wrote a thorough study Art of
Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic where she, among other issues, clarifies the distinguishing characteristics between Male and Female Gothic. In brief summary,
Female Gothic features a young heroine persecuted by a male suitor or a tyrant, it explains the supernatural, focuses on terror (an imagined threat), and demands a happy- ending (usually marriage). On the contrary, Male Gothic revolves around a male protagonist (a hero/villain), the supernatural is left unexplained and presented as part of reality, it focuses on horror (description of vivid imaginary, such as bleeding portraits or rotten corpses), and the plot is a tragic one ending with the protagonist’s failure and possible death (102-4). Moreover, both traditions deal with femininity: Male Gothic explores it through the depiction of a madwoman as standard perception of the female principle, whereas Female Gothic serves the woman writer as a platform for the depiction of her female experience with all its containments (Williams 175).
Williams further draws attention to the vital aspect of Gothic: the past which creates a certain pressure point that the Gothic story builds upon and is deeply rooted in the patriarchal structure. Patriarchal family becomes the central unit from which all conflicts derive; in result, the Gothic plots are family plots in their essence (22), where patriarchal family serves as the idealized model. Both Male and Female Gothic have been equally concerned with the familial affairs. While Male Gothic focuses on the maintenance of legitimate descent and inheritance and perceives women as threats to
15 the patriarchal establishment, Female Gothic explores the woman’s struggle for her realization that is conditioned by male dominance. As such, the Gothic historical novel brings the ghosts of the past back to life and it does so through the usage of certain narratives techniques, such as flashbacks, dreams or the unreliable first-person narration. This past needs to be acknowledged and seen to in order for the characters to comprehend their present situation and be able to move on; yet most importantly, the past hides the key to the understanding of one’s self. In this sense, the past becomes ‘the other’ (Williams 32).
Certainly, when it comes to Female Gothic, the readings vary in how they approach the plot and the male/female dynamics. Gothic feminism that re-opened the debate about Gothic fiction is deemed too melodramatic at times and thus disparaged.
Williams, too, tends to be apprehensive about certain feminist interpretations of Female
Gothic because, in her understanding, the feminist critics missed the most crucial point of a Female Gothic story: “its constructive and empowering function for its female readers,” who would derive from the text that there is more to the female self than just resigned acceptance of ‘the other’ role (Williams 138). On the other hand, she supports the feminist argument that Female Gothic is more revolutionary than Male Gothic. She explains that the word ‘revolution’ means ‘to turn around’ etymologically and female
Gothic writers by writing from the position of ‘the other’ have broken the rules and
“creat[ed] a new game with different rules altogether” (172).
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2.3 The Woman’s Gothic Historical Novel: Contextualising Daphne du
Maurier
Going back to Ellen Moers’s original interpretation of Female Gothic, the works of women writers document the female experience. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the banishment of women from the political sector and their treatment as the inferior sex have forced the literary women to escape into their fictional worlds, which provided them with the opportunity to vocalize their frustration. It comes as no surprise that women writers have naturally adopted the form of the Gothic novel because it allowed them to “speak the ‘I’ in a world in which the ‘I’ in question [was] uncomprehending of and incomprehensive to the dominant power structure”
(DeLamotte 166). In other words, as Margaret Atwood puts it, “[i]t is in the Gothic novel that women writers could first accuse the ‘real world’ of falsehood and deep disorder” (qtd. in Massè 315).
Unquestionably, the literary women serve as a useful source of historical evidence of the female experience. Throughout the centuries, women were not deemed an eligible part of history and were therefore excluded from its records. However, since the late seventeenth century, fiction represented “one of the primary ways in which women writers have written history, and written themselves into ‘[h]istory’” (Wallace 2013, 2-
3). Writing from the position of the ‘other’ their works mostly took the form of the
Gothic novel, an ‘other’ genre itself; joining the Gothic with the historical novel was then a natural choice. Their major linking characteristic resides in their seemingly incompatible representation of the past; whereas Gothic attempts to reconcile the past in relation to the present and is not a proper history, the ‘historical’ refers to the realistic approach that avoids any supernatural involvement.
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As Wallace suggests, “the writers of the inter-war period were concerned especially to locate themselves in relation to the nineteenth-century women writers, particularly the Brontës . . .” (Wallace 2000, 8). They wanted to define themselves within a certain tradition and subsequently to set aside from them, to a certain extent.
Elaine Showalter ascribes this tendency to the fact that women writers have been struggling to establish their autonomy – personal, as well as artistic – and they thus
“reasserted their continuity with the women of the past . . .” (302). Apart from many biographical or critical essays about the nineteenth-century female authors, fiction plots became recycled, too. Unquestionably, Jane Eyre was the most frequently re-written story because of its prototypical romantic plot related to patriarchy and class- consciousness.6 Wuthering Heights, another story commonly labelled as romance provided the successive female authors with inspiration about male and female relationships for their work. Consequently, the first half of the twentieth century records a significant increase of women writers who adopted the historical novel modelling themselves mainly on their nineteenth-century predecessors.
In her study The Woman’s Historical Novel 1900-2000 Diana Wallace delineates the historical novel. According to her, a novel meets the requirements of being
‘historical’ if: it sets its story in a specific historical period; it deals with a certain historical event; it relates the story to the personal life of somebody (or the writer); or in its intertextual references to earlier texts (4). Oftentimes the historical novel became hybridised with other genres, such as the Gothic, the detective story or romance. This also constituted the chief reason why the historical novel appealed to women writers, while men authors rather turned away from it because of its negative connotations with the ‘popular’ or ‘escapist’ literature. Furthermore, the term ‘historical novel’ was
6 Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (1938) and Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1966) are just the two examples.
18 commonly interchangeable with ‘historical romance’ – a love-story. Daphne du
Maurier, being labelled a ‘romantic writer’ herself, attempted to clarify the misconception of romance. According to her, a romance has nothing to do with love but it is “a tale with scenes and incidents remote from everyday life, and a romancer [is] a fantastic liar;” to prove her point she points out that Wuthering Heights, which has been claimed a great romantic story, contains more savagery than love (du Maurier 2005,
107).
Indeed, female Gothic texts have always been labelled as ‘escapist,’ meaning either popular literature, or the writer’s want to escape into the world of fiction.
However, Susanne Becker calls for the redefinition of escapism when applied to certain female texts. In her terms, “escapism deal[s] with cultural constraints by drawing attention to their existence and ideological construction rather than just running away,” and as such, it is also concerned “with the idea of a ‘Woman’ and its cultural containment” (34). Alternatively, du Maurier distinguishes between two kinds of writer’s escape: firstly, the writer yearns to escape from his everyday life but he is not aware that he truly runs from himself, and secondly, the other writer desires to send a message through his work that might possibly change the world of its readers (du
Maurier 2004, 64-5).
Jane Eyre represents one of the classic examples of escapist literature as described by Becker and du Maurier’s latter categorization. Brontë attempts to depict a contemporary woman within her “cultural containment” as follows:
Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel, they need
exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer
from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is
narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow creatures to say they ought to confine themselves to
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making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. (Jane
Eyre 112)
In this passage Jane shares her aggravation with the imbalanced distribution of gender roles and demands the same opportunities for women. Eventually, her journey leads to her emotional liberation, yet she finds her place beside the man she loves and accepts domesticity and thus falls back into her pre-destined role; but she is aware now.
Furthermore, Jane represents the ‘travelling heroine’ Ellen Moers had in mind when she invented the term Female Gothic, which originally referred to Radcliffe’s Emily from the Mysteries of Udolpho. As Elaine Showalter explains, Charlotte Brontë introduced a romantic heroine that followed a new pattern: she “sobbed, struggled and rebelled” and women could share their suffering with her (103). Showalter put this type of a heroine in opposition to the so called ‘inspiring professional role-model’ created by Jane Austen and George Eliot and these were the ones to be followed.
Undoubtedly, being a woman has always represented a challenge and many times the unstable social circumstances led to the identity confusion. During the inter-war period, the gender roles were shifting and domesticity, the highly praised Victorian value, was re-introduced. Despite the fact that significantly larger number of women had access to higher education (yet, these were mainly upper-class or aristocratic women), they were encouraged to get married and have children. The advertised ‘good’ woman “was presented as content with her domestic lot as wife and mother” [and] middle-class women then ought to embody “a role of maternal femininity” (Horner and
Zlosnik 1998, 18). However, in the second half of the twentieth century, this model became threatened by the introduction of the pill for girls, the age of consent was lowered and “sex instruction [was] given in schools, with diagrams on the blackboard”
(du Maurier 2004, 47). All these shifts inevitably found their way into women’s fiction.
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These female authors, with Daphne du Maurier among them, readily adopted the Gothic conventions which allowed them to explore the feminine in contrast to the masculine.
2.4 Daphne du Maurier and the Gothic
Daphne du Maurier was publishing her works from 1931 to 1977 and her writing career “spanned a time of great change in literary fashions and tastes and in the growth and importance of women’s fiction” (Forster 415). Throughout her entire life she tried to get rid of the ‘romantic’ label which was given to her by literary critics who completely misinterpreted her writing and they praised it for reasons du Maurier did not want to be celebrated. She carried on an older tradition majorly influenced by the
Brontës whom she admired and whose liking for the Cornish landscape transferred itself into du Maurier’s fiction as well, giving rise to the establishment of Cornish Gothic.
Generally, her stories are “atmospheric, with a strong sense of place” (Forster 42). Her novel Rebecca, said to be written in the Brontës’ tradition, is now considered a modern classic; and as much as the Brontës became re-written, the story of Rebecca gave birth to many sequels and stories based on du Maurier’s work.7
In the 1990s, Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik analysed du Maurier’s fiction and they arrived at the conclusion that she, as a writer, defies any categorization. In spite of her undeniable affinity with the Gothic which consciously appears in all her works, to lesser or greater extent, du Maurier does not seem to fit the Female Gothic classification as the feminist critics delimitated it; for although du Maurier uses the classic plot with the young heroine confined in a house of secrets in Jamaica Inn or Rebecca, the novels
7 Susan Hill’s sequel Mrs de Winter (1993) and Sally Beauman’s companion novel Rebecca’s Tale (2001) are two novels officially authorized by the du Maurier Estate. Furthermore, Antonia Fraser wrote a short story called “Rebecca’s Story” and Mary Wings (1992) and Maureen Freely (1996) adapted du Maurier’s Rebecca to more contemporary times.
21 do not follow the Female Gothic formula too strictly. It is mainly due to du Maurier’s usage of both female and male narrators that causes the major confusion about her categorization. Elements of Female and Male Gothic are mixed in her works; for example, the young narrator of My Cousin Rachel is a male counterpart to the female narrator of Rebecca, having characteristics commonly ascribed to the Female Gothic heroine. Therefore, Horner and Zlosnik proposed that attention needs to be also paid to du Maurier’s personal identity which “involved a negotiation between what she perceived as the male and female aspects of herself in a continually self-conscious performative process of gender identification” (Horner and Zlosnik 2006, 113).
Du Maurier’s primary impulse to write was to explore male and female relationships. She always felt uncertain about the concept of love claiming “there is no such thing as romantic love” (du Maurier 2005, 99). Her scepticism stemmed from observing her own parents; for despite being devoted to Muriel until his death, Gerald du Maurier, a famous theatre actor and Daphne’s father, had numerous affairs with other women. Muriel, Daphne’s mother, knew that Gerald would always come back to her and she tolerated him his escapades, as long as they did not publicly humiliate her.
As a result, Daphne’s early short stories portrayed men as bullies and seducers and women as weak creatures continuously betrayed and dominated (Forster 42). In them she stressed “masculine heartlessness” and “feminine helplessness” (Forster 67).
However, after publishing My Cousin Rachel in 1951, her characters underwent an apparent shift: the women were no longer exploited and took control over the men who became easily deceived by them (Forster 260). Additionally, her male characters are never heroic because they always depend on another, usually older man, while her female protagonists struggle alone (du Maurier 2004, 58-9).
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Another theme that found its way into du Maurier’s fiction was rooted in her
ambivalent sexuality. She always felt ambiguous about her identity and about being a
woman; in result, her characters have an alter ego that endangers their existence and
threatens their mental sanity. This split in du Maurier’s personality resided in her
unrelenting desire to be a boy. When she was a little girl she envied the boys their
freedom and opportunities, but later on in her life, her ‘boy-ish’ nature became
manifested in her affection for the same sex. Regardless of her ‘Venetian tendencies’,
as she called her lesbian desires, she got married to an army senior officer and deputy
commander Tommy ‘Boy’ Browning. Growing up in conservative Britain, du Maurier
would never admit being a lesbian and nobody, apart from a limited number of people,
knew about her same-sex relationships while she was alive. This ‘No. 2 personality’8
that projected into her writing and differed from her real-life self she came to call the
‘boy-in-the-box,’ and was continuously making effort to keep him locked up. Writing
then served her as a tool for exploration of her identity and it helped her cope with her
conflicting inner selves. She stated: “The writing me is different from the living me,
yet they’re both mixed-up. If writing goes there would be no longer any reason for
living” (du Maurier 2004, 162).
Throughout her life, du Maurier had several affairs with men and women
(although these were deeply emotional rather than physical) but she believed family to be the most important structure in life; similarly to Williams’s perception of family as the centre of Gothic plots, Daphne du Maurier considered the family unit the highest law of society and, according to her, its neglect would cause society to disintegrate. She
8 Du Maurier was fond of reading Carl Jung who described the psychoanalytic phenomenon of an individual having two separate personalities – No.1 and No. 2. No. 2 could be loosely compared to Freud’s alter ego and together with No. 1 self they should exist in mutual agreement.
23 was apprehensive of the newly emerged woman who was greatly disillusioned by her increasing independence and she proclaimed:
Nothing but the family bond will hold men and women together. Already women, emerging from
centuries of submission, fret against their more passive role, demanding equality in all things as
their right, but in achieving this they lose their first purpose in life, which is to preserve, to
maintain the family. (du Maurier 2005, 115-16)
In contrast to her predecessors who wanted to diminish the male dominance and escape the roles of mothers and wives, du Maurier advocated the importance of family; thus in her stories, her heroines might rebel but they cannot resist the established order in the end. In other words, du Maurier “press[es] the reader to escape bounds while at the same time urging an acceptance of how things are and clinging, safe, to familial pieties”
(Light 158). Regardless of the resemblances to the Brontës in setting and subject matters, du Maurier’s female characters in Jamaica Inn and Rebecca lack the
“combativeness” of the Victorian heroines and they arrive at dead ends in their journeys
(Auerbach 145).
As a writer, du Maurier was highly influenced by the works she read since she was a little girl. Katherine Mansfield represented a role model for her, yet she enjoyed classic Victorian literature the most, apart from those “soppy books” and the “romantic slush” (qtd. in Forster 16). She rejected modernism which emerged in the early- twentieth century. Instead, she set her stories in historical pasts and enclosed her protagonists in mansions or houses which were haunted by those pasts. The past returns in many forms, causing troubles for the protagonist in the present; in Rebecca, the ghost of the late Mrs de Winter still lingers at Manderley in its every corner and must be ousted in order for the protagonist to start living freely; in Jamaica Inn, the ancient past is embodied in the character of a vicar who stands for the old Druid beliefs, creating an
24 uncanny atmosphere; in My Cousin Rachel, the dead come back through a will that fuels the protagonist’s actions; and in The House on the Strand, the main character repeatedly time-travels back to the fourteenth century where he hopes to find the answers for his current situation.
Du Maurier preferred past to the present. Her obsession with continuity and family ancestry prompted her to write not only family biographies,9 but also stories based on other families, and she also wrote the biographies of Francis and Anthony
Bacon and Branwell Brontë. Contemplating continuity and time du Maurier writes:
What brings all of us through the years, from the first cry at birth to the sinking pulse at the end,
and whom have we left behind us on the way, what ghosts, what crouching figures by what
window? (du Maurier 2004, 45)
To du Maurier the past represented a pleasant escape from her contemporary world and the confusion of it to the times long gone. As a result, most of her works naturally take the form of a historical novel. The tension between past and present blurs the boundaries of reality, creating double worlds and/or personalities; subsequently, the protagonists are subjected to their own introspection. Du Maurier’s fondness for Gothic settings with the focus on landscape and isolated houses with the secret room generates the atmosphere of suspense and, furthermore, it drives the characters’ actions, urging them to explore their masculine/feminine selves. As Horner and Zlosnik point out,
“Gothic writing appealed to [du Maurier] because of the very fact that it destabilizes all kinds of boundaries, including those of gender” (Horner and Zlosnik 2006, 113) and reality.
9 She wrote her father’s biography after his death called Gerald: A Portrait (1934) and a novel titled The Du Mauriers (1937) based on her family history but set in an imagined background.
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3. The Gothic in Daphne du Maurier’s Fiction
3.1 Jamaica Inn: Revisiting the Nineteenth-Century Female Gothic
Jamaica Inn is du Maurier’s fifth book that was published in 1936. After her literary break-through with her first novel called The Loving Spirit in 1931, du Marier had already established her status as an aspiring young writer; but it was not until the release of Jamaica Inn that she could celebrate her first commercial success. As all her previous fiction, Jamaica Inn also aims to “demonstrate the unevenness of the relationship between the sexes, to show the man as brute and the woman as victim”
(Forster 121). This time, the novel introduces a young female protagonist Mary Yellan who is a prototype of a courageous, travelling Gothic heroine as Ellen Moers originally described her. Mary comes to live at Jamaica Inn with her tyrannous uncle and her submissive aunt and she thus finds herself among the company of smugglers and ship- wreckers. In 1939, the novel was made into film by Alfred Hitchcock, a version that du
Maurier hated, mainly for the portrayal of the wreckers as “Peter Pan pirates” who were supposed to be violent and ugly instead (qtd. in Forster 144).10
Written in the fashion of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and R. L.
Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Jamaica Inn is unquestionably a Gothic tale which, on the one hand, adapts the nineteenth-century Gothic literary conventions, yet on the other, it
10 In fact, Hitchcock’s adaptation was altered in as many aspects as possible. Generally, Hitchcock focuses more on delivering a chilling story rather than addressing the subject matters of the book. First and foremost, Mary’s story becomes of secondary importance and she is omitted from a substantial amount of the scenes. Instead, the law and smuggling take the first place which leads to a crucial deviation from du Maurier’s story that highlights different issues and thus presents different Gothic values, such as the heroine’s journey to self-realization. One of the crucial characters Joss Merlyn does not appear in the film, making it impossible for Mary to recognize him as her partner in life – a relationship which serves du Maurier to express her beliefs about women’s emancipation. Likewise, Francis Davey the vicar is left out completely and replaced by Sir Pengallon the town’s magistrate; thus the story is driven by money and greed in opposition to the ancient world that the vicar stands for. Moreover, it is Trehearne (another Hitchcock’s addition) who tries to reveal the real mastermind behind the smuggling instead of Mary whose character is supposed to be shaped by this revelation in du Maurier’s story. Overall, Hitchcock is too much preoccupied with the legal system and by giving Sir Pengallon the vicar’s role in his film version he thus diverges from the one of the dominant Gothic themes of the novel – the past/present connection and the natural law that the vicar embodies.
26 carries a sense of modernity due to its engagement with sexual desire that du Maurier views as “an overpowering force in all humans but one necessarily repressed by conventions (Light 176). Mary’s love for Jem Merlyn, her uncle’s brother to whom he bears a strong physical resemblance and who represents a complete counterpart to her uncle, addresses du Maurier’s anxiety about the contemporary woman’s place in society. Despite the fact that Mary the female protagonist attempts to escape the social ties of marriage and domesticity and instead of it aspires to “save money in some way, and do a man’s work on a farm” (135), she finds her place by Jem’s side eventually, re- enforcing the patriarchal order. Du Maurier’s deviation of the Female Gothic plot from the nineteenth-century texts then resides in giving the heroine a choice “between the
‘free’ life and the home-loving one, which is found wanting . . .” (Light 70) than simply introducing the polarity between masculine freedom and feminine restrictions.
Du Maurier sets Jamaica Inn in her beloved Cornwall, which presents itself here in form of wild and violent moors. Placing the inn in the midst of the Bodmin moors, du
Maurier could not find, according to Patsy Stoneman, a more “wuthering” setting that would resemble the one of Wuthering Heights (qtd. in Horner and Zlosnik 1998, 71).
When Mary is making her first journey to Jamaica Inn through the “mizzling rain” and
“clammy air,” the wind blows vehemently and “in the exposed places on the high ground it blow[s] with such force that the whole body of coach tremble[s] and sway[s], rocking between the high wheels like a drunken man” (1). In fact, this opening scene of du Maurier’s novel strongly resembles Jonathan Harker’s arrival to Count Dracula’s castle; the nearer Jonathan gets to Dracula’s mansion, the more perceptible the darkness grows outside the carriage and no one dares pronounce either the Count’s name, or speak about that remote region. In a similar manner, Mary’s fellow travellers are apprehensive about mentioning the inn because “Jamaica’s got a bad name” and
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“[r]espectable folk don’t go to [it] any more” (11). Thus du Maurier prefaces her Gothic tale by arousing the sense of ‘uncanniness’ in the reader.
On the whole, the landscape holds a greater narrative importance than merely capturing the mysterious spirit of the story; the treacherous moors surrounding Jamaica
Inn and Mary’s peaceful homeland in Helford create the primary contrast the novel works with and that is typical of a Gothic plot. Upon entering Bodmin moors, Mary immediately longs for “the shining waters of Helford, the green hills and the sloping valleys [and] the white cluster of cottages at the water’s edge” (3). Yet instead, she finds herself in a desolate countryside, describing it as follows:
No trees, no lanes, no cluster of cottages or hamlet, but mile upon mile of bleak moorland, dark
and untraversed, rolling like a desert land to some unseen horizon. No human being could live in
this wasted country . . . and remain like other people; the very children would be born twisted . . . .
Their minds would be twisted, too, their thoughts evil . . . . They would be born of strange stock
who slept with this earth as a pillow, beneath this black sky. They would have something of the
Devil left in them still. (13)
Mary’s predictions come true when she discovers that “[t]he grey slate inn, with its tall chimneys, forbidding and uninhabited though it seem[s], [is] the only dwelling-place on the landscape” (31) and its owner, Mary’s uncle Joss Merlyn, is the “twisted child” born in these dark lands; for the Merlyns were “a vile breed . . . with their studied insolence and coarseness [and] their rough brutality of manner” (68). Subsequently, Mary becomes a Gothic heroine entrapped in Jamaica Inn that is ruled by her malevolent uncle. As Diana Wallace observes, Gothic houses and rooms stand for confinement, whereas natural landscape and the sea or water offers an escape (Wallace 2005, 89).
Therefore, despite the unwelcoming sight of the spread out moors, “there [is] a challenge in the air that spur[s] Mary Yellan to adventure” (32) because the outside
28 world offers a felicitous escape from the enclosed walls of the inn and from her dominating uncle.
In result, the landscape metaphorically expresses the boundaries in the heroine’s psyche, similarly to Wuthering Heights (Horner and Zlosnik 1998, 71). Mary ventures into the masculine world of freedom when exploring the moors and, unlike the female narrator of Rebecca who desperately attempts to make a suitable wife for her husband,
Mary attempts to resist the restrictions of her womanhood. Du Maurier’s placement of a female character at the centre of an historical adventure story enables her to examine the possible impact of a woman’s emancipation (Light 167). By having the courage to step into the man’s territory of self-reliance Mary attempts to defy the institution of marriage and she views possible romantic feelings for a man as a weakness; because “[o]nce she depart[s] from the line of conduct she ha[s] laid down for herself, there would be no returning. There would be no privacy of mind [and] no independence” (155).
Ultimately, Mary comes to interpret the landscape as “an intimation of the possibility of moving beyond a social, gendered identity . . . [and] to be free of the constraints of femininity” (Horner and Zlosnik 1998, 77).
As defined in section 2.2 by Williams, Gothic plots are family plots. DeLamotte explains further that “[i]n the sinister dwellings of Gothic romance, women writers expressed their sense of entrapment by and subjection to patriarchal, familial, legal, and class structures” (161). In Jamaica Inn, Uncle Joss represents the central male character who personifies the prototypical Gothic villain of a Female Gothic plot. As such, he locks up the female heroine in his castle with a secret room and the heroine’s discovery of this room reveals the villain’s secret about his ill dealings; “because not knowing for sure is the primary source of Gothic terror” (DeLamotte 48). Joss is depicted by du
Maurier as a man of animalistic features: he has the strength of a horse and hungry
29 appearance of a wolf and resembles a giant gorilla (16). To Mary, Joss is “a monster” with no morals (134) involved in smuggling and ship-wrecking. At Jamaica Inn, Joss hosts his accomplices who are “dirty for the most part, ragged, ill-kept, with matted hair and broken nails; tramps, vagrants, poachers, thieves, cattle-stealers, and gypsies” (42-
3). During the night, the stolen goods get traded here and plans are arranged about their next wrecking missions. Mary’s initial feeling of “a bird in a net” is subsequently replaced by determination to face her present situation, “and courageously too,” if she ever wants to escape her Uncle’s patriarchal dominance over her (51).
Generally, women in Jamaica Inn are viewed by the men as weak creatures subjected to the male dominance. In addition to that, Mary’s mother remarks that young girls are encouraged to marry because of the common belief that “[a] girl can’t live alone . . . without she goes queer in the head, or comes to evil” (6). The novel features two types of women in closer detail: firstly, there is Mary’s Aunt Patience who “hold[s] a dog-like devotion for her husband” (51) to whom she is just a “bleating sheep” without any right to have her own opinions (203), and secondly, there is Mary Yellan the protagonist who is disgusted at her Aunt’s willing submission to Uncle Joss. Mary observes that “for the most part the poor [Aunt] exist[s] in a dream, pottering about her household duties in a mechanical fashion and seldom uttering a word” (64); furthermore, she gives the impression of “a whimpering dog that has been trained by constant cruelty to implicit obedience, and who, in spite of kicks and curses, will fight like a tiger for its master” (19). Mary thus becomes determined to release Patience from
Joss’s influence and to help her start a new life somewhere far from Jamaica Inn.
The decision to make the saving of Patience the main priority stems from Mary’s resolution to prove that a woman can succeed in life without a man’s presence by her side – a vision, which her Aunt disrupts. Mary’s distrustful attitude towards female
30 integrity is stimulated by her contested identity of her sex. Each time Mary demonstrates bravery and wit – the two inherently male qualities from the novel’s standpoint – her femaleness is suppressed. Uncle Joss, despite his ill-treatment of women, appears to admire Mary’s boldness and he says to her: “I’m fond of you, Mary, you’ve got sense, and you’ve got pluck; you’d make a good companion to a man. They ought to have made you a boy” (128). In his statement Joss does not ascribe the qualities he praises in Mary to her femaleness because women should not behave in this manner. Instead, his wish for her to be a boy captures the story’s belief about the gendered distribution of power: if she was a boy, Mary’s sense and courage would be highly valued, yet in a girl, these very qualities become threatening.
Additionally, Mary’s frustration at the ordeals of her womanhood arises when she unexpectedly falls in love with Joss’s brother Jem. She proclaims:
I can’t make plans or think for myself; I go round and round in a trap, all because of a man I
despise, who has nothing to do with my brain or my understanding. I don’t want to love like a
woman or feel like a woman . . .; there’s pain that way, and suffering, and misery that can last a
lifetime. I didn’t bargain for this; I don’t want it. (164)
The desperation Mary voices in this passage springs from her romantic feelings for a man and as such they pose a threat to Mary’s resolution to make her way in life on her own. Her biggest concern consists in her inability to think rationally when being under
Jem’s spell; he therefore represents an uncontrollable distraction from Mary’s mission to emancipation. As DeLamotte argues, “Gothic romances show women trying resolutely to build up an inner sense of worth but in fact suffering from a continual sense that the real determination of their value . . . is not within their power” (176).
Mary’s struggle to establish her “inner sense of worth” gets repeatedly thwarted by the presence of Jem in her life. Despite having no illusions about romance, “Jem Merlyn
31
[is] a man, and [Mary is] a woman, and whether it [is] his hands or skin or his smile she
[does] not know, but something inside her respond[s] to him, and the very thought of him [is] an irritant and a stimulant at the same time” (137). Consequently, Mary is subjected to her sexual desires which she categorically attempts to suppress.
In fact, in terms of the Female Gothic plot, Jem Merlyn exemplifies the so called
‘Byronic hero.’ Here, the link between the Gothic and Romanticism comes to the surface again; for this type of a hero is “driven by erotic love, however fatal[;] [and] a capacity of feeling in the conventional man is this character’s most potent source of mystery” (Williams 144). The female heroine is attracted to this hero who commonly possesses a dual personality that makes him unreadable to the heroine and temporarily places him into the role of the male ‘other.’ Once the heroine recognizes his true nature, the hero becomes “transformed” in her eyes and he confirms his reciprocated feelings for the heroine (Williams 144).
In Jamaica Inn, Mary’s initial confusion about Jem’s mysterious character originates in his relation to her Uncle Joss and she suspects him from being one of
Joss’s fellow wreckers. Additionally, Jem admits to Mary that “[the] Merlyns have never been good to [their] women:” their father would beat their mother until she could not stand, yet she would always stand by him (71) and Joss treats Patience in the same manner. Jem’s interest in Mary can be detected, but in spite of his lacking tenderness and being rude (136), he never ill-treats her. Mary expresses her anxiety about Jem’s dual personalities as follows:
She thought again of the laughing, care-free Jem . . . who had kissed her and held her. Now he was
grave and silent, his face in the shadow. The idea of dual personality troubled her, and frightened
her as well. He was like a stranger to her tonight, obsessed by some grim purpose she could not
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understand. […] Whatever Jem had done or intended to do, whether he were false or treacherous
and a murderer of men, she loved him, in the weakness of her flesh, and owed him warning. (217)
Mary’s ambivalence about Jem’s character resides primarily in his strong physical resemblance to his brother – Mary’s Uncle Joss. For when looking at Jem at times,
Mary sees Joss instead, and the mere thought of him repulses her. The Gothic duality of character is thus instigated not only by the hero’s split of personality, but also by the existence of his double. Du Maurier polarizes the two brothers here and Mary figures that this opposition works on the principle of “aversion” and “attraction,” between which the boundary-line is very thin (140). For some unexplained reason the very same characteristics she despises in Joss, Mary seems to be overlooking in Jem; “both break the law, but the one revolts and the other excites” (Light 157). At one point, the resemblance of the brothers leads to their nearly complete merging in Mary’s head:
“[S]omewhere in the dark places of [Mary’s] mind an image fought for recognition . . . and it was the face of Jem Merlyn, the man she loved, grown evil and distorted, merging horribly and finally into that of his brother” (168).
As Nina Auerbach suggests, “Jamaica Inn is dominated by insanely powerful men who claim its landscape [and] Mary spends the novel bouncing from one to the other”
(145). Apart from battling Joss and Jem’s powers of masculinity, Mary must also reconcile the threatening past. Du Maurier sets the story in the nineteenth century during the reign of George IV., as Diana Wallace suggests, when coast guards were about to be established and, in one way, the wreckers symbolize “the barbaric past, like the pagan Gods” (Wallace 2013, 141). To Mary, their name “sound[s] fearful and obscene, like a blasphemy” (167). The mention of paganism derives from the character of Francis Davey the vicar, who identifies himself with the ancient pagan Gods. He speaks of himself as “a freak in nature and a freak in time” and explains to Mary: “I live
33 in the past, when men were not so humble as they are today . . . [and] when the rivers and the sea were one, and the old gods walked the hills” (274). His aim is to remove
“the poor trappings of civilisation that [one] suck[s] into [their] system as a child” and to teach people to live “as men and women have not lived for four thousand years”
(278). Furthermore, the vicar finds a potential companion in Mary that would join him on his mission because “[t]here is a dash of fire about [her] that the women of old possessed” (277). When midway through the story Mary arrives at the realization that her Uncle is under control of someone else – because Davey turns out to be the hidden leader of the wreckers – the quest to uncover this mystery becomes vital to Mary understanding of the world around her and she must come to terms with this haunting past.
Since the very beginning of the story, Mary strongly believes that Uncle Joss is the main threat to her ideology of living freely as a woman. However, when Joss and
Aunt Patience are killed by Davey, on the one hand, Mary is released out of her confinement at Jamaica Inn, yet on the other, she must still face the vicar. As suggested earlier in this chapter, the landscape is of great significance because it, in one sense, represents the boundaries of the psyche and it becomes Mary’s quest of the Gothic heroine to interpret the landscape in these terms. For not only does Mary associate the landscape with freedom in contrast with the entrapment of the inn, but she also comes to the understanding that the moors are the vicar’s domain. Du Maurier describes the
Bodmin moors as follows:
There was a silence on the tors that belonged to another age; an age that is past and vanished as
though it had never been, an age when man did not exist, but pagan footsteps trod upon the hills.
And there was a stillness in the air, and a stranger, older peace, that was not the peace of God. (39)
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In this passage, du Maurier consciously blurs the boundaries of reality by depicting the landscape as some past world. Davey’s love for the moors stems from their evoking the past times; “they are the survival of another time [and they] were the first thing to be created . . .” (105).
Ultimately, the character of the vicar appears to “emanate from the landscape”
(Auerbach 145). Mary observes that he possesses inhuman qualities and looks different from any man she has seen (105): “He was a shadow of a man [and] he lacked substance” (143). After Davey attempts to kidnap Mary and they make their way through the moors, they get confronted by Jem who shots the vicar eventually to save
Mary. Yet Davey willingly embraces his passing and his body and spirit disperse into the landscape: “Francis Davey outlined against the sky, standing upon a wide slab like an altar, high above her head. He stood for a moment poised like a statue . . . and then he flung out his arms as a bird throws his wings for flight, and drooped suddenly and fell [off the cliff]” (292). Thus the haunting past is repelled at last.
As Williams suggests in her study of the Female Gothic plot, “the male other’s duality prompts the heroine’s affirmation through education; thus he is first threatening, then reassuring” (145). Mary’s initial doubts about Jem’s sincerity of his interest in her and his insinuated engagement in the wrecking business are dispelled at last. Despite his illegal earning of his living as a horse stealer, Jem has never been involved in his brother’s business. In the end, Mary faces the decision to either settle back at Helford, or to lead a nomadic life with Jem by her side. Consequently, Mary’s choice of the latter offers an ambiguous ending to the story; because instead of readily accepting the institution of marriage and thus re-enforcing the patriarchal order, du Maurier re-writes the typical Female Gothic ending and provides her heroine with at least partial freedom.
Furthermore, du Maurier’s suspicions about the woman’s emancipation come across
35 here; in result, Mary the Gothic heroine is granted the choice to decide the course of her life, which her literary predecessors were usually spared, but she follows in their footsteps nonetheless with her resolution to give up everything for a man.
36
3.2 Rebecca: Becoming the ‘Other’ Woman
Rebecca is du Maurier’s seventh book that was published two years after the release of Jamaica Inn in 1938. She wrote it during her stay in Egypt where she was accompanying her husband on one of his military expeditions and she found herself missing England and her beloved Menabilly11 immensely. Right after its publication,
Rebecca became du Maurier’s most popular novel and it is still her most read work to the present day. Yet the commercial success of Rebecca did not resonate with du
Maurier the same way it did with the public because the reviews irretrievably labelled her as the author of romance, making it almost impossible for her subsequent works to get a serious critical recognition. However, in spite of du Maurier’s irritation about the novel’s rating of a “romance in the grand tradition” (qtd. in Forster 139), Rebecca, written in the fashion of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, has started its own literary tradition. Susan Hill’s Mrs de Winter (1993) is one of the official sequels that deals with the second Mrs de Winter’s haunting past of her life at Manderley that Rebecca engages itself with and it also depicts her continuing struggle to establish her identity as the true
Mrs de Winter.
Broadly speaking, a love-story dominates Rebecca and thus the relation with the genre of romance can hardly be avoided; but it is not primarily a story about love. Du
Maurier proclaimed that “[t]here was more hatred in it than love . . .” (qtd. in Forster
137) – the same statement she made about Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.
Moreover, Rebecca attempts to explore female jealousy, a motif that was later on resurrected in My Cousin Rachel where it is studied from a male perspective. For the
11 Menabilly was a house du Maurier fell in love with at first sight. Despite the fact she was never able to purchase it to make it her own, she spent enough time living there to become enchanted by its “sense of mystery” and “secrecy” (qtd. in Forster 359). Her profound fondness for Menabilly went to the extreme and du Maurier admitted she loved the house more than people (qtd. in Forster 188). In result, Menabilly found its way into some of her novels where it doubles as the Gothic castle or mansion. Undoubtedly, Rebecca’s Manderley bears the most apparent resemblance to Menabilly.
37 first time since the publication of her first novel The Loving Spirit du Maurier employs the first-person narration in Rebecca. On the one hand, such literary device provides her with the opportunity to examine the protagonist’s mind in more depth than she has ever done in her previous works and subject her heroine to a close introspection; but on the other, the protagonist becomes an unreliable narrator, primarily due to her compelling need to daydream; thus “what happens in this woman’s mind is more important than what actually takes place around her” (Forster 137).
At the plot level, Rebecca echoes Jamaica Inn: both novels are examples of
Female Gothic: they both follow a story of a young, innocent heroine and present her relationship to a powerful man that is deeply rooted in the patriarchal system. Yet this time, as opposed to Mary Yellan, the narrator of Rebecca is keen to accept the role of the wife to Maxim de Winter because, according to her, “it is his dependence upon [her] that has made [her] bold at last. . . . [She] has lost [her] diffidence, [her] timidity [and her] shyness with strangers” (9-10). The story then describes her struggle to execute that function as expected of her because she is being incessantly compared to Rebecca – the late Mrs de Winter. The narrator remains nameless until the very end which adds to her image of an unimportant creature in comparison to the popular, yet deceased Rebecca.12
Additionally, Maxim de Winter is as harsh as the men in Jamaica Inn but “[he] needs no huge body, his power is in his social class” (Auerbach 145).
On the whole, “Rebecca is a minutely class-conscious book” (Watson 30) deeply concerned with patrilineal heritage that is signified by Maxim’s attachment to his
Manderley. As Ellen Brinks suggests, “possession [is] the prerogative of patriarchal power [and] castles figure as material emblems of an enduring patriarchal lineage [in
12 Various assumptions have been made about why du Maurier decided to leave her heroine nameless. Her answer to that question was surprisingly uncomplicated: she could not come up with one which subsequently proved to be technically challenging for her in the process of writing the novel (du Maurier 2005, 3).
38
Gothic tales]” (13). Manderley, the central presence of Rebecca, motivates people’s actions in the book. Maxim’s claim on and emotional attachment to his mansion originates in the story’s patriarchal distribution of power and he does not hesitate to shoot his first wife Rebecca to preserve his proprietary rights that she endangers: “[He] put[s] Manderley first, before anything else” (306). Apart from bestowing a certain societal status on Maxim, Manderley furthermore functions as a purveyor of imagined identities to the characters. As Light explains:
It is just not that places, and especially houses, are for the du Maurier the repositories of the past,
where we can best find and read the accumulation of marks of change, but that they house ‘us’:
who we are, and what we imagine ourselves to be, becomes an interior location, the boards and
curtains extensions of our ‘selves’. (188)
Both the first and second Mrs de Winter come to view Manderley as a place that will establish their identity: marrying an upper-class gentleman offers them the opportunity to become the mistress of his mansion and present themselves as a wife of an influential man.
As Wallace writes, “the female-male-female triangle plot is one of which has a particular resonance for women writers in general and is widely used in women’s fiction, especially in the inter-war period” (Wallace 2000, 6). She puts this statement into historical context and explains that it followed mainly from the ideology of domesticity prevalent in the 1930s which praised the institution of marriage (Wallace
2000, 12). Thus Rebecca, written in this time period shortly before the Second World
War broke out, explores this topic likewise focusing on “the balance of power in marriage” (Forster 138) that becomes threatened by the haunting image of the late wife.
Subsequently, the narrator is literally put into the position of the ‘other’ woman; yet in this sense, her ‘otherness’ does not necessarily relate itself to the male fear of the female
39 typical of Female Gothic plots but rather to the narrator’s entrance into a house that is still inhabited by Rebecca’s spirit which appears to govern Manderley. The narrator laments:
I could not help it if she came to me in thoughts, in dreams. I could not help it if I felt like a guest
in Manderley, my home, walking where she had trodden, resting where she had lain. I was like a
guest, biding my time, waiting for the return of the hostess. Little sentences, little reproofs
reminding me every hour, every day. (154)
Despite the fact that the narrator is now the rightful Mrs de Winter and Manderley partially belongs to her, her feelings keep on convincing her otherwise. Additionally, the people she encounters are always quick to point out that “[she] is so very different from Rebecca” (118).
Indeed, the female rivalry permeates the entire story and it becomes the narrator’s quest to exorcise Rebecca’s oppressive presence both from Manderley and her mind; otherwise, she cannot fulfil the role of Maxim’s wife to its full extent – a role, she very much desires to perform. Since the story’s beginning, it shows that she is a foreigner in
Maxim’s world: this “raw ex-schoolgirl, red-elbowed and lanky-haired” (17), as she refers to herself, cannot make sense of Maxim’s upper-class world in which she becomes merely a “youthful thing” and “unimportant” (14), too. She tells Maxim: “I’m not the sort of person men marry” (57); but once she accepts Maxim’s proposal, she cannot wait to get married: the thought of marriage seems as “[s]uch an adventure” (62) to her. As suggested in section 2.2 by Williams, the Female Gothic plot ends up by the heroine marrying her pursuer and his marriage to her provides the heroine with a new identity (103). However, in Rebecca’s case, the reader finds the heroine already married by the novel’s beginning. Du Maurier thus alters the traditional progression of the plot:
40 her protagonist must reassert her newly-acquired identity instead of striving towards its attainment.
Generally speaking, Rebecca deals with various aspects of ‘otherness.’ At the level of Female Gothic plot, Rebecca as well as her successor are automatically put into the position of the female ‘other’ that follows from the patriarchal perception of the world. Despite the fact that both women re-enforce patriarchal beliefs by marrying a man, they do so with different aims; while Rebecca marries Maxim to cover up her sexual affairs by publicly presenting herself as an orderly wife, the narrator’s intentions are comparatively selfless and she marries the forty-two-year-old Maxim because of her naïve conviction that “[she] love[s] [him] dreadfully” (58). Nonetheless both women become ‘otherized’ in terms of the traditional Female Gothic plot by acquiring the marital status and accepting the values it stands for.
However, as the title of the book suggests, the story seems to put the spotlight on
Rebecca rather than on the narrator. Despite Rebecca’s lack of living presence in the novel, her character becomes central to the narrator’s journey to the identity establishment. The protagonist is very much aware of her inferiority to Rebecca because she lacks all her qualities that, according to the narrator’s beliefs, are found desirable in women, such as “confidence, grace, beauty, intelligence [and] wit” (148). Furthermore, the narrator’s inferior position at Manderley is determined upon her first arrival there because she is allotted a room that “[has] something inferior, not up to Manderley standards, a second-rate room, as it were, for a second-rate person” (83). On the contrary, “[the morning room which used to be Rebecca’s office] was a woman’s room, graceful, fragile . . . [and] [t]here was no intermingling of style, no confusing of period, and the result was perfection . . .” (93). The narrator’s overt jealousy of and hatred for
Rebecca – “[a] thought forbidden and prompted by demons” (63) – results in the
41 narrator’s ceaseless imagining of what Maxim’s marriage to Rebecca must have been like and how different their relationship certainly had been in comparison to the one she has with him now. Shortly, the narrator’s desire to be like Rebecca possesses her mind, to the extent that Rebecca becomes her alter-ego essentially.
In her study of the female Gothic texts, Eugenia DeLamotte identifies the character of the “Hidden Woman” that exists in the story to pose a sudden threat to the heroine’s world and to the perception of her own identity.13 She argues that this mysterious woman appears in one of two forms: either the “Good Other Woman, long- suffering and angelic, whose imprisonment and/or death was unmerited, [or] the Evil
Other Woman, who got no more than she deserved and is now either dead or sorry for her sins or about to die” (153). In DeLamotte’s definition, the character of Rebecca naturally suggests itself as the exemplary embodiment of the Evil Other Woman: she is dead and she was “a bad (sexual) woman” (DeLamotte 153) during her life, which constitutes one of the distinguishing attribute of this woman. As Mrs Danvers confirms,
“[Rebecca] was not in love with anyone. She despised all men. She was above all that . .
. [and] [l]ove-making was a game with her, only a game . . . . She did it because it made her laugh (382).
In this sense, “[Rebecca], for Maxim, is the Other necessary for the construction of the masculine self” (Horner and Zlosnik 1998, 105) because he comes to view her as the threatening female that endangers the patriarchal ideals about women’s domesticity and their image of orderly wives. In other words, at a symbolic level, Rebecca can be read as a supernatural force that threatens to feminize the estate and the patriarch, by challenging patriarchal order and heterosexuality (Pons 74). Such threat to Maxim’s
13 Bertha Mason from Jane Eyre could be one example of DeLamotte’s “Hidden Woman,” whose discovery of existence results in Jane’s re-evaluation of Rochester’s sincerity of character and it also prevents their marriage.
42 masculinity and to the legitimate patrilineal heritage of Manderley prompts his shooting of Rebecca; but unfortunately, by carrying out his revenge in this manner Maxim puts
Rebecca into the position of the Gothic heroine who has to suffer for her renouncement of the socially-constructed vision of proper femininity. Moreover, Maxim believes that
Rebecca is pregnant with an illegitimate child. This assumption turns out to be untrue eventually because Rebecca could not have children due to her serious illness that would cause her to die in a few months; yet by baring this idea in his mind Maxim’s deed becomes more unjustifiable than Rebecca’s female rebellion. Consequently,
Rebecca also appears to not fit the profile of the Evil Other Woman as defined by
DeLamotte any longer; instead, she rather resembles the Good Other Woman who suffers for her overstepping the boundaries of her femaleness.
The question thus arises who is the true Evil Other Woman in relation to the narrator. As the story unfolds, the narrator arrives at a realization that it is not, in reality,
Rebecca who provoked the narrator’s hatred for the late Mrs de Winter and installed the feeling of exclusion in her; it is not her ghost who haunts her. Despite the story’s apparent dealings with the supernatural, Rebecca’s ghost in fact never appears as any type of a ghostly apparition that could be spotted by the living people. Instead, Rebecca becomes materialized through her devoted servant Mrs Danvers who “simply adored
Rebecca” and is now “insanely jealous” of the new wife (113). Therefore, it is Mrs
Danvers’s shadow that follows the protagonist’s every move, not Rebecca. The narrator states: “[Mrs Danvers] was like a shadow standing there, watching me, appraising me with her hollow eyes, set in that dead skull’s face” (82). Consequently, the character of
Mrs Danvers might also be interpreted as the Evil Other Woman in the sense of posing a threat to the assertion of the patriarchal order – in a similar fashion that Rebecca does
– because she attempts to persuade the young heroine to leave her position of Maxim’s
43 wife; moreover, Mrs Danvers praises the qualities in Rebecca that disrupted the patriarchal ideals about the female sexuality and identity.
In fact, Mrs Danvers might be interpreted as the living embodiment of the dead
Rebecca. Upon the narrator’s first encounter with her, Mrs Danvers is described as “tall and gaunt, dressed in deep black, whose prominent cheek-bones and great, hollow eyes gave her a skull’s face, parchment-white, set on a skeleton’s frame;” moreover, her hand is “deathly cold” and she speaks “in a voice as cold and lifeless as her hands” (74).
When mentioning Rebecca’s name, the “dull” and “toneless” voice of Mrs Danvers transfers to “unexpected animation, with life and meaning” (81). At the plot level, Mrs
Danvers functions as the structuring device of a Gothic tale and her character serves to distort the boundaries in the story. As Horner and Zlosnik argue:
Not only does she blur the boundaries between life and death [by her continuous resurrection of
Rebecca’s ghost] . . ., [but] she also blurs the boundaries of sexual identity . . . . On the one hand,
she emphasizes [Rebecca’s] beauty, sensuality and femininity by endowing her fine clothes with a
metonymic significance. On the other, she stresses Rebecca’s power and masculinity, drawing
attention . . . to the boyish ‘crop’ she sported in the last few years. (Horner and Zlosnik 1998, 122)
This argument offers a different representation of Rebecca from Maxim’s perception of her as the female ‘other.’ To Mrs Danvers, Rebecca’s masculine qualities and sexual liberty only contribute her adoration of Rebecca who proclaims that “[she] shall live as
[she] pleases . . . and the whole world won’t stop [her]” (275). Thus Du Maurier presents the reader with two interpretations of Rebecca: the first one views Rebecca’s behaviour as upsetting the patriarchal ideologies about women, while the second reading interprets Rebecca’s emancipatory tendencies as admirable.
In her interpretation of the heroine’s relationship with Rebecca, Wallace proposes a Freudian reading and identifies it as the Oedipal mother-daughter rivalry in which
44
“[t]he protagonist’s move from idealisation of Rebecca to a rejection of her corresponds to the little girl’s move from attachment to the mother to rejection of her” (Wallace
2000, 50). As such, the protagonist’s “idealisation of Rebecca” poses a great danger to her because, at times, she imagines what Rebecca would have done in her place so vividly that it almost represses her true self; on one occasion, “[she] had so identified
[herself] with Rebecca that [her] own dull self did not exist [and] had never come to
Manderley. [She] had gone back in thought and in person to the days that were gone”
(224-5). Alternatively, on another occasion, she sees Rebecca’s reflection when looking into a mirror: “A face stared back at [her] that was not [her] own. It was very pale, very lovely, framed in a cloud of dark hair. […] The face in the glass stared back at [her] and laughed” (426).
In fact, one moment occurs in the novel when the narrator through her lack of information nearly achieves to bring Rebecca back to live. During the dressing ball given at Manderley, Rebecca’s faithful servant Mrs Danvers cheats the protagonist into dressing up as one of the displayed portraits; however, she deliberately forgets to mention that Rebecca was inspired by the very same portrait for her costume too, when she was Maxim’s wife. Upon looking at the narrator in her disguise, Maxim’s sister
Beatrice assures her that the impression was identical with Rebecca’s: “The same picture, the same dress. You stood there on the stairs, and for one ghastly moment I thought . . .” (242). Beatrice leaves her sentence unfinished but it becomes clear that she identified the narrator with Rebecca.
Ultimately, in Wallace’s terms, “[Rebecca] as [the narrator’s] rival then becomes a key structuring element and the heroine’s identity is ratified by her man’s choice of her as different from her rival” (Wallace 2000, 7); for it is not until Maxim dismisses his
45 alleged love for Rebecca by calling her “vicious, damnable [and] rotten through and through” (304) that the narrator can attain her true self at last. She declares ecstatically:
I was the self that I have always been, I was not changed. But something new had come upon me
that had not been before. My heart, for all its anxiety and doubt, was light and free. I knew then
that I was no longer afraid of Rebecca. I did not hate her any more. Now that I knew her to have
been evil and vicious and rotten I did not hate her any more. She could not hurt me. (319)
Upon deciphering Maxim’s character who is the ‘Byronic hero’ in relation to the protagonist – as Jem is to Mary in Jamaica Inn – the heroine’s struggle for her identity reaches its end. On the one hand, the narrator manages to establish her identity as the true wife to Maxim de Winter; yet on the other, the protagonist’s insistence on covering up for Maxim’s murder of Rebecca as an expression of her devoted love for him can no longer sustain the narrator’s image of a pitiful, innocent heroine who has been put into this position involuntarily.
As in Jamaica Inn, du Maurier’s apprehension about women’s emancipation can be derived from her conflicted representation of Rebecca; on the one hand, du Maurier allows Rebecca to push the boundaries of her femaleness, yet on the other, such conduct leads to her death when she is killed by her husband who holds conservative beliefs about women’s liberation. Furthermore, Rebecca as a Female Gothic story that desperately attempts to preserve the patriarchal order results in the transformation of a naïve young heroine into an accomplice to murder – quite an extreme ending to a
Female Gothic plot that presupposes merely the heroine’s acceptance of marriage. Thus, as she admits, with her conniving gesture “[she] too kill[s] Rebecca” (319), and “[i]n protecting Maxim, [she is] not just protecting a person but an ideal (Pons 76).
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3.3 My Cousin Rachel: Merging Male and Female Gothic
My Cousin Rachel is a Gothic historical novel that Daphne du Maurier wrote at the mid-point of her writing career and as such it represented a certain “climacteric” divide: “it crowned her earlier successes, and it is, in many ways, a last throwing-down of the novelistic gauntlet” (Beauman v). After its publication in 1951, it immediately became a best-seller and it also enjoyed positive reviews from the critics. This time, du
Maurier employs the male first-person narrator because “she wanted to explore jealousy from the man’s angle, and to show how simple it is for a woman to manipulate a man”
(Forster 253). Thus Philip Ashley, the male counterpart to the female heroine of
Rebecca, becomes subjected to the introspection of his character in order to investigate the principles of femininity embodied in his cousin Rachel14 – a woman who is “the source of great torment to others” (Forster 251).
Undeniably, My Cousin Rachel exemplifies a thorough intertwining of Male and
Female Gothic, documenting du Maurier’s skilful writing with her careful attention to the plot construction. Assuredly, the male narration anticipates a Male Gothic plot, which is not however maintained here to its full extent. Generally speaking, Anne
Williams defines Male Gothic as “a dark mirror reflecting patriarchy’s nightmère, recalling a perilous, violent, and early separation from the mother/mater denigrated as
‘female’” (107). Rachel’s supremacy over Philip is indisputable and as such it subverts the story’s intended portrayal of the female as the ‘other.’ This subversion is supported further by Philip’s first-person narration: his version of the story cannot be deemed reliable due to his tendency to day-dreaming and child-like behaviour, which strongly resembles the heroine from Rebecca. Consequently, the Male and Female Gothic
14 Du Maurier admitted that the character of Rachel was inspired by Ellen Doubleday, her American publisher for whom she held strong romantic feelings that were unfortunately not reciprocated in the same manner by Ellen.
47 conventions become interwoven, examining femininity through a distorted male lens, shifting the narrative point of view away from Rachel the possible Gothic heroine, who might either be trapped in Philip’s mansion, or might in fact be manoeuvring the course of actions.
Indeed, at the plot level, the similarities of My Cousin Rachel with Rebecca can barely pass unnoticed. Firstly, both stories feature a triangle of characters whose mutual feelings for one another are central to the plot’s development and they conduct the characters’ behaviour: this time, Philip’s devoted adoration of his guardian Ambrose leads him into following his example causing him to fall in love with their cousin
Rachel, right after Ambrose’s marriage to her and his subsequent death. In result, as in
Rebecca’s case, My Cousin Rachel is a story about “jealousy and unfounded suspicions”
(Forster 252) rather than love, as it might appear on the story’s surface. Secondly, both tales present young, naïve protagonists who during a distinctive series of events arrive at a realization and/or commit an act that somehow changes her/him and causes her/him to suddenly mature: the narrator of Rebecca becomes Maxim’s accomplice when she helps him cover up his murder of Rebecca and, in My Cousin Rachel, Philip indirectly assists in Rachel’s death. Furthermore, the motif of the ‘doppelgänger’ is present here as well: whereas the late Mrs de Winter’s ghost haunts Manderley, Philip “ha[s] become so like [Ambrose] that [he] might be his ghost” (4). Lastly, the house as the symbol of patriarchal lineage and inheritance exists in both stories, and in each of the cases it gets threatened by a female presence.
The duality of character common in du Maurier’s writing creates the initial problem for the protagonist. In Rebecca, the narrator is forced to live in her rival’s shadow, whereas Philip is involuntarily placed into a position that presses him to re-live
48
Ambrose’s life. Ambrose, Philip’s “guardian, father, brother, counsellor, as in fact [his] own world” (1) bears a strong physical resemblance to Philip to the extent that they could be called twin brothers. Due to this discernible likeness, Philip believes at times that the people he encounters appear to be speaking to Ambrose instead of to him; for instance, when meeting Rachel for the first time, Philip notices that it is not him whom she sees, but Ambrose – “[n]ot Philip, but a phantom” (6). Alternatively, the same way
Mrs Danvers keeps Rebecca’s spirit alive by displaying her belongings around
Manderly, Ambrose’s ghost exists in form of his will which becomes the symbol of the haunting past.
Philip’s clarification of Ambrose’s death and the disclosure of Rachel’s plans with her late husband’s fortune, together with the challenge to not repeat his guardian’s mistakes when put into the same situation, both offer Philip the possibility to get rid of the lingering past and break the attachment to his alter-ego Ambrose. Instead, Philip’s likeness to Ambrose ultimately proves to be his undoing (5). Repeating Ambrose’s error of falling in love with Rachel, regardless of Ambrose’s warnings about her dubious intentions, Philip wants to marry her, too. The moment Rachel rejects his proposal,
Philip’s intense rage evokes Ambrose, whom he believes to be standing beside him in the shadows (270), and the two merge in one person. As a result, Philip nearly yields to
Ambrose’s spirit that temporarily possesses him and he puts his hands around Rachel’s throat, in a failed attempt to strangle her. Seeing his reflection in the mirror afterwards,
Philip is convinced that it is Ambrose who stares back at him (271). In the novel’s end,
Philip/Dr Jekyll is unable to fight Ambrose’s spirit in him/Mr Hyde and kills Rachel to revenge Ambrose’s death, despite having no definite proof and loving her deeply.
49
The world of My Cousin Rachel is male-dominated where women are perceived as the weaker sex. Du Maurier works with this ideology in a story that presents two antagonistic worlds. Firstly, there is England, “a dour, feudal enclave fiercely resistant to social or political change, a world in which women are marginalised . . .,” and secondly, there is Florence, “a place of profligacy, deadly intrigue and sexual sophistication” (Beauman vii). The Ashley family consisting of Philip and his guardian
Ambrose owns an English estate that banishes women from it because, according to
Ambrose, they cannot be trusted and make “mischief in a household” (9). In other words, “[t]he Ashley household . . . has been a microcosmic if extreme version of the homosocial world which constructs and shores up masculinity . . .” (Horner and Zlosnik
1998, 131). Furthermore, instead of “go[ing] in for breeding[,] [Ambrose] prefer[s] growing things from the soil . . . [because] the result is far more satisfying” (9). Never having met his parents Philip, for whom Ambrose is “god of all creation” and whose
“whole object of [his] life [is] to resemble [Ambrose]” (2), is unconsciously growing up ignorant of women (56).
On the contrary, Rachel or the Contessa Sangalletti, half English and half Italy, represents the ‘other’ world. Coming from the “outlandish parts” (109) of Italy Rachel’s female ‘foreignness’ is intensified by the geographical distance at which the
Englishmen coming into contact with her insistently hint. After visiting Italy in search of Ambrose who unexpectedly marries Rachel, Philip finds Italy “dirty” and
“verminous” and consequently he “turn[s] to loathing of all things alien . . .” (29), including Rachel at first. Before meeting her in person, Philip imagines Rachel as “a monster, larger than life itself,” with eyes “black as sloes” and moving around “sinuous and silent, like a snake” (53), addressing thus the male fear of the female ‘other.’ His ultimate mission becomes the revenge of Ambrose whom he believes to have been
50 poisoned by Rachel, after receiving strange letters from him where Ambrose mysteriously writes about their cousin. In his last letter, Ambrose complains that “[s]he has done for [him] at last, Rachel [his] torment” (27), and subsequently, Philip learns of his guardian’s death. Henceforward, more than anything in the world Philip wants to see
Rachel suffer (100).
However, one is never able to read Rachel’s character properly for the entirety of the story and reveal her true intentions because she is presented only through Philip’s unreliable testimony of her. As a result, she becomes a mystery woman with multiple personalities; on the one hand, she is presented as the acquisitive widow who poisons her husband and is then after his fortune, yet on the other, “[t]he blend of [her] graciousness and camaraderie [makes people] immediately look up to her . . .” (149).
On the one hand, Rachel is said to be addicted to spending money – “the one way to her heart” (207), but on the other, her loss of her unborn child might produce sympathy for her. Nevertheless the conflicting opinions about Rachel help to sustain the mysterious image of her person, which consequently magnifies the threat of her ‘femaleness.’
Following Anne Williams’s argument that Gothic plots are centred on the patriarchal family that places its emphasis on proper patrilineal inheritance (see section
2.2), the Ashley estate (similarly to Maxim de Winter’s Manderley) occupies a prominent position in du Maurier’s story; not only does it embodies the lawful property rights, but it also symbolizes the emotional link between Philip and Ambrose.
Ambrose’s determination to train Philip as his heir – “a profession in itself” (10) – results in breeding extreme attachment to the house in Philip, which ultimately comes to represent the source of all his needs. In terms of the patriarchal beliefs, inheriting
Ambrose’s estate gives Philip the “sense of ownership, of pride, and of possession”
51 installing a “feeling of confidence” in him (55), and as such it satisfies his rightful proprietary claims. Philip declares ecstatically:
It came upon me strongly and with force, and for the first time since I had learnt of Ambrose’s
death, that everything I now saw and looked upon belonged to me. I need never share it with
anyone living[;] . . . [t]he whole living entity of the house was mine, and mine alone. The grass
beneath my feet, the trees surrounding me, the hills behind me, the meadows, the woods, even the
men and women farming the and yonder, were all part of my inheritance; they all belonged. (54)
Philip’s profound sense of possession that he exhibits in this passage stems predominantly from his intense adoration of Ambrose. He perceives the house as a physical bond between him and his guardian that keeps their relationship alive after
Ambrose’s death; Philip is part of the house, “belonging, as Ambrose ha[s] done and still [does], somewhere in the shadows” (74). Yet this apparent sense of unity might become threatened by a female presence in the house and thus, until meeting Rachel,
Philip chooses to remain a bachelor. Echoing Ambrose’s sceptical beliefs about women,
Philip states that “[i]f it’s warmth and comfort that a man wants, and something beautiful to look upon, he can get all that from his own house, if he loves it well” (148).
Consequently, all women who might possibly want to marry Philip become potential
“intruder[s] to his home” (74).
Rachel’s arrival at the Ashley estate represents a breaking point in the story; on the one hand, it is the first closer encounter with a woman that Philip experiences, and on the other, it shifts the Gothic conventions away from the male narrator to the Gothic heroine. Subsequently, the relationship between Philip and Rachel gradually develops into “a complex and ultimately indecipherable mix of sexuality and economics in which the fate of the Ashley estate is at stake” (Horner and Zlosnik 1998, 136). In Philip’s case, affection is expressed through means of possession. First and foremost, the title of
52 the novel itself includes the possessive pronoun ‘my’ before Rachel’s name, suggesting
Philip’s claim on her. Furthermore, his decision to give Rachel a pearl necklace as a
Christmas present that is being passed down in their family symbolizes Philip’s insistence on family traditions and the maintenance of ancestry line: “[a]n Ashley, on his marriage, allows his bride to wear the collar on her wedding day, as sole adornment”
(195). Essentially different from Philip, Rachel’s obsession with money and property comes through as well; in the beginning, it is only conveyed by hearsay. The accusations of her “unbridled extravagance” (194), a “disease” inherited from her
“spendthrift father” (160), raised by Ambrose in his letters are followed by the findings of Philip’s financial adviser who manages Philip’s bank account and marks a significant overdraft. However, no definite prove of Rachel’s suspicious actions exists and therefore she cannot be condemned.
Ultimately, the relationship between Philip and Rachel becomes the interplay between the masculine and the feminine in which each of the sides strives for dominance over the other. Philip’s inexperience in life and with women puts him at disadvantage when being confronted by Rachel – a woman of thirty-five and widowed twice. Demonstrating clear Oedipal qualities, Philip’s love for Rachel is in fact a cry for his absent mother. Orphaned at a young age, Philip speaks about his parents as follows:
I had never thought much about them, or felt the lack of them, Ambrose had answered for them
both. But now, looking at my cousin Rachel, I wondered about my mother. […] I wished suddenly
that I could remember her. Why was it that a child’s mind could not return beyond a certain limit?
I had been a little boy, staggering after Ambrose, shouting to him to wait for me. Nothing before
that. Nothing at all . . . . (113)
Philip’s identification of Rachel with his mother partially arises from Rachel’s frequent maternal treatment of Philip. On one occasion, Rachel calls Philip “that horrid boy, so
53 spoilt and prim” (107). On another, when attempting to soothe Philip, Rachel asks him to bend down, she takes his face between his hands, kisses him and orders him to go to bed, “like a good boy” (146). Additionally, she once touches his head in a manner “of someone patting a child who has misbehaved, [when] the adult find[s] herself too lost in tedium to continue scolding . . .” (312). Moreover, the image of Rachel as the threatening, mother figure15 is symbolically described in Philip’s initial thoughts about
Rachel. In his mind, Rachel takes on “a dozen personalities or more and each one more hateful than the last:” at one moment “monstrous”, and the next “pale and drawn;” at one moment “middle-aged and forceful”, the next “simpering and younger than
Louise16” (23). Yet after their first personal contact, Philip fails to detect the “viper, sinuous and silent” (86) in Rachel and instead he is overwhelmed by her decency and refined manners. During one of their subsequent conversations, Philip experiences a new feeling which is “queer” and “strange,” going “right through [him], never before known” (119). At last, Philip’s original hatred for Rachel is replaced by sexual desire because “[he] can’t go on hating a woman who doesn’t exist” (101).
As suggested earlier in this chapter, the character of Rachel is read only through
Philip’s narrative point of view. This implicitly Male Gothic convention originates from the patriarchal belief about the importance of the male gaze. Anne Williams explains in her study that “the possessor of the gaze, a man who sees a woman is in the position of power . . . and any woman who becomes an object of the male gaze, may never be anything else but an object . . .” (109). Williams follows Freud’s theory of the ‘I’ where
“the Oedipal crisis is precipitated by the perception of absence . . .” (108).
15 As described in Sigmund Freud’s theory, the child’s unconscious desire for the parent of the opposite sex is a necessary stage in the child’s psychological development. In any case, the desire needs to be dealt with; otherwise it leads to neurosis. Philip’s perception of Rachel as a “monster” or “viper” shows clear signs of his unresolved complex. 16 Louise is Philip’s godfather’s daughter around the same age as Philip, a great friend of his and a possible future wife.
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Consequently, based on this presupposition the categories ‘male-me’ and ‘not-male/not- me;’ or alternatively, ‘I’ and ‘other’ – a man and a woman. Du Maurier’s representation of Rachel/the female through the eyes of Philip/the male refers to the well-known
Gothic dilemma about the masculine fear of the feminine. Imparting the narrative point of view – the male gaze – to Philip, Rachel is automatically placed into the role of the female ‘other.’ Her submission to the role is expected in order to maintain the Male
Gothic plot.
However, Rachel’s behaviour does not quite correspond with the classic prototype of the Female Gothic heroine; for “she ha[s] a certain independence of spirit that would seem […] unfeminine” (91). Femininity, as defined in this novel, does not relate to a single aspect, but encompasses the person’s nature as well as their appearance. On the one hand, Rachel’s free will with which she acts suppresses her femininity because, in this sense, freedom is a masculine quality; yet on the other, in terms of looks, one of the gentlemen finds Rachel not “unremarkable,” nor “beautiful,” but “decidedly feminine”
(117). Generally, Rachel’s composed demeanour contrasts considerably with Philip’s reckless actions, to the point that it appears to be a part of an elaborate plan. For despite
Rachel’s intellectual advantage, she purposefully ensures Philip at times in his dominance over her to satisfy his male ego; for instance, she asks him to create a “list of rules” or a “code of conduct” for her (125) because “[she] must do as [she is] bid . . .
[as] part of a woman’s training” (124). Placing herself voluntarily into the role of the
‘other,’ Rachel – “a woman of the world” – manages to “twist a young man like [Philip] around her finger” (133).
At one point, du Maurier suggests in My Cousin Rachel that the primary difference between men and women resides in the fact that “women […] act always
55 from emotion [while] men, more usually though not always so, with reason” (311).
Ironically, this ideology becomes reversed here because it is Rachel who holds the mental power over Philip, whose actions are driven by emotion. Following in
Ambrose’s footsteps, “[Philip] ha[s] woken to [Rachel] just as some men wake to religion [and] he become[s] obsessed in the same fashion” (103). However, the main difference between Ambrose and Philip considering their relationship with Rachel lies in Philip’s identification of Rachel with his absent mother. Philip admits that at those times they spend apart, “[he] would feel oddly lonely, as a child does when holiday is done” (178). Finally, by giving her the pearl necklace that his mother wore on her wedding day, Philip makes the identification most overt and the necklace simultaneously stands for a proposal to Rachel, who rejects it, and thus does not yield again to the patriarchal demands.
Consequently, Philip’s indirect murder of Rachel, when he purposefully does not warn her of the unstable terrace leading over the garden that is currently under reconstruction and through which Rachel falls, “re-enacts the matricide,” which re- institutionalizes the patriarchal order (Horner and Zlosnik 1998, 140). In Freudian theory, the Oedipal complex fails to be resolved and re-news the initial fear of the mother. Moreover, such an ending meets the requirement of the tragic plot in
Williams’s definition of Male Gothic and it also kills the untrustworthy female.
However, Philip’s murder additionally stands for his inability to break the ties with the past; Philip succumbs to Ambrose’s will and carries out the revenge. Henceforth, Philip becomes haunted by his impetuous deed and at the same time Rachel takes up the role of the persecuted Gothic heroine, defeated by the male ego. At last, Rachel can never be condemned for allegedly killing Ambrose and now it is Philip who is haunted by guilt.
He proclaims:
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No one will ever guess the burden of the blame I carry on my shoulders; nor will they know that
every day, haunted still by doubt, I ask myself a question which I cannot answer. Was Rachel
innocent or guilty? Maybe I shall learn that too, in purgatory. (4)
Proving neither her innocence, nor her guilt, Philip fails to demystify the female; for sometimes, as Ambrose warns Philip, “there are women, […] good women very possibly, who through no fault of their own impel disaster. Whatever they touch somehow turns to tragedy” (6).
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3.4 The House on the Strand: Reconciling the ‘Unconscious’ Past
The House on the Strand (1969) was the second to last novel du Maurier wrote at the age of sixty-two and at the same time it was also her last successful one. By this time of her writing career, du Maurier has moved on her interest to the “complexities of human identity and the possibilities of paranormal experience” (Brayfield xi) and she combines historical fact with psychological insights in this particular book. In one of her previous works called The Scapegoat (1957), du Maurier introduces a male protagonist who swaps his life with his double he meets in France during his visit. This motif of ‘doubling’, manifesting its loose affinities with R. L. Stevenson’s The Strange
Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1881), re-appears in The House on the Strand, yet the plot is carried out in a different manner. Furthermore, du Maurier admitted that writing the character of Dick allowed her to explore the duality of human nature, to the extent that “[s]he did not feel she was pretending to be him but that she was him” (Forster
364).
The influence of reading Carl Gustav Jung strongly manifests itself in this particular novel which builds its main motif upon Jung’s theory of the ‘collective unconscious.’ In his study of the human psyche Jung distinguishes between two types of the ‘unconscious:’ ‘personal’ which contains memories of an individual inaccessible to his consciousness that can be recollected through dreams or hypnosis17 and ‘collective’ which includes shared memories of all humans disregarding their different cultures or time periods to which they are born. Jung defines the ‘collective unconscious’ in his words as follows:
The collective unconscious comprises in itself the psychic life of our ancestors right back to the
earliest beginnings. It is the matrix of all conscious psychic occurrences, and hence it exerts an
17 Jung’s ‘personal unconscious’ can be compared to Sigmund Freud’s ‘unconscious’
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influence that compromises the freedom of consciousness in the highest degree, since it is
continually striving to lead all conscious processes back into the old paths. (112)
Subsequently, du Maurier extends Jung’s definition in The House on the Strand and states that “everything we have done from the infancy onwards […] is reproducible
[and] returnable” and stored within the same memory brain cells that also contain “the legacy of parents, grandparents [and] remoter ancestors back to primeval times” (221).
The brain cells concerned with one’s memory she calls the “memory-box” which
“store[s] not only [one’s] own memories but habits of the earlier brain pattern [all people] inherit. These habits, if released to consciousness, would enable [them] to see, hear [and] become cognoscent of things that happened in the past” (221). Additionally, the drug introduced in du Maurier’s story that possesses the power of time-travel functions as a medium through which the past is repeatedly recollected.
As suggested earlier, the story introduces a male narrator. Dick, a failing publisher unhappy in his marriage, feels disillusioned by his current situation and finds a retreat in fourteenth-century England to where he time-travels after taking a drug concocted by his biophysicist friend Magnus, acting the role of the “human guinea pig” (50).
Moreover, the character of Dick represents the link between the two worlds – past and contemporary – and his quest becomes to discover why the drug takes him back to the fourteenth century where he follows the footsteps of Sir Roger Kylmerth the steward, what possible connection exists between them and, most importantly, whether Roger and his contemporaries “[are] all products of the drug [that] turn[s] a clear brain sick”
(81), or they are evidence of some greater psychologically-constructed unconscious mind.
Published during the 1960s when drug use became popular with the counterculture movement, The House on the Strand assuredly depicted a topical issue.
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The psychedelic drug du Maurier presents here is a blend of two hallucinogens teonatacl and ololuiqui that are real and their effects similar to those of LSD: enhanced sight, loss of sense and loss of touch, nausea and vertigo. Magnus explains to Dick that “[the hallucinogens] only push the brain around in different directions – quite chaotic” (15).
Despite the psychedelics not being chemically addictive, “the text suggests a dependence that is psychological rather than physical . . .” (Brayfield xiv). Du Maurier’s added time-travelling feature to the drug enables her to create an alternate world that gives rise to questions about the significance of human existence. In result, the two- level plot becomes an examination of the Gothic duality of mind.
The setting of du Maurier’s novel with scattered scenes of medieval murder and adultery is certainly a Gothic one and, in addition to that, she also makes intentional references to invoke Gothic images in her readers. First and foremost, Magnus’s laboratory, the Gothic secret room, is described by Dick as “macabre;” in fact,
“Bluebeard’s Chamber18 would be an apter description for it. All those embryos in jars, and that revolting monkey’s head . . .” (14). A few pages later the laboratory does not remind him of “the bearded potentate in the Eastern fairy-tale” any more but rather of
The Alchemist who is “naked save for a loincloth . . . kindling a fire with bellows, and to his left [stands] a hooded monk and an abbot, carrying a cross” (23). The notion of alchemy echoes the medieval ages which lent Gothic the motif of the haunted castle and the atmosphere of horror. In The House on the Strand “the Bluebeard’s chamber” is part of the Kilmarth house where Dick is invited by Magnus to stay on his own (until the arrival of his family) in order to test his drug without any unwanted attention.
18 The story of Bluebeard is a French folktale of a wealthy man who murders his wives and hides their bodies in his secret chamber. One day the chamber is discovered by the current wife of Bluebeard who, after learning the horrible truth about him, kills him with the help of her sister and inherits all Bluebeard’s property. Lastly, she lets the dead wives be buried. This story is considered one of the original sources for the subsequent interpretations of Gothic tales because it contains the chief elements of Gothic, revealing its principles: the castle, the secret room and the gender dynamics.
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Yet this time, as emphasized by Magnus, the drug experiment is no type of “a ghost-hunt” with “conjuring spirits from the vasty deep” (47-8). This time, as opposed to the other three novels already examined in this paper, du Maurier does not kindle spirits from the past that come to haunt the living: those “poor things . . . wither[ed] away from tedium, unable to draw attention to themselves” (25). Instead, her revival of fourteenth-century England serves her to explore the subject of time continuity that erases the boundaries between the past, present and future where “everything living is part of the whole [and people] are all bound, one to the other, through time and eternity”
(189). She proposes the question whether “time [is] all-dimensional – yesterday, tomorrow running concurrently in ceaseless repetition” (42). Ultimately, the meaning of the experiment becomes the discovery that “by moving about in time death [is] destroyed” (189) and all people represent “links in an interwoven chain bound one to the other through the centuries” (207).
Despite du Maurier’s addition of the supernatural element of time-travel and her apparent involvement with Gothic, the story gives the impression of realism, primarily for its engagement with science and the realistic portrayal of the medieval world that shows no signs of a dream-like state. During his first trip19 to the past, Dick anticipates
“the blurred intoxication of a dream” and not “a reality more vivid than anything hitherto experienced” (1). He discovers that he is able to walk around in this world with
“a dreamer’s freedom but with a waking man’s perception” (188), watching the events that already happened while being invisible to all the fourteenth-century inhabitants. He immediately becomes increasingly involved with this newly discovered reality in comparison to his own life. At first he cannot comprehend his fascination for it; even
19 The word ‘trip’ is used deliberately by du Maurier when she is referring to Dick’s journeys to the past. She borrows the phraseology of drug users’, who call ‘the trip’ the experience of being on some type of one or more hallucinogenic drugs.
61 listening to some “back-chat” of two horsemen that would normally make him yawn at a social event in his world he finds exceedingly interesting. On the whole, “[Dick’s] only desire [is] to be part of the world about [him]” (29).
As opposed to Philip from My Cousin Rachel whose naivety and inexperience drive his actions and fill him with energy to fight for his beliefs, Dick has already lived through enough that any vision of possible escape is welcomed. His wife Vita, “a hot- house plant like many American women” (18), insists on his moving to New York in order to pursue his publishing career, whereas Dick wants to stay in England. When he gets offered to stay at Kilmarth, the mere thought of spending his time as he wishes and without the “paraphernalia of life en famille” (51) excites him tremendously; for in spite of still loving his wife after their three-year marriage, they have reached a temporary impasse and become strangers to one another. Moreover, “the children, who [are] bred of her body and not [his], [make] the division [between them] yet more complete” (260) and “[he] could [do] without them” (96). Thus the escapes to the past become a welcome distraction and Dick explains their importance for him as follows:
As eavesdropper in time my role was passive, without commitment or responsibility. I could move
about in their world unwatched, knowing that whatever happened I could do nothing about to
prevent it – comedy, tragedy, farce – whereas in my twentieth-century existence I must take my
share in shaping my own future and that of my family. (35)
Dick’s suggested attraction for giving up responsibility corresponds with du Maurier’s repetitive depiction of her male narrators as weak creatures in need of assistance and it copies the relationship of Philip and Ambrose in My Cousin Rachel. The dynamics of
Philip’s immense adoration of Ambrose carries over into The House on the Strand where it results in an evident yet unvoiced homosexual attraction between Dick and his
Cambridge fellow Magnus. As Celia Brayfield suggests, “their attachment was probably
62 unique to middle-class England in the twentieth century . . . and [it] was a product of emotional denial, single-sex boarding schools and a paralysing awareness of social class
(xii). Although the homosexual desires are never addressed overtly, Dick’s affectionate feelings for Magnus contrast noticeably with the indifferent behaviour to his wife Vita.
In fact, Dick’s description of women has clear misogynist implications. He states that
“[t]he trouble [is], with women, they [have] one-track minds, and to their narrow view everything male, be it a man, dog, fish or slug, pursue[s] but a single course, and that the dreary road to copulation” (122). In all probability, Dick’s marriage to Vita stems from his sexual attraction for her, yet it can never reach the “binding” and “intimate”
(215) relationship between him and Magnus that is emotionally conditioned.
Assuredly, Magnus is the dominant partner in the relationship who has the power to manipulate Dick into doing anything for him. Dick clearly concedes the supremacy to
Magnus when he states that “he call[s] the tune, and [Dick] dance[s]”
(16). As a matter of fact, Magnus’s presence evokes almost a drug-like state of mind.
When interacting with Magnus, Dick experiences “the stimulation,” and then afterwards, Magnus is suddenly gone and “the inevitable sense of depletion” arrives
(49). Furthermore, “there’s some sort of a hoodoo […] when [Magnus] is around” (96).
Additionally, the relationship between Magnus and Dick also exists in the novel to create a polarity of two opposing approaches to the experiment, resurrecting the original
Gothic dilemma. Dick describes the difference in their attitudes as follows:
[Magnus’s] was scientific, unemotional, it did not really concern him who was broken in the
process so long as what he was attempting to prove was proved successfully; whereas I was
already caught up in the mesh of history: the people who to him were puppets of a bygone age
were alive for me. (94-5)
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The conflict between the scientific interests and personal detachment of Magnus from the past world and Dick’s emotional engagement with the people and events of the fourteenth century paraphrase Gothic’s eighteenth-century disagreement over the importance of reason, and the subsequent apprehension about it in the nineteenth- century due to the progress in science; for it is clearly the emotion that is foregrounded by Gothic writers including du Maurier. Thus Dick cannot possibly resist staying away and he keeps battling reason with emotion. Ironically it is Magnus, the man of science, who abandons his rational thinking at last while being on a trip to the past himself and he decides to give hand to Isolda to help her climb;20 “[i]f instinct […] warned him otherwise he […] disregarded it, unlike [Dick], and therefore showed the greater courage” (257). Human compassion crosses the boundary between centuries and it ultimately defeats reason.
As Brayfield points out in her essay, the names du Maurier chose for her characters are not accidental and they have symbolic meanings; because in Latin
Magnus means ‘great’, Vita means ‘life’ and Dick has three meanings in American slang – a detective, a penis, or an annoyingly stupid person (xii). Magnus’s dominance and intellectual ‘greatness’ over Dick both in their relationship as well as in their behaviour when facing the same situation (whether to help Isolda), is contained in his name. Vita’s reproductive function of a woman can be derived from hers. Lastly, Dick’s name summarizes his irritable character, ‘the penis’ insinuates the questions of sexual identity and the word ‘detective’ introduces Dick in his role of an investigator of
Magnus’s death.
20 Magnus warns Dick from the very beginning that he can move freely in the past world, except from touching anything, which would have catastrophic consequences. When stretching his hand to Isolda, Magnus is uncontrollably teleported back to the present materializing at one end of the tunnel where he gets killed by a freight train. As a result, it cannot be said for certain in which world Magnus died.
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Although Magnus’s courageous deed might make Dick’s actions appear inferior,
Dick also experiences certain moments that almost cause him to die. With his growing emotional attachment to the past world Dick begins to think of himself as “a ghost in time” (63) or “a freak in time” (72), ascribing greater credibility to the other world because that is reality and he the alien presence in it (5). Gradually his addiction to the time-travel intensifies to the point that when Dick is in his contemporary world, imagining what is happening in the past one, he starts “crave[ing] the living experience”
(152, my emphasis). However, the real danger resides in Dick’s inability to control the entire duration of his trips. He can never anticipate the ending of it and is thus being unpredictably thrown back to the present; as a result, the two worlds sometimes merge to the extent that he gets almost hit by a car on one occasion and by a train on another.
Yet the vital moment occurs when Dick attempts to strangle his wife thinking he is still in the fourteenth century aggravated with Joanna, who was supposed to be the victim of his rage. At last, Mr Hyde nearly overpowers Dr Jekyll – a motif that repeats itself in
My Cousin Rachel.
Consequently, the death of Roger puts an end to Dick’s need of time-travel. He feels “no more desire to loose [himself] in the other world” (328) and both Roger and
Dick are free. In Jungian terms, Dick’s ‘personal unconscious’ assimilates21 with his
‘collective unconscious’ embodied in Roger and thus Dick’s achieves to reconcile his ancestral past with his present self. Dick comes to the realization eventually that “[he has] not been moving among childhood ghosts” when being in the past and that “Roger the steward [is] not [his] alter-ego” (85); they cannot all be a part of Dick’s ‘personal unconscious’ and a different explanation for his dilemma must exist. Furthermore, by assimilating the two worlds – past and present – du Maurier manages to summarize the
21 In Jungian theory the term ‘assimilation’ is used to describe the phenomenon of merging the ‘personal’ and ‘collective unconscious’ by conscious introspection.
65 substance of her writing through the character of Dick. When reaching the state of complete enchantment and feeling “disembodied” during one of his trips, Dick proclaims:
Never before, neither in my own world nor on the previous occasions when I had strayed into the
other, had I felt such a sense of unity. I was one of them, and they did not know it. I belonged
amongst them, and they did not know it. This, I think, was the essence of what it meant to me. To
be bound, yet free; to be alone, yet in their company; to be born in my own time yet living,
unknown in theirs. (108, my emphasis)
Dick’s trips to the past constitute a necessary psychoanalytic journey he must undertake because “carried within us [the past] can determine and therefore constrain how we may behave” (Light 190). Thus Dick arrives at the realization that he needs to reconcile his ancestral ‘unconscious’ that is part of his own psyche in order to resolve his current identity crisis. Bounded within a specific span of time at last, Dick’s existence is freed from the fear of the inescapable evanescence of life because of his newly-gained awareness of the continuity and interconnectedness of the human mind. As Du Maurier writes, “[t]ime [does] not exist, for the aged, for the young, and for those of us who sometimes see it open and fold up of a sudden, like a telescope” (du Maurier 2004, 45).
Inevitably, “we are all ghosts of yesterday, and the phantom of tomorrow awaits us alike in the sunshine or in shadow, dimly perceived at times, never entirely lost” (du
Maurier 2004, 46).
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4. Conclusion
Women’s writing forms a distinctive literary category that resulted from the different historical experience of women from their male counterparts. Assuredly, women have always been part of history; however, their female experience has not been necessarily taken into serious account and their voices have been excluded from the historical records. As explained in the theoretical part of the thesis, such gendered approach to life and history led the women writers to express their frustrations and anxieties in their writing and their works have subsequently become the testaments of their marginalized female experience. In the 1976, Ellen Moers defined the literary sub- genre of Female Gothic stating that all literature done by women is Gothic in its essence. She thus created the initial argument that was later on developed by the feminist critics: the women writers have used the Gothic genre because its conventions allowed them to depict their struggles under the patriarchal dominion in their truest nature.
In result, the Gothic genre has become gendered and the major Gothic works called for their re-evaluation. As suggested by DeLamotte, “[a]lmost from its inception, the genre has itself been described metaphorically as engaged in confinement and constriction, destroying barriers, going too far” (142). It was clarified in chapter 2 that no single definition of the Gothic genre can be given because the Gothic gets commonly combined with other genres, such as romance or the historical novel. Yet DeLamotte’s formulation encompasses the genre’s main characteristics; for in its broadest sense, the
Gothic aims to disrupt various sorts of boundaries in a provoking manner in order to challenge certain socio-cultural issues, as demonstrated in the four selected novels by du
Maurier. In other words, by “destroying barriers” between the normal and the unacceptable the Gothic genre destabilizes the established orders of society.
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One predominant motif of a Gothic plot has undeniably been the concept of femininity which gave rise to other questions connected with this term, such as one’s sexuality, personal identity and the unequal distribution of powers of the two genders.
As described in section 2.4, du Maurier’s conflicted female identity led to her natural adoption of the Gothic genre because through her main characters she managed to explore her clashing female and male self; while her female personality presented du
Maurier only with its confinements, the ‘boy-in-the-box’ whom she desperately tried to keep locked up desired freedom and manifested in her works. Her protagonists are then both women and men; their respective stories study the relationship dynamics between the male and the female from various angles and address du Maurier’s anxieties originating in her confusion about her own existence.
When Daphne du Maurier started publishing her works in the 1930s, England was undergoing certain transitions related to the conception of the female that influenced her creative thoughts. During the inter-war period, women’s roles were shifting again, looking back into the past in search of the Victorian ideal of the nuclear family; thus marriage and domesticity became highly valued. In literature, modernism entered the scene and women writers were trying to delineate themselves from the nineteenth- century female authors, mainly to separate themselves from them. However, Daphne du
Maurier being brought up in a conservative family rejected modernism in her writing and looked for inspiration in the works of the Brontës, R. L. Stevenson, Charles
Dickens, Oscar Wilde and many of their other contemporaries.
Indeed, instead of differentiating herself from her literary predecessors, du
Maurier adopted the traditional Female Gothic plot in her early works, as proved in the analyses of Jamaica Inn and Rebecca. These two novels aim to show the unequal distribution of power between the two sexes. Due to du Maurier’s belief that family
68 represents the main unit of society, she came to view emancipation of the contemporary woman as a highly contested phenomenon. In her personal life, she praised family above all, yet she wanted to be the breadwinner; marriage to her husband meant everything to her and she would not divorce him under any circumstances, but she also fell in love will several women throughout her life.
In result, despite the fact that Jamaica Inn and Rebecca are examples of the traditional Female Gothic that portray a young heroine in her struggle for identity which she eventually finds in her commitment to a man, du Maurier modifies the plot’s ending in both cases. In Jamaica Inn, Mary Yellan attempts to defy the constrictions of her womanhood at first, yet she finds her place beside Jem, gaining thus only a partial freedom. In Rebecca, Rebecca pays for her sexual frivolity with death and the narrator, who could potentially embody the ideal Female Gothic heroine, becomes ‘villainized’ instead when she decides to cover up Maxim’s murder of Rebecca in the end.
Therefore, du Maurier’s female protagonists rebel but they return within the constraints of the patriarchal order at last.
As argued by Williams in chapter 2.2, both Male and Female Gothic deal primarily – in their feminist and psychoanalytic readings of the twenty-first century – with the notion of femininity; while Female Gothic attempts to present the female experience with all its constrictions, Male Gothic strives for the portrayal of the female as a threatening ‘other.’ In My Cousin Rachel, du Maurier manages to merge the two opposing literary conventions by employing a male protagonist Philip Ashley who sees the female ‘other’ in his cousin Rachel. Despite the fact that the story subsequently develops into a traditional Male Gothic plot, Rachel’s character becomes noticeably foregrounded and overpowers Philip’s narrative position in a similar fashion Rebecca overshadows the second Mrs de Winter. Subseqently, Philip’s unquestionable
69 resemblance to the protagonist of Rebecca makes him her male counterpart and My
Cousin Rachel thus becomes a re-written, male version of Rebecca. In other words,
Female Gothic is re-made into a Male Gothic with Philip acquiring some qualities of the
Female Gothic heroine: they are both naïve, inexperienced and possess alter-ego personalities – Rebecca and Ambrose – who threaten to destroy the protagonists’ own selves.
Furthermore, My Cousin Rachel creates a certain milestone in du Maurier’s writing in the sense that her female characters are no longer submissive victims and they can manipulate their men. For even though Rebecca already introduced such example of a manipulative woman, the reader does not learn about Rebecca’s intrigues any sooner than at the near end of the story. However, My Cousin Rachel follows a young man who is emotionally tortured by a woman older than him and the story then becomes a testament of his torment caused by the formidable female.
In the last novel The House on the Strand that the thesis presented an apparent deviation could be detected from du Maurier’s previous focus on the protagonist’s identity acquisition which followed from the interplay of the two sexes. This time, du
Maurier’s primary interest resides in the exploration of the past which also holds the key to the resolution of Dick’s identity crisis. Written at the age of sixty-two when du
Maurier’s anxieties about the hardships of old age such as memory loss came up, The
House on the Strand attempts to resurrect the past most eagerly and vividly out of the four novels, in an attempt to escape the desolating present. Yet the principles of femininity and masculinity are still prominent in this story that depicts a homosocial world – as My Cousin Rachel does – with its misogynist view of women.
Overall, the one distinguishing feature of du Maurier’s female narrators from the male ones is that the female protagonists always struggle alone on their journeys, as
70 proved in Jamaica Inn and Rebecca; on the contrary, her male protagonists need the assistance of older men. While Philip follows his guardian Ambrose in My Cousin
Rachel, Dick’s actions are directed by his close friend Magnus in The House on the
Strand. Therefore, even when du Maurier creates a male-oriented story that perceives women as the weaker sex, her men are incapable of an individual conduct of their lives and require instructions. Du Maurier therefore urges her readers to confront the restrictions of their sex. According to her beliefs, people should step outside the boundaries of their selves defined by the conservative order. However, the subsequent return within the boundaries is necessary; otherwise, if the family unit as the ultimate law of society was to be challenged, the social system would disintegrate.
Consequently, du Maurier’s significance of her fiction cannot be denied; for the relevance of her subject matters she addresses in her works will always be relevant in the world that continuously struggles to balance the female and the male powers. By discussing those issues in seemingly uncomplicated tales of romance, du Maurier manages to attract a wide readership. Moreover, her combination of Female and Male
Gothic plots in her writing makes her uniquely defy any categorization. Yet more importantly, her diverse use of the Gothic conventions allows her to communicate her anxieties about her conflicted female identity in her writing from different viewpoints, in an attempt to reconcile the two opposing tendencies: for on the one hand, she believed in conservative ideals of family togetherness and continuity, but on the other, she wanted to explore the scenarios of their possible disruption, making thus her novels persistently topical.
In conclusion, the Gothic genre irrefutably served du Maurier to document her female experience in her works through the adaptation of its plots in the same way it served her literary predecessors. Du Maurier carried on the Female Gothic tradition of
71 the Brontës but applied its conventions to the twentieth-century questions of femininity.
She lived nearly through the entirety of the last century and thus experienced the term’s conception to shift more than once: in the first half of the century, England yearned for the Victorian values of domesticity; on the contrary, the other half witnessed various women’s emancipatory movements caused by the emergence of the second-wave feminism. In her writing, du Maurier managed to unite the two ideologies to make sense of the world; while she encouraged her readers to push their boundaries of their selves, she also reminded them to come back within the limits to preserve the established order.
However, du Maurier’s primary concern of a writer was to reconcile the on-going inner battles between her male and female self, the past and present and the conservative and modern – all of which became intertwined and followed from one another. She reached the compromise between all those opposing concepts in her stories, using the Gothic genre to challenge the set boundaries. Ultimately, by acknowledging the past and cherishing the family unit, du Maurier’s ‘disembodied spirit’ that “was neither girl nor boy” (Forster 222) could realize itself in her writing; for as Virginia Woolf declares, “[it] is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be man or woman pure and simple; one must be a woman-manly or man- womanly” (qtd. in Showalter 288). In du Maurier’s words:
We are none of us isolated in time, but are part of what we were once, and of what we are yet to
become, so that these varied personalities merge and become one in creative thought . . . . (du
Maurier 2004, 64)
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5. Bibliography
Primary Sources: du Maurier, Daphne. Jamaica Inn. 2nd ed. 1936. Introd. Sarah Dunant. London: Virago,
2015. Print.
---. The House on the Strand. 1969. Introd. Celia Brayfield. London: Virago, 2003.
Print.
---. My Cousin Rachel. 1951. Introd. Sally Beauman. London: Virago, 2003. Print.
---. Rebecca. 2nd ed. 1938. Afterword by Sally Beauman. London: Virago, 2015. Print.
Secondary Sources:
Auerbach, Nina. “Daphne du Maurier (1907-1989).” British Writers, Supplement 3. Ed.
George Stade. NY: Scribner’s, 1996. 133-49. GVRL. Web. 18 Oct. 2017.
Baldick, Chris, and Robert Mighall. “Gothic Criticism.” Punter 267-87.
Beauman, Sally. Introduction. My Cousin Rachel. By Daphne du Maurier. 1951.
London: Virago, 2003. v-x. Print.
Becker, Susanne. “Gothic Contextualisation.” Gothic Forms of Feminine Fiction.
Manchester: Manchester UP, 1999. 21-40. Print.
Botting, Fred. Gothic: The New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge, 1996. Print.
Brayfield, Celia. Introduction. The House on the Strand. By Daphne du Maurier. 1969.
London: Virago, 2003. xi-xvii. Print.
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Brinks, Ellen. Introduction. Gothic Masculinity: Effeminacy and the Supernatural in
English and German Romanticism. By Brinks. London: Bucknell UP, 2003. 11-
24. Print.
Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 1847. London: Penguin, 1994. Print.
Davison, Carol Margaret. “The Victorian Gothic and Gender.” Smith and Hughes 124-
41.
DeLamotte, Eugenia C. Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century
Gothic. NY: Oxford UP, 1990. Print.
Fitzgerald, Lauren. “Female Gothic and the Institutionalisation of Gothic Studies.” The
Female Gothic: New Directions. Ed. Diana Wallace and Andrew Smith. London:
Palgrave, 2009. 13-25. Print.
Forster, Margaret. Daphne du Maurier. 2nd ed. London: Arrow, 2007. Print.
Hennessy, Brendan. “The Gothic Novel.” British Writers. Ed. Ian Scott-Kilvert. Vol. 3.
NY: Scribner’s, 1979. 324-46. GVRL. 11 vols.
Horner, Avril, and Sue Zlosnik. Daphne du Maurier: Writing, Identity and the Gothic
Imagination. London: Palgrave, 1998. Print.
---. “Female Gothic.” Powell and Smith 107-120.
Hume, Robert D. “Gothic versus Romantic: A Revaluation of the Gothic Novel.” PMLA
84.2 (1969): 282-90. JSTOR. Web. 7 Nov. 2017.
Jung, Carl Gustav. “The Significance of Constitution and Heredity in Psychology.”
Collected Works of C. G. Jung: Structure & Dynamics of the Psyche. Ed. Gerhard
Adler and R. F. C. Hull. Vol. 8. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1970. 107-113. Print.
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Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. NY:
Columbia UP, 1982. Print. European Perspectives.
Light, Alison. “Daphne du Maurier’s Romance with the Past.” Forever England:
Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars. London: Routledge,
1991. 156-207. Print. du Maurier, Daphne. Myself When Young. Introd. Helen Taylor. London: Virago, 2004.
Print. Rpt. of Growing Pains: The Shaping of a Writer. 1977.
---. The Rebecca Notebook and Other Memories. 1981. Introd. Alison Light. London:
Virago, 2005. Print.
Massè, Michelle A. “Psychoanalysis and the Gothic.” Punter 307-320.
Moers, Ellen. “Female Gothic.” Literary Women. 1976. London: Women’s P, 1978. 90-
110. Print.
Meyers, Helene. “Introduction: Feminist Gothic/Gothic Feminism.” Femicidal Fears:
Narratives of the Female Gothic Experience. By Meyers. NY: U of New York P,
2001. 1-24. Print.
Pons, Auba Llompart. “Patriarchal Hauntings: Re-reading Villainy and Gender in
Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.” Atlantis 35.1 (June 2013): 69-83. JSTOR. 6 Nov.
2017.
Powell, Anna, and Andrew Smith, eds. Teaching the Gothic. London: Palgrave, 2006.
Teaching the New English.
Punter, David, ed. A New Companion to the Gothic. Chichester: Blackwell, 2012. Print.
Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture.
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Radcliffe, Ann. “On the Supernatural in Poetry.” New Monthly Magazine 16.1 (1826):
145-152. Rpt. in. Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook 1700-1820. Ed. E. J. Clery
and Robert Miles. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000. 163-172. Print.
Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to
Lessing. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1977. Print.
Smith, Andrew, and William Hughes. The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2012. EBSCOhost. Web. 6 Nov. 2017.
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Wallace, Diana. Female Gothic Histories: Gender, History and the Gothic. Cardiff: U
of Wales P, 2013. EBSCOhost. Web. 5 Nov. 2017. Gothic Literary Studies.
---. Sisters and Rivals in British Women’s Fiction, 1914-1939. By Wallace. London:
Palgrave, 2000. Print.
---. The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900-2000. London:
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Watson, Nicola J. “Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca.” The Popular & the Canonical:
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6. Summary
The thesis examines four selected novels written by the British woman writer
Daphne du Maurier as the examples of Gothic fiction. Since its origins in the eighteenth century, the Gothic genre has been marginalized and dismissed as a genre of popular taste due to its frequent association with the novels of romance. With the second-wave feminism in the 1970s Gothic literature has finally received a serious critical attention because of the interest of the feminist critics in literary works written by women writers who, according to their beliefs, employed the Gothic genre in their texts to describe their equally marginalized female experience, creating thus the sub-genre of Female
Gothic.
In the first part, the thesis maps the beginnings of the Gothic genre and its subsequent development and literary criticism up until the twentieth century when
Daphne du Maurier was publishing her works. The second part then offers a literary analysis of four of her novels: Jamaica Inn, Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel and The House on the Strand. The aim of the thesis is to show how du Maurier adapts the traditional
Gothic plots in these works to address her anxieties about her conflicted female identity through her characters which she also relates to the female experience in general. Du
Maurier’s literary abilities to write convincingly both from the female as well as the male perspective enable her to explore various aspects of the socially-constructed principles of femininity and masculinity.
The thesis concludes by commenting on her combined usage of Female and Male
Gothic plots in the selected works that, on the one hand, leads to her resistance of a definite categorization as a writer, but on the other, allows her to examine the relationship dynamics between the female and the male from different viewpoints.
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7. Resumé
Tato diplomová práce analyzuje čtyři vybrané romány od britské spisovatelky
Daphne du Maurier jako příklady gotické fikce. Již od svého vzniku v osmnáctém stolení byl gotický žánr především díky své časté asociaci s milostným románem, který byl oblíbený mezi ženskými čtenářkami, marginalizován. S druhou vlnou feminismu v 70. letech minulého století se gotická literatura díky feministickému zájmu o díla
ženských spisovatelek konečně dočkala seriózní pozornosti literárních kritiků. Z feministického hlediska tyto autorky užívaly gotický žánr k tomu, aby popsaly svou rovněž marginalizovanou ženskou zkušenost, a vytvořily tak pod-žánr ženské gotiky22.
Ve své první části práce mapuje začátky gotického žánru a jeho následný vývoj a literární kritiku až do dvacátého století, kdy Daphne du Maurier publikovala svá díla.
Druhá část pak nabízí literární analýzu čtyř jejích děl: Jamaica Inn, Rebecca, My
Cousin Rachel a The House on the Strand. Cílem práce je ukázat, jak du Maurier zpracovává klasické gotické zápletky ve své literární tvorbě, aby prostřednictvím svých postav vyjádřila obavy o své rozporuplné ženské identitě, kterou zároveň dává do obecné souvislosti s ženskou zkušeností. Literární schopnosti du Maurier psát přesvědčivě jak z ženské, tak i z mužské perspektivy, jí umožňují prozkoumat různé aspekty společensky nastavených principů feminity a maskulinity.
Práce ve svém závěru komentuje kombinované užití ženských a mužských gotických zápletek ve čtyřech vybraných dílech Daphne du Maurier. Toto užití na jedné straně popírá spisovatelčinu jednoznačnou kategorizaci, ale na straně druhé jí poskytuje možnost studovat vztahovou dynamiku mezi ženami a muži z různých hledisek.
22 Veškeré české překlady odvozené od původního anglického termínu ‚Female Gothic‘ jsou přeloženy volně, protože pro ně neexistují oficiální české ekvivalenty, například ženská a mužská gotika a podobně.
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