Daphne Du Maurier (1907 - 1989)

English novelist, playwright, nonfiction writer, and editor.

Regarded by many critics as a natural storyteller who made effective use ofmelodrama, du Maurier is best known for her Gothic novels and short stories.Unaffected by the literary fashions of her day, she wrote simple narrativesthat appealed to the average reader's love of adventure, fantasy, sensuality,and mystery. Perhaps best known for the Gothic novelRebecca (1938), herwritings have been extremely popular, and many have been adapted for film andtelevision.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Du Maurier was born in London to a family whose members had been successfulin arts and entertainment. Her father was a matinee idol and theater manager,and her grandfather was an artist forPunch and the author of severalnovels. Du Maurier was privately educated, and her youth was a swirl ofyachting and skiing parties and trips abroad with wealthy friends. Her careeras a novelist began on a visit to Cornwall when she was twenty. According toMargaret Forster (see Further Reading), du Maurier "was one of those writers inwhom the right place releases a certain sort of psychic energy…. Cornwall, withits wild seas and rocky coastline, its mists and moors, answered some deeplonging inside her." She eventually settled there, and it became the setting ofsome her best-known stories. Much of her time was spent in Menabilly, a manorhouse in Cornwall that was the inspiration for Manderley, the location of hermost famous novel,Rebecca. Du Maurier's earliest published works,articles and short stories, appeared primarily in women's magazines. Shepublished her first novel,The Loving Spirit, in 1931. That work wasfollowed by a number of novels and several collections of short stories, thefirst of which,The Apple Tree: A Short Novel and Some Stories, appearedin 1952. She died in 1989 at the age of eighty-one.

MAJOR WORKS

In her long career as a writer du Maurier produced nineteen novels, fivevolumes of short stories, two plays, and other writings. According to critics,most of her fiction can be classified as either cloak-and-dagger romances orGothic novels. Like her acknowledged master, Robert Louis Stevenson, du Maurierwrote fantasies involving pirates, smuggling, and ladies in distress. Yet duMaurier preferred to be thought of as an author of mystery and suspense.Rebecca is the story of a woman who feels a sense of competition withher husband's first wife, who died under mysterious circumstances. In theopinion of many reviewers, it is an interesting psychological study of a youngwoman married to an older man, as well as a gripping Gothic novel that includesmurder, violence, and a mysterious, haunted mansion. In her short story "TheBirds" (1959) du Maurier creates a nightmare world in which great flocks ofbirds inexplicably attack and kill humans. The work was made into a popularmotion picture directed by Alfred Hitchcock. "Don't Look Now" (1971), a macabretale about an English couple in Venice who receive visions of the future, hasbeen described as compelling and suspenseful; it was adapted as a film that, inthe words of Pauline Kael (see Further Reading), "is the fanciest, mostcarefully assembled Gothic enigma yet put on the screen."

CRITICAL RECEPTION

In spite of her popularity, du Maurier has never won the full approval of the literary establishment. Many critics find her prose clear but uninteresting and deplore what they perceive as a lack of symbolism or imagery in her books. According to some, du Maurier wrote mostly on the surface, only rarely...

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probing the psychological depths of her characters, and her plots seem conventional or contrived. Other commentators, however, have praised her works as imaginative and evocative, lauding her ability to create suspense and atmosphere. Richard Kelly (see Further Reading) describedRebecca as "the first major Gothicromance in the twentieth century and perhaps the finest written to this day."He pointed out thatRebecca includes many key components of Gothicromances, including "a mysterious and haunting mansion, violence, murder, asinister villain, sexual passion, a spectacular fire, brooding landscapes, anda version of the madwoman in the attic." Sylvia Berkman assessed du Maurier asa "specialist in horror," noting that "her creative intelligence isresourceful, her command of eerie atmosphere persuasive and precise, her senseof shock-timing exceptionally skilled." Even du Maurier's detractorsacknowledge her ability to create fantasy worlds that transport readers out oftheir daily existence and into places of romance and adventure.

JOHN BARKHAM (REVIEW DATE 8 MARCH 1953)

SOURCE: Barkham, John. "The Macabre and the Unexpected."NewYork Times Book Review (8 March 1953): 5.
In the following review, Barkham praises du Maurier's storytelling abilityin Kiss Me Again, Stranger.

In her short stories, as in her novels, Daphne du Maurier is a firm believerin keeping her readers on tenterhooks. She cannot dazzle them with her prose orexcite them with her imagination, but at least she baffles them with hermysteries. And baffle them she does, over and over again in this book [KissMe Again, Stranger]. Guessing the identity of du Maurier murderers is stilllikely to remain a favorite indoor sport this spring.

These eight tales are the mixture as before. All lean to the macabre, thestrange, the unexplained. None of them is bad, and several are very goodindeed. No wraiths or clanking ghosts, you understand, but subtle emanations,like a dying tree that bursts ominously into bloom, or a wife who falls underthe spell of the mountains. In every case Miss du Maurier painstakingly createsher atmosphere before she begins spinning her web. No fleeting moods orimpressions here: the style is deliberate, the pace leisurely, and the storieshold up as stories.

One is a masterpiece of horror. Twenty years ago an Australian named CarlStephenson wrote a superb short story, "Leningen and the Ants," in which hedescribed a South American planter's epic struggle against a column of jungleants. It was an adventure you could not forget. Miss du Maurier has matched itwith a story in the same genre. "The Birds" is set on a peaceful English farm.Its theme? The birds of the world have suddenly and inexplicably turnedpredatory, and all over the earth have begun to peck, scratch and tear humanbeings to death. We watch the attack on the farm. Like Leningen, farmer NatHocken fights a hair-raising battle against the winged warriors that darken thesky.

Two of the tales are straight studies in crime. There is the elegantmarquise who dallies with a young photographer and pushes him over a cliff,only to find herself trapped through a revealing portrait, a piece of very neatplotting. Better still is "The Motive," a skillful unraveling of a seeminglypurposeless suicide. Here Miss du Maurier does what J. B. Priestley did so wellin his "Dangerous Corner." She opens with a motiveless death, then graduallyleads the reader deeper and deeper into the mystery, until at last all thejigsaw pieces fall into place. This kind of progressive revelation requiresreal craftsmanship.

Have you noticed how often the agent of mystery or evil in a du Maurierstory is a woman? Du Maurier women have been bewitching and bewildering theirsimple-minded menfolk for years, and in these stories they are still at it. Thegirl who lures a youth into a cemetery, the marquise who kills her lover, thenagging wife who haunts by way of a tree—these arefemmes fatales whotoy with their men and then get them, one way or another. They also leave thisreviewer with some interesting theories as to the author's artisticmotivations.

In these days of shiny-knobbed science fiction, the old-fashioned story ofthe supernatural, which used to chill the kids and keep old men from thechimney corner, is becoming somthing of a rarity. More's the pity. Miss duMaurier can still write them in the grand tradition. Try these tales and seehow they dwarf those rockets and bug-eyed monsters.

SYLVIA BERKMAN (REVIEW DATE 15 MARCH 1953)

SOURCE: Berkman, Sylvia. "A Skilled Hand Weaves a Net of Horror."New York Herald Tribune Book Review 29, no. 31 (15 March 1953): 4.
In the following review of Kiss Me Again, Stranger,Berkman lauds duMaurier as a "seasoned" and "skilled" author of horror and suspenseliterature.

Daphne du Maurier is a specialist in horror. Her creative intelligence isresourceful, her command of eerie atmosphere persuasive and precise, her senseof shock-timing exceptionally skilled. In this collection of eight stories (ofwhich all but two are very long) she explores horror in a variety of forms; inthe macabre, in the psychologically deranged, in the supernatural, in thefantastic, most painfully of all, in the sheer cruelty of human beings ininterrelationship. Yet on the whole the volume offers absorbing rather thanoppressive reading because chiefly one's intellect is engaged; the emotionalcontent remains subordinate. Broadly speaking, for the most part these arestories of detection as well, with the contributing elements of excitation,suspense, and climax manipulated with a seasoned hand.

Miss du Maurier is most successful. I believe (as most of us are) when herintentions are unmixed.Kiss Me Again, Stranger, the title story,adaptly marshals the ingredients best suited to her abilities. Here in a trim,fluently moving narrative she developed an incident in war-torn London, with nopurpose beyond the immediate recounting of a sad and grisly tale. A youngmechanic, a simple, sensitive, likable good chap, attracted by a prettyusherette at a cinema palace, joins her on her bus ride home, to be led,bewildered, into a cemetery, where her conduct baffles him, to say the least.The girl, so gentle, wisful, languorous, and sleepy, turns out to bepsychopathically obsessed, with a vindicative animus against members of the R.A. F. The summary is unjust, for Miss du Maurier forcibly anchors her story ina strange lonely graveyard atmosphere, with night rain falling cold and drearyon the flat tombs, which both reflects and reinforces the mortal impairment ofthe young girl's nature and the destruction of the young man's hopes, in acharnel world dislocated by the larger horror of war.

InKiss Me Again, Stranger, all separate aspects of the narrativefuse. "The Birds," however, essentially a far more powerful story, is marred byunresolved duality of intent. Slowly, with intensifying accurate detail, Missdu Maurier builds up her account of the massed attack of the starving winterbirds on humankind, the familiar little land birds, the battalions of gullsbearing in rank upon rank from the sea, the murderous predatory birds of preydescending with ferocious beaks and talons to rip, rend, batter and kill. Thestruggle involved is the ancient struggle of man against the forces of nature,Robinson Crusoe's struggle to overcome an elemental adversary through cunning,logic, and wit. The turning of this material also into a political fable, withthe overt references to control from Russia and aid from America, to my minddissipates the full impact of a stark and terrifying tale.

"Monte Verità" also clothes parable in an outer aspect of realism, this timefor the statement of philosophical axiom: that the residence of truth is harsh,lonely and austere, by an ascent granted only to few, but its attainment theattainment of richest beatitude, even though in the general community below thefew spirits who achieve the lofty summit are persecuted through hatred andfear. Again Miss du Maurier is most successful in the establishment ofother-worldly atmosphere, the creation of impressive scene, particularly of theclear symbolic peaks of Monte Verità rising pure and unadorned against the sky.Perhaps this kind of story requires a special attitude on the part of theauthor—E. M. Forster's confident assumption that the dryadis in thetree, if only one looks hard enough; too heavy a grounding in realistic detailcan arouse realistic questioning. Here the factual narration of events, inwhich Anna, forsaking worldly attachments enters the citadel on the heights ofMonte Verità, and the subsequent development of the two men who love her, againimposes disunity. Yet "Monte Verità" contains an abundance of integratedincident to sustain the interest; one surely wants to know the end.

Equally, each of the stories exerts that claim: one surely wants to know theend. "The Split Second," with its investigation of the intertemporal in theinstant of death, represents the author at her most skillful, weaving alogical, firm, constantly tautening web of mystification and suspense. "TheLittle Photographer," recounting the divertissement of a bored, vain, beautifulmarquise with a crippled shopkeeper, in part recalls Thomas Mann's "Little HerrFriedemann"; but Miss du Maurier has given the denouement a characteristic turn(M. Paul is not idly cast as a photographer; he had a way of snapping picturesof his lady after their dalliance in the bracken), and the story ends with asinister good chill.

Miss du Maurier is not primarily concerned with character. Her figures arepresented with swift unhesitating strokes; through them a fairly complicatedhistory unfolds. Yet every account of human action contains its residue ofhuman experience; and Miss du Maurier's main themes, if seriously regarded, areneither haphazard nor trivial: again and again she returns to the considerationof our human predicament, to frustration, destruction, loss, betrayal, andneedless suffering, Joyce's themes of the "Dubliners," conveyed through theobverse method of a decided emphasis on plot. In general in this volumecomplexities of plot disinfect horror to a pungent and provocative spice.

The Loving Spirit (novel) 1931
I'll Never Be Young Again (novel) 1932
The Progress of Julius (novel) 1933
Gerald: A Portrait (biography) 1934
Jamaica Inn (novel) 1936
The du Mauriers (family history and biography) 1937
Rebecca (novel) 1938
Come Wind, Come Weather (short stories) 1940
Rebecca [adaptor; from her novel] (play) 1940
Frenchman's Creek (novel) 1941
Hungry Hill (novel) 1943
The Years Between (play) 1944
The King's General (novel) 1946
September Tide (play) 1948
The Parasites (novel) 1949
My Cousin Rachel (novel) 1951
The Apple Tree: A Short Novel, and Some Stories (novella and shortstories) 1952; also published asKiss Me Again, Stranger: A Collection ofEight Stories, Long and Short, 1953; and asThe Birds, and OtherStories, 1977
Mary Anne (fictionalized biography) 1954
The Scapegoat (novel) 1957
The Breaking Point (short stories) 1959; also published asThe BlueLenses, and Other Stories, 1970
Early Stories (short stories) 1959
The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë (biography) 1960
Castle d'Or [with Arthur Quiller-Couch] (novel) 1962
The Glass-Blowers (novel) 1963
The Flight of the Falcon (novel) 1965
The House on the Strand (novel) 1969
Don't Look Now (short stories) 1971; also published asNot afterMidnight, 1971
Rule Britannia (novel) 1972
Echoes from the Macabre: Selected Stories (short stories) 1976
Myself When Young: The Shaping of a Writer (autobiography) 1977; alsopublished asGrowing Pains: The Shaping of a Writer, 1977
The Rendezvous, and Other Stories (short stories) 1980
Letters from Menabilly: Portrait of a Friendship (letters) 1994

AVRIL HORNER AND SUE ZLOSNIK (ESSAY DATE 2000)

SOURCE: Horner, Avril, and Sue Zlosnik. "Daphne du Maurier and GothicSignatures: Rebecca as Vamp(ire)." InBody Matters: Feminism, Textuality,Corporeality, edited and with an introduction by Avril Horner and AngelaKeane, pp. 209-22. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000.

In the following essay, Horner and Zlosnik examine the Gothic andsymbolic significance of du Maurier's representation of the title characterin Rebecca.

Gothic fiction over the last two hundred years has given us characters suchas Dracula and Frankenstein's monster who have passed into popular culture andtaken on an almost mythic dimension (Day 1985: 3).Rebecca, Daphne duMaurier's most famous novel, has given us one such character. This essay willattempt to retrieve Rebecca's textual Gothic ancestry and relate it to adiscussion of the destabilising nature of her absent/present body and itsstatus as ghostly yet corporeal trace. In particular, it will explore thesignificance of signature as bodily trace in relation to the writing identitiesof both Rebecca and her creator, Daphne du Maurier.

In what is still probably the most memorable representation ofRebecca (published in 1938), Hitchock's film (made in 1940) retains thenovel's Gothic emphasis. However, Alison Light's influential reading of thenovel has resulted in an argument centred on the class dynamics of the text;this sees the narrator's bourgeois feminine subjectivity as both inflected andthreatened by that of a wayward, aristocratic Rebecca who enjoys a freedom ofself-expression and lifestyle denied the timid second wife of Maxim de Winter(Light 1984). Whilst providing some invaluable insights, this reading hasnecessitated a fairly free, and sometimes inaccurate, portrayal of the socialclass of both Rebecca and her creator.¹ In fact, Rebecca's socialclass is not entirely clear from the novel. Indeed, Michelle A. Massé, inspeculating that Rebecca was married for her money, opens up the possibilitythat her marriage to Maximilian de Winter combined his aristocratic status withhernouveau riche wealth and was thus a marriage of expediency for bothparties (as she points out, 'Manderley's splendor is very recent' (Massé 1992:181)). Nor is it accurate to describe du Maurier herself as 'aristocratic': herfather's title came with a knighthood earned in 1922 and her own title of 'LadyBrowning' derived from her marriage to Major 'Boy' Browning. Moreover, such anapproach tends to shift du Maurier's novel out of the Gothic paradigm: forexample, relating the writing ofRebecca to the rise of the love-storyduring the inter-war period, Light describes the novel as 'a thriller or murderstory … as well as a love-story' (Light 1991: 163). A subsidiary effect of suchcategorisations has been to define Rebecca as a vamp or afemme fatale;indeed Light refers to du Maurier as finding 'her scarlet woman irresistible'(Light 1991: 157).

Yet the term 'femme fatale' is not simply a sign of aristocraticfemininity; there are racial and gendered positions embedded in the term whichare brought to light when we examine the close but distinct etymological andcultural relationship between the words 'femme fatale', 'vamp' and'vampire'. The first phrase, imported from the French in 1912, according to theOxford English Dictionary, linguistically 'otherises' a particular typeof woman as a source of threat. Thefemme fatale has, of course, a longcultural history which goes back to Jezebel, Salome and Cleopatra, but she doesnot become prominent in art and literature until the late nineteenth centurywhen she emerges, according to Mary Ann Doane, as a response to anindustrialised and rapidly changing society in which women were resistingVictorian models of femininity (Doane 1991: 1-2). She is associated, accordingto Doane, with distinct characteristics. She is never really what she seems tobe; her rather morbid sexuality connects her beauty with barrenness, lack ofproduction, death and obliteration; because her power situates thefemmefatale as evil, she is invariably punished or killed (often by a man);finally, she is often associated with a sexually ambiguous identity, in so faras she is frequently linked with androgyny, bisexuality and/or lesbianism.Rebecca manifests all of these characteristics. She is not what she seems tobe: the outward conformity of the sophisticated chatelaine figure, adored bythe Cornish community, hides a secret self who behaves differently in Londonand within the privacy of her boat house. Her beauty is certainly associatedwith barrenness and death. She is indeed perceived as evil by Maxim and ispunished accordingly by him. Finally, her sexual identity is ambiguous; thetext makes it clear that she has committed adultery but also hints that she andMrs Danvers have been lesbian lovers. More broadly, she destabilises currentnotions of gender: seen through Mrs Danvers's eyes, Rebecca signifies bothfemininity and masculinity. On the one hand, the housekeeper emphasises herbeauty, sensuality and femininity by endowing her fine clothes with a metonymicsignificance. On the other hand, she stresses Rebecca's power and masculinity:what she loved in Rebecca, it seems, was her strength, her courage and her'spirit', which she associates with masculinity: 'She ought to have been a boy,I often told her that' (du Maurier [1938] 1992: 253). At the level of plot,then, Rebecca is presented, it would seem, as a classicfemme fatalefigure.

The discourses of film and literature invariably use the phrase 'femmefatale' interchangeably with the word 'vamp'.² Yet 'vamp' isdefined by the OED as a Jezebel figure who is deliberately destructive, whereasthefemme fatale is often perceived as having 'powerdespiteherself' (Doane 1991: 2). A few critics, however, do perceive thisdistinction. Pierre Leprohon, for example, in his bookThe ItalianCinema, suggests that thefemme fatale and the vamp are quitedifferent, the latter being connected with a conscious desire to destroy: sheis, he argues, 'deliberately devastating, the woman who lives off her victims'misfortunes, a kind of vampire'. In contrast, 'the fate of thefemmefatale is often as dreadful as that of her lovers, and this makes her evenmore appealing' (cited in Doane 1991: 127). Interestingly, theOEDsuggests that the word 'vamp' (first used in this sense in 1918 and quitedistinct from to 'vamp' on a piano, which has a different etymology) doesindeed derive from the word 'vampire'. This slippage between the words'vampire' and 'vamp' is attributed by several critics to afin-de-siècleanxiety concerning the shifting status of women. For example, Bram Dijkstra hasnoted that '[b]y 1900 the vampire had come to represent woman as thepersonification of everything negative that linked sex, ownership, and money'(Dijkstra 1986: 351); according to Alexandra Warwick, the changingrepresentation of the female vampire in late nineteenth-century texts reflecteda growing anxiety about the 'masculinisation' of women in their transition fromangels of the hearth to 'wandering' New Women (Warwick 1995:202-20).³ The actual threats embodied in real women, then, resultedin the female vampire being culturally transmuted into the vamp; by the earlytwentieth century the sinister polyvalency of the former had become translatedinto the sexual threat of the latter.

The corporeal code of the vamp is, of course, immediately recognisable:invariably her direct gaze emanates from a slender, nubile body; she usuallyhas dark hair, either in abundance or cut very short, so that it sits like acap on her head; above all, her presence is strongly erotic. Lulu, in G.W.Pabst's famous 1929 filmPandora's Box, played by Louise Brooks, wasportrayed in just such a way. Du Maurier's Rebecca, when sheis madevisible in film or television adaptations, is often rendered as the classicvamp.⁴ We are not claiming that this is a misrepresentation: duMaurier's famous novel, set in the mid-twenties according to its author (duMaurier [1981] 1993: 10), certainly draws on late nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century constructions of the independent and sexually active woman asvamp. Yet the corporeal charisma so important in portrayals of the 'vamp' iscommunicated in the novel only through traces of Rebecca's body and the thingsconnected with her: her scent, her clothes, the rhododendrons, her signature,her script. In du Maurier's text, it is, paradoxically, the veryabsenceof Rebecca that is used to denote so powerfully thepresence of adultfemale sexuality. Rebecca, then, isghost as well as vamp. Du Maurier'swork is, after all, a Gothic novel, not afilm noir; the threateningwoman is 'otherised' not only through physical difference, but also through thesupernatural. Not surprisingly, then, we find du Maurier subtly drawing on thevampiric tradition in her creation of Rebecca and this, we suggest, contributesmuch to the evocation of the uncanny in the novel. However, we shall argue thatthe cultural slippages between the terms 'vamp', 'vampire' and 'femmefatale' are reflected not only in the unstable status of Rebecca's body butalso by Maurier's construction of a writing persona which, in flight from thefeminine and the corporeal, embraces the masculine and the disembodied.

Like those of the vampiric body, the status and whereabouts of Rebecca'scorpse are problematic. When her boat is raised and a body is found in it,doubt is cast upon the identity of the body in the crypt. Rebecca's body—to useTania Modleski's words—'becomes the site of a bizarre fort/da game'⁵(Modleski 1988: 49). What Anne Williams describes as 'that intensely Gothicphenomenon, the sight of a worm-eaten corpse' (Williams 1995: 73), is deniedthe reader: instead, various characters present us with vivid but differentnarratives of watery disintegration. So Rebecca's corpse is 'absent' for muchof the novel yet remains insistently and disturbingly present in theimaginations of these characters—just as her absent body remains insistently'alive' for the narrator, whose continual association of Rebecca with thebloodred rhododendrons and headily scented azaleas of the Manderley estateevokes a charismatic female sexual presence for both herself and the reader.Yet the narrator's final thoughts on Rebecca's body link it not with water, butwith dust:

Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. It seemed to me that Rebecca had no realityany more. She had crumbled away when they had found her on the cabin floor. Itwas not Rebecca who was lying in the crypt, it was dust. Only dust.

                      (duMaurier [1938] 1992: 334)

Thus Rebecca's 'second' burial (which seeks literally to encrypt herungovernable force) is associated with the end of Dracula, whose body crumblesto dust at the moment of death: 'It was like a miracle, but before our veryeyes, and almost in the drawing of a breath, the whole body crumbled into dustand passed from our sight' (Stoker [1897] 1993: 484). The apparent finality ofRebecca's burial, however, is undercut by an earlier incident in which thenarrator thought she had 'finally' destroyed Rebecca's writing (the inscriptionin the book of poems), only to find it resurfacing again and again atManderley. The 'dust' that is Rebecca's body is no more final than the'feathers of dust' of the burned fly-leaf or the ash scattered by the 'saltwind' of the novel's final line. Like the vampire, Rebecca seems able toreconstitute herself endlessly and, like the vampire, her corporeal status isunstable: she is neither visibly a body nor visibly a corpse.

Rebecca is also associated throughout the novel with several characteristicswhich, according to Ernest Jones, traditionally denote the vampiric body:facial pallor, plentiful hair and voracious sexual appetite (Jones [1991] 1992:409). And like the vampire, she has to be 'killed' more than once: the plot'sexcessive, triple killing of Rebecca (she was shot; she had cancer; shedrowned) echoes the folk belief that vampires must be 'killed' three times.Although Rebecca lacks the requisite fangs and only metaphorically sucks mendry, she can none the less be placed within Christopher Frayling's secondcategory of vampires, that of the Fatal Woman who, according to Frayling,'altered the whole direction of the vampire tale' from the mid-nineteenthcentury onwards: 'sexually aware, and sexually dominant … attractive andrepellent at the same time', she is clearly symptomatic of a cultural anxietyconcerning adult female sexuality (Frayling [1991] 1992: 68, 71-2). Seen inthis light, Rebecca's literary lineage includes Prosper Mérimée's Carmen, Poe'sBerenice, Gauthier's Clarimonde and Le Fanu's Countess Carmilla—not forgetting,of course, Charlotte Brontë's Bertha Mason, described in Chapter 25 ofJaneEyre as 'the foul German spectre—the Vampyre'. Rebecca may, then, be readnot only as vamp but also as vampire: she is a clear descendant of the femaledemon lover who transmuted into the female vampire in mid- to late VictorianGothic texts and into the vamp in twentieth-century cinema.

Like all vampire figures, Rebecca is associated with a transgressive,polymorphous sexuality. She is also, like all vampire figures, a figure ofabjection. Recent critics of the Gothic have used Julia Kristeva'sPowers ofHorror: An Essay on Abjection ([1980] 1982) to explore how representationsof the abject in certain texts relate to certain discourses and cultural valuesat a particular historical moment.⁶ Kristeva's concept of the abjectthereby becomes a concept which enables them to define how shared constructionsof 'otherness' are predicated upon shared cultural values at specific times: bythis logic, you may know a culture by what it 'throws off' or 'abjects'. Butthe figure of abjection in aGothic text may, of course, be presented assimultaneously repellentand charismatic, thus allowing the reader toindulge in a transgressive redefinition of 'self'. This 'other' is alsoinvariably the focus of more than one cultural anxiety and may therefore act asa vehicle of abjection in several ways. It is not surprising, then, to findthat the sexual threat represented by Rebecca as 'vamp' is further inflected bythe text's association of her with vampirism and 'Jewishness'. Rebecca wassupposedly based on Jan Ricardo who was engaged to Major 'Boy' Browning beforehis marriage to du Maurier; she was a 'dark-haired, rather exotic young woman,beautiful but highly-strung', according to Margaret Forster (Forster 1993: 91).However, du Maurier's presentation of Maxim's first wife as a dangerous andbeautiful dark-haired woman with an Hebraic name might well have beenunconsciously influenced by the air of anti-semitisim prevalent in Europeduring the 1930s. In this context, it is perhaps worth nothing that DavidSelznick, the producer of Hitchcock's film version ofRebecca, isreputed to have had misgivings about the film's title, commenting that it wouldnot do 'unless it was made for the Palestine market' (Shallcross [1991] 1993:69-70). As both Ken Gelder and Judith Halberstam have noted, thenineteenth-century vampire was often portrayed as having Jewishcharacteristics—the physical appearance, the often perverse desires and theunrooted, wandering nature of 'the Jew' (as then constructed) all beingprojected onto the vampire (Gelder 1994: 13-17; Halberstam 1995a: 86-106).Indeed, Judith Halberstam argues that 'the nineteenth-century discourse ofanti-Semitism and the myth of the vampire share a kind of Gothic economy intheir ability to condense many monstrous traits into one body' (Halberstam1995a: 88). Many anxieties are written on the body of Rebecca, including thatof the woman author whose social identity is transgressively inflected by herwriting identity.

For it is Rebecca's signature and handwriting which constitute the metonymicrepresentation of her body throughout the text, indelibly inscribing herpresence. Certainly the semiotic of her script complicates our perception ofher function in the novel. On the one hand, her writing—as we see it, forexample, in the loving dedication to 'Max' and in the contents of themorning-room desk—is proof of her ability, during her life, to play an allottedrole within the realm of 'everyday legality' and to masquerade effectively as acountry-house hostess. Rebecca's writing initially appears to tell the tale ofan ideal wife, loving towards her husband and the perfect hostess for hiselegant country mansion. However, the script itself, which continually irruptsinto the text, tells a different story, since it is also associated with amasculine strength and an indelible authority; as such it indicates a wayward,wilful quality that runs counter to Maxim's idea of the good wife. Moreover, itis sharply differentiated from that of the narrator who describes her ownhandwriting as 'cramped and unformed' (du Maurier [1938] 1992: 93) with all theintimations of immaturity and social inhibition that this suggests. Thisnarrator connects Rebecca's 'curious', 'sloping' or 'slanting' script with avibrant vitality: 'How alive her writing though, how full of force' (62).Always Rebecca's handwriting suggests supreme confidence and knowledge. Inparticular, the capital letter 'R', embroidered on the handkerchief thenarrator finds in Rebecca's mackintosh and on Rebecca's nightdress case, takeson a runic force which derives from its powerful visual impact and its refusalto be destroyed. In this novel Rebecca surfaces most clearly through hersignature, which uncannily inscribes the body's presence despite its absencethrough death. Above all, it is her autonomous energy, implicit in Rebecca'shandwriting, which impresses itself on both the narrator and the reader. Thus,there is a duality in Rebecca's script, which seems to tell one story but whichgives the lie to it in the actual appearance of the writing itself. Theactivity of writing is thereby seen to be implicated in the production ofsexual subjectivity.

Yet, despite her accentuated difference from Rebecca, it is the timid andnameless young second wife who has been transformed into the older, wisernarrator of Rebecca's story. She has become empowered to do this, however, onlyby modifying her perception of Rebecca as 'other' and assimilating herautonomy. Her initial attempts to exorcise Rebecca's presence, through, forexample, burning the fly-leaf in Maxim's book which contains her signature, aredoomed to failure. Instead, what we see in the novel is a gradualidentification between the narrator and Rebecca, quite literally enacted in theManderley Ball scene when the narrator's appearance as Maxim's ancestress,Caroline de Winter, seems to raise Rebecca from the dead (even Maxim's sister,sensible Beatrice, says 'You stood there on the stairs, and for one ghastlymoment I thought …' (225). Indeed, we learn at the beginning of the novel thatthe (now older) narratorhas finally acquired the confidence for whichshe envied Rebecca as a young woman: 'and confidence is a quality I prize,although it has come to me a little late in the day' (13). The conclusion mustbe that only with Rebecca 'really' dead can she write Rebecca's story, althoughit is onlythrough Rebecca that she can write. Significantly, then, inthe final dream of a novel haunted by disturbing dreams the narrator findsherself writingas Rebecca:

I was writing letters in the morning-room. I was sending out invitations. Iwrote them all myself with a thick black pen. But when I looked down to seewhat I had written it was not my small square handwriting at all, it was long,and slanting, with curious pointed strokes. I pushed the cards away from theblotter and hid them. I got up and went to the looking-glass. A face staredback at me that was not my own. It was very pale, very lovely, framed in acloud of dark hair. The eyes narrowed and smiled. The lips parted. The face inthe glass stared back at me and laughed. And I saw then that she was sitting ona chair before the dressing-table in her bedroom and Maxim was brushing herhair. He held her hair in his hands, and as he brushed it he wound it slowlyinto a thick rope. It twisted like a snake, and he took hold of it with bothhands and smiled at Rebecca and put it round his neck.

'No', I screamed. 'No. no …'.

                                      (395-6)

Whereas the firing of Manderley reminds us of the burning of Thornfield andof a work which finally eliminates the 'other' woman, this dream perpetuatesthe psychic disruption which Rebecca signifies. Although the narrator harboursa distrust and fear of Rebecca's sexuality, communicated by the snakeimage,⁷ the dream also reveals her unconscious identificationwith it. For much of the novel she has consciously wished to be themodel wife and hostess she believed Rebecca to have been; yet the mirror imageof the dream signals a further desire for identification with Rebecca's sexualandtextual charisma.

This is because Rebecca, despite—or because of—her corporeal absence,embodies a dynamic multivalent alterity for the nameless narrator: she isadulteress, lesbian, bisexual, vampire, Jew. The fact that Rebecca's body showstraces of both Jewishness and vampirism indicates the essentially Gothicquality of the novel; for in the Gothic text perverse sexuality, as JudithHalberstam (citing Sander Gilman) notes, is inevitably 'ascribed to thesexuality of the Other' (Halberstam 1995: 68). In assimilating bothpsychological and corporeal aspects of Rebecca, the narrator implicitly rejectsthe social categorisations which separate the 'bad' from the 'good' woman.Furthermore, in absorbing the 'disembodied spirit' of Maxim's first wife, thenarrator comes to embody aspects of Rebecca's power and self-confidence. Aboveall, she writes, and with the maturity and adult sexual identity implied byRebecca's 'bold, slanting hand' rather than with the childish ingenuousness ofher former self. Her signature and her text are thus haunted by that ofanother.

However, that phrase we have just used, 'disembodied spirit', is taken notfrom the novel, but from letters written by du Maurier in the 1940s. Here wewish to link the issue of Rebecca's signature and corporeal identitywithin the text with that of du Maurier as authorof the text. AsMargaret Forster's biography has revealed, Daphne du Maurier seemed to followthe lifestyle expected of women of her class, yet such conformity hid severalunconventional relationships and a complex and conflicted sense of identity(Forster 1993). Furthermore, in spite of living an apparently happy life aswife, mother and successful novelist, du Maurier experienced a great deal ofanxiety and ambivalence concerning her identity as a woman writer. For much ofthe time she felt that part of herself was a 'disembodied spirit', a phrase sheuses in two separate letters to Ellen Doubleday, wife of her Americanpublisher, Nelson Doubleday. She uses it first in a letter dated December 1947,which is written in a parodic fairy-tale manner, to describe what we would nowcall a sense of split subjectivity:

And then the boy realised he had to grow up and not be a boy any longer, sohe turned into a girl, and not an unattractive one at that, and the boy waslocked in a box forever. D. du M. wrote her books, and had young men, and latera husband, and children, and a lover, and life was sometimes lovely andsometimes rather sad, but when she found Menabilly and lived in it alone, sheopened up the box sometimes and let the phantom, who was neither girl nor boybut disembodied spirit, dance in the evening when there was no one to see.

                            (Forster1993: 222)

In a letter written to Ellen almost a year later in September 1948,reflecting on her husband's reliance on her money-earning capacity as abest-selling novelist, she uses the phrase in a slightly different way:

I mean, really, women should not have careers. It's people like me who havecareers who really have bitched up the old relationship between men and women.Women ought to be soft and gentle and dependent. Disembodied spirits likemyself are allwrong.

                            (Forster1993: 235)

In the first letter, she describes a masculine dimension of her being which,while 'locked' away, undergoes a metamorphosis into the 'disembodied spirit'which is androgynous and suggestive (to her) of a more authentic 'self'. Such acreative spirit, associated as it is in this letter with her life at Menabilly,is intrinsic to her life as a writer. However, the second letter suggests thatwhile acknowledging her career as that of author, she felt ill at ease as asuccessfulwoman writer in the wider world; this is confirmed by anotherletter to Ellen Doubleday written in October 1948, in which she confesses toseeing her work as having given her a 'masculine approach to life' (Forster1993: 232). Later, having become intrigued by the work of Jung and Adler duringthe winter of 1954, she explains her 'disembodied' self by reference to Jung'svocabulary of duality and identifies her writing persona as having sprung froma repressed 'No. 2' masculine side. In a letter to her seventeen-year-olddaughter in the same year she explains, 'When I get madly boyish No. 2 is incharge, and then, after a bit, the situation is reversed … No. 2 can come tothe surface and be helpful … he certainly has a lot to do with my writing'(Forster 1993: 276). Thus du Maurier came to perceive herwritingidentity as masculine. While such a 'disembodied spirit' was containable, whileit could be put back in the box, it could do no harm; when, however, du Maurierperceived it as taking over—when she referred toherself as the'disembodied spirit'—then she believed it to be socially destructive. Arguably,it was this anxiety concerning the 'Other' contained within the 'self' whichgave Jung's work particular resonance for her. Du Maurier's creation of Rebeccaas the narrator's transgressive double can also be seen, then, as amanifestation of an anxiety concerning writing, identity andgender.⁸

Interestingly, Forster's biography and Oriel Malet'sLetters fromMenabilly (1993) provide evidence that in letters to friends du Maurieridentified, at different points in her life, with both Rebecca and thenarrator. For example, in a letter to Maureen Baker-Munton, written in 1957, duMaurier comments: 'I wrote as the second Mrs. de W. twenty-one years ago, withRebecca a symbol of Jan. It could also be that … I—in Moper's dark mind—can bethe symbol of Rebecca. The cottage on the beach could be my hut. Rebecca'slovers could be my books' (Forster 1993: 424). In these letters quoted byForster, the narrator tends to be linked with du Maurier's social, 'feminine'identity and Rebecca with her creative writing persona, that 'No. 2' masculine'self'. As we have estab-lished, this sense of the writing self as masculine'Other' can be seen in the inscription of Rebecca's 'masculine' energy through'those curious, sloping letters' that continually surface in du Maurier's mostfamous novel, a text in which the transgressions of the 'Other' are bothwritten on the body and embodied in the writing process itself. Du Maurier'sletters suggest that, as she grew older, she moved towards seeing identity assomething multiform and fissured, rather than unitary and coherent. Arguably,the writing process itself provided du Maurier with a way of manipulating suchmultiplicity and of harnessing the potentially destructive aspect of the'Other'—as it does for the narrator ofRebecca. Rebecca's death withinthe plot suggests the containment of transgressive desire but her 'disembodiedspirit', with all its divergent energies, continues to inform the writingprocess. We suggest, then, that Rebecca's power to haunt the modern imaginationhas much to do with her textual and culture lineage. In creating her, duMaurier drew both on the Gothic tradition and on a broad cultural anxietyconcerning the changing status of women in the late nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries. For du Maurier, that anxiety was further inflected by theassociation of the writing woman with a transgressive female identity and this,too, finds expression in her most famous novel. Such anxieties manifestthemselves in the way Rebecca's character dissolves some important boundarylines. Neither visibly a body nor visibly a corpse, she upsets the line betweenlife and death; between eros and thanatos; between absence and presence; andbetween the two stereotypes—that of the asexual virgin-mother and that of theprostitute-vamp—which Andreas Huyssen sees as sustaining 'the myth of thedualistic nature of woman' (Huyssen 1986: 73). Rebecca also disrupts thedividing lines which separate thefemme fatale from the vamp and thevamp from the female vampire.

This instability of meaning is emphasised by the Gothic nature of Rebecca'sbody. In addition, the suspended 'R' of her name and the quasi-illegible 'M' inher engagement diary, by constituting a semiotic of fragmentation andincompleteness within the text, indicate metonymically the mysteriousuncertainty of her absence/presence. The materiality of Rebecca's signaturefurther signals an anxiety concerning the relation between writing, autonomyand sexual identity. This can be seen as a textual trace of du Maurier's ownanxiety about the relation between the 'sexed' body and the culturalconstruction of authorial identity as 'masculine'. There are, as ElizabethGrosz has noted:

ways in which the sexuality and corporeality of the subject leave theirtraces or marks on the texts produced … The signature not only signs the textby a mark of authorial propriety, but also signs the subject as the product ofwriting itself, of textuality.

                                    (Grosz1995: 23)

Just as du Maurier's use of the phrase 'disembodied spirit' in her lettersindicates a bodily unease in occupying the authorial position, so Rebecca'suneasy status as both too fleshly (vamp) and too uncanny (vampire) reflects acultural ambivalence towards the sexually expressive and autonomous woman. Suchanxieties are condensed in the way that Rebecca's signature haunts the text; inthis sense, writing itself is Gothic.

Notes

1. Even more recent essays onRebecca continue to be heavilyinfuenced by Light's approach. See, for example, Janet Harbord 1996.

2. See, for example, Linda Ruth Williams's use of the terms asinterchangeable (Williams 1993: 53, 56).

3. In this connection, see also Rebecca Stott 1992, especially Chapter 3 onDracula.

4. The Carleton Television adaptation of the novel, shown in January 1997,portrayed Rebecca in this way, for example.

5. Modleski uses this phrase to describe the manner in which representationsare played out on the narrator's body, but it is just as appropriate todescribe the absence/presence of Rebecca's (dead) body.

6. For example, Gelder 1994 and Halberstam 1995 relate Gothic presentationsof the abject to cultural constructions of 'Jewishness' in the late nineteenthand early twentieth centuries, whilst Warwick 1995 explores it in relation tothe changing status of women during that period. See also Jerrold E. Hogle(1996) for an example of how textual representations of the abject reflectanxiety concerning changing class structures in early twentieth-centuryFrance.

7. The snake image is often associated with female vampires as in, forinstance, Tieck'sWake Not the Dead, Coleridge'sChristabel,Baudelaire'sLes Métamorphoses du Vampire and (obliquely) Keats'sLamia.

8. For a fuller exploration of the connection between writing, identity,gender and du Maurier's use of the Gothic genre, see Avril Horner and SueZlosnik 1998.

References

Day, W. P. (1985)In the Circles of Fear and Desire: A Study of GothicFantasy, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press.

Dijkstra, B. (1986)Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil inFin de Siècle Culture, New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Doane, M. A. (1991)Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory,Psychoanalysis, New York and London, Routledge.

du Maurier, D. ([1938] 1992)Rebecca, London, Arrow.

――――――. ([1981] 1993)The Rebecca Notebook and Other Memories,London, Arrow.

Forster, M. (1993)Daphne du Maurier, London, Chatto and Windus.

Frayling, C. ([1991] 1992)Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula,London, Faber and Faber.

Gelder, K. (1994)Reading the Vampire, London and New York,Routledge.

Grosz, E. (1995)Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics ofBodies, New York and London, Routledge.

Halberstam, J. (1995)Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology ofMonsters, Durham and London, Durham University Press.

Harbord, J. (1996) 'Between Identification and Desire: RereadingRebecca', Feminist Review, 53, 95-106.

Hogle, J. E. (1996) 'The Gothic and the "Otherings" of Ascendant Culture:The OriginalPhantom of the Opera', South Atlantic Quarterly, 95 (3),821-46.

Horner, A. and S. Zlosnik (1998)Daphne du Maurier: Writing, Identity andthe Gothic Imagination, London, Macmillan.

Huyssen, A. (1986)After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture,Postmodernism, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press.

Jones, E. ([1991] 1992) 'On the Vampire', in C. Frayling,Vampyres: LordByron to Count Dracula, London, Faber and Faber.

Kristeva, J. ([1980] 1982)Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection,trans. Leon Roudiez, New York, Columbia University Press.

Ledger, S. and S. McCracken, (eds) (1995)Cultural Politics at the Fin deSiècle, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Light, A. (1984) '"Returning to Manderley": Romance Fiction, FemaleSexuality and Class',Feminist Review, 16.

――――――(1991)Forever England: Femininity, Literature and ConservatismBetween the Wars, London and New York, Routledge.

Malet, O. (ed.) (1993)Daphne du Maurier: Letters from Menabilly,London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Massé, M. A. (1992)In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism, and theGothic, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press.

Modleski, T. (1988)The Women Who Knew too Much: Hitchcock and FeministTheory, London and New York, Routledge.

Shallcross, M. ([1991] 1993)The Private World of Daphne du Maurier,London, Robson Books.

Stoker, B. ([1897] 1993)Dracula, Harmondsworth, Penguin.

Stott, R. (1992)The Fabrication of the Late Victorian Femme Fatale: TheKiss of Death, London, Macmillan.

Warwick, A. (1995) 'Vampires and the Empire: Fears and Fictions of the1890s', in S. Ledger and S. McCracken (eds),Cultural Politics at the Fin deSiècle, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Williams, A. (1995)Art of Darkness: A Poetics of the Gothic, Chicagoand London, University of Chicago Press.

Williams, L. R. (1993)Sex in the Head: Visions of Femininity and Film inD.H. Lawrence, Hemel Hempstead, Harvester Wheatsheaf.

SOURCE: du Maurier, Daphne. "Chapter 1." InRebecca. 1938.Reissue edition, pp. 1-4. New York: Avon Books, 1994.
The following excerpt comprises the first chapter of Rebecca,whichwas first published in 1938.

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood bythe iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter, for theway was barred to me. There was a padlock and a chain upon the gate. I calledin my dream to the lodge-keeper, and had no answer, and peering closer throughthe rusted spokes of the gate I saw that the lodge was uninhabited.

No smoke came from the chimney, and the little lattice windows gapedforlorn. Then, like all dreamers, I was possessed of a sudden with supernaturalpowers and passed like a spirit through the barrier before me. The drive woundaway in front of me, twisting and turning as it had always done, but as Iadvanced I was aware that a change had come upon it; it was narrow and unkept,not the drive that we had known. At first I was puzzled and did not understand,and it was only when I bent my head to avoid the low swinging branch of a treethat I realised what had happened. Nature had come into her own again and,little by, little, in her stealthy, insidious way had encroached upon the drivewith long tenacious fingers. The woods, always a menace even in the past, hadtriumphed in the end. They crowded, dark and uncontrolled, to the borders ofthe drive. The beeches with white, naked limbs leant close to one another,their branches intermingled in a strange embrace, making a vault above my headlike the archway of a church. And there were other trees as well, trees that Idid not recognise, squat oaks and tortured elms that straggled cheek by jowlwith the beeches, and had thrust themselves out of the quiet earth, along withmonster shrubs and plants, none of which I remembered.

The drive was a ribbon now, a thread of its former self, with gravel surfacegone, and choked with grass and moss. The trees had thrown out low branches,making an impediment to progress; the gnarled roots looked like skeleton claws.Scattered here and again amongst this jungle growth I would recognise shrubsthat had been land-marks in our time, things of culture and of grace,hydrangeas whose blue heads had been famous. No hand had checked theirprogress, and they had gone native now, rearing to monster height without abloom, black and ugly as the nameless parasites that grew beside them.

On and on, now east, now west, wound the poor thread that once had been ourdrive. Sometimes I thought it lost, but it appeared again, beneath a fallentree perhaps or struggling on the other side of a muddied ditch created by thewinter rains. I had not thought the way so long. Surely the miles hadmultiplied, even as the trees had done, and this path led but to a labyrinth,some choked wilderness, and not to the house at all. I came upon it suddenly;the approach masked by the unnatural growth of a vast shrub that spread in alldirections, and I stood, my heart thumping in my breast, the strange prick oftears behind my eyes.

There was Manderley, our Manderley, secretive and silent as it had alwaysbeen, the grey stone shining in the moonlight of my dream, the mullionedwindows reflecting the green lawns and the terrace. Time could not wreck theperfect symmetry of those walls, not the site itself, a jewel in the hollow ofa hand.

The terrace sloped to the lawns, and the lawns stretched to the sea, andturning I could see the sheet of silver, placid under the moon, like a lakeundisturbed by wind or storm. No waves would come to ruffle this dream water,and no bulk of cloud, wind-driven from the west, obscure the clarity of thispale sky. I turned again to the house, and though it stood inviolate,untouched, as though we ourselves had left but yesterday, I saw that the gardenhad obeyed the jungle law, even as the woods had done. The rhododendrons stoodfifty feet high, twisted and entwined with bracken, and they had entered intoalien marriage with a host of nameless shrubs, poor, bastard things that clungabout their roots as though conscious of their spurious origin. A lilac hadmated with a copper beech, and to bind them yet more closely to one another themalevolent ivy, always an enemy to grace, had thrown her tendrils about thepair and made them prisoners. Ivy held prior place in this lost garden, thelong strands crept across the lawns, and soon would encroach upon the houseitself. There was another plant too, some halfbreed from the woods, whose seedhad been scattered long ago beneath the trees and then forgotten, and now,marching in unison with the ivy, thrust its ugly form like a giant rhubarbtowards the soft grass where the daffodils had blown.

Nettles were everywhere, the van-guard of the army. They choked the terrace,they sprawled about the paths, they leant, vulgar and lanky, against the verywindows of the house. They made indifferent sentinels, for in many places theirranks had been broken by the rhubarb plant, and they lay with crumpled headsand listless stems, making a pathway for the rabbits. I left the drive and wenton to the terrace, for the nettles were no barrier to me, a dreamer, I walkedenchanted, and nothing held me back.

Moonlight can play odd tricks upon the fancy, even upon a dreamer's fancy.As I stood there, hushed and still, I could swear that the house was not anempty shell but lived and breathed as it had lived before.

Light came from the windows, the curtains blew softly in the night air, andthere, in the library, the door would stand half open as we had left it, withmy handkerchief on the table beside the bowl of autumn roses.

The room would bear witness to our presence. The little heap of librarybooks marked ready to return, and the discarded copy ofThe Times.Ashtrays, with the stub of a cigarette; cushions, with the imprint of our headsupon them, lolling in the chairs; the charred embers of our log fire stillsmouldering against the morning. And Jasper, dear Jasper, with his soulful eyesand great, sagging jowl, would be stretched upon the floor, his tail a-thumpwhen he heard his master's footsteps.

A cloud, hitherto unseen, came upon the moon, and hovered an instant like adark hand before a face. The illusion went with it, and the lights in thewindows were extinguished. I looked upon a desolate shell, soulless at last,unhaunted, with no whisper of the past about its staring walls.

The house was a sepulchre, our fear and suffering lay buried in the ruins.There would be no resurrection. When I thought of Manderley in my waking hoursI would not be bitter. I should think of it as it might have been, could I havelived there without fear. I should remember the rose-garden in summer, and thebirds that sang at dawn. Tea under the chestnut tree, and the murmur of the seacoming up to us from the lawns below.

I would think of the blown lilac, and the Happy Valley. These things werepermanent, they could not be dissolved. They were memories that cannot hurt.All this I resolved in my dream, while the clouds lay across the face of themoon, for like most sleepers I knew that I dreamed. In reality I lay manyhundred miles away in an alien land, and would wake, before many seconds hadpassed, in the bare little hotel bedroom, comforting in its very lack ofatmosphere. I would sigh a moment, stretch myself and turn, and opening myeyes, be bewildered at that glittering sun, that hard, clean sky, so differentfrom the soft moonlight of my dream. The day would lie before us both, long nodoubt, and uneventful, but fraught with a certain stillness, a dear tranquilitywe had not known before. We would not talk of Manderley, I would not tell mydream. For Manderley was ours no longer. Manderley was no more.

Biography

Auerbach, Nina.Daphne du Maurier: Haunted Heiress. Philadelphia:University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000, 180 p.

Biography of du Maurier that also focuses on her lesserknown writings,which Auerbach contends are du Maurier's most compelling.

Forster, Margaret.Daphne du Maurier: The Secret Life of the RenownedStoryteller. New York: Doubleday, 1993.

Detailed account of du Maurier's life and career, including criticalanalysis and biographical interpretation of her works.

Criticism

Bakerman, Jane S. "Daphne du Maurier." InAnd Then There Were Nine … MoreWomen of Mystery, edited by Jane S. Bakerman, pp. 12-29. Bowling Green,Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1985.

Discusses six of du Maurier's novels, including RebeccaandJamaica Inn,as accomplished examples of romantic suspense fiction.

Butterly Nigro, Kathleen. "Rebecca as Desdemona: 'A Maid that ParagonsDescription and Wild Fame.'"College Literature 27, no. 3 (fall 2000):144-57.

Compares du Maurier's Rebeccato William Shakespeare's playOthelloas a means of reexamining the character of Rebecca.

Horner, Avril, and Sue Zlosnik. "The Secrets of Manderley:Rebecca."InDaphne du Maurier: Writing, Identity, and the Gothic Imagination, pp.99-127. New York: Twayne, 1998.

Examines Rebeccaas a complex, layered study of femaleidentity.

――――――. "Deaths in Venice: Daphne du Maurier's 'Don't Look Now.'" InSpectral Readings: Towards a Gothic Geography, edited by Glennis Byronand David Punter, pp. 219-32. London and New York: Macmillan, 1999.

Asserts that in the story "Don't Look Now," du Maurier used Gothicconventions to explore issues of identity, particularly genderidentity.

Kael, Pauline. "Labyrinths."New Yorker 49 (24 December 1973): 68,71.

Favorable review of Don't Look Now,the film based on du Maurier'sshort story.

Kelly, Richard.Daphne du Maurier. New York: Twayne, 1987.

Book-length survey of du Maurier's works.

Shallcross, Martyn. "Sinister Stories." InThe Private World of Daphne duMaurier, pp. 144-55. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991.

Discusses the film adaptations of two of du Maurier's most famous shortstories, "The Birds" and "Don't Look Now."

Smith, Harrison. "The Anatomy of Terror."The Saturday Review (14March 1953): 29, 52.

Review of Kiss Me Again, Stranger,in which Smith asserts that duMaurier "has the gift of making believable the unbelievable."

Wisker, Gina. "Don't Look Now! The Compulsions and Revelations of Daphne duMaurier's Horror Writing."Journal of Gender Studies 8, no. 1 (March1999): 19-33.

Focuses on du Maurier's horror writings, examining their relationship totraditional Gothic literature and their exploration of gender identity andpower.

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE:

Additional coverage of du Maurier's life and career is contained in thefollowing sources published by Thomson Gale:Authors and Artists for YoungAdults, Vol. 37;Beacham's Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction: Biographyand Resources, Vol. 1;British Writers Supplement, Vol. 3;Contemporary Authors, Vols. 5-8R, 128;Contemporary Authors NewRevision Series, Vols. 6, 55;Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vols.6, 11, 59;Contemporary Popular Writers; Dictionary of LiteraryBiography, Vol. 191;DISCovering Authors: British; DISCovering Authors:Canadian; DISCovering Authors Modules: Most-studied Authors andPopularFiction and Genre Authors; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Literature and ItsTimes, Vol. 3;Literature Resource Center; Major 20th-CenturyWriters, Eds. 1, 2;Mystery and Suspense Writers; Novels forStudents, Vol. 12;Reference Guide to English Literature, Ed. 2;Reference Guide to Short Fiction, Ed. 2;St. James Guide to Crime andMystery Writers, Vol. 4;St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & GothicWriters; Short Stories for Students, Vols. 14, 16;Short StoryCriticism, Vol. 18;Something about the Author, Vols. 27, 60;Twayne's English Authors; andTwentieth Century Romance andHistorical Writers.