Romance with Daphne du Maurier: Revisiting the Ruins of Englishness in <Rebecca>

초록

Until recently, the tag of romance novelist and regional writer has been attached to Daphne du Maurier, leading to the critical neglect of the generically varied and discursively complicated nature of her writing. This paper aims to place du Maurier’sRebecca in the tradition ofEnglish country house fiction and argue that du Maurier renders the pastoral Cornish landscape as a site wherein mythical Englishness is given a concrete, palpable form, only to disclose the phantasmagoric nature of such Englishness. In Rebecca, the romantic fantasy of Englishness is disturbed when Manderley, the epitome of the prestigious authority and culture of the past, becomes a site wherein contradictory and interrelated female desires and feminine sexuality are contested and negotiated. The literary elevation of the domestic England in Rebecca produces a troublesome realignment of sexual politics at home, which is part of redefining and reshaping Englishness. The intimate and desirable landscape of Manderley is intertwined with the treacherous landscape of a psychology that projects contradictory ideals of femininity, unburies forbidden, unruly female desires, and thereby destabilizes the space of feminine, domestic Englishness both in fascination and in terror.

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