Spreading the Du Maurier Love
I bought and read a collection of Daphne Du Maurier's stories last week, which made me want to write what I like about her. And after a bit of researching, I found out that last May 10 was her 100th birthday, had she lived to celebrate it.
Du Maurier basically re-invented the gothic romance in the first half of the 20th century, taking cues from the Brontes and Wilkie Collins, a contemporary of Dickens and one of the first practitioners of the mystery/thriller genre. The image of the other wife in Rebecca, for instance, echoes the mad woman in the attic in Jane Eyre.
Anyway, I first heard Du Maurier after watching Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds sometime in high school, which stars the unfortunate Tippi Hedren. Unfortunate, because Hitch was obsessed about her and when she spurned his advances, he locked her into a contract that prevented her from making movies for years making her an outdated actress when the contract was over. (How obsess was Hitch about Hedren? See the disturbing Marnie, their last movie together.) Aside from being known as one of the Hitch’s blondies, Hedren is also known as the woman who gave birth to Antonio Banderas’ wife. Poor woman.
But I digress. See, Du Maurier collaborated with Hitchcock several times, hence the interest. If I’m not mistaken he turned into movies three of her stories: Jamaica Inn, Rebecca, and The Birds. I think My Cousin Rachel, Don’t Look Now, and Frenchman’s Creek were also made into films, but not by Hitch. Now, not everyone likes Du Maurier. She is one of those writers who can be really obvious, campy and melodramatic. ( See ending of Kiss Me Again, Stranger and Jamaica Inn. But then again, melodrama is an ingredient of the gothic romance) If I compare her reception to another contemporary author, I guess I would file her next to Angela Carter, she who re-tells fairy tales and often gets accused of using too much tired tropes and flowery language. But Du Maurier is rescued from obscurity and critics’ eternal condemnation by working extra-hard than the next gothic romance/thriller writer.
Let’s start with atmosphere. The Du Maurier universe is basically Cornwall, with its solitary manors, dark clouds, gray seas, and heavy silence. Du Maurier’s settings are impeccable reconstructions of her characters’ psychological drama. A place becomes a vehicle in which she could explore character. In Monte Verita, for instance, Anna’s spare rooms foreshadows her decision to “leave” the world; and the mountain to which she retreats to becomes the unattainable past and future for the two men who loved her. Du Maurier tries to make her stories go beyond the parameters of genre and the dubious categories of popular fiction (the last phrase came from film critic David Thomson.) You may roll your eyes over the plot of Kiss Me Again, Stranger, but it’s still endearing because Du Maurier managed to put in it elements of noir and a boy-meets-girl “meet cute” that is very Luc Godard circa fifties, except it’s deadly. The fact that the narrator is never named in Rebecca, a most logical choice, considering that she lives under the shadow of a golden ghost, is an indication of extraordinary technique and confidence. I read somewhere that she deliberately did not name the narrator because she wanted to see for herself if she can sustain it. And she did, from the first and most quoted line in Rebecca “Last night, I dreamt I was in Manderley again”), to its ambiguous ending. She is also a master of suspense and the grotesque, which are very “technical” and difficult to pull off. The ending for Don’t Look Now is particularly chilling because the identity of the killer comes out of nowhere. It’s the same feeling I felt after reading A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor, another story-teller who specializes in the grotesque, hair-rising, yes, but satisfying too. What I’m saying is, go read Du Maurier. :)