Author: mooregr

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier is a work that I have always felt very connected to.  I first encountered it my junior year of high school.  In my British Literature class that year, I had a final paper assignment that allowed students to pick any literary text that we wanted to write about.  My aunt recommended that I read Rebecca for this assignment because she thought it would be of interest to me.  Through my first reading of Rebecca, I had an analytical framework through which I was looking at the text because I was reading it knowing that that paper assignment was coming up.  I thought about it mostly in terms of identity and tracking how the text thought about the narrator and Rebecca.  It was very similar to the way that I read texts for English classes now; I always like to take notes of patterns, images, etc. in case I find compelling evidence for later essay assignments.  Partially, I wonder what it would be like to have read this book for the first time for simple enjoyment and not analysis.  Though, I think ultimately I would have missed much of what makes this text so rich and thought-provoking if I wasn’t being intentional with my reading in the first place.  This text was really one of the first books that I genuinely practiced close reading while reading, as much of high school English dealt with thematic analysis on a larger scale.  I think that my relationship with the text will be largely the same as I still have the reverence for it that I always have, but after spending much of college practicing close reading and analyzing, I think I will be able to take larger strides in analysis of the reading I will do now.

I’m drawn to Rebecca because of the way that it weaves elements of multiple genres together, such as the mix of romantic, gothic, and detective tropes.  I am also really drawn to the ways that the novel offers complex questions about identity, gender, power, and sexuality.  These themes have always been the most interesting fields of analysis for me.  Many of these theoretical frameworks offer insight into larger psychological arguments that I enjoy thinking about.  I am always interested in the expression of “the self” in characters and how their expressions are influenced or shaped by their environments.  The women in this text and the expression of their identities are so complex, and so I continue to be drawn to this text because I think that there is always more analysis that could, and should, be made.

I’m writing a biography about Daphne du Maurier because I really enjoyed her novel Rebecca, which I read a few years ago.  It’s so rich with complex questions about gender, personal relationships, identity and the self.  I’m considering using this as my primary text perhaps alongside another one of her works, such as The Scapegoat or My Cousin Rachel.  I’m trying to work through these other primary texts to help me decide.

Daphne du Maurier was born in 1907 in Regent’s Park, London to an actress and actor-manager, growing up surrounded by art and theater.  With their governesses, she grew up with her two sisters “bound together in a world of the imagination, stories and fantasy”, which greatly influenced her creative career (“Daphne”).  Her works often depict romantic narratives set in the wild coast of Cornwall, a place she developed an intense passion for due to years spent at their country home during family holidays (“Daphne”).  While her work is often classified as romance, she is considered “‘the mistress of suspense’” and much of her works illustrate gothic undertones (“Daphne du”).  Maurier met her husband Lieutenant-Colonel Frederick Browning when he sailed to London to meet her after reading her debut novel The Loving Spirit; they were married for 33 years(“Daphne du”).  Allegedly, their marriage dealt with difficulties “because of Daphne du Maurier’s secret bisexuality however she denied this fact” (“Daphne du”).  Questions in her own sexuality could perhaps coincide with Maurier’s continuous emphasis on the identity and the self in her works.  She often wrote about marital problems and the type of psychological stress that caused.  Rebecca, written in 1938, was inspired by the marital difficulties she faced with Browning during the war as a wife of an active member of the military; much like the protagonist of Rebecca, Maurier felt jealous of her husband’s former fiancée while living there in Egypt (“Daphne”).  Additionally, she had a difficult relationship with her father, which publicly arose in her biography of him entitled Gerald: A Portrait (“Daphne”).  Daphne du Maurier’s literary talents spanned a wide variety as she wrote novels, short stories, biographies, and plays.  She had three children with Frederick Browning and died in Cornwall in 1989 at the age of 81.

“Daphne du Maurier.” British Library, https://www.bl.uk/people/daphne-du-maurier.

“Daphne du Maurier.” Famous Authors, https://www.famousauthors.org/daphne-du-maurier.

One major pattern I’ve noticed in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved is the emphasis on questions surrounding bodily autonomy.  The work questions whether the characters have control over their own bodies and also whether some seem to exert control over other characters’ bodies as well as their own.  A clear example of this emphasis appears when Baby Suggs describes being free for the first time.  She states, “‘These hands belong to me.  These are my hands’” (Morrison 166).  Morrison continues this thread saying, “Next she felt a knocking in her chest and discovered something else new: her own heartbeat” (166).  When Baby Suggs truly acknowledges her own freedom, she feels in control of her own body for the very first time and can claim it.  As an enslaved person, she had little control over her body and therefore, feels a physical difference once free.

There is a complex relationship with bodily autonomy in this work.  Morrison emphasizes bodily control in passages like the one mentioned, while also highlighting how other characters seem to lack control or lose control in brief moments.  When Sethe sees Beloved for the first time, she is suddenly overwhelmed with the urge to pee and can barely control her body.  She describes this sudden problem as “unmanageable” (Morrison 62).  Again later, Sethe feels as though she is being choked.  With no one around her, she cannot seem to force her own airway to clear.  This can be attributed to ghosts or supernatural behavior, but even still, Morrison emphasizes a helplessness that characters seem to face in terms of their own body, while others have more freedom.  Perhaps, the question of bodily autonomy can be taken even further to follow the main mystery of the novel, which surrounds the death of the baby.  At the end of the reading for this week, we learn that Sethe killed her own child, Beloved, and had planned to kill the other children when the white men arrived.  Children are in a sense an extension of the parents, a piece of a mother lives inside her child.  Therefore, when Sethe kills Beloved, she is partially killing herself, or a part of her own body.  This can be extended further to question whether the act changes Sethe’s physical appearance somehow.  When Paul D looks at the newspaper, he repeatedly states, “That ain’t her mouth” (Morrison 181).  He may be in denial about Sethe’s actions, but he does claim that the mouth of the woman photographed looks different than the one he remembers.  The actions Sethe took against her child, an extension of her own self, perhaps, altered the state of her body.  The forced control Sethe enacts perhaps leads to her future feeling of helplessness and lack of bodily autonomy, such as the moment when she is strangled.  Her body seems to have agency, yet rebel against itself, and change without her control.

In Michael Field’s Underneath the Bough, there seems to be a recurring pattern of switching back and forth between an emphasis on love or an emphasis on death.  Specifically at the beginning of book five on page 80, Michael Field quite directly switches back and forth either one line after another or by having the mentions broken up by a few lines.  The speaker seems to be lying on her deathbed in the first stanza, then imagines two lovers together, and then returns to the present as the speaker and her companion await a dreadful fate.  In the first stanza, Field states “A woman is lying in her shroud/ To whom a lover has never vowed”.  Here, the death of this woman highlights the absence of romantic love in her life.  Death seems to extinguish any potential for love.  When the second stanza mentions the two lovers, it describes them embracing as “the winter daylight died”.  In the last stanza, Michael Field states, “Then we forgot the lovers; for the room/ Was filling with a doom”, which again brings together this union of love and death.  The speaker and her companion cannot acknowledge love, for themselves or others, as death is upon them.  Love only exists in the silent expression of holding hands.

This brief poem of book five highlights a recurring pattern across all the books in Underneath the Bough.  Field makes direct connection to love and death all throughout.  As the speaker grapples with their existence between these two harsh outcomes, the collection offers perhaps the idea that death often allows people to realize that authentic love is present.  Across books, another brief example of this pattern is at the end of book three in the poem titled “Daybreak”.  Field writes, “And yet choose to wake in death? / Eros, while my Love has breath / I will breathe beside her” (55).  The speaker will express their love until ultimately death consumes one or both of them.  In this collection, as I have tracked through these two brief instances, any mention of love seems to be immediately followed by a mention of death.  It’s almost as if Michael Field’s acknowledgement of love, and the happiness and warmth it provides, simultaneously identifies their anxieties about an impending death, often for only one half of the couple.      

I was drawn to the section of stanzas on page 18 of Michael Field’s Underneath the Bough, starting with the lines “Through hazels and apples”.  These stanzas describe the speaker and their love traveling through a garden in the morning.  It closely followed ideas described in the background article for Underneath the Bough.  In that article, Robert Fletcher describes this work as having different and simultaneous accounts of desire; Michael Field’s work seems to have “‘a desire to tell and not to tell…’” (114).  In these stanzas, the speaker describes the act of eating apples, but also simultaneously describes themselves as being “Unfed that day” (Field 19).  They seem to declare something, but also rescind these statements two stanzas later.  This connects to the end of the second stanza from this grouping.  Here Field states, “By one rare rose: / Did we smell at the heart, / And then depart?” (19).  The speaker and the lover seem to indulge themselves in the garden, but then immediately flee.  Additionally, each stanza ends in a question mark, as if to say that the speaker is questioning their actions or questioning the truth of the interactions between the two of them.  The speaker desires to describe the morning interactions but doesn’t completely commit to them as absolute truths.

On the surface, these stanzas seem to describe a morning outing between two lovers, but it also has deep sexual implications and innuendos.  Eating the fruit in this garden seems to signify a passionate sexual encounter between the speaker and their love.  However, the speaker has eaten in the first stanza but seems to end the third stanza feeling unfed or unsatisfied.  Reading these stanzas in a sexual lens perhaps offers the question of whether the circumstances of this erotic relationship, forced to take place “back by the alley”, is satisfying and fulfilling for the speaker (Field 19).  They soon depart this setting after three short stanzas, but it seems that the speaker wishes to live in a place of “roses and apples”, since the third stanza ends with the speaker grappling with their own personal circumstances.  These three stanzas can certainly connect with the rest of the work as well, since Field frequently uses sexual innuendo to make this romantic relationship more tangible.  Frequently throughout this work, erotic relations, such as the one described in these stanzas, are regarded as equal, if not more important, than any verbal expression of love.