Avril Horner

Keeping It in the Family: Incest and the Female Gothic Plot in du Maurier and Murdoch

From Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) to the present day, incest has repeatedly featured as a motif in Gothic fiction. This is hardly surprising because in Gothic novels the family is frequently represented as harbouring dangers, its structures at one and the same time regulating and focusing desire. Female sexuality is habitually the contested space in the family (both its control and exploitation) and in the Gothic plot young women frequently find themselves particularly at risk from the predatory attentions of tyrannical fathers, father surrogates or, indeed, rapacious siblings. James Twitchell suggests in his 1987 book Forbidden Partners: The Incest Taboo in Modern Culture that the prohibition of incest is the most defining trait of the human family and that ‘if we want to understand the dynamics of the modern family we will have to study the unfolding of this trait in the nineteenth century as the modern nuclear family takes shape’. It does not escape Twitchell’s attention that Gothic fiction in this period has a recurrent tale to tell: ‘If the Gothic tells us anything it is what “too close for comfort” really means.’1 Feminist scholarship has played a significant role both in establishing Gothic studies2 and in providing detailed historical and discursive contextualisation for changing representations of incest in literature.

Deaths in Venice: Daphne du Maurier’s ‘Don’t Look Now’

In spite of the enduring popularity of Hitchcock’s 1940 film, most people recognise Rebecca (1938) as a Daphne du Maurier novel. Fewer people know that du Maurier wrote the short story ‘Don’t Look Now’ on which Nicholas Roeg’s 1973 film — described in The Second Virgin Film Guide as one of his ‘finest and most accessible’ works — is based (Monaco, 1993: 220). The story, published in 1971, is economically plotted. It opens with a conversation between John and his wife, Laura, who have come on a short holiday to Venice; they are there in order to try to recover some sense of normality following the loss of their five-year-old daughter, Christine, who has died from meningitis. John and Laura meet Scottish twin sisters in their sixties, one a retired doctor, the other blind, who are also tourists in Venice. The blind sister is psychic and claims to have had a vision of the couple’s dead daughter, which she communicates to Laura. Laura believes her and gains comfort and happiness from it; John is annoyed and upset by the claim. A strange incident occurs: one evening, walking in the narrow streets of Venice, they hear a strangled cry; John then catches sight of what looks like a little girl, wearing a pixie-hood, who seems to be trying to escape from something or someone by jumping from boat to boat in the canal.

Southern Hauntings: Kate Chopin’s Gothic

Long regarded as a brilliant regional realist writer, Kate Chopin also used Gothic effects in her fiction but until now this aspect of her work has not been fully explored. There are no zombies, vampires or ghosts in her tales but they are full of secrets, the abject, the repressed and the uncanny. In this chapter, Beer and Horner argue that Chopin’s exploration of the legacy of slavery and colonisation defines her as a postcolonial writer who used Gothic effects in order to convey how past horrors continued to impact upon Louisiana in the 1880s and 1890s. Chopin challenges segregation and reveals it to be based on spectral boundaries redolent of past powers. In this respect, her stories illustrate her commitment to the process of enlightenment and rapprochement.

The ‘wondrous necessary man’: Canetti, The Unicorn and The Changeling

The Unicorn, published in 1963, is one of Murdoch’s most heavily allusive and intertextual works. Not surprisingly, then, it has been read in quite different ways: as Christian allegory; as a quest in which misuse of power is a temptation and Platonic Good the Holy Grail; as a Gothic novel — to mention but three.1 In this essay I shall explore the ramifications of Marian Taylor’s sense of Gerald Scottow as ‘the wondrous necessary man’.2 Murdoch does not intimate the source of these words but in fact they are those used by Beatrice-Joanna in the last Act of Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling (1622) to describe De Flores, the charismatic villain of the play.3 I should state at the outset that we have no evidence that Murdoch ever read, or saw a production of, The Changeling although she did confess to an ‘interest’ in Jacobean drama.4 However, we do have evidence that John Bayley taught it at Oxford and knew it very well indeed — well enough, in fact, to be able still to quote lines from it in 2008.5 It is possible that, at the very least, Murdoch might have listened to her husband talking about the play during the early years of their marriage and would, perhaps, have been struck by its dark exploration of obsessive desire. If she had read or seen it, she would certainly have been drawn to what Leo Salinger has called Middleton’s ‘gift for exposing velleities and self-deception in his characters’.6

Introduction: Art, morals and 'The discovery of reality'

Iris Murdoch’s insistence on the indissoluble link between art and morals is the underlying reason for the current renaissance in Murdoch studies. This volume is one of its progeny and illustrates the seriousness with which Iris Murdoch’s work is now being taken by moral philosophers, theorists of the novel, contemporary writers and theologians. Indeed her novels, literary theory, moral philosophy and theological beliefs are frequently referenced in ‘ethical turn’ criticism which has itself changed the face of literary criticism over the past ten years. Her work has sparked such interest because of her unique position as a working moral philosopher and practising novelist whose fiction tests and contests the moral stances to which she commits herself in her philosophical essays (despite the fact that she said repeatedly that she did not want philosophy to intrude into her fictional writing). Thus her novels do not function as mere illustrations of her moral philosophy but as meditations on, and counterpoints to, the positions she puts forward there. Her fears about the decline of religious faith in the West were not only related to the denial of a personal God (a position to which she herself subscribed), but also to an anxiety that a wholly secular society would no longer actively encourage quiet reflection on abstract matters such as truth, freedom, morality and the nature of goodness and evil.

Myself When Others: Daphne du Maurier and the Double Dialogue with ‘D’

One of the most powerful influences on Daphne du Mauriers life and writing was her relationship with her actor-manager father, whom she referred to as ‘D’. Although critics such as Nina Auerbach have usefully explored du Mauriers personal and artistic debts to her grandfather (the writer and artist George du Maurier), little has been written on how Gerald du Mauriers personality and possessive love of his daughter marked her work. This essay examines the nature of du Mauriers ambivalent love for her charismatic, emotionally immature and egocentric actor father and explores how she used disguise, masquerade and acting in her fiction in order to represent and explore complex family relationships. To illustrate our argument, we focus on her less well-known works, including The Progress of Julius (1933), Gerald: A Portrait (1934), The Parasites (1949), Myself When Young (1977) and the short story ‘A Border-line Case’ (1971), while also suggesting that some of her best-sellers, such as Frenchmans Creek (1941) and Rebecca (1938), can be fruitfully re-read through such a perspective. We conclude that her fictional transformation of the family theatrical legacy enabled du Maurier to understand–and come to terms with–her ambivalent attitude towards her own father. Moreover, the disturbing nature of her fiction challenges sentimental narratives of family life, asking the reader to consider at what point, and in what ways, love can become dysfunctional and damaging. Her novels and short stories, read in this light, pose enduring questions concerning the relationship between character and author and between ‘self’ and ‘other’.

Writers of Gothic

Ainsworth made his first venture into sensational fiction with ‘The Test of Affection’ (European Magazine, 1822), a tale that relies heavily on artificial ‘SUPERNATURAL’ devices in the ANN RADCLIFFE mode for its effect. It was followed by ‘The Spectre Bride’ (Arliss’s Pocket Magazine, 1822) and his early Gothic tales were collected in his first book, the anonymous December Tales (1823). All of this youthful work — which displays more enthusiasm than polish — was produced while Ainsworth was living in Manchester, where he had been born in 1805.

Women Writing Women

Writing in 1979, Patricia Stubbs identified a problem encountered by feminist writers at the end of the nineteenth century as still having relevance for the current generation of women writers. ‘This’, she claims: is a difficulty peculiar to realist fiction — that of how to incorporate it into a form whose essential characteristic is the exploration of existing realities, experiences and aspirations which go well beyond the possibilities afforded by that reality…. This explains the increasing importance of non-realist linear narrative forms in contemporary women’s writing. She cites Monique Wittig, Beryl Bainbridge, Angela Carter and Patricia Highsmith as writers who write in fantasy modes in order to evade this constraint.1 Those feminist writers of fiction who remained within realist paradigms found themselves writing narratives of victimhood: Margaret Drabble’s heroines are an interesting example. ‘This, above all, to refuse to be a victim’, says Margaret Atwood’s nameless narrator at the end of her 1972 novel Surfacing.2 In the 1970s and 1980s, a number of women novelists did just that and found in the traditions of Gothic the potential for writing transgression that challenged patriarchal assumptions and expectations in the late twentieth-century context. In Gothic’s hybridity they discovered ways of opening up parodic spaces to comic and liberating effect.

Men Writing Men

Such was the impact of second wave feminism that the 1980s saw the invention of the term ‘crisis in masculinity’. However, as Michael Roper and John Tosh have pointed out, the phenomenon is not new: ‘Masculinity is always bound up with negotiations about power, and is often therefore experienced as tenuous’.1 One of the effects of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s was to focus the spotlight on gendered social practices and on sexuality. Thus by the 1980s there was a growing popular understanding that gender was not synonymous with the biological body, that gender and sex are not synonymous. This is nicely illustrated in a comic vein by the popular satirical television series, Spitting Image, which portrayed the then prime minister, Mrs Thatcher (otherwise known as ‘The Iron Lady’ and ‘Attila the Hen’, to quote two of her more repeatable nicknames), dressed in a man’s suit. Topped with the three-dimensional caricature that was the latex head of the Spitting Image puppet, this representation of Mrs Thatcher became equally as familiar to the British in the 1980s as the dulcet tones and gentle visage of ‘the lady’ herself.2 Along with similar puppets, ‘she’ was manipulated to participate in scenes of public and private life in which her weaknesses and strengths alike were ruthlessly satirized. In addition to adopting male dress, ‘Mrs Thatcher’ was shown behaving in a far more masculine manner than her male Cabinet colleagues.

The Late Romantic Turn

Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent was published in 1800 and Eaton Stannard Barrett’s The Heroine in 1813, that is, after the Gothic novel had peaked in terms of its popularity during the 1790s and before those better-known parodies of Gothic fiction, Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey and Austen’s Northanger Abbey, which were published in 1818.1 Whereas The Heroine is a clear parody of the conventions of the popular Gothic novel, Castle Rackrent is perhaps a more subtle parody of the Gothic mode. Both Edgeworth and Barrett were commended by Austen, who wrote in a letter dated 2 March 1814: ‘I finished The Heroine last night and was very much amused by it … It diverted me exceedingly … I have torn through the third volume… I do not think it falls off. It is a delightful burlesque particularly on the Radcliffe style.’2 Belinda, Maria Edgeworth’s novel published in 1801, is of course linked with Fanny Burney’s Cecilia (1782) and Camilla (1796) in Austen’s Northanger Abbey as one of those works ‘in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language’.3