Abstract
Jamaica Inn is a shipwreck narrative, set at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The shipwreck narrative is a popular and culturally significant genre which addresses moments of crisis when social rules and morals come under pressure. As Margarette Lincoln argues, these are moments ‘in which assumptions about divine Providence, about national character, about gender roles, about civilised behaviour, are placed at risk or thrown into unusually sharp definition’.1 Since early modern times and well into the nineteenth century, thousands of mariners each year were shipwrecked and drowned around the dangerous coasts of Britain. The dangers were enhanced by wrecking activities as the coastal population plundered the cargo or even ‘assisted’ the ship in running aground with false lights on the cliffs. This historical fact goes some way towards explaining why wrecking has become such a powerful trope in the English cultural memory. Beyond this, wrecking captured the romantic imagination, and if anything, its appeal grew as it gradually ceased to be a social reality. Shipwreck narratives cater to a reading public’s taste for sensationalist entertainment, but they also open up the wide spaces of myth. In his book on the ‘discovery of the seaside’, Alain Corbin notes that ‘[n] ear the strand, that indeterminate place of biological transitions, the links connecting mankind with the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms can be seen with exceptional clarity.
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Notes
See Margarette Lincoln, ‘Shipwreck Narratives of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century’, in: British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 20 (1997), 155–72; 155. Lincoln identifies the ‘earliest collection of narratives of shipwrecks’ as ‘Mr James Janeway’s legacy to his friends, containing twenty-seven famous instances of God’s Providence in and about sea-dangers and deliverances (London 1675)’ (159).
Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Sea: the Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World 1750–1840, trans. Jocelyn Phelps (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 223, 225.
Incidentally, the name of the house, Jamaica Inn, suggests that these cargoes are mostly the fruits of a prior injustice, namely the colonial trade. However, du Maurier did not invent the name, and the implications of colonial trade are not explored in the novel. During an excursion with her friend Foy Quiller-Couch, she visited the real ‘Jamaica Inn’ where she was inspired, having also read Stevenson’s Treasure Island. It is tempting but, I think, unwarranted to argue for more than a small element of ‘exotic’ excitement in this context. Du Maurier prefaces her book with the customary disclaimer about the fictional nature of her descriptions. Daphne du Maurier, Jamaica Inn [1936] (London: Pan Books, 1976).
Du Maurier, Enchanted Cornwall (1989), 101, 52.
See Patsy Stoneman, Brontë Transformations: the Cultural Dissemination of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1996).
For criticism on the gothic, see Ann Williams, Art of Darkness: a Poetics of Gothic (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995);
Richard Davenport-Hines, Gothic: 400 Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin (London: Fourth Estate, 1998);
M. Mulvey-Roberts, The Handbook to Gothic Literature (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998);
David Punter, Gothic Pathologies: the Text, the Body and the Law (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998);
R. Mighall, A Geography of Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999);
David Punter (ed.), A Companion to the Gothic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000);
Markman Ellis, The History of Gothic Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000);
Avril Homer (ed.), European Gothic: a Spirited Exchange 1760–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002);
Toni Wein, British Identities, Heroic Nationalisms, and the Gothic Novel, 1764–1824 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca [1938] (London: Arrow Books, 1992), 19.
Of course there are clues which suggest a reading of Jane Eyre as a rebellious text. For contemporary reviews stressing this rebelliousness, see Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre [1847], ed. Richard Dunn, Norton Critical Edition (New York and London: Norton, 2001);
for influential feminist readings see for example, Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: The Hogarth Press, 1928),
and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: the Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979).
In their study of Daphne du Maurier, Avril Homer and Sue Zlosnik focus on the author’s negotiation of the gothic tradition, arguing that Rebecca is the narrator’s dark double with connotations of the femme fatale, of Jewishness, of polymorphous sexuality and of the vampire. They stress the role of Rebecca and Mrs Danvers in enabling the heroine’s development in the direction of both adult sexuality and writing skills. Homer and Zloznik, Daphne du Maurier (1998), 119–20.
The canonization of Rebecca is developing apace, and the novel has been included as a set text in the third-level Open University Course A300 Twentieth-Century Literature: Texts and Debates. One of the aspects that the course book emphasizes is tourism. See Nicola J. Watson, ‘Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca’, in: David Johnson (ed.), The Popular & the Canonical: Debating Twentieth-Centwy Literature 1940–2000 (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 13–56. ‘Indeed, Rebecca’s protagonist is in some sense herself merely a tourist in Manderley, as the poignant moment when she remembers her childhood trip to the local shop and the purchase of the postcard of the house should remind us from the very earliest pages of the novel. As the narrator traverses house, garden and shoreline, picking up the traces of Rebecca in her domestic landscape, she begins to construct for us as readers a similar itinerary of desire and investigation. […] Like the typical tourist, she is a middle-class interloper in an aristocratic social system, obsessed with a lost, invisible and enigmatic past embodied in an infinitely desirable and ultimately unattainable piece of property. Alert with febrile attentiveness to every clue and trace in the present-day landscape of what once was, condemned to (and desiring to) repeat the past, determined actually to insert her body into the imaginary past […], the narrator efficiently and inevitably both prefigures and constructs the present-day literary tourist’ (52).
Homer and Zlosnik, Daphne du Maurier (1998), 101. Daphne du Maurier’s reference occurs in Enchanted Cornwall (1989), 106.
Du Maurier, Enchanted Cornwall (1989), 101.
Yet another set of mythical resonances can be added by relating Rebecca with Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and via this Shakespearean romance with classical myth. Janet S. Wolf makes a convincing case for the presence in The Winter’s Tale of the ancient earth goddess depicted in classical antiquity in her three aspects of maiden, mother and crone, as represented by Persephone (Perdita), Demeter (Hermione) and Hecate (Paulina). Moreover, these three aspects are often blurred and the three figures have a tendency to change places or be regarded as three aspects of one goddess. In ‘de Winter’s tale’, these three aspects of the goddess are represented by the young orphaned narrator, Rebecca and Mrs Danvers. Janet S. Wolf, ‘“Like an old tale still”: Paulina, “triple Hecate”, and the Persephone Myth in The Winter’s Tale’, in: Elizabeth T. Hayes (ed.), Images of Persephone: Feminist Readings in Western Literature (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994), 32–44. Daphne du Maurier’s repeated comments that Rebecca was not a romance but a study in jealousy would strengthen the thematic link with The Winter’s Tale.
For a related argument, see Gina Wisker, ‘Dangerous Borders: Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca: Shaking the Foundations of the Romance of Privilege, Partying and Place’, in: Journal of Gender Studies 12:2 (2003), 83–97.
‘As the basis for the romance is destabilised, so too are the values of the country house and Englishness and the aristocracy. The union of Maxim and Rebecca is childless, as is that of the second Mrs de Winter — there will be no inheritance of wealth and the maintenance of family strengths and values. Far worse probably, the actual edifice of English stability and the nostalgic, comfortable conservatism of the romantic fiction are entirely destroyed when the grand house goes up in flames. Du Maurier, in Rebecca, undermines the conservative traditions which she seems to be upholding and rewarding both in terms of upper middle class values as embodied in the house, Manderley, and in the forms of romantic fiction which themselves seek to continually play out a version of achieved desire which can only render the sexually active transgressive, lively minded woman as demon, and exorcised demon at that’ (94–5). For a different reading emphasizing containment and the reformation of the aristocratic ruling class through bourgeois femininity, see Roger Bromley, ‘The Gentry, Bourgeois Hegemony and Popular Fiction: Rebecca and Rogue Male’, in: P. Humm, P. Stigant and P. Widdowson (eds), Popular Fictions: Essays in Literature and History (London: Methuen, 1986), 166–83.
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© 2010 Ina Habermann
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Habermann, I. (2010). From Gothic to Memodrama. In: Myth, Memory and the Middlebrow. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230277496_9
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