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

Abstract

One of the most powerful influences on Daphne du Maurier's 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 Maurier's personal and artistic debts to her grandfather (the writer and artist George du Maurier), little has been written on how Gerald du Maurier's personality and possessive love of his daughter marked her work. This essay examines the nature of du Maurier's 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 Frenchman's 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’.

Keywords:

• character and author
• Daphne du Maurier
• family relationships
• Gerald du Maurier
• incestuous desire
• self and other

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Meg Jensen for sharing her ideas with us before the publication of her work, when we were drafting our lecture for the Daphne du Maurier International Centenary Conference held at Fowey, 10–11 May 2007. Those ideas provided an initial and important stimulus for this essay.

Notes

¹This letter, together with others by du Maurier, came up for auction at Sotheby's in 1997. They were bought by a private collector. The letter is dated 5th May 1962.

²There are obviously echoes here of Shakespeare's Othello, in which jealousy and a handkerchief are key elements.

³As Forster notes in her biography of du Maurier, Puxley's real name was Henry Puxley. However, du Maurier called him ‘Christopher’ and herself ‘Jane’, names perhaps adapted from her novel The Loving Spirit.

⁴Hodges comments elsewhere, apropos The Parasites, that du Maurier ‘was fascinated by the phenomenon of incest, which is a recurring thread in her books—not from the sexual aspect, but as a manifestation of the urge that she believed exists in all of us to get back to our families’ (Hodges 2007: 30).

⁵‘A Border-line Case’ was first published by Gollancz in 1971 in the collection Not After Midnight and Other Stories; the same collection was published by Penguin Books in 1973 as Don't Look Now.