‘Beautiful Creatures’: The Ethics of Female Beauty in Daphne du Maurier's Fiction

Abstract

This paper argues that Daphne du Maurier's enigmatically beautiful heroines consistently function in her novels as sites of moral possibility; I show how beauty–whether it promotes justice or its opposite–both delineates and complicates the moral landscape each novel explores. In order to establish a pattern, I explore three very different novels–Rebecca (1938), The King's General (1946) and My Cousin Rachel (1951)–all of which are fundamentally concerned with notions of justice and beauty, as becomes clear in their opening pages. Elaine Scarry's provocative and controversial book, On Beauty and Being Just, offers a suggestive lens through which to consider the way beauty operates in these texts, positing that beauty is a sort of compact between the beautiful being and the perceiver of that beauty, and that this compact–however fraught, as she argues, with the potential for error–promotes truth-seeking and justice. Projecting the compact onto relationships between characters, du Maurier places the perception, interpretation and response to female beauty at the heart of her morally ambiguous novels. Beauty exists neither as a force nor as a passive attribute, but rather as a tense and delicate relation–between Rebecca and her unnamed successor, between Philip Ashley and his mysterious cousin Rachel, between Honor Harris and her reckless general. Latent in that relation is the possibility of equality, of justice, of obedience to the truth-seeking impulse Scarry attributes to beauty. Ultimately, I argue, du Maurier anticipates Scarry's contention that beauty introduces ethical potential, but does not guarantee its fulfillment; and this conflict, to a considerable extent, structures her novels.

Keywords:

• beauty
• Daphne du Maurier
• Elaine Scarry
• error
• femme fatale
• gothic
• heroine
• justice
• narrative

Notes

¹This distinction is fundamental to Edmund Burke's definition of beauty in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757). Beauty (whether of people or things), he argues, produces ‘love’, which is entirely different from ‘desire or lust’ (Burke 1958: 91).

²Philip's association of female beauty with destructiveness flies in the face of prevailing nineteenth-century aesthetic theories. For Kant and Burke, the kind of power Philip attributes to beauty is aligned solely with the sublime—Scarry's ‘aesthetic of power’—while beauty is ‘diminutive’ and ‘powerless’ (Scarry 1999: 85). Further, the beautiful is feminine while the sublime is essentially masculine. Philip attributes the power of the sublime to his imaginary Rachels—but also to the real Rachel, once he has recognised her beauty and begins to fear her. For Scarry, these aesthetic distinctions posit oppositions where there was once continuity, and demote beauty in the process. Philip's association of beauty with power suggests a similar blurring of the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime.