2This article attempts to redress this imbalance, bringing greater theoretical attention to the “The Apple Tree” within the fields of gender and Gothic studies. Within the context of the First and Second World Wars, it examines attitudes towards gender and du Maurier’s own issues with identity, to explore the instability of the gendered characterisation of the protagonists. This contribution also traces the narrative tensions that arise from the characters’ inability to fulfil the expected binary gender roles imposed by the Gothicised marital/familial home through du Maurier’s use of spectrality and a fear of domestic entrapment and violence. It thus suggests that the true horror at the centre of this text is an oppressive masculine and submissive feminine identity which symbolically disrupts both genders. “The Apple Tree” may therefore best be read as an allegory for the inherent (self) destructiveness of traditionally constructed gender roles and identities.

A Woman’s Place Is in the Home

3The disruption and insecurity caused by the First and Second World Wars motivated society to re-establish the home as the “centre” of family life (Santana 4). The prevailing opinion held that women who had entered employment to help in the wartime effort would, or perhaps should, return to their proper historical place in the home. Their active role during war was generally thought to have been nothing more than a temporary stopgap to ensure industry continued until men returned from the front, so that “women were asked to forget the skills they [had] learned and the wages they [had] earned” in order to “submit” to their “family obligations” (Santana 4-5). Liz Heron also explains that “giving central importance to the family was part of an effort of national reconciliation,” aimed particularly at resolving “sex [and gender] antagonisms” (qtd. in Haggett 7). As a result, quintessential images of suburban family life became culturally pervasive in both Britain and the United States. Women were encouraged to take pride and pleasure in looking after their husbands, children, and home, rather than pursuing self-actualisation via further education or professional careers. Instead, much like Midge’s character in “The Apple Tree,” “truly feminine women” learned that they should not want “careers, higher education, political rights” or even “independence” (Friedan 5).

4Large numbers of women consequently left employment or were otherwise laid off to make their jobs available to the returning men. Although women’s participation in the workforce increased from 45.9% in 1955 to 51% by 1965 in Britain, “many employers [continued to operate] a ‘marriage bar,’ whereby women were sacked upon marriage” (Anitha and Pearson). Worldwide economic expansion and the advocacy of traditional family values thus led to 1950s culture becoming dominated by images of the middle-class, suburban housewife, influencing (or perhaps even determining) women’s role within society and becoming part of their identity. One can thus apply to British women what Betty Friedan asserts about their American counterparts, namely that “in the fifteen years after the World War II, this mystique of feminine fulfilment became the cherished and self-perpetuating core of contemporary American culture. Millions of women lived their lives in the image of those pretty pictures of the American suburban housewife” (8).

6These feelings weighed most heavily upon du Maurier when she did not take to motherhood naturally, as can be seen from some of her letters, in which she scrutinised her own shortcomings in order to understand why she still felt so dissatisfied, locating herself outside the so-called natural order of society. For example, in a 1948 letter to her close confidant Ellen Doubleday, she states that women must choose between becoming a mother and having a career (Forster 251). By that time, du Maurier was raising three growing children—two girls, Tessa (born 1933) and Flavia (born 1937), and one son, Kits (born 1940). Still, her life choices contradict her views, suggesting she preferred the idea of motherhood to the task of actually raising children. Indeed, many biographers, including du Maurier’s own daughter, document the author’s struggles with motherhood. In A Daughter’s Memoir (1994), Flavia Leng paints a rather lonely picture of her childhood, describing how her mother would often ignore her children when she was busy with writing. As for Margaret Forster, she describes the sense of guilt du Maurier felt when motherhood did not bring her the same satisfaction her writing did (109). Her success as an author and her apparent failings as a mother led her to believe she had somehow gone against nature. As Friedan explains, “if a woman had a problem . . . she knew that something must be wrong with her marriage or with herself” (8, added emphasis).

7It therefore seems that du Maurier felt conflicted about her roles as a wife, mother, and the family’s matriarch, furthering her gender anxieties. This can be read in both the wrongness she equates with her writing career and in her refusal to categorise herself as a woman. Throughout her life, du Maurier used gender-neutral words and phrases to describe herself, such as “disembodied spirit” (Forster 235), which suggests she did not feel at home within her assigned place, or her own body. It can be argued that in using the word “disembodied,” she symbolically attempted to divest herself of the physical body she had difficulty reading and defining, while the word “spirit” has unnatural or supernatural connotations, bringing to mind the concept of ghosts and, by association, the Gothic—a genre du Maurier would return to time and time again in her fiction. The Gothic may thus have allowed her to project and explore her own gendered anxieties within her work, perhaps anticipating the concerns of second-wave feminism sparked by Friedan’s seminal work The Feminine Mystique (1963). As Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik aptly propose, du Maurier’s “novels and short stories offer particularly interesting examples of how Gothic writing is inflected by both personal and broader cultural values and anxieties” (2). The transgressive potential of the Gothic genre can thus be said to have allowed her to embody and realise her own gendered fears within the body of her work, of which the short story “The Apple Tree” provides a prime example.

Submissive Femininity

8The story follows the male narrator, Buzz, as he ruminates about his marriage to his recently deceased wife, Midge. Midge’s characterisation as the dedicated housewife is therefore utterly dependent on her husband. Yet, dissatisfaction is written onto her subjugated “dejected” body:

No matter where it was, whether in the garden, or in the house, or even shopping in the town, she would take upon herself this same stooping posture, suggesting that life treated her hardly, that she had been singled out from her fellows to carry out some impossible burden. . . . (114)

9Du Maurier directly relates Midge’s discontent to the “monotonous” (116) and “dreary routine” (115) of her domestic life. She is “depressed” (114), “weary” (114) but above all, filled with “resentment” (118). Arguably, the symptoms Midge exhibits relate to what Friedan would later call “The Problem that Has No Name” (5), a quiet desperation for something other than the established norm. A sense of unfinished business therefore lingers around the narrative as Midge continually returns to haunt the text and her husband in the figure of an apple tree. Roger Luckhurst notes that ghosts tend to appear at specific moments or in specific locations, and can be considered “symptoms, points of rupture that insist their singular tale be retold and their wrongs acknowledged” (qtd. in Blanco and Peeren xi). Midge’s ghost-like presence (reminiscent of du Maurier’s own “disembodied spirit”) exists at a point of rupture, occupying a liminal space in which she is both alive and dead, marking a breaking point in the relationship between men and women and, by association, in women’s relationship with the home.

10Still, Midge has no real alternative to her former role: “He had ventured to ask once why so much cleaning of the house was necessary. Why there must be the incessant turning out of rooms. . . . Midge stared at him, not understanding” (118). While Buzz implies there may be a life beyond Midge’s wifely duties, he fails to provide her with another option, and Midge’s internalisation of the prevalent gender ideology of the time does not allow her to realise what that life might look like. Setara Pracha argues that Midge’s inability to articulate her feelings can be read most clearly in her “trademark sigh of ‘oh well…’ [that] always starts an unfinished sentence” (181), du Maurier’s use of ellipses suggesting that Midge has been conditioned to accept her given role and does not possess the language to communicate her sense of dissatisfaction. Friedan describes a similar phenomenon in The Feminine Mystique: “when a woman tries to put the problem into words, she often merely describes the daily life she leads” (19). Without the words to convey the problem, Midge has no option but to defensively reinforce gendered stereotypes by relying on her husband to give her meaning within the coercive narrative of domesticity, even in death. Buzz would be the first to complain, she argues, “‘if the house was “like a pigsty’” (118).

11Midge can subsequently be defined as an exaggerated form of archetypal or hyper-femininity. As the apple tree, she once again does everything in her power to please Buzz, flowering brightly and producing masses of fruit, perhaps in a symbolic attempt to compensate for the fact that “they themselves were childless” (115). This is underlined by the description of the tree, which stands “reproachful,” “anxious,” and “desirous of admiration” (140), recalling Midge’s body language and demeanour in life. She is therefore destined to repeat her “singular tale” of the devoted housewife, to borrow Luckhurst’s phrase (qtd. in Blanco and Peeren xi). By these means, as Diana Wallace argues, women are “ghosted” within society (137), relegated to a form of non-personhood or never fully realised subjectivity that du Maurier’s story literalises.

12There are many examples of “ghosting” within the text. While Midge is still living, Buzz dismisses her feelings and grows increasingly resentful of his wife’s sullen behaviour. His disparaging tone deems Midge ungrateful for the home he has provided for her. Almost in revenge, Buzz possessively reclaims his home after her death by erasing all traces of her existence from the house: “He tore the photograph in half and threw it on the fire. He watched it curl up upon itself and burn” (135). As a result, he unconsciously exorcises her memory or exiles it to the garden. Midge’s identification with the apple tree reiterates her subservient role, symbolically evoking the Genesis story and the fall from Eden within popular culture, though paradoxically positioning the home as paradise lost for the former housewife. Yet the more the spectral Midge submits to her given role, raising her “withered branches” in “supplication” (126), perhaps searching for absolution, the more belligerent her husband becomes, further subjecting her memory to patriarchal control and punishment.

13Buzz’s continual rejection of Midge, both living and dead, denies her a sense of identity, causing her character to deteriorate throughout the narrative. As the story progresses, the apple tree is described as “half dead” (121), “rotten,” and “skeleton” like (126), bringing to mind the image of a decaying body. This culminates with her husband’s decision to cut down the tree:

That was more like it. That was the answer.
     Up and down went the heavy axe, splitting and tearing at the tree. Off came the peeling bark. . . . Hack at it, blast at it, gouge at the tough tissue, throw the axe away, claw at the rubbery flesh with the bare hands. Not far enough yet, go on, go on. . . .
     Now she’s groaning, now she’s splitting, . . . hanging there upon one bleeding strip. Boot her, then. That’s it, kick her, kick her again, one final blow, she’s over, . . . and all her branches spread about her on the ground. (152)

14The personification of the tree as a female body through the use of gendered pronouns, references to human anatomy (“flesh,” “tissue,” “blood”), and the tree’s continual association with Midge become increasingly uncomfortable. As the scene progresses, the description reads more like a violent attack on a human being than the felling of an apple tree. The use of sexually charged language symbolically equates the imagery with rape, as the movement of the axe and hands invasively penetrate the body of the tree, tearing away strips of bark that “come off” like clothes. In this way, du Maurier offers a coded expression of women’s fear of domestic violence.

15Helene Meyers contends that “feminist debates on violence against women centre on . . . the literal, fear-inspiring violation of female bodies and the figurative, theoretical status and limits of the female subject” (2). This can be seen at work in “The Apple Tree” as Midge’s spirit masochistically returns to her husband after the attack: “a stray piece of brushwood, cold and wet, touched his lips, it was like a hand, hesitant and timid feeling its way towards him in the darkness” (159). Yet for Meyers, the Gothic offers a “novelistic lens” for negotiating the complex relationship between femicidal plot structures and discourses surrounding female victimisation (2), by exposing “the extent to which women’s fears are warranted and normalised within cultural arrangements” of the home (26).

16Although this scene is the only example of literal violence within the text, more recent changes in legislation now formally recognise “controlling or coercive behaviour within an intimate or family relationship” as a form of abuse that causes “someone to fear violence” (Crown Prosecution Service)—an arrangement that is arguably normalised within Buzz and Midge’s marriage. For much of the narrative, Midge is portrayed as a kind of Stepford wife, robotically going about her domestic tasks and even asking her husband’s permission to see to his supper early when she is seriously ill (119). She gives little thought to her own wellbeing, seemingly in an attempt to win her husband’s favour, but Buzz continues to “neglect” her (115). This is a form of coercion, for the more Buzz ignores Midge, the more she does for him. Though Buzz is never shown to resort to physical violence while Midge is alive, the attack on the tree suggests that an underlying threat of violence perhaps governed her behaviour.

Oppressive Masculinity

17This scene also exemplifies the inherent instability rooted within traditional masculinity. The majority of the memories the reader is made privy to illustrate Buzz’s mistreatment of his wife; he sneaks off to the cinema to avoid dealing with her (119), he “yawns” at her sexual advances (136), all the while contemplating having an affair with May, a much younger, more beautiful woman (122). Midge’s spirit consequently returns to haunt the narrative, forcing Buzz to recognise his role in his wife’s unhappiness. Still, Buzz refuses to accept any responsibility, insisting that her “depression” (114) is the result of her self-inflicted “martyrdom” (121). Buzz’s growing resentment for his wife, and by association the tree, leads him to take her “dejection” as a personal criticism and rejection. The fact that Midge comes into her own as the apple tree, blooming brightly without her husband’s overbearing presence, underlines this reading.

18As the story’s narrator, Buzz portrays and betrays his patriarchal authority through his own self-doubts and guilty fixation with his dead wife. This can be discerned both in his frequent use of ellipses and the multiple tangents down which the reader is led. Although du Maurier does not make wholly clear if Buzz should be condemned for his actions (Midge could have been an overbearing wife), his guilty subconscious seems to inflict its own form of psychological punishment, implicating Buzz’s (but also du Maurier’s) own misogyny. In spite of his attempts to forget his wife, Buzz finds himself enthralled by the memories brought about by the apple tree’s looming presence. The tree overshadows the rest of garden, encroaching upon the house, planting seeds of doubt in Buzz’s mind.

19Despite the fact that Midge’s spirit is still conditioned by traditional gender roles, Buzz becomes increasingly paranoid, fearing femininity’s growing power. Perhaps anticipating the shifting gender dynamics of the future, he envisages his dead wife as a hostile force set to invade his territory, as does the overpowering scent of the apple tree branch that he burns in the cellar furnace prior to his felling of the tree:

he was seized with a kind of fear, a feeling of panic almost. What if the smell filled the whole house through the night, came up from the kitchen quarters to the floor above, and while he slept found its way into his bedroom, choking him, stifling him so that he could not breathe? The thought was ridiculous, insane—and yet… (131)

20Buzz’s quasi-sacrificial burning of a fallen branch attempts a kind of spiritual cleansing of his home. However, this has the reverse effect, as the smell of the burning apple wood infiltrates every room in the house, violating the carefully constructed boundaries held and maintained within Buzz’s mind, and by extension, his home. The shadowed depths of the cellar become a symbolic representation of Buzz’s mind, as hidden thoughts refuse to stay buried and climb their way to the surface. As a result, Buzz experiences topophobia in and around his home, leading him to believe that Midge’s spirit has returned to dominate the household and creep her way back into his life (131), threatening his patriarchal power. Just as Sharon Rose Yang and Kathleen Healey suggest that “fierce personifications of nature . . . may mirror and reinforce the passion, ferocity, and obsession of a character” (6), the reincarnation of the dead Midge as an apple tree disturbs Buzz’s understanding of himself as master of the house and instils fear in him.

21The apple tree’s sudden vitality may also symbolise Midge’s liberation from her sexually indifferent husband. Somewhat like the tree of knowledge in the Genesis story, the apple tree/Midge appears to possess knowledge that both disgusts and excites her husband, as implied by the sexually charged imagery of the felling scene. The tree is subsequently described as “indecent” and “blasphemous” (124), effectively stereotyping and demonising female sexuality. Still, Buzz’s (over)reaction—the overkill of his wife’s memory, first by burning her photograph and then by brutally felling the tree—calls into question his masculinity. In a similar reading to this scene, Pracha suggests that Buzz’s “impotent fury at the tree is provoked by his fury at his own impotence” (179). Likewise, R. W. Connell writes that while “violence is part of a system of domination, [it] is at the same time a measure of its imperfection. A thoroughly legitimate hierarchy would have less need to intimidate” (84). Buzz’s decision to fell the tree can therefore be read as an attempt to reassert his virility and his authority over his wife, as his position within the narrative is dependent upon a submissive femininity. The attack on the tree/Midge is therefore authorised by normative definitions of masculinity, with violence used as part of a system of control.

22However, Buzz’s attempt to reassert control over his wife ultimately proves to be self-destructive, adversely bringing about his death as he trips over the stump of the apple tree after an evening of drinking in the local pub one cold winter night, trapping his leg in the process. The apple tree consequently doubles Buzz’s troubled subjectivity insofar as his partial destruction of the garden results in his own destruction.

23Roger Horrocks argues that traditional or hyper-masculinity is “unnatural,” because “both men and women contain masculine and feminine elements” (91). He explains that “our society requires such a self-destructive identity, a deeply masochistic self-denial, a shrinkage of the self, a turning away from whole areas of life, that the man who obeys the demands of masculinity has become only half-human” (25). This, and what becomes of the woman who obeys the demands of femininity, is what we see played out in the text. The more Buzz seeks to exorcise Midge’s memory, the more his mental state deteriorates: his behaviour becomes erratic and he begins to drink heavily. Therefore, as Greg Buzzwell argues: “On one level, ‘The Apple Tree’ can be read as the story of a woman haunting her husband from beyond the grave but, on another, it can be viewed as a chilling meditation upon mental disintegration.” Buzz’s obsession with the apple tree takes on the qualities of an unstable delusion, an attempt to fill the void left by his wife, which threatens his identity even as he feels liberated from her “dejected” presence. With reference to the work of Julia Kristeva and her theory of abjection, Julian Wolfreys explains that “that which threatens the self is not simply locatable outside of the self but rather emerges or erupts within subjectivity” (3). Midge arguably brought structure and meaning to Buzz’s life, with her submissiveness propping up his faulty masculinity, and his ensuing fixation with the tree suggests he cannot survive without his other, perhaps better, half. The uncanny space of the garden is subsequently rendered an extension or externalisation of Buzz’s disturbed mind.

24Similarly, as the apple tree, Midge paradoxically “murders” Buzz in fear of losing her husband and her sense of identity, so to speak, to the younger tree in the garden, associated with May, the farm girl with whom her husband almost had an affair. May’s haunting presence has led Marta Miquel-Baldellou to suggest that the “ghost of infidelity” pervades the story, as the fallen branch from the older tree seems to point in “accusation” to the other, much younger tree, “underscoring [Buzz’s] guilt” (125). Accordingly, Buzz is punished for his transgressions in the final scene. When he wanders through the garden to admire the younger tree, Midge’s spirit appears to trap his leg with her remaining stump, refusing to let him go: “He would have to lie there all night, held fast in the clutch of the old apple tree. There was no hope, no escape” (159)—and possibly no one to rescue him from the falling snow. While Midge appears to be defending the sanctity of her marriage, she ironically sacrifices her husband to re-establish her place in the patriarchal order.

Subverting the Gender Binary

25Although writing in regard to du Maurier’s novel Rebecca, Auba Llompart Pons’s conclusions are also applicable to “The Apple Tree.” Pons argues that it is “not only about how far a man can go to comply with patriarchal norms, but also about how much a woman is . . . ready to accept, overlook and sacrifice in exchange for patriarchal stability” (81-82). In this way, the couple illustrate a kind of sadomasochist relationship which legitimises Midge’s place within the narrative. Many of the examples discussed above—like Buzz seemingly deriving pleasure from his wife’s humiliation and the brutal attack on her/the tree—show that her husband uses pain to regulate Midge’s behaviour, something she accepts without question, returning to her husband in life as well as in death. This conforms with Michelle A. Massé’s suggestion that “the cultural, psychoanalytic and fictional expectation” is that women “should be masochistic” (qtd. in Meyers 60) in order to socially conform, and that the Gothic genre seeks to highlight (and perhaps readdress) this phenomenon, which can arguably be seen at work in “The Apple Tree.”

26However, du Maurier also subverts the traditional gender binary found within Gothic fiction as the roles of victim and villain become interchangeable. In Gothic fiction, women conventionally feature as imperilled heroines while, in “The Apple Tree,” Midge proves a mortal danger to her husband, purposefully contradicting the initial reading of Midge as a mere victim. Christine Berthin aptly contends that

it is in the nature of ghosts to stand in defiance of the binary opposition (life or death, inside or outside as well as present and past) that constitute the symbolic system, and as such they are ultimately linked with deconstruction. (3)

27In this way, du Maurier uses Midge’s haunting presence to disrupt our gendered assumptions, reversing the role of victim and villain and undermining its significance within the symbolic order. As Meyers argues, “oppression and agency can—and do—coexist in bodies, systems, narratives. Thus, victimisation can be recognised as such without attendant claims of powerlessness, virtuousness, innocence, or purity” (154-55).

28Within du Maurier’s Gothicised world, representations of gender are thus marked by an inherent duality. Men and women are shown to be both victim and villain, passive and active, admirable and abominable. The apple tree and the uncanny space of the garden function as double of the characters’ divided subjectivities as split along gender lines. As Horner and Zlosnik put it “in seeming to set up a binary opposition between femininity and masculinity, du Maurier in effect explores subjectivity as a spectrum rather than a position” (100). By framing the narrative in this way, she reveals that the true horror at the centre of this text is the perpetuation of traditional gender roles and identities. The protagonists’ ultimately (self) destructive use of violence leads us to question the ideological construction of femininity and masculinity within society, as traditional gender roles are constantly threatened, but also prove a threat to their defenders. If Gothic fiction “questions the very possibility of representation and de-substantializes the symbolic order as inherently ghostly or haunted by its own failings,” to borrow Christine Berthin’s words (2-3), the instability in du Maurier’s characterisation of both Midge and Buzz challenges preconceived notions about gender. Thus, “The Apple Tree” is best read as an allegory for the inherent dangers rooted within traditional gender roles and identities, exposing the lie that a stable unitary masculinity or femininity exists.