1There are no positive living sustained relationships in Daphne du Maurier’s dark, Gothic short stories. She wrote in an era in which Hollywood romances were flourishing, the popular presses produced magazines full of stories of romantic experiences, and novels flooded the market, peddling versions of “happy ever after.” However, du Maurier’s characters are never more than performative when acting the roles of such loving couples, whether they are rushing off to a romantic escapade in Paris or a beach location, or settled in calm domestic peace and continued loving embrace. Peace and loving embraces are only notional. At any moment, the husband of many years can step out from the dependable round of drinks and dinner with some friends, and a tidy house and marriage, and decide to murder some stranger he randomly visits (“The Alibi”); the romantic escape to a beach adventure avoids drowning but ends in loathing (“Week-End”); the caring husband is revealed as a predator, a vulture in men’s clothing in a plot with a serpentine nurse (“The Blue Lenses”); and the dream lover, a surprising, dashing kindred spirit, with a dangerous job, can turn out to be your father (“A Border-Line Case”).
2This essay uses a literary Gothic lens to explore predatory and deceptive relationships in du Maurier’s short stories. Initially, it elaborates on several stories which deal with dead-end or dangerous romantic relationships, and predatory domestic family relationships, in order to underline the particular Gothic streak in du Maurier’s short fiction. It then focuses in particular on “The Blue Lenses” and “The Alibi,” to show that du Maurier systematically undermines not only the domestic normal, but also the romantic and crime fictions that frame her stories, and to emphasise where dangerous, self-deceptive storytelling meets predatory relationships.
3David Punter argues that Gothic writers work “on the fringe of the acceptable, for it is on this borderland that fear resides” (189). This contribution sets out to explore du Maurier’s use of strategies of pre-second-wave feminist Gothic horror to problematise stable versions of perceived reality, identity, and loving relationships and to understand how she does this by undermining the comforting stories we tell ourselves. In her questioning of these myths and of these dangerously delusional, cosy narratives, she is a precursor to the more “magical” Angela Carter whose work shows the influence of du Maurier, particularly Rebecca (1938), and who openly debunks myths of gender roles, or narratives of the ties that bind, with a specific focus on myths of the feminine:
I believe that all myths are products of the human mind and reflect only aspects of material human practice. I’m in the demythologising business. . . . This investigation of the social fictions that regulate our lives—what Blake called the ‘mind-forged manacles’—is what I’ve concerned myself with consciously since that time. (Carter 70-71)
4The Hitchcock version of Rebecca (1940) was likely seen by Carter, who was brought up on Hollywood films and recognised that the novel rewrote Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Carter goes so far as to describe Rebecca as a book that “shamelessly reduplicated the plot” of Brontë’s novel (qtd. in Horner and Zlosnik 99). However, as Nina Auerbach explains, du Maurier is not a mid-twentieth-century feminist:
The Daphne du Maurier I kept returning to as a teenager, and keep returning to now, is far from a compliant fulfiller of feminine (or feminist) wishes. Her vision of relationships, especially family relationships, is unapologetically brutal. The magic that runs through her stories does not soften the characters or resolve their tensions. (14)
5Susanne Becker sees women’s Gothic as questioning domesticity, and talks of ways in which Gothic texts by women haunt each other, both in concerns and forms, revisiting the more traditional Gothic texts—which disturb but offer conventional rewards such as marriage and money—and those which leave women’s conventional roles and rewards in question. She notes the “writing and re-writing of female texts haunting one another: around the interrogative texture of romantic love and female desire, of gender construction between le propre and the monstrous-feminine, of the (contextualising) dynamics of domestic horror” (68). In a previous study, I commented that “Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik (1998) revived the appreciation of Daphne du Maurier as a Gothic writer and in so doing overturned the established version of female Gothic as offering resolutions and a happy ending” (Wisker 11). As Gothic horror, du Maurier’s work focuses on relationships, families, couples, power, self-delusions, the body, and entrapping narratives, especially of romance and domestic security. However, unlike later second-wave feminist Gothic fiction—particularly the wry, cruel, carnivalesque work of Angela Carter—once du Maurier has undermined the narratives that make us vulnerable, she does not offer any celebratory radical escape: she leaves women partners, or those who think they could be partners, disillusioned, vulnerable, collusive, stuck (Rebecca, “The Blue Lenses”) or dead (“Panic,” “The Alibi”). These are trapped relationships with none of Carter’s energetic agency. There is no one else to be and nowhere else to go in du Maurier’s pre-second-wave feminist Gothic.
6The men in du Maurier’s work are self-absorbed, careless with the feelings and the lives of others, even to death (“Panic”), and above all selfish and Britishly dull. Yet, her women are scarcely an improvement on this, being also self-absorbed and entitled. One domestic Gothic scenario, “The Limpet,” is a good example of the damage done by blinkered selfishness. Since the plots often rely on the protagonists’ version of the stories, they are, in their minds, hard done by and perfectly correct in making the best of a bad situation. In that story, a woman’s life is spent finding exactly how to inveigle her way into others’ trust and friendship, then romance and marriage. She has developed a knack of getting her own way by either flattering them and making herself essential and/or identifying potential disasters, which dismays them and destroys their investment in their sense of self-worth, their worldview and plans, and their will to live. She starts with challenging her parents:
. . . and often I remember Mother would say to me with a sigh, “Your father’s late again. I wonder what’s kept him tonight?”
I would look up from my homework and say—just to tease, you know—“You shouldn’t have married a man younger than yourself. He likes young company, that’s what it is, and he finds it with those girls in the office, not all that older than I am myself.” (“The Limpet” 186)
7Later the woman undermines her father’s health, so he dies under an unnecessary exploratory anaesthetic. She also wrecks the lives of an actor, a designer, a politician and several others, attaching herself to them, telling lies, till they escape with someone else or die. She is unaware of her spite and its selfish, destructive results.
8No cosy domestic scenario or family is safe in du Maurier’s Gothic. For the selfish male partners, dull husbands with murderous intent, and the equally selfish daughters and lovers, there is no generous sense of any other humans. No one is worthy of any behaviour modification or duty of care.
9Nina Auerbach comments: “I have found in no other writer’s work the same tough-minded anatomy of family life combined with so eerie a patina of domestic strangeness” (13). And indeed, as a Gothic writer, du Maurier, like Carter after her, questions myths and the narrative trajectories which confirm certain certainties of both everyday life and dreams, thereby destroying a form of ontological security. These are in the main romantic fictions, crime fictions and what might be called fictions of the domestic everyday. For instance, in “Nothing Hurts for Long,” a husband returns from a trip to Berlin, having constructed a new, racier way of living, ignoring his utterly dependant wife. The excessive staged preparations for his return, the special meal, are all nullified as he focuses on dinner with friends, phone calls, leaving the waiting wife as emptied out as their marriage. As in “A Difference in Temperament” or “No Motive,” ostensible domestic bliss or family situations are therefore wrecked.
10Stories of coupledom and relationships deliberately dismantle the popular cultural peddling of romantic experience and outcomes, courtship, and marriage. In short-story form, it is possible to sketch the scenario and characters, set up the idyll or the banal norm, then puncture it with sudden sharp acts of surprise violence, or psychological, emotional, domestic brutality, or bodily harm. Alternatively, control over the everyday can be leaked slowly away with consistent boredom, small acts of cruelty dissolving security and hope.
11One of my major interests in du Maurier’s short stories is in their deft sketching of selfish and deluded individuals, and in their skilful questioning of the narrative by which we protect ourselves from insecurities. This is the narrative which assures us that parents care for children, children for parents, lovers permanently love and cherish each other, and that—apart from the criminal maniacs, or those acting in times of war (which seem to excuse abnormal behaviour)—on the whole, people will treat each other with respect and honesty. Not in du Maurier, whose characters look as though they will establish loving relationships, but quickly tire of each other and run if illness or neediness appear (“Panic”). They manipulate their parents and lovers (“The Limpet”); they play out parts in the selfish stories they weave, in which they are guiltless; they deceive, desert, undermine, and randomly plot murder (“The Alibi”). Seemingly caring and trustworthy, they hide their true, cruel nature in plain sight (“The Blue Lenses”).
12Daphne du Maurier’s great strength is in observation of others and imagining, sensing, and elaborating on the most selfish and cruel, or just plain insensitive, motives; it is in the insidious destabilisation of the security of both the everyday normality of life—the narratives by which we construct and interpret our worlds—and what is defined as real or labelled as trustworthy. The common pattern in relationships in her short stories is selfishness, self-delusion and spite, malice, whether deliberate or accidental or casual. The common result is a sapping banality, an emptying out of hope and joy even in the mundane, a vacuum, nothingness, existential isolation and terror, death. This sense of terror and emptying out is based on the ways in which the characters have entirely invested in a constructed version of self in the world and in relationships, and in a false sense of security, buying into the proxies, the presentations, and performances, ultimately leaving them only with ontological insecurity, familiar from scenarios and experiences read through existentialism and phenomenology. Everyone in some way is deliberately acting as though words and names, roles and performances, relate directly to reality, and where one’s essence and being, and security of relationships, of identity and reality, are just that: trustworthy, lasting, and real. In this undoing not only is there anxiety, loss, and death, but also a huge terrifying vacuum of the disjuncture between lived and felt reality, and the realisation that reality is a construct.
13In this thought, therefore, du Maurier’s work takes us into a world which reminds us of existentialism and phenomenology in its fundamental questioning of the relationships between categories, words, proxies, and felt, lived, seen, or perceived reality. Familiar faces, behaviours, places, the trustworthiness of continuities of time and place are all called into question. Zones of normality are breached. The experiences, labels, names, times, and spaces of the everyday are shown to be essentially unfixed, unsafe, alternative, and undependable. Some of this strange experience is accompanied by self-deception, so the stories with which we make sense of our lives and events are revealed as unstable. In du Maurier’s work, behaviours are all disrupted, while trusted relationships dissolve into doubt and boredom. Moving into liminality, her characters slip off ties and habits. Perhaps that, too, is exciting: this is a release—the frisson of difference, of destabilisation of the mundane—but also a danger, as you can die, or dissolve.
14A key story in this discussion is “The Blue Lenses,” with its metaphor of new clarity of sight on hitherto domesticated or romanticised versions of other people, and sudden insight into their intent. In the midst of performance of normativity, co-option to romantic fallacies and narratives of domestic security and bliss, this tale pulls back the skein of invested belief in relationships, in one’s sense of what is “real,” or trusted, or known (whether places or people), in the relationship between words and performances, in our reading of the world and our place in it, and in our own intact safety of self. It reveals that the world is in fact filled with predatory dissimulating others, snakes, vultures, boars, and scratchy cats pretending friendship.
15“The Blue Lenses” concerns Marda West, a married woman who must have a serious eye operation which requires her to wear bandages to enable her eyes to heal and then gradually have lenses fitted. Her married status is, as ever, important, since it indicates implicit trust, reliance, and a comfortable sense of the reliable everyday. As she comes round from her operation, her husband, Jim, visits. They phone, they chat about her soon-to-be newly enhanced sight and her coming home. She is all the while literally in the dark, however, as her eyes are bandaged: “‘You will see,’ the surgeon told her, ‘more clearly than ever before’” (44).
16As Marda settles into consciousness and the temporary anonymity of her own darkness, she imagines Jim as attentive as ever, and she invests her trust in the nurses caring for her, so sweet and attentive, highly caring and professional. Nurse Ansel is so dependable that Marda “tentatively suggest[s] . . . that perhaps when she return[s] home the night-nurse might go with [her and her husband]” (48) for a week once the lenses have been replaced and she can recuperate. Waiting for Jim to come into her hospital room, she is imagining a lover bringing exotic flowers. And in anticipation, she feels “‘like being born again. I’ve forgotten how the world looks.’ . . . ‘Such a wonderful world,’ murmured Nurse Ansel” (49). The problem begins when Marda opens her eyes. It seems seeing clearly cuts through the pretence and performance people put on in front of each other, and the lenses reveal true selves, a clarity that is first comic, as if a game is being played on her, then terrifying.
17Starting to see, she sees otherwise, almost too clearly. One kindly nurse is a cow and a doctor is a terrier, whom she expects to bark. Lunch is brought in by a kitten. Worried, she feels she is stuck in some kind of joke or conspiracy: “The whole floor was in the deception” (55). She begins to suspect that “[t]he lenses, by their very nature, by some quality beyond the layman’s understanding, must transform the person who was perceived through them” (58). Yet, when she tells her husband they are all animal heads showing their natures, she says she can see perfectly: “‘It’s just that… that all the nurses look like animals. And Greaves, too. He’s a fox terrier. One of those little Jack Russells they put down the foxes’ holes’” (60). “What was so wrong with people?” (62).
18At least, early on, when the first part of the operation leaves her with only black and white sight, she sees her own reflection as normal in the mirror. Since questions about game playing and dressing up are met with annoyance and the reminder that everyone is doing their job well, Marda begins to realise that whatever she sees, she needs to stop commenting. When things get worse, alone in the sense of being stuck in a conspiracy to fool her, humiliate her, and threaten her, she escapes from the hospital. However, people are also animals outside, so she is treated with suspicion, as if mad, and returns. “The world was theirs, there was no human left. Seeing her run they turned and looked at her, they pointed, they screamed and yapped, they gave chase” (76).
19The worst moments are the revelation of how changed her relationship is with her husband, the nurse, and herself. Her husband is a vulture with a “blood-stained beak” (69). The nurse who had seemed to be some kind of angel is revealed to be a snake: “the long snake’s head, the twisting neck, the pointed barbed tongue swiftly thrusting and swiftly withdrawn” (63). There are documents to sign, and Nurse Ansel, the snake, guides her with these. It is not possible to communicate her fears to others who cannot see as clearly as she can, or hide their animal natures. She is deemed wayward or slightly mad when she shares what she sees, a madness which could lead to further loss of control because if she were identified as mad, her little—and now dangerously enlightened—freedom would be removed. Humanity has left the people about her and she fears that the last thing to go would be the human voice.
20This is du Maurier’s version of the horrors perceived in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and by Anne Catherick in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White: Marda feels that “[t]his was her hell. She was quite alone, coldly conscious of the hatred and cruelty about her” (71). Like the protagonist in John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, undergoing an eye operation while alien plant species shoot blinding toxins into people’s eyes, when she regains her sight it is as if she were the only person who could see. Like previous patients, she will “actually see more clearly in every way” and realise that “she [can see] all her friends and her family as they really [are]” (73). The kind of sight she eventually gains is that of du Maurier herself, initially blurry as you make things and people out to be what they are, then incisive and terrifying in its clarity. If you alert those around you to what you see and what people are really like, you could be deemed mad, unsettled, and then be punished or ostracised. The clarity of one who can see human flaws and pretences all too clearly is therefore revealed as a dangerous gift. The solution is a form of collusion. Looking in the mirror after the second operation, quietened and colluding, Marda is further alarmed: “The eyes that stared back at her were doe’s eyes, wary before sacrifice, and the timid deer’s head was meek, already bowed” (82). Her insights are piercing, and she has seen through their pretences. However, she will be sacrificed.
21In her introduction to The Breaking Point, Sally Beauman notes: “these stories are jagged and unstable; they constantly threaten and alarm; they tip towards the unpredictability of fairy tale, then abruptly veer towards nightmare. They are elliptic, awkward—and they are fascinating” (ix). As she also reminds us, du Maurier acknowledged that before writing this collection she had come near to a breakdown (ix). Indeed, there runs throughout all of these stories a sense of precarity in the everyday and a debate about the purpose—or lack of purpose—of art, of all forms, which could resonate with her own concerns as a writer and may have served as therapy.
22Daphne du Maurier’s short stories also interrogate grand narratives, defamiliarising their trajectories and the matched beliefs in which we invest. Just as in Rebecca, the narrative begins at the end, and the popular fiction trajectory of romance and wooing, leading to domestic security and bliss, dissolves into the instability of homelessness and into a life of mutual pretence with a murderer. The only punishment is deceit and boredom. Alison Light notes:
Daphne du Maurier’s writing is not powerful because it successfully conveys a conservative vision but because of the pleasure it takes in undermining its own beliefs. Du Maurier’s writing suggests that conservatism has its own divisions, its own buried desires, and that it has its own unconscious, its craving which cannot be satisfied and its conflicts which cannot be resolved. (158)
23Romantic fictions are also overturned in “Panic” and “Week-End,” where the thrill of sexual liaisons, particularly the rather illicit sort, dissolves into disgusted boredom or death. Du Maurier’s lovers on an escapist weekend in “Week-End” are childlike and irresponsible. Naming each other “Mousie” and “Hoosie,” they are seen “clapping their hands” (139). Later, after Housie shows he has no clue how to re-start the hired boat and they are stuck, wet and cold on a random beach, the momentary idyll of place and relationship turns to loathing. They have passed “from a fatuous self-content to a strange senility” (139): each is piqued by rheumatism or neuralgia; even the sky and bird song are shrunk, and they are silent on the return drive. What is amusing here is the stupidity of their initial romancing of the weekend escape, and the rapid descent into discomfort, cluelessness, and boredom. There is a sense of ennui, the abyss of the everyday, reminiscent of Sartre and Beckett.
24Whether launched into the narrative of love, domestic bliss, a romantic fling, sudden discovery of talent, creation of a secret life or physical escape, du Maurier’s characters show themselves to be but trapped in a delusion which leads to boredom or ignominious, squalid death. Du Maurier’s horror is other people and also the self; it is the terrifying, sudden or slow, banal dissolution of an often rather mundane dream. Her Gothic horror builds on destabilised, established narratives, whether of domestic harmony, everyday normality or named things, presences, time, place—it is Freudian and existential at its core. Names and naming, meaning, narrative ways of pinning down and sense-making float away from the people, events and places, objects and trajectories. Du Maurier both deconstructs and confirms conventional beliefs, leaving the reader uneasy. As noted elsewhere, her intent is one of “testing their limits, questioning received interpretations and securities whether of behaviour in the natural world, or of the stability of body, time and space. The strength of what lingers beyond any restoration of order is deeply disturbing, but attests to the tenuousness of all boundaries and natural laws” (Wisker 23).
25In emphasising the instability and deceptiveness of all that seems reliable and safe, the everyday world, other familiar humans, oneself, and particularly the domestic sphere, du Maurier’s work resembles that of contemporary women writers of horror. She is in good company among women writers who disrupt and pull the plug on the often delusional and always cramped, contained everyday, particularly as it affects women. Short stories by Katherine Mansfield, American author Shirley Jackson and Canadian author Alice Munro similarly scrutinise any beliefs about harmonious coupledom, the security of relationships, betrothals, marriages, the dependability of family members, the trustworthiness of everyday relationships, and domestic securities, revealing investment in these to be whimsical, short-sighted, and dangerous. If they were straightforward crime authors there would be an expectation of invasion and physical violence, of murder and then detection. Rather, they show the insidious and interminable damage couples do to each other, children to parents, parents to children. People do become ill and even die as a consequence, but without a murder, detection, or capture. There is no restitution and peace, just the sense in the end of destabilisation and dissolution.
26“Panic” unites both romantic and crime narratives, and also undermines them. An initially exciting illicit affair is exposed as selfish and seedy; the hotel for quick relationships is situated down a back street, and when the young woman, listless, worried, suddenly dies in the night, the lover’s intentions are entirely for self-preservation. His only regret, and a terrible one, is that he has fled the scene leaving behind proof of identity—a wallet. Restitution and punishment are left beyond the structure of the story.
27Du Maurier’s Gothic fictions of domestic bliss and family security harbour irritation, pretence and possibly death. Her Gothic romantic fictions are built on deceit, collusion, and more death. None of this is punished. Her Gothic crime fictions are based on accident, dissimulation, and pretence. All the real crimes go unpunished.
28There is melodrama in equal measure as dullness and ironic accidental destruction in “No Motive” and “The Alibi.” In “No Motive,” the lovely young wife, beloved by her wealthy husband, preparing for her first child, suddenly commits suicide. We travel with the detective who cannot trace a single reason for this until he discovers she was removed when a teenager, pregnant with a traveller’s child, and had the illegitimate child in Cornwall. None of this needed ever be known but for the thieving, red-haired young travelling man with a “pinched face like a ferret” (42) who tried to sell her garden seats. She is faced with the sudden recognition of her lost son and fear of either being found out or bearing another potential reprobate.
29All sorts of myths, beliefs, and entrenched behaviours are queried in du Maurier’s work. In her dealings with time, space, identity, and continuity, she works between the ostensibly safe and the dangerously insecure, the brittle and easily dissolved. Nothing and no one is truly explicable or trustworthy. In tales like “A Difference in Temperament” and “The Alibi,” selfishness, self-delusion and the social freedom allowed to men alone let du Maurier’s self-absorbed narcissists slam doors, saunter out, lie, send their wives home early and believe they are special and talented enough to enjoy entitled freedoms, paltry though these are (sitting in a taxi, smoking, without having to turn to your wife).
30The key tale which dangerously empties out the comfort of the ordinary and also deals with the variable unstable insights of the (inept) artist is “The Alibi,” an ironically twisted crime tale. In that story, crossing the Embankment, a man looking at his wife and others sees “minute, dangling puppets manipulated by a string. The very steps they took were jerking, lopsided, a horrible imitation of the real thing” (1). He plans random murder—in number 8 Boulting Street, where he delusionally convinces himself he is an artist, though his wife comments later that his paintings are just “daubs”—and ends up unwittingly culpable in deaths, embracing a label of murderer to make his life meaningful.
31This is a twisted tale, a Gothic horror story that creeps up on middle-class boredom and reveals its comfort in the everyday to be unstable. The serial killer next door who always seemed such a pleasant chap might well have similar hidden urges to the protagonist, Fenton, a very ordinary man in an ordinary London home with an ordinary office job who tries to construct for himself an unknown extraordinary life on the side. Fenton’s desire to be interesting, and to forge his own way, is an ill-conceived compulsion which could be comic in terms of his delusions of grandeur and talent, and of the ultimate mess he makes of everything, were it not also fatally damaging to the powerless others whose stories become entangled in his. He and his wife are first seen taking an afternoon stroll. He decides for her that she is too tired to continue and rapidly pops her in a taxi and heads off on his own personal mission. Although he might seem to be a very ordinary man, and he and his wife have the same couple round for drinks every other week and go to them every other week and live in a typical middle-class tidy home in London, he clearly feels trapped in this dull normality, in “his life-imprisonment, beginning daily with the drawing-back of the curtains and early morning tea” (3).
32Fenton would like to be exciting enough to live a double life. He harbours some kind of secret story of his own unusualness, his own greatness, which causes him to sideline and hardly even consider any of his wife’s feelings or the feelings of anybody else. His particular internal narrative at this point is to find a run-down, therefore (in his view) unimportant and unnoticed, part of London—not too seedy in fact, and indistinguishable from any other ordinary poor part of London—and swiftly enter the random lives of random others and murder them. He picks number 8 Boulting Street, an out-of-the-way spot in an area of London where he feels that the people will not be noticed once they are dispatched, constructing his sense of his own importance, power and agency within his own little plot, with himself as the lead protagonist, clever in both the current planning and the future cover-up. He believes his acts would be untraceable. He is not actually sure what he is going to do, but he is driven by the desire to dispatch whoever lives there, as if this would give his life some kind of meaning outside of his ordinary office job. Murder seems his intent, and his perception of the young Central European woman who opens the door to him is clearly as Other, a xenophobic and sexist interpretation. Escape from the routine is power, and “the feeling of power within,” demanding “a longer term of freedom” (5), makes those in his plan nothing more than dispensable objects, puppets.
33A poor artist in every way, Fenton designs a plot that is actually plotless: “‘according to what I will, what I decide, their whole future will be decided. Faces smashed in. Sudden murder. Theft. Fire.’ It was as simple as that” (4). His random decisions to change lives are all violent, blandly, delusionally monomaniac. He imagines the end result without putting much work into the detail, aiming like a stage villain “[t]o murder you and the child, my dear, and dig up the floor, and bury you under the boards” (6). He sees Madame Kaufman, as he calls the young woman, and her son, Johnnie, as dispensable, their loss unnoticeable. She is “a foreigner too. There were too many of them in the country” (7). This is a tale partly about delusional control, that of writers, artists, murderers, those who believe themselves to have power over others’ lives. The artist is in control over others, and in his mind, Fenton is some kind of an artist in crime. He decides on a clean death and sees himself as godlike: “But there was to be no question of butchery. No blood. No mess. The answer would be to stifle them both in sleep, the woman and her child. It was much the kindest way” (11). Locked in his own importance, he believes it was “an amazing thing. It was an act of God that he had suddenly arrived. He stared at her, shocked” (11), causing him to say, “‘I’ll do my part to put an end to your troubles, I assure you’” (12).
34Renting a room with the young Austrian mother, Madame Kaufman, is a plan which is meant to last a very short amount of time. Like all plans or plots gone wrong, however, its instigator has to explain why he wants to rent the room at the back of Madame Kaufman’s kitchen. It is perfectly clear to Fenton that he plans to move in very quickly and murder her and her small son, who is as locked into their impoverished lives as she is. The son Johnnie is always tied to the railings, the woman is always stuck in the kitchen, only he is free to come and go as he pleases, but in order to have that freedom he has to construct what he feels, and she seems to accept, as a credible story of his reasons for being there. She assumes he is an artist and so he adopts that role, but to follow that through he has to get paints. She points out shops in the area which sell paints, and she expects he will come with all the paraphernalia to support his performance as an aspiring artist, when he is actually a murderer-in-waiting. The clunkiness of having to carry more paints, easels, paper to actually set up this charade would be amusing if it were not so threatening underneath, since he is trying to find the right moment when he might kill the two of them. Meanwhile, his internal thoughts are of his power, and the annoying qualities of women. She becomes, just like her son, “Fenton’s creation” (23) and he feels a “tremendous sense of power to put the woman upon canvas” (23). However, she has views, of course, and
[i]f there was one thing he could not stand it was a woman who argued, a woman who was self-assertive, a woman who nagged, a woman who stood up on her rights. Because of course they were not made for that. They were intended by their Creator to be pliable, and accommodating, and gentle, and meek. The trouble was that they were so seldom like that in reality. (24)
35The selfish sense he feels of “blessed anonymity” (26) turns out to be ironic. To his mind, leaving on three weeks’ holiday and throwing away his canvasses into the river absolves him from any responsibilities: “All his troubles went with his discarded junk. All his pain” (27). Yet, it is precisely this action which ironically leads to his downfall since he ends up catching the interest of a policeman when thus disposing of his work in the river. It is possible for him to spend less and less time at work or at home, and to tell his colleagues and wife that he is busy with other important things, these being his construction of an alternative life. Ironically once more, Fenton becomes so caught up in this alternative life that he begins to believe his own charade and in how talented he is. He attempts his very first canvas and paints the child Johnnie, as suggested by his mother. He decides that his work is not particularly figurative and revels in the thought that it is avant-garde. The delusion about destroying someone else’s life through murder is strong and bizarrely juxtaposed to his delusion of becoming a first-rate artist. He cannot see that either of these could ever go wrong, and he first carries out the dual roles of artist and murderer, smirking in his own head, removing himself increasingly from normality by staying away and even arriving late to the regular fortnightly, incredibly dull mundane drinks and supper with the Alhusons from down the road. He then becomes totally absorbed in his painting, creating (rather poor) art from life.
36Plots often do not go according to plan, and if Fenton could be compared to an artist-writer himself, constructing a version of life and peopling it and plotting it, his plot of the clever murderer—and now the talented artist—goes horribly wrong. Returning to leave rather more money than he needs to, he finds that Madame Kaufman is locked in the bedroom, the house is heated, she will not come out. He then goes to his studio to tidy it up some more, before returning to the kitchen where she finally meets him. When he tells her that he will be leaving for his three-week holiday, she perceives that he probably will not return, which would not only take away companionship for her, but also her only income. She looks ghastly and he sees her as having an “animal’s eyes in pain. He felt disturbed. It was rather dreadful, going off and leaving her like this” (32). She gives him a bundle to throw away which he takes with him.
37The exchange of money and bundle, then getting rid of that bundle, is what links Fenton into someone else’s plot, the kind which the criminal justice system would recognise as a murder plot. Ironically, this is what he had in mind in the first place, a plot to murder a mother and her child. He throws away his painting things and reconsiders disposing of the bundle in the same manner as he is watched by a policeman. Finally, he throws it away in a bin at the Chelsea hospital—ironically, also a foundling hospital.
38In the middle of a mundane dinner party at the Fentons’, the police knock at the door, so Fenton’s parallel life, absurd though it is, enters his ordinary life to the shock and horror of his wife and their friends. He is accused of throwing something dubious into a bin, which he agrees to. This “something” is in fact the body of Madame Kaufman’s new-born baby. And then, much worse still, the bodies of the young woman and little Johnnie are found gassed in the basement flat. Initially, Fenton is staggered with the ridiculous situation in which, having set out to murder them, they end up dead—but he has had no hand in it. At the same time as the discovery of the bodies, there is the revelation of his as-yet undiscovered artistry, which he feels is so wonderful that they would appreciate it. He is rather upstaged by the dead mother and child and simultaneously unaware of the way in which he naturally would seem incriminated in such a context. Pleased with himself, in the midst of real horror and oblivious to it, he turns the pictures round, and his wife with disgust defines his work as just “daubs” (42). In his view, his wife “did not know she had a genius for a husband” (34), but hers is not a gasp of admiration, rather a “frozen stare of misunderstanding. Then her face seemed to crumple, and she turned to the Alhusons” (42). He is a failed murderer and a failed artist. Seizing the moment, he embraces the label and says he killed them both: “‘All right, I’ll confess everything. I was her lover, of course, and the child was mine. I turned on the gas this evening before I left the house. I killed them all. I was going to kill my wife too when we got to Scotland. I want to confess that I did it… I did it… I did it…’” (43). Ironically, a non-entity in a world of delusion, believing himself a murderer and an artist, he is now labelled, placed, normalised within the justice system.
39Dangerous, self-deceptive storytelling meets predatory relationships in many of Daphne du Maurier’s short stories. “The Blue Lenses” emphasises physically and psychologically flawed sight, which is suddenly pierced through with an insufferable honesty and cruel reality which the protagonist prefers to ignore or cannot bear to acknowledge. “The Alibi” focuses on another deliberate self-deceiver, who misleads his wife, their “friends” and the young woman from whom he rents a room, and finally decides to embrace the lies he alone has been fabricating—his final self-deception leading to an investment in a false story with him as the lead figure: a murderer.
40Self-deception and predatory relationships dominate in both these stories, as they do in most of du Maurier’s brilliantly observed and imagined works. Her women’s Gothic scrutiny of the dull and dangerous ordinary undercuts all investment in romance, adventure, companionship, and domesticity. Many of her characters are mundanely wadded round with complacency and dullness, risk-averse, lacking in insight or just vulnerable. They are victims of the selfishness, cruelty and deviousness of close relatives, friends, and lovers who for the most part harbour their own misplaced sense of importance and grandeur. Her protagonists are frequently collusive with their own downfall, buying into their own tales of intelligence, control, talent, romance, innocence, domestic bliss, harmonious safety. Some are either blessed or cursed with dangerous insight, inflected with Gothic images, cutting through pretences, or inappropriately filled with their own godlike roles as creators, manipulators and entitled destroyers of the lives of others.
41In “The Blue Lenses,” Marda West could see people as they really were. Those whom she had loved and trusted most were the most dangerous: “her nurse had turned into a snake, her husband into a vulture” (71). Du Maurier’s work therefore disturbs and shakes our worlds because like one waking from an operation, blinking in the new daylight, we also see too clearly. As a woman Gothic writer in the liminal space before second-wave feminism, du Maurier questions and challenges normativity, domesticity, gendered roles, and the safety offered by narratives of the normal—the kind of narratives which are seen in both romantic fictions and crime fictions where establishing, restoring, securing order are at the heart as they are of domestic fictions of family life.
42Du Maurier’s Gothic work refuses such normalising and reassurance. Romance turns into a precarious boredom, disaster, or loss, while punishment seems unattachable to real crime. Ultimately, as the narrative trajectories of popular and everyday human fictions fall apart, there is no ontological security and no order. It is all but a human construct, stories we tell ourselves.
