- 1 For a more detailed discussion of du Maurier’s development of, and engagement with, the horror genr (...)
1In 1952, the publication of Daphne du Maurier’s first collection of short stories, The Apple Tree: A Short Novel and Several Long Stories, was met with a degree of surprise by critics and fans alike. Nancy Spain, from The Daily Express, remarked on the brutality of the collection as a whole, asserting that “anyone writing such stories was surely sick” (qtd. in Forster 260). According to Margaret Forster the stories represented “a change not only in Daphne’s style but in her subject matter,” providing a space where “her ‘macabre tastes’ at last were acknowledged and given an outlet, reflecting the confusion of her inner self” (260). Certainly, the short-story form appears to have given du Maurier space to examine particular themes in more intimate, and more intensely brutal, detail. Her perennial interests in cultural boundaries of identity and “otherness”—discussed by Alison Light (185) and Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik (37), among others—are depicted on a different scale. Without the dramatic arc of the novel form, these themes inhabit smaller spaces. The tension becomes located in the bodies of the characters themselves and understanding the “other” becomes a visceral act; bodies are dismembered within narratives to be reconstructed into a wholeness of meaning which corresponds to each character’s own field of cultural reference. Thus, the horror of du Maurier’s short fiction derives not only from her treatment of the bodies themselves but from the violatory act of (mis)interpretation.1 Mutants are created by observers who dissect and reassemble bodies in the likeness of their imagined “other”; masks are exposed as a conceit, a presumed artifice distinguishing the exterior from some “interior self” which remains ultimately elusive.
2This article discusses three stories which exemplify the confusion of du Maurier’s “inner self,” referred to by Forster, and offer scope for discussion of the peculiar iconography of the body in British post-war society. Firstly, two stories taken from her 1952 collection will be discussed: “Kiss Me Again, Stranger” and “The Little Photographer.” In a collection laced with bodily horror and viscerality, these two stories are of interest because of their portrayal of post-war displacement and an interaction between individuals which is based on the reading of the other through physical “norms.” The third story analyzed here presents a more abstract and psychological examination of bodily symbolism. “The Blue Lenses,” from The Breaking Point (1959), provides an interesting counterpoint to the earlier stories. Emerging at the latter end of the decade, it is still explicit in its engagement of “reading the other”; however the relationship between cultural narratives and psychology is more prominent. This article will consider whether du Maurier’s increasingly psychological approach to the symbolism of the body and ideas of behavioural norms in the late 1950s is personal to her or part of a wider mid-century shift in Western culture as a whole.
- 2 Mass-Observation was a social research project which began in 1937 and continued into the 1950s. T (...)
3The body’s relationship to social and personal identity had, by 1952, become a popular topic for discussion. In her study of social research in the mid-century, Sarah Igo writes that the publication of the Kinsey Reports “would come to bear profoundly on how Americans understood their society and themselves” (5). Likewise, as Adrian Bingham notes in “The ‘K-Bomb,’” the British populace was similarly aroused by the statistical approach to behavioural (particularly sexual) studies. Kinsey’s books, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), inspired similar research in Britain, notably the “Little Kinsey” survey undertaken by Mass-Observation and serialised in The Sunday Pictorial in 1949 (Bingham 156-58).2 The popular appeal of these projects, and the populist notions of “normal” bodies and behaviour they promulgated, could be interpreted as a response to the uncertainty of the post-war decade. According to Julia Jordan, the 1950s was a period when “uncertainty was made concrete.” Memories of the bombing of towns and cities during the Second World War, combined with the threat of nuclear warfare, created a sense of instability, a general feeling that “anything could happen” (266). Notions of statistical “normality,” both biological and behavioural, provided an impression of universal order which responded to the zeitgeist of the period and led to an increased usage of the term “normal” and, significantly, to a strengthening of its moral and social connotations within popular culture from the early 1950s onwards (Cryle and Stephens 313-14).
- 3 Created in approximately 1945 by the American sexologist Robert L. Dickinson and the artist Abram B (...)
- 4 Daphne du Maurier’s interest in psychology, particularly Jung, and the social sciences is evidenced (...)
4The “normal body” had been envisaged previously, most notably in the Dickinson-Belskie statues from the late 1940s,3 but the public response to Kinsey’s work and the subsequent trends in social research promoted the body as a space where the “normal,” in both biological and behavioural terms, could be measured and analysed. The idea that bodies could be “normalised” and thus understood, or that individual behaviour and collective culture could be located and described in biological terms, would certainly have appealed to du Maurier’s growing interest in anthropology and psychology at this time.4 The body as a space for the intersection of behaviour and biology, of cultural influence and individualism, becomes for du Maurier a locus for imposed cultural narratives and performance, harbouring the potential for symbols to be manipulated, or misread. Her bodies echo wider social anxieties of the decade; they are inscribed by memories of conflict, crumbling class barriers and the threat of nuclear war.
5This popularisation of statistical “norms” came alongside an explosion of mass media and thus increased exposure to new cultural frameworks within Britain. As Tracy Hargreaves and Alice Ferrebe assert, Britain in the 1950s was undergoing “irrepressible national and cultural change . . . persistently imagined and re-presented” (8). The bodies in du Maurier’s work highlight this plurality of cultures, and therefore associated interpretations, which came with the proliferation of new media and the levelling of social class in Britain. Her stories are populated with individuals who persistently re-imagine themselves and others, who misread and misrepresent within mutable cultural boundaries.
- 5 Anna Creadick writes about how notions of normality which both assumed and upheld structures of hom (...)
6In both “The Little Photographer” and “Kiss Me Again, Stranger,” the protagonists construct relationships founded upon misinterpretation and misrepresentation. Both deal with the tacit contract of trust constructed between a man and a woman. Critically, they examine, with forensic detail, the bodily signifiers which formulate a sense of knowledge and understanding of the other and point explicitly to the fallibility, indeed futility, of such signifiers, fraught as they are with the potential for manipulation both by the embodied and by the interpreting subject. Both stories portray women. Both portray killers. That the killers are female is unsurprising in du Maurier. However, they speak to specific aspects of cultural intelligibility within the post-war period, informed by notions of gender and the dynamics of power inherent in the newly popular idea of a medicalised “normal” body.5
- 6 See Gill Plain for a more detailed critique on the cultural anxiety, fueled by wartime propaganda, (...)
7“Kiss Me Again, Stranger” portrays a male narrator’s brief encounter with a young usherette who is later revealed to be a serial murderer, prowling London looking for RAF men to disembowel. The brevity of their time together is significant. The story is an exposition of the narrator’s changing interpretation of the girl, informed not simply by her body but by the presumed context with which he surrounds it. The story speaks to specific themes of the post-war period. The rise of youth cultures in post-war Britain was welcomed, as Nick Bentley states, with a “mixture of celebration, suspicion and moral panic” (177). The imagined immorality of a generation brought up in conflict was articulated in images of dangerous, young criminals—like Margery Allingham’s Jack Havoc in The Tiger in the Smoke (also published in 1952) or the 1950 film The Blue Lamp directed by Basil Dearden—who represented a living and sinister legacy of war. Still, while the criminals in these stories are male, du Maurier’s killer is female. Her femininity is perpetually physicalised by the male narrator and provides the pivotal conflict of the story, namely that while she lives in a post-war world where murderers and violence exist, these things are not expected, by the narrator at least, to be enacted by women. Thus the story turns out to be less about the violence of her crimes and more about cultural expectations of femininity.6
- 7 Allingham uses Jack Havoc’s own voice to confirm, and bring nuance to, the murderous portrait laid (...)
8The protagonists, the mechanic as narrator and the young usherette, are emblematic of the types of youth both celebrated and feared. The mechanic is the optimistic post-war young male. The usherette is from an underworld of displaced and desensitised individuals. His optimism is born of the war, as is her cynicism. His skills, learned in the Army with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers during the war, have shaped his life choices; her experience of the Blitz has shaped hers. They are, from the beginning, products of a specific moment and society. Unlike The Tiger in the Smoke, the story never actually presents the reader with acts of violence. And unlike Allingham’s killer, Jack Havoc, the girl’s voice is rarely given space within the narrative.7 The reasons for her actions are not heard beyond a brief allusion to the RAF having destroyed her home in the war. She is framed, as are her crimes, by the narratives created by others. The tension hinges upon the narrator, the young mechanic’s almost wilful misinterpretation. His understanding of the girl, known only as a brief physical presence within the text, is revealed in its process of formation via the multiple perspectives he imagines around him: whether it is the imagined smiles of the night bus conductor on seeing the young “couple” or a fantasy about how the waitresses will come to know them at the local café (“Kiss Me Again” 221). She and her crimes are subsumed by the narratives created by others—narratives informed primarily by her femaleness:
She had copper hair, page-boy style I think they call it, and blue eyes, the kind that look short-sighted but see further than you think, and go dark by night, nearly black, and her mouth was sulky-looking, as if she was fed up and it would take someone giving her the world to make her smile. (207)
- 8 Jess Berry refers to the fashions of the late 1940s and early 1950s as portraying “an image of fema (...)
9The narrator inscribes her body with an inherited, national, concept of the young, fashionable and displaced post-war female, with the emphasis, for instance, on her page-boy haircut.8 He instils within it an idea of her desires, her identity. And yet this passage is filled with uncertainty: he “thinks” it is called a page-boy haircut and her “sulky-looking mouth” implicitly points to the potential for looks to deceive. He observes the surface and understands it within a cultural framework. Du Maurier highlights the symbolism of the body here, and the types of reading at play. The narrator’s invocation of the girl leaves no space for other readings:
She turned those blue eyes in my direction, still fed-up they were, not interested, but there was something in them I’d not seen before. . . . Cat’s eyes have that gleam sometimes, when you stroke them, and they purr and curl themselves into a ball and let you do anything you want. (208)
10Here he has already begun to lose the uncertainty evident in his initial description. His imagination is informed by the assumptions he has already made. To him, her gleaming cat’s eyes connote domesticity, a need to be possessed, protected. He interprets her essentially in reference to her imagined response to the self he envisions he is or could be. He gains self-definition via her presumed vulnerability. He leaves no space for other readings of the feline imagery: connotations of selfishness, predation, and egotism, for example.
11His inability to see ambiguity extends to his interpretation of his own role. It is he, after all, who inhabits the role of the prowler. He lingers outside the cinema before following her onto the night bus. His observation of the young woman, supposedly unaware that she is being followed, is unnerving in its detail. “She had a mac on, belted, and her hands in her pockets, and she had no hat. She walked straight up the street, and she didn’t look right or left of her” (211). The story, again, echoes familiar images of post-war crime fiction, the man trailing the unsuspecting woman through London. In his pursuit, he is actively confirming the notion of her vulnerability and potential victimhood. He situates the girl in an oppositional role against which he can formulate his own sense of identity. He constructs a role for himself as protector and lover to his vulnerable cat-like girl. Unlike the reader, he seems unaware of his resemblance to the criminal predator. His narrow construction of the girl and his inscription of her body strengthen his own narrow, yet culturally informed, sense of masculinity.
12Her body, as subject and locus of his interpretations, thus defines not only itself but the surrounding world as the narrator consistently overlays their interactions with the imagined perceptions of others. The reader is therefore presented with simultaneous interpretations of the girl and the people who see her, or them, as in “anyone could tell that we were together, the girl and I . . . . For all they knew we might have been a married couple on our way home” (217). The “courting couple” (212) he imagines they resemble reflects back upon those who would observe them in such terms; and in establishing her as “my girl” (214), he shapes the world around them to accommodate his fantasy. He thus constructs the very social context which informs his understanding of the girl.
13The role of the physical is therefore heightened within the text. Moments of physical contact between the narrator and the usherette are infrequent (“She held my ear a moment before she pulled it, like as though she were just feeling the skin and liked it, and then she just gave it a lazy tug” [213]), but their interactions are critical in maintaining a perpetual sense of unease. This allows the reader a small glimpse beyond the narrator’s complacency. The narrator, for instance, while contemplating her similarity to a purring cat, fails to register her own assessment of her body. “‘I’m paid to look like this and lure you inside,’” (208) she says, an open acknowledgment of artifice and deception. Nor does he query her reference to the movie—“‘the knifing’s amateur’” (208). Her words are less important to him than her physical aspect as he looks for a material surface upon which he can find the reflection of his own ideals.
14In “The Little Photographer,” du Maurier also exposes the role of the imagined other in defining oneself. While not written in first person, the narrative is told via the single perspective of the Marquise, a frustrated and attractive woman who is holidaying with her children away from her husband in the South of France. She becomes acquainted with a shopkeeper while wandering the empty streets of the town during the midday heat. The man is meek, working class and handsome, and he has a clubfoot. He reveals that he is a photographer, and she invites him to visit her at her hotel to take photos of her family. Her boredom is assuaged by his obvious attraction towards her, and they embark upon a series of sexual encounters on the cliffs near the resort. Throughout, the photographer is regarded as a plaything by the Marquise, something to while away the time and to counter her own shame at her conventionality in never having taken a lover before. The Marquise, however, does not foresee the photographer’s desire to continue the relationship beyond her stay in the area, and when he admits his plans, she reacts violently with fatal consequences.
15The disability of the photographer as well as his “littleness” deserve attention here. Du Maurier had already presented a story centred upon a protagonist with a disability, both in The King’s General (1946) and in “The Birds,” a story from the same collection as “The Little Photographer.” Honor Harris and Nat Hocken, the two protagonists in those stories, challenge the contemporary and culturally predominant association of disability with weakness or incompleteness, and it can be argued that the photographer’s disability is designed to throw the unconscious bias of the Marquise’s gaze into relief. Indeed, seeing that Lennard J. Davis refers to “normalcy” as being “a location of bio-power as Foucault would use the term” (128), the Marquise, as an individual who identifies as medically “normal,” is thus bolstered by “a network of traditionalist ableist assumptions and social supports” (Davis 128) which lend a superficial, and it turns out dangerous, authority to her gaze. She feels entitled to subjugate and du Maurier makes the reader aware of this.
16The subjectivity of the body—hence an inherent need to be subjected to the senses of another, specifically to a cultural gaze—is fundamental to the forensic nature of the narrative. People and things within the text are dismembered, reduced to their constituent parts: hands, voices, feet, and eyebrows populate the text. Persons within the text are portrayed as mosaic forms, and each element of their physicality is given the potential for a meaning and cultural coding of its own via the elevation of specifically chosen bodily parts from their wider bodily and social context. For example, the photographer’s “sculptured mouth” (“Photographer” 169) arguably brings with it connotations of Greco-Roman classical beauty, whereas the focus on his “misshapen foot” (173) draws upon traditional Gothic tropes. By dissecting the body into differing yet familiar stereotypes which sit alongside one another in one body, du Maurier challenges the readers’ own assumptions of beauty and “normality” and, in so doing, reveals how the process of reading the body is simultaneously culturally inscribed and inherently subjective. This plurality of meaning devalues any one interpretation and thus foreshadows the misunderstanding between the photographer and the Marquise later in the story.
17This story engages explicitly with the idea of performance and the representation of the body. This can be seen in an intimate scene of the Marquise painting her fingernails. While the minutiae of the body are to be a feature throughout the story—with throats, lips or torsos listed and assessed in intimate detail—in this opening passage it is the art of accentuation and disguise which is foregrounded:
She had dabbed a touch of colour on to three separate fingernails, and now she held her hand in front of her to see the effect. No, the varnish on the thumb was too red, too vivid, giving a heated look to her slim olive hand, almost as if a spot of blood had fallen there from a fresh-cut wound. (160)
18The beauty of the Marquise is inextricable from its construction. Throughout, the narrative points to the performance of beauty—her “first tell-tale lines smoothed from her face” in a salon in Paris (187); the tableau she makes “ready set for him [the photographer] to gaze upon” (173). Her beauty is depicted as necessitating a continual process of construction, of augmentation and renewal, validated only by its effect upon others. From her hotel room, she leans from the balcony to be seen by the guests below, to feel the “first wave of admiration that would come again in full measure when she descended” (166) only to return upstairs after lunching where she “once again touched her face with powder, circled her mouth, dipped her fore-finger in scent” (168). If, as Elaine Scarry asserts in her 1999 discussion of the historical significance of beauty in Western culture, “the beautiful person or thing incites in us the longing for truth” (31), then the Marquise reveals its vacuity. In this story, beauty is transactional and worthless when the protagonist is alone with only her “naked body and the sad sulky mouth” (“Photographer” 163-64).
19Just as the narrator of “Kiss Me Again, Stranger” is defined by the imagined vulnerability of the girl, so the Marquise establishes her imagined opposing force. However, the disabled photographer, through the detailing of his features, confuses her interpretation of him as a subject inscribed with opposing cultural symbols—simultaneously divine, or supernormal, and base, or subnormal. Indeed, she encounters him as two selves. Firstly, she perceives his face at a window—with “the eyes of a gazelle,” “so gentle, that it might have come straight from a stained-glass saint in a cathedral” (169). He then invites her to shelter from the heat of the day in the back room of his shop, where she observes his bare arms, his throat, his open vest. This body is raw, masculine, and pure. Then, when she moves into the shop, she sees a man transformed into an ordinary shopkeeper in “a grey cheap coat worn by any man serving in a shop” (172). It is only this last self that she observes as disabled. Yet due to the blurring of these two selves, his clubfoot does not provoke aversion but “a fascination, strange, unknown” (172).
20The Marquise creates a body at once divine and abject, in its opposition to her beauty. His disability is, in her reading of his body, a part of the self which is shaped by his social status. It is a physicalisation of what she perceives as the natural imbalance between them. This perception however is an example of her consistent conflation of the cultural with the natural, something which is germane to her actions within the story. The photographer’s cultural status, as working class, is thus merged with his physiological form while his disability is interpreted in terms derived from popular notions of bodily “normalcy”: his body is a site where the “normal”—and the exclusions thus inherent, both in statistical and behavioural terms—can be measured and interpreted. This conflation of his body and its social context enables what Peter Stallybrass and Allon White term the “consolidation of grotesque otherness [which causes] the establishment of the oppositional identity of the conventional, and by definition ‘respectable’” (193). What is significant in the body of the photographer, however, is the duality perceived by the observing subject. He is abject in terms of his class and physical non-conformity. Yet, through his association with the divine and natural world, he connotes something beyond her own mortal and affected standards of beauty and convention. It is perhaps this combination, placed in opposition to the Marquise, which provokes her ensuing behaviour. The photographer reaffirms and validates her beauty through his imperfections while, by identifying him as abject, the Marquise is elevated in her own estimation in terms of exceptionality and superiority. Nevertheless, his divinity facilitates another form of opposing self-identification for the Marquise, one which is animalistic and sensual, beyond societal conventions. This cleaving of identity—or Spaltung, in Freudian terms—is, according to Davis, a primitive act undertaken by most cultures, derived from early childhood cognitive development:
The young infant splits the good parent from the bad parent—although the parent is the same entity. . . . The residue of this Spaltung remains in our inner life, personal and collective, to produce monsters and evil stepmothers as well as noble princes and fairy godmothers. In the same primitive vein, culture tends to split bodies into good and bad parts. (129)
21The photographer and the Marquise both assume that they inhabit oppositional positions to one another, and in so doing provide the much-needed self-definition which, at the opening to the story, the Marquise, at least, is lacking. However, if the creation of identity depends on an oppositional other—a transgressive or abject state of being—it necessitates the imagining of this “otherness” (Stallybrass and White 193, Butler 100). Knowledge of “the other” would negate and erase its otherness after all. Thus, the imaginary idea of the other is fundamental to self-definition. For the Marquise, the photographer, as a lower-class disabled male, is an “identity-in-difference” (Stallybrass and White 193), and their relationship is only sustainable as long as they do not quite know each other and the Marquise is able to maintain the split identity she has imagined for him. When he reveals his intentions towards her—to take a serving position in her home in order to continue their affair—the transaction of mutual definition is destroyed. All pretence and performance is cast off. Each party destroys the illusion upon which the other has based their assumptions. To the Marquise he becomes pathetic, ridiculous, and their place of rendezvous “sordid, shameful”; to the photographer she becomes false, “bad” even (“Photographer” 192). This mutual enlightenment compels their bodies to become autonomous from the characters’ narratives which have contained them. Physicality takes over—her violent movements, his shoulders heaving. It is at this point that the Marquise’s body, now devoid of any cultural intelligibility due to the threatened destruction of the boundaries she thought incorruptible, becomes an active force. No longer subjected, the body takes control:
the terrible impulse was born in her, and flooded her whole being, and would not be denied. Leaning forward, her hands outstretched, she pushed his stooping body. He did not utter a single cry. He fell, and was gone. (193)
22In both these stories bodies (and the reading of them) are bound by cultural dictates. Their meaning is, therefore, due to the multiple cultures at play, inherently unstable. Each character assumes the fixedness and universality of their own cultural symbolism. The Marquise trusts that the photographer will remain as “other”—as a liminal and fleeting testament to her beauty, to her existence. She misreads his disability as vulnerability and assumes he accepts his role as the abject. She does not anticipate his desire to follow her back from the seaside resort—interestingly a landscape included in those named by Stallybrass and White as belonging to “the outer limit of civil life” (191)—and enter into the structure of her daily life in Paris and at the Marquis’s chateau.
23The photographer transgresses the boundaries she believes are tacitly agreed upon, while the mechanic in “Kiss Me Again, Stranger” trusts, not the girl herself, but the narratives constructed around her. In both cases, the ambiguity of the body as means of expression and basis for interpretation is fully exposed. In “The Little Photographer,” as the parameters of their relationship shift, the Marquise’s perception of her lover’s body—specifically his disability, once a “fascination”—is immediately and violently transformed into the affliction of a limping “creature,” “always waiting, always hoping” (“Photographer” 172, 191). Meanwhile, the mechanic in “Kiss Me Again, Stranger” is only disabused of his imagined narrative surrounding the girl when he holds another narrative in his hand—the evening paper which names her as the serial killer prowling London at night:
They’d got her. About three o’clock in the afternoon. I didn’t read the writing, nor the name nor anything. I sat down on my bed, and took up the paper, and there was my girl staring up at me from the front page. (“Kiss Me Again” 231)
24The girl remains a face framed by the words of others, her name still unspoken. The mechanic’s refusal or inability to read those words demonstrates his resistance to any alternative readings of his girl. Thus, despite her acts of violence, ripping RAF men “right up the guts” (230), she remains a character actively diminished by his narrative. A diminutive physical space housing the stories of others.
- 9 Hargreaves and Ferrebe point to the cultural picture of post-war Britain as being characterised by (...)
- 10 In her letters to Victor Gollancz (held in the archive at the University of Warwick), du Maurier re (...)
25If Daphne du Maurier’s 1952 collection is visceral in character, then The Breaking Point (1959) is a collection characterised, as Sally Beauman puts it, by “psychological stress” (ix). In these stories, reality is more obviously a psychological construct. The collection was, by du Maurier’s own acknowledgement, written after a brush with severe nervous collapse, which may account in part for the instability inherent in all markers of reality within it. However, the symbolic nature of the physical, and the cultural nature of these symbols, can also be considered within the context of wider societal change in Britain which occurred across the decade—namely decolonialisation, increased immigration, and post-war rehabilitation, all of which contributed to a broader sense of global cultures, and particularly Britain’s place within them.9 Du Maurier’s own interests in anthropology justify a reading of this collection as an exploration of the plurality of cultural meaning and, with it, the removal of certainties and an implicit acknowledgment that the world can be read in different ways.10 Indeed, du Maurier plays with these ways of reading, the psychology of meaning, throughout this collection.
- 11 Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik comment on how du Maurier is obviously influenced by Jung in the late (...)
26By 1959, the body in du Maurier’s stories becomes a place where psychological, rather than just behavioural, traits hold potential for embodiment.11 Aspects of the subconscious—Jungian archetypes and animalistic spirits—which du Maurier is known to have shown interest in across the mid- to late 1950s, are juxtaposed with, and manifested within, the biological. “The Blue Lenses” provides a perfect example of the way in which the conflation of the physical and the behavioural becomes a conflict between the material and the psychological. In this story, the role of the gaze, collective and personal, in promulgating shared notions of normality, is made explicit.
27The interaction between the body and the observer is particularly significant in “The Blue Lenses,” dealing as it does with a woman who has only recently recovered her sight. The woman’s vision, reborn, has none of the certainty evident in that of the mechanic or the Marquise. Her gaze is tentative, unsure of its parameters. The woman is conscious of the fallibility of her visual interpretations as both the Marquise and the mechanic are not. Where the mechanic trusts only his eyes, the patient trusts everything but her vision. The premise of the story is fairly simple. On regaining her sight following surgery, a woman finds she sees everyone with the heads of animals—animals which seem to correspond with some hidden aspect of their characters: the husband’s predatory nature is suggested by a vulture’s beak, the duplicity of the nurse by a snake’s tongue.
28The third-person narrative shifts the site of ambiguity. This is not the untrustworthy narrative of the mechanic since, in this case, ambiguity is observed, located in the woman’s sight. The initial blindness of the woman enables du Maurier to extend the fragmentation, applied previously to the body as subject, to the process of bodily interpretation. By stripping the protagonist of the familiarity of sight, the process of learning how to read the material world in visible terms is presented in stages, and thus made absurd. Du Maurier brings the gaze itself under the same forensic scrutiny which is applied to the bodies:
The door opened, the familiar umbrella and bowler hat the first objects to appear round the corner, then the comforting burly figure, but—God… no… please God, not Jim too, not Jim, forced into a mask, forced into an organization of devils, of liars… Jim had a vulture’s head. She could not mistake it. The brooding eye, the blood-tipped beak, the flabby folds of flesh. (“The Blue Lenses” 68)
29Here, as the woman observes her husband enter the room for the first time since her operation, the reader witnesses the stages of his bodily revelation. Her observation is fragmented just as his body is, revealing the impact of each corporal element upon her understanding. His accessories, ciphers of status and social convention, are familiar to her, and his size is “comforting,” but the viscerality of his fleshy vulture’s face is disgusting to her. Its bloodiness contaminates the familiar standards of identity she expects.
30Temporarily blind, the individuals around her faceless, the woman grows uneasy. She imagines “the first encounter . . . or perhaps some unexpected facial form” (49) and yet she accepts, and relies upon, her reading of other aspects of their physicality because the “darkness, perhaps, had made her more sensitive” (45). Du Maurier plays upon the well-worn cliché of the enhanced perceptive powers of the blind and uses it to interrogate the cultural markers embedded, both consciously and unconsciously, in the performance and styling of the body:
Such a calm, comfortable voice, and the way she shifted the pillows and held the glass to the patient’s lips, the hand smelling faintly of Morny French Fern soap with which she washed her, these things gave confidence and implied that she could not lie. (45)
- 12 Victoria Sherrow describes how advertising campaigns used by cosmetic manufacturers, from the early (...)
31The smell of “Morny French fern soap” here serves just as the girl’s “page-boy haircut” does for the mechanic—providing a familiar, cultural context in which to assess the other. It enables the woman to establish a form of connection with the nurse. She assumes she inhabits the same cultural framework as herself and assesses her accordingly. The sweet-smelling woman, a trope itself of 1950s advertising, must, in the patient’s mind, have goodness, morality and dependability.12 In her state of blindness, she reads the world only through these ciphers of convention.
32It is significant that the woman’s confusion and horror comes when her sight is returned to her—as opposed to the mechanic and the Marquise, who are blinded by their ability to see only what they want in the bodies of their respective others. Whereas they use sight to (mistakenly) distinguish behavioural characteristics in biological traits, the woman is confident in those around her until she can see them. When they are revealed in animal-headed form she loses all ability to read them. The grotesqueness of their appearance does not comply with her understanding of the community to which she belongs. Thus to re-establish order she imposes her own narrative, one of conspiracy. As each new face is revealed to her, from her husband to the nurses and the doctors, down to the men and women in the street below her window, she desperately seeks for an explanation for this unfamiliar world: “The mask must be worn on purpose. Perhaps it was some kind of experiment connected with the fitting of the lenses—though how it was supposed to work she could not imagine” (52).
33If not a test of her new lenses the story does test the cultural gaze. Vision, and by extension all senses to which the material world is subjected, communicates nothing without a framework of meaning. In “The Blue Lenses,” the very codings which work to deceive and undermine in the previous stories have been removed. The woman is allowed to see bodies which (potentially) correspond to behaviour and psychology in the forms of their animal appendages, yet this lies so far outside her frame of reference, so beyond the conventions in which she is literate, that she is unable to locate the boundaries between individuals, bodies, and the collective. The animal-headed bodies populating the hospital corridors, the wards, and the streets outside confuse all cultural standards of both biological and behavioural norms. As the grotesque becomes all-pervasive, the opposing codes—necessary in du Maurier’s earlier stories to define the self versus the “other”—are weakened if not eradicated. Their bodies communicate nothing to her when she is robbed of the cultural tools with which to dissect and label them. Thus she looks for a new narrative of deception, one populated with “an organization of devils, of liars” (68). This allows her to develop confidence in her own role, the captive. She is able to construct the necessary and familiar binaries of self and “other.” She is forced to explain away the fantastic evidence of the bodies around her to maintain her own boundaries of selfhood.
34In the three stories discussed here, the discomfort provoked by the body and its readings is particular to its social and historical context. The stories speak to the fear of “a scarcely concealed awareness of untruth” (34) expressed by the German philosopher Theodor Adorno in his Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, a collection of essays on modern society published in 1951. Indeed, du Maurier’s bodies offer no truth, and “norms” statistical or otherwise provide nothing but a reflection of the cultural authority which articulates them. Her bodies are vacuums within the text, not objective realities. They are mosaic forms, each element of their physicality given the potential for a meaning and cultural coding of its own. Beautiful, ugly, and normative forms, all act as symbols of something informed by a particular culture and all defy their cultural interpretation, pointing to “the intrinsic instability of [their] symbolic function” (Beardsworth 231).
35Reading bodies becomes something dangerous in du Maurier’s hands; the cultural gaze to which the body is subjugated becomes something visceral and violatory. If, as Julia Kristeva claims, horror “represents . . . our most intimate and most serious apocalypses” (208), then du Maurier draws the apocalyptic into the intimate realm of the body and with it the associated violence and disintegration. Her stories from the 1950s present bodies which serve as microcosms of the social anxieties of the decade, together with a social identity that is not only destabilised by a traumatic past and an uncertain future, but also fragmented by a pluralisation of meaning and disrupted notions of behavioural and biological “normality.”
36Gina Wisker writes that du Maurier’s horror “develops a dialectic between the familiar and the transgressive” (23), thereby highlighting the instability of the boundaries of each. Cultural identity—nationality, class, gender—depends upon a collective consensus over what is termed familiar and what is not. Du Maurier exposes the construction of these binary assumptions. The ambiguity of beauty, identified by Mitchell as “insistently central” in du Maurier’s work (25), is extended to encompass all bodies in her short fiction. Bodies are endlessly dissected by their observers, their constituent parts sorted and categorised to establish meaning, metaphorically pinned, and labelled accordingly; yet they ultimately evade cohesive denotation, remaining constant only in their inconsistency. They shift in meaning according to the changing cultural frameworks which support them. They mislead and betray, not only others but themselves: the Marquise is, after all, reminded of her own bodily vulnerability at the end of “The Little Photographer” when her husband relates a story in which a baby born to an able-bodied mother inherits the disability of its father. In “The Blue Lenses,” the narrative created by the invalid, to uphold her understanding of the “normal” world, is upended when she finds herself confronted with the eyes of a doe in the mirror.
37The forensic nature of du Maurier’s bodily descriptions interrogates the value of scientific and clinical analysis, at a time when such analysis was gaining traction in sociological sciences (Cryle and Stephens 337). The fragmentation of the physical mirrors the anxiety around cultural cohesion during the period. If, as Butler asserts, the viability of the body is enshrined in the “domain of cultural intelligibility” (2), du Maurier’s stories explore the confusion of inner and outer selves, of psychology and biology, within the shifting parameters of “cultural intelligibility” in the post-war period. The 1950s’ fascination with the “normal” is, in du Maurier’s bodies, revealed to be misplaced. The body as a simultaneous locus for personal identity and cultural dictates is overwhelmed and deconstructed by conflicting authorities. Ultimately whether beautiful or non-human, the bodies within these texts reveal only the broad anxieties of the age: that “normality” is deceptive, that biology is subject to cultural interpretation and that masks conceal nothing more than themselves.
