1Literary history is littered with texts labelled as “populist,” “romantic,” or “escapist,” and most of them were written by female authors whose names await scholarly resurrection. Daphne du Maurier’s work survives despite these designations because it is disturbing, challenging, brutal, uncompromising, and difficult. Du Maurier writes unlikeable characters, and more interestingly, unlikeable women. Written long before Gone Girl (Gillian Flynn, 2014) and Killing Eve (Luke Jennings, 2014), her short stories present female psychopaths; or wives, mothers, and girlfriends who are distinctly unpleasant. They are ambitious, dishonest, spiteful, cynical, cruel, while their male counterparts are fragile egomaniacs or dim-witted ingénus. Du Maurier’s characters may be unsympathetic and in her literary dystopias the anti-romantic vehicle is steered by the anti-heroine and anti-hero towards inexorable doom—but the short fiction is gripping.
2My research began when I was discouraged from teaching du Maurier’s work on the basis of her uncanonical status and the popularity of her novels which are often labelled as “mezzo” or “middlebrow.” Intrigued, I decided this “writer of romances” needed re-examining, and I read everything she had written, including the sketches and notes for unpublished stories at the archives in Exeter. I discovered the truth of Slavoj Žižek’s observation that her stories “should be interpreted through each other, read side by side” in order to see the “precise structure” that they form. Indeed, much of her short fiction highlights issues that coalesce around a symbolic foregrounding of the human form, a conceptual paradigm which allows for a variety of approaches to her work, for an exploration of disease and disability, the grotesque, hybridity, androgyny, the uncanny, and human simulacra. Due to the scope of this article, I will be following only a few of these themes, looking specifically at disease, androgyny and gender, and human simulacra in three stories, “Monte Verità” and “The Little Photographer” (1952), and “The Alibi” (1959).
3Daphne du Maurier’s life (1907-1989) covers a great many social, political, and cultural changes, and this is reflected in her writing. She is a writer who lived through two World Wars and the spread of psychoanalysis. She witnessed the onset of the permissive society, a shift to the rejection of marriage as the only sanctioned form of relationship, and the commercialisation of romance as a marketing tool. Her earliest stories were written during the suffragist struggle for political enfranchisement and, unsurprisingly, a recurring central theme is the desire for autonomous power, freedom over the body and the self. Each time a body part is referenced within a given text, it is used symbolically to draw attention to a broader issue—common or singular.
4Here are synopses from three examples in Early Stories, du Maurier’s earliest collection (1954). In “The Closing Door” (eleven pages), a young man receives the news that he has a terminal illness, soon to be fatal. His fiancée’s joy in life strikes a discordant note to his misery and the figure of a paralysed beggar shows him what lies ahead in chilling detail. The beggar is a memento mori illustrating how his body will also degenerate into paralysis, indicating not only the crippled future of the ex-serviceman, but potentially also his country, Britain. “La Sainte-Vierge” (nine pages) focuses on Marie, a young Breton housewife who idealises her faithless fisherman husband, Jean. Whilst praying to the village icon of the Virgin and Child for Jean’s safe return from sea, she sees what she thinks is a holy vision. She does not realise that the silhouette is in fact Jean making love to another woman, the body representing illusion and betrayal in this story. “Panic” (nine pages) dramatises an illicit weekend in Paris which results in the dramatic escape of the male lover after the girl dies during their night together—except that his missing wallet shows there will be no escape after all. Ill health, infidelity, and immorality are dealt with elliptically in these early stories and the pursuit of desire ends in violence and death—themes that are played out in all the collections but most fully in the stories published in the 1950s, a period in the middle of du Maurier’s writing career.
5In her first interview with the BBC, du Maurier referred to her shorter fiction as “rather horrific short stories. I brew about [them]” (“Summer Season”). Her characters are lost, maimed, mute, bereft, diseased, haunted, and trapped. Their bodies are disabled, denied, rejected, dislocated, and destroyed. The body serves as the locus for a cultural critique of contemporary anxieties, capital punishment, fascism, patriotism, misandry, misogyny, patriarchy. Recurrent devices include the transfiguration of the human form into the animal kingdom or the disfiguration of the body into disability or hideousness.
6The aesthetics of disfigurement becomes even more prevalent in the post-World War II collections, The Apple Tree (1952) and The Breaking Point (1959). This is the most daring of du Maurier’s fiction, in which the relative brevity of the form necessarily condenses the plot until only significant details remain. Each story centralises a part or parts of the body, present or missing. They embody the component parts of a dismembered human form that echoes the desires and dreams, trials and traumas, changing values and technologies of the period in which the texts were written.
7Gretchen Henderson’s study of ugliness explores what happens when examining parts of the human form individually:
When treated singly as subjects, limbs and organs transform into literary or historical subjects with agency and identity, calling into question the notion of a person’s control over his or her own body. Control is an illusion when the constitutive parts of a body possess identities and wills. Ascribing agency to one part of the human body creates a particular relationship of the part to the whole. (91)
8Daphne du Maurier’s short stories are more violent than her novels as they deal in darker themes mapped onto intimate relationships and the domestic arena. Like her inspiration, Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), she came from the privileged classes, but her writing continually mocks the hypocrisies of the bourgeoisie and the Establishment. The immediacy and drama of her works focus attention on human experience as it is lived through the body and questions the “moral isolation of those protected by wealth” (Stapleton 945). Gender and disability are foregrounded, as are marginalised groups such as children and patients (“The Lordly Ones” and “The Blue Lenses”), and alternative sexual practices like fetishism or celibacy (“The Doll” and “Not After Midnight”), while impotence is a recurrent trope for du Maurier’s most commonly depicted protagonist, the middle-aged Englishman. “Monte Verità,” “The Alibi” and “The Little Photographer” are examined here as examples of du Maurier’s idiosyncratic use of somatic symbols.
9“Monte Verità” (The Apple Tree, 1952) concerns a trio of characters—a married couple and an aspiring, but ultimately unsuccessful, male lover—in a story characterised by the gyno-geography of “two peaks, absolutely bare and naked” (53), encircling yonic walls and a phallic tower. The eroticised landscape of the eponymous “mountain of truth” belies other du Maurier tales, such as “Frustration” and “The Rendezvous,” in which sexual desire is aroused but not consummated. The visual metonymy of the body parts indicates existing fissures within the marriage, and within a culture that insists on the binaries of male/female and either/or, denying the possibilities of a gender spectrum of orientation that includes the hybrid of both/and.
10In what can be called the most abstruse of du Maurier’s short fiction, “Monte Verità” presents an enticing glimpse into how the blending of the spiritual and the corporeal forms an interstice where gender fluidity can flourish. Anna, the central figure of the androgyne, is considered from multiple temporal perspectives, and it is her unknowable future that haunts the text. Du Maurier tantalises us with an unusual, sophisticated, and spiritual persona whose motivations remain largely hidden from the narrator. As with so many of du Maurier’s female characters, the reader has little idea of her inner life, except for a few clues as to the impulses that direct her choices. Were Anna to narrate her own story, answers to the greatest questions of human existence might be provided. As it is, Anna’s would-be lover is left baffled by her actions and his own responses, in a text that hints towards the potential for an enlightened gender utopia. However, the reader is finally left firmly earthbound like the male characters in the story, through whose subjectivity the events are experienced and from whose perspective they are related. In the best tradition of the experimental aspects of the form, “Monte Verità”—the first text in The Apple Tree collection—outlines the issue of same-sex or androgyne union, and can be read as a rejection of femininity in favour of the freedoms associated with non-gender identification. It handles a divisive topic long before contemporary culture was ready to address it, one that is still controversial now, decades after its original publication. As with much of du Maurier’s work, it is therefore ahead of its time.
11In her stories, discussion of the human form is inflected by gender, a feature of her writing that she sometimes changed in the final stages (Forster 257). “Monte Verità” illustrates Julie Wosk’s statement that “the women that men manufacture are often articulated creatures, assemblages of disparate parts” (5). Here, the female character of Anna is described in terms of her eyes, her bare arms, her feet or her smile, showing that, to her husband and his friend, she is an assemblage of parts that do not constitute a satisfying whole. Also, as so often with du Maurier’s female characters, the reader frustratingly only glimpses Anna in parts, while her words are related by male characters and her actions remain mystifying. Anna’s marriage to Victor and the male narrator’s carnal attraction to her beauty stand as du Maurier’s usual pattern of dysfunctional heterosexual relations. However, in this case, it is Anna who ventures on alone until she successfully ascends into asceticism, androgyny, and celibacy. She finds “everything” (“Monte Verità” 74) she needs, and what she needs is not a husband or a lover. She thus rejects two men to live among godlike androgynous beings, whose gender was female at birth but is now indeterminate. In that sense, the plot has parallels with that of “The Doll,” a story rediscovered in 2011, where violinist Rebecca rejects a human male in favour of a male mannequin.
12Achieving the summit of selfhood, Anna’s beauty falls away and gnosis is attained through independent individuality within a community, self-fulfilling lesbian or masturbatory exploration. Recalling the “sheer selfish joy of living alone and being dependent on no one” which du Maurier mentions in a letter to her friend and former governess Maud Waddell (letter of 2 July 1931), Anna’s marital desertion in favour of what we could refer to as the yonic delta group on the mountain indicates that the freedom to be oneself is as much a state of mind as a physical space in which to dwell. There is a yearning tone to much of this text, and du Maurier’s private correspondence echoes this, intimating freedom as a vital personal issue. A case in point is the real-life episode in 1952 when du Maurier strode across mountains and down the Rhone with her friend Clara Vyvyan, clearly relishing the freedom and lack of responsibility. As Forster puts it, quoting Vyvyan’s impression of du Maurier at the time, “Swinging along the paths she unzipped the skirt and walked in shorts, then in villages she zipped it back up—‘she was feminine… [then] on the yonder side up rolled the skirt and she strode forward like a boy’” (263). It is telling that Vyvyan genders the freedom she describes as in this period it was typically males who enjoyed the role of questing adventurer. In that sense, the character of Anna is the author’s wishful exercise in self-fulfilment, away from family and home.
13Her beauty gone, only the authentic aspects of Anna remain, but the would-be lover recoils from her leprosy. As du Maurier wryly observed, “learning the truth can give a person the appearance of disease, and leprosy can eat away the body and the mind. If you try to reach the gods you can destroy the body—leprosy” (1957 letter, qtd. in Forster 207). This is an encoded reference to her personal experience in the late 1950s as she discovered her husband’s infidelity, which was mirrored by her own extra-marital wanderings and led her marriage to become increasingly unstable. As in other texts from her short fiction, the incomplete, broken or damaged human form is therefore the page on which du Maurier’s social critique is written—a critique that encompasses emotional and intellectual as well as physical infidelity, topics that are alluded to in her personal correspondence. Du Maurier exhorts the reader to bring their understanding to a tale wherein the body is both essential to piety, accessing the esoteric and spiritual transcendence, yet also disregarded, diseased, and androgynous. Anna pursues personal fulfilment with disregard for the traditionally female duties of wife and mother, single-mindedly favouring communion with the godlike androgynes. At the end of the narrative Anna’s fate is unknown, but the possibilities include the dramatic contrast of a deathly plunge into the abyss or a divine ascension to heaven.
14In one sense, this novella and others by du Maurier write into the (Islamic) tradition of “blight literature,” a literary form in which texts have an implicit moral agenda activated through the presentation of bodies suffering disease, disability, or blemish. Kristina L. Richardson comments on how medieval texts from eastern literary canons include a prevalence of such characters which contribute to “the diffusion of these themes in religious, literary and historical discourses” (130). By doing likewise in her stories, du Maurier highlights the broken body as the locus of larger issues and topical debates. It is depicted individually and severally, encouraging both particular and general observations, or it can indicate a British psycho-geographical terrain traversed by disabled veterans, refugees, service-dodgers and Land Girls. For instance, the male characters of Buzz in “The Apple Tree” and Fenton in “The Alibi” together present a dubious picture of their war service, and it is unclear whether either of them engaged in military action of any kind. Conversely, the psychopathic usherette in “Kiss Me Again, Stranger” (1952) is a beautifully warped figure as a direct result of the Blitz, and this is clearly identified as the combined responsibility of both the Luftwaffe and the RAF. This aspect of du Maurier’s work recalls the movement within modernism in which writers and poets attempted the literary treatment of the cultural traumas caused by two World Wars using the mythic and blight traditions as a framework. This highlights her as an author whose work needs to be understood against contemporary literary movements, research which is gradually being undertaken.
15Daphne du Maurier was keenly politically aware and her move to Gollancz Publishers in 1934 confirmed her as a subtle observer and commentator on her times. Victor Gollancz was a British publisher, humanitarian activist, Christian Socialist, and supporter of left-wing causes, who predicted the Nazi extermination of the Jews and would later found the Left Book Club (1936), an important vehicle for social and political change. The unpublished correspondence between them includes detailed exchanges concerning the morality of capital punishment and how best to devise ethically appropriate consequences for murder. This leads us into a consideration of the second story, “The Alibi,” which again privileges a trio of characters, this time two women and a man. It also illustrates an authorial concern with media that replicate, disguise, and distort the human image, and pays a subtle homage to the genre of the Künstlerroman, in which a character’s artistic development to maturity is traced.
16“I can’t go on” is James Fenton’s impassioned but muffled cri du coeur at his stultifying life, the tedious riverside walk with his wife Edna being the catalyst for a series of events that lead all characters to the “breaking point,” the title of the collection. That Sunday, on their habitual stroll, Fenton looks at his wife’s made-up face and starts to hallucinate, to see her and others as marionettes, a “horrible imitation of the real thing, of what should be” (“The Alibi” 1). At this point, his “life-imprisonment” (2) seems infinite and unbearable, and the story sets out the events that will make his “the master-hand that set the puppets jiggling” (3). However, Fenton is in the grip of a play in which other characters also have agency, and by choosing to get caught up in their lives he determines his own eventual fate—a more exciting fate than even he could have imagined. Suddenly desirous of being the powerful master-hand rather than the “lifeless wood, matchstick wood” (1) comprising the manipulated puppet, Fenton walks to “lose identity” (2) and escape the dull rituals of married life. Having decided to pick a house at random and murder its occupants, he charms his way into No. 8 Boulton Street and disarms Anna Kaufman, a single mother, by posing as a painter in need of studio premises, a suggestion initially made by her and leapt upon by him as an excuse for his continued presence in her home. However, instead of murdering his new landlady, Fenton starts a double life and finds release by painting her and her son in oils.
17Representation through painting is a theme that is present from the outset, beginning with Edna’s overdone make-up, as previously mentioned, and ending with Anna’s immortalising portrait counterpoised with her lifeless body on the bed. Du Maurier also uses this story as a vehicle for dissecting a certain kind of artistic attitude and avant-garde creativity. The narrative arc shows Fenton increasingly fancying himself as a talented painter: his palette colours are described as “life in abundance” yellow or “Doge’s palace” red, and he daydreams about his wife’s proud surprise at the opening of his future gallery show. However, his lack of artistic talent is implied by Anna’s nuanced comment that her portrait has “a mouth like a fish” (29) and by Edna’s final dismissal of his paintings as “daubs, done anyhow” (42). Even his self-portrait is a failure, in part because of his inability to paint his own eyes, which he eventually leaves closed, indicating his lack of insight. Indeed, while Fenton thinks of himself as an avant-garde modernist painter, he fails to notice Anna’s pregnancy or desperation, and his surrealist painting is not an evocative representation of this pallid woman with lank hair and dark circles under her eyes, a lonely, anxious figure vulnerable to predatory males roaming London’s wasteland. As in “The Little Photographer,” where beauty is the guiding impulse of replication for Monsieur Paul, here the facsimile image of Anna is a partial and misleading clue to character and behaviour. Likewise, Fenton’s closed-eye portrait indicates a man unable or unwilling to see himself and others as they are. In that sense, “The Alibi” can be seen as a meta-critical Künstlerroman in miniature where du Maurier outlines her fraught relationship with modernist art, and there are parallels with “The Rendezvous” in which she dissects literary criticism in a blisteringly witty character assassination of protagonist Robert Scrivener.
18The damaged dwellings in the bombed-out location of Boulton Street are metaphors for the minds and bodies of the characters. The female protagonist Anna Kaufman is an itinerant refugee, isolated and crippled by suffering. Apathetic and weak, she is defenceless against Fenton’s apparent kindness and unable to protect herself, her son, or her unborn baby—all are dead by the end of the story. When Fenton suddenly “confesses” he killed Anna and her child the reader understands that this bravado masks a weak character seemingly incapable of such dynamic action. Indeed, he is a typical example of du Maurier’s middle-aged male characters, emotionally warped and compulsive liars, other notable examples including Buzz in “The Apple Tree” and Rev. James Holloway in “Angels and Archangels.” In case the reader misses the point, Fenton is repeatedly shown as a xenophobic misogynist whose need to keep women in “their place” is countered by the pathetic desperation of a man lacking his wife’s respect.
19Fenton is unable or unwilling to change his domestic situation and win Edna’s respect. Thus, the drive to control the fates of lesser mortals engenders satisfaction, providing a sense of power that is missing in his own sphere. Fenton plays God and smugly reflects that “according to what I will, what I decide, their whole future will be decided” (4). The lack of agency and inability to make decisions within his own life is balanced by his perceived ability to decide to spare others, or to make them suffer. Fenton is not violent immediately—in fact, he is never violent towards the denizens of Boulton Street—his reasoning being that “the feeling of power within him demanded a longer term of freedom” (4). Only the drama of imaginary murder can satisfy his need to prove to himself that he is powerful.
20Du Maurier specialises in the shortcomings of the middle-aged husband and Fenton is a prime example of this type, a regular feature of her shorter fiction. The framing context of puppetry and artifice is pertinent for a story in which the protagonist is an artist painting portraits. Self-deceit and exposure are staple themes for du Maurier, and this example evinces the satirical stance and dark humour for which she should be better known, together with the considerable modernist aspects of her short fiction, including fractured temporality, open-ended narratives, and a concern with the subconscious mind.
21The ending provides the inanimate bodies of Anna, Johnnie, and a foetus for a theatrical scene which links to where the text began, the introductory paragraphs where Fenton first imagines himself as a master of life and death. Initially, he sees himself as a godlike figure and aspires to be the one who controls people, the one who creates the “mask painted rapidly by a master-hand, the hand that held the puppets” (3). Latterly, it is Anna who takes the initiative by choosing to place herself and her children beyond the suffering of this world, leaving Fenton pretending to be a murderer whose motivations are potentially fascinating, instead of a rather dull pen pusher who becomes a puppet within the criminal justice system. With no control over his future or himself, our final view of him is as one of the marionettes he so despises in the opening scene where he is walking on the Embankment. To the character, however, the confession may lead to the fame—or notoriety—he fervently desires: Fenton states to Anna at the outset that since his youth he has wished “to become great. To be famous. To achieve something outstanding” (24). The question is whether he is more pathetic as a potential killer of the defenceless, or as someone who confesses to murder to make himself more interesting or, as he puts it, “outstanding.”
22Du Maurier conspicuously dislocates desire from particular and genital origin, instead portraying the lusts and impulses of male characters as literally or wilfully impotent. This compels Fenton (“The Alibi”), Buzz (“The Apple Tree”) and Victor (“Monte Verità”) to seek unorthodox and even disordered releases for their desire, including fetishisation, delusion, and murder. Sexual practice is not erased but rather suppressed and redirected into fixations that motivate the characters. One example of this is Fenton’s refusal of sexual contact with Anna even when she initiates and offers him intercourse. Unbuttoning her cardigan, she asks, “‘[a]nd now Mr Sims, . . . which would you prefer to do first? Come to bed or paint Johnnie?’” (“The Alibi” 17). He shuns her advances on the basis of his alleged impotence (the facts of the matter are never confirmed), instead maintaining the power relation that is already established and that he finds so enthralling. He considers himself to be an Übermensch despite his phallic absence and his having no sexual desire for the women in his life. His phallic energy is first transposed into homicidal inclinations, then it infuses his painting whereby it gives him “a tremendous sense of power to put the woman upon canvas . . . : the fact that the bulk of a live person, and that person a woman, could be transmuted by him upon a blank canvas” (23). The verb choices of “put” and “transmuted” are significant as he places Anna the live person into his own creation where he has in practical terms “shut her up” (23), but also effectively silenced her for good. Anna Kaufman is translated into Fenton’s painted figure and positioned where she is no longer an active subject but a static object, and thus improved, as he sees it, available for his male gaze.
23The diametric motivations of the characters create much of the dramatic humour of the text as, unbeknownst to Anna, Fenton desires consummation of violent, rather than sexual, acts, as his suspiciously swift invention of a war wound shows:
“It’s… it’s extremely kind of you Madame Kaufman,” he said. “I do appreciate your offer. It’s most generous. The fact is, unfortunately, I’ve been totally incapacitated for many years… an old war wound… I’ve had to put all that sort of thing out of my life long ago.” (18)
24When he is not enthusiastic, Anna utters the sobering comment of a woman accustomed to being used, “‘It makes no difference to me. I’m at your disposal’” (17, italics mine). The final word of this exchange iterates the throwaway condition of Anna and Johnnie Kaufman, and everything inside No. 8. In common with the character of Buzz in “The Apple Tree,” whose London job excludes him from active service, Fenton’s war service is doubtful and disguises an impotence that seems as much martial as it is sexual. Though the body is the locus of du Maurier’s explorations, it is not the location of loving behaviour between humans, something she reserves for animals (as in “The Lordly Ones”), if it is included at all.
25“Out of order” is the note on the bell but also stands as a comment on Anna and Johnny’s life: without family, community, or support, they are vulnerable to the predations of any passing male, in this case bored, wage-slave Fenton. In their lives, there is no order of any kind—whether residential, economic, parental, marital or domestic—and as Fenton inveigles himself into No 8 this disorder extends to the artistic, criminal and legal areas. When Anna tries to “bring herself to order” (8), things have gone too far for her to be able to do so. Alone in a foreign country, this abandoned mother has undergone unknown hardships in order to survive. As her rented home is to be demolished, one feels that she too is due for destruction, although later she gains hope from Fenton’s presence, and it seems that both she and the building may be reprieved after all (25). The significance of her name, Kaufman, with its Jewish overtones, is a deft recognition of the many people displaced and destroyed in the aftermath of World War II: its forgotten origins include the German meanings of merchant and lender, resonant words for a character whose body is at Fenton’s, and the world’s, “disposal.”
26In contrast to Anna and Johnny, Fenton is now full of “power and purpose” (8). His escape from marital “bondage” necessitates action and his sojourn at No. 8 is like the entry into a “new dimension” (3). Squalor, shambles, and apathy encourage him to feel that he will be providing a necessary service some day in killing the inhabitants of No. 8. This is a justification that Fenton readily proposes to himself, thinking that it is “[a] kindness really, to put her [Anna] out of her misery” (7). As so often in du Maurier’s short fiction, the author’s handling of masculinity and the martial arena is satirical and negative. Curiously, however, it is often her female characters who enact violence (sometimes of a lethal kind) on the body and not the would-be alpha males, a feature that is demonstrated in other texts from throughout her writing career, including “The Doll” (first published in 1937), “The Little Photographer” (1952), “No Motive” (first published in the United States in 1953), and “The Chamois” (1959).
27“The Alibi” uses a murder plot as a vehicle for a grotesquely funny exploration of self-deceit, an exposé of bourgeois rituals, and an affective tracing of the life of one of many immigrants in the post-war period. It also continues du Maurier’s youthful interest in dissecting a corrupt system and exposing its apparent paternalism as self-interest in tales such as “And Now to God the Father,” “Angels and Archangels,” “Tame Cat” and “Panic,” all compiled in Early Stories (1954). In this text Fenton initially serves as a lover, customer, and finally as a father figure to peripatetic Anna who, as an unsupported female immigrant, has no defence against systemic paternalistic control. Du Maurier’s fictional interrogation of masculine paradigms engages with Lacanian theory which indicates the paternal signifier or “Name of the Father” as the Law. In this reading, Anna passes from man to man, never becoming an autonomous subject in her own right but doomed to inhabit the role of an object. However, if she does in fact complete suicide, she ironically rejects objecthood and becomes a subject, the tragedy being that the result is her death. Likewise, it is Fenton’s deep sense of a lack of being that engenders a desire to fill a primary loss at the core of his subjectivity, his obsession with artifice and mannequins highlighting his need to be authentic. Thus, in a postmodernist reading, “The Alibi” is a merciless dissection of the relations between personal power and fame, between image and the interior life.
28This exercise in close reading shows du Maurier’s insistent practice of writing the violence of the 1940s upon the distressed social tissue of a recovering London. She enacts her insights through the violence of her stories: violence against a civilian population, violence that ended thousands of lives and devastated millions more. The crux of “The Alibi” is Fenton’s impotence as a man, a husband, and a creator—the ensuing frustration motivating him to contemplate violence and leading to his deranged actions in an admission of murders. In his reinvention of himself as an avant-garde artist, he forgets the murderous impulses which initially led him to the house, reframing them as a “temporary phase of irritation” (26) with his wife. Fenton’s character is a composite representation of the impotent governing forces of Britain, unable to protect the population from bombing or foreign belligerence, and innocent bystanders subject to the irrationality of war and post-war aggression. The climax presents the reader with the dead bodies of a mother, a child, a foetus, and finally the body of Fenton, in all probability caught by the hangman’s noose. Du Maurier takes violence from the battlefield to the domestic arena, illuminating the damage transposed onto the bodies of the nation, at home.
29“The Little Photographer” is another du Maurier variant on the relationship between fatal desire and the grotesque body, a story that foregrounds the carnal encounter between Madame la Marquise, a beautiful but restless aristocrat, and Monsieur Paul, a crippled photographer. In the original 1952 British edition, it is situated between “The Apple Tree” and “Kiss Me Again, Stranger,” two stories in a collection of six that explore the complexities of thwarted desire and where “[t]he freak and the grotesque overlap as bodily categories” (Russo 79). Subsequent editions alter the story order, and this has implications for readings of the collection as a thematic whole.
30The backdrop of French nobility provides a period context and, though she only married into the aristocracy, the Marquise’s desire for the material body of the socially inferior photographer illustrates how in society “the top includes the low symbolically, as a primarily eroticised constituent of its own fantasy life” (Stallybrass and White 5). Du Maurier’s corpus of short fiction interrogates the dichotomies of image versus reality, perception versus truth, artifice versus innocence, and in “The Little Photographer” the Marquise and her eponymous lover dramatise the consequences of fatal desire on the body. It is also an exploration of the replicated image of an individual person along the lines of Jean Baudrillard’s concept of each human as a debased version of the Almighty Being (see Horrocks and Jevtic 109).
31The union between the aristocratic and the artisan body is a fertile one as the photographer replicates the Marquise’s beauty in the paper facsimiles of his craft and in the human flesh of the potential baby to come. In her study of beauty, philosopher Elaine Scarry makes the replicating power of photographs clear when she states that it “brings copies of itself into being. It makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people” (3). This concept, which may be called “perfection copy,” offers a useful segue into a text that is concerned with replication and self-image, with desire for beauty and the ugliness of truth. In “The Little Photographer,” through his sense of sight, Monsieur Paul is Scarry’s “perceiver who is imperilled, overpowered, by crossing paths with someone beautiful” while Madame la Marquise is threatened by the sense of touch which “brings immediacy to ugliness” (Scarry 73). Certainly, it is Monsieur Paul’s touch that ultimately results in the defiling of the Marquise’s body, reputation, status, and lifestyle.
32The farthest connotation of touch is injury, which Scarry defines as the true opposite of beauty: “Ugly touch can stain, infect, abuse or violate” (73). In this text, the boundaries of the body are aligned with social borders, which when crossed, erupt in a Bakhtinian carnival of fertile disorder. Thus, Monsieur Paul’s high-booted foot acts metonymically in that, for the Marquise, it is a titillating corporal invitation to engage in illicit sexual activity with a crippled, lower-class male. This border crossing and miscegenation could result in a pregnancy and identify the Marquise as the lover of a congenital cripple—an identification that will perhaps be written on the body of her yet-to-be-born child, the result of illicit desire and of the mating of beauty and brokenness. Notably, Monsieur Paul’s sister is also clubfooted, and this is an additional indicator that there is a strong hereditary pattern. With customary humour, du Maurier leaves the reader to imagine the consequences of the Marquise’s very public humiliation, one that we know is the just deserts of a murderer. Alternatively, the Marquise faces a lifetime of being blackmailed by Monsieur Paul’s desperate and determined sister who seizes the opportunity for financial support and whose disability acts in her case as a symbolic marker for moral degeneracy.
33Du Maurier specialises in the fractured family, and this Cinderella story gone awry has an unhappy-ever-after with a suitor’s foot that fits a cripple’s boot. The daughter of a hardworking surgeon and an ailing mother is elevated into the French aristocracy, into a life of chateaux and servants where she is the beautiful princess. A succession of appreciative audiences watch the Marquise enact her dance of performative femininity; their admiration elicits “the sense of happiness that she felt must only come to a prima donna after the clamour of long applause” (“Photographer” 186). A notable subtext here is a consideration of du Maurier’s relationship with her own body and her impatience with the trappings and restrictions of twentieth-century models of femininity. Her personal dictum was “be your own mistress, always” (du Maurier, letter of 25 May 1943). This, and her semi-permanent escape to Fowey to pursue her literary bent, indicates an independence of spirit and an impatience with gendered codes of behaviour that limited her freedom. Once in Cornwall, she always wore trousers and favoured what biographer Forster cites as “almost a uniform of no-nonsense casual dressing” (268) which reflected her rather culturally masculine priority of professional creativity. At a time when women of her class were often solely running homes and organising servants, du Maurier knew her writing and financial independence was purchased at the expense of keeping her cook happy.
34As the story progresses the world of fairy tale becomes mundane, and the Marquise finds herself neglected by her husband’s work commitments, which leave him no time for her “in spite of his devotion” (“Photographer” 163). This heroine is trapped by circumstances and evidently not “free to come and go” as she pleases (165). Her married best friend has taken a lover, and although she is not from the aristocracy, the increasingly sexually aware Marquise intuits that this is a commonplace occurrence among the nobility. The bodies of the Marquise and Monsieur Paul are the space where du Maurier enacts the conflict between power, desire, and violence, emphatically positioning happiness, marital harmony, and femininity as performative acts.
35The story works dialogically as the untold perspective of the late wife in Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue “My Last Duchess.” Here, the aristocratic “gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name” (Browning 207) leads to disappointment: a restricted, lonely life in a gilded cage where the Marquise is morbidly static in her perfect reflection. In that sense, du Maurier’s brutal, suggestive stories were precursors for the work of Angela Carter whose observations on gender and narrative ring true:
To be the object of desire is to be defined in the passive case.
To exist in the passive case is to die in the passive case—that is, to be killed.
This is the moral of the fairy tale about the perfect woman. (The Sadeian Woman 76-77)
36Critics such as Lucy Armitt position du Maurier firmly within the female gothic, the realm where “boundaries, borders and thresholds” (1) are habitually transgressed. Though this risks being another literary ghetto, as is any category with “women” or “female” in front of it, there is truth in that these texts invariably occupy liminal spaces and that the ambiguous endings are even more striking than those of the longer fiction. As mentioned previously, in “Monte Verità” heterosexual union is rejected for spiritual communion but there are few clues to the fate of the androgynes. In “The Alibi,” human interaction results in death for all the main characters but the cause is unstated and the reader is left wondering if it is loneliness that finally brings both characters to the breaking point of the collection title. Here, in “The Little Photographer,” there are hints at the consequences of the commingling of bodies and classes, but the story ends before these are realised.
37The human body is the means by which the mind interacts with the material world. We cannot experience the world without being physically within it and our first “home” is our body. Du Maurier’s short fiction in general compels the reader to witness as the breaking point is reached, brains fail to comprehend, eyes refuse to see, hearts close, genitals are maimed, the bodies of lovers are rejected and destroyed. The mind space of the psychopath is explored with a mordant humour, the unpalatable aspects of human nature—our extremes and “inadmissible selves”—are mercilessly exposed to the light of the reader whereby would-be murderers fail and apparently fragile victims turn killers.
38Du Maurier’s fiction is characterised by its dangerous strangers and an open-ended, dialogical ambiguity. In the modernist style, her stories offer the enjoyable discomfort of unknowable futures. Will there be a pregnancy for the Marquise, and if so, will the baby be congenitally lame? Will James Fenton be hanged for murders he did not commit? Did the androgynous community ascend to heaven or were they consumed by Monte Verità?
39As has been illustrated here, the stories can be collated through a corporeal analysis whereby psychological politics are mapped out on the human body, the site of unnatural occurrences and illicit desires. The short stories have plots that unearth corruption at the individual and the national level, and what Nina Auerbach calls “English decay” (1) is du Maurier using somatic symbols to illustrate moral depravity.
40Du Maurier’s stories are anti-Romantic literary vehicles that utilise heterodox models as a disguise, leaving rejected, diseased and disabled bodies in their wake. They lead readers into a consideration of the spirit as disembodied, of the body as disjointed, of the family unit as fragmented, and of society as in need of moral reconstructive surgery. Du Maurier destabilises the reader by her presentation of an ugly, morally unstable universe, which is closer to the one we live in than the one we wish to inhabit.
