Where the Boys Are: Daphne du Maurier and the Masculine Art of Unremarkability

Abstract

It was not until the rise of cinema as common entertainment in the twentieth century that visual discourses clearly surpassed verbal ones as popular modes of representation. This shift in media did influence the efficacy of portraiture’s symbolic function but, as my earlier discussion of Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando and Sally Potter’s cinematic adaptation demonstrates, the genre nevertheless continued to play a role in the articulation of gender- and desire-based subjectivities in not only fiction, but now also film. The sexual visuality articulated through the Victorian novel changed but it maintained its potency, with the mass visuality stimulated by the mainstreaming of cinema remaining heavily invested in the rhetoric and strategies found in Gothic and sensation fiction. According to Patricia White, common nineteenth-century Victorian literary forms had a considerable effect on cinematic renditions of gender and sexuality. Referencing ‘the familial and sentimental models’ as particularly strong pre-cinematic contexts for lesbian iteration specifically, White argues that ‘the inheritance of mid-century Hollywood films from nineteenth-century paradigms of women’s culture and relationality represents an articulation of new identities with older forms of female homosociality’.¹