Family Gothic

Abstract

In this chapter we shall examine Daphne du Maurier’s early novels. These works, which concentrate heavily on self and family, show du Maurier’s imagination beginning to engage with the Gothic. Their particular emphases also point to matters which will continue to inform du Maurier’s writing throughout her career: The Loving Spirit (1931) sets up Cornwall as an important and appropriate landscape for her subject matter; I’ll Never Be Young Again (1932) deals with a sexually fragmented subject; The Progress of Julius (1933) explores the ‘other’ through the ‘foreign’. These early works are clear evidence of the author’s interest in the relation between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’, which manifests itself in the later fiction as a doppelgänger or alter ego figure. The ‘difference’ between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ may manifest itself through age, gender, social class, ‘foreignness’, or any combination of these. In Elisabeth Bronfen’s words, ‘For the subject, the function of the other is to reaffirm and guarantee the stability of its position in the world, a sense of self-identity and self-centredness’.¹