An Analysis of the Image of Rebecca from the Perspective of Feminism文献综述

 2022-08-14 10:08

Literature Review

Of

An Analysis the Image of Rebecca from the Perspective of Feminism

Rebecca is a novel written by English author Dame Daphne du Maurier. Taking the form of a flashback, the narrator, the nameless heroine, the second Mrs. de Winter, tells her memories and experiences in the mansion called Manderley with her husband Maxim de Winter. Through this narrative, the unseen title character, Rebecca de Winter, is shaped.

The author, Daphne du Maurier (1907-1989), is a famous British woman writer. She was also a member of Association of the Royal Society of Literature during her life time and wrote 17 novels and dozens of other types of literary works. She hated city life and lived in Cornwall, England for many years. The inspiration of most of her works came from the social customs and local social background, and for this reason people often called her works “Cornwall novel.”

Deeply influenced by Gothic Novel, which is famous for its mystery, curiousness and terror, Daphne writes her works with plots full of twists and turning. Daphne du Maurier is good at telling a story. She not only has the mental ability necessary to develop credible characters but also has a gift for creating tension and suspense. She usually uses a first-person narrator, the narrator “I” in Rebecca, for instance, to create suspense and to give the story greater credibility. In her 50 years of writing career, there have been a large number of novels, short stories, biographies, so as to be available, the academic circles for her comments over a long period of time have ignored her as the best writer of talent. Many literary critics showed their recognition of her works being indeed popular, meanwhile, positioned her as a superficial romantic novelist. However, in recent several decades, more and more scholars came to realize the value of researches on Rebecca and the writer Daphne du Maurier. This essay is going to do a brief summary of the results of the study of Rebecca and du Maurier at home and abroad, in order to provide a more clear direction for future research.

  1. Researches on Rebecca in abroad

As du Mauriers most famous work, Rebecca, once published, sold 45,000 copies in the first month. Since the 1980s, British and American scholars have been writing in academic journals or in the monograph to interpret the novel from different perspectives. In the book, Classical and Trash, Traditions and Taboos in High Literature and Popular Modern Genres, Harriet Hawkins analyzed the opposition and similarity between the two female characters, the nameless narrator “I” and Rebecca (1990: 188).

Shortly after du Maurier died in 1989, there were many biographies of her biography about her, for instance, Martyn Shallcrossrsquo; The Private world of Daphne du Maurier and Margaret Forsterrsquo;s Daphne du Maurier. All these biographies mentioned du Maurierrsquo;s homosexual orientation, which pointed out a new direction of researches on Rebecca. Based on Queer theory, an approach to literary and cultural study that rejects traditional categories of gender and sexuality, Mary Wings made an analysis of the homosexual relationship among female characters in Rebecca. Besides, in Between Identification and Desire：Rereading Rebecca, Janet Harbord demonstrated that the book emerged the taboo between homosexual desires and the authorrsquo;s bewilderment of traditional gender model and female identity was reflected in the image of Rebecca.

Since the 1990s, more and more scholars paid close attention to the similarity between Rebecca and other novels. However, some feminist critics provided a different new view of this story, which totally distinct from the traditional gothic romantic novel telling the hero and heroine defeated the female villain. This new interpretation aligns “it with gothic narratives that deal with the dangers women suffer under the patriarchal control of their husbands” (Auba Llompart Pons, 69). Rebecca, as well as other du Maurierrsquo;s works, should not be read as a conventional romantic novel but a work that exposed the villainy of patriarchy.

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