Du Maurier's Containment Of Women In Jane Eyre

Rebecca resists the traditional plot of both subgenres, yet it utilizes them delivering a combination of both. This combination, the thesis argues, represents du Maurier’s view of the modern powerful woman. Du Maurier carries out her project through two distinct twists in the traditional female Gothic plot of her predecessor Jane Eyre. The first is shifting the marriage scene from the end to the beginning thus bringing to more focus the female sexuality and its treatment in marriage. The second is the existence of queer understatements coating not only Rebecca but also other characters. These queer understatements are emphasized through the triangular affairs between the characters of the novel: the nameless narrator, the deceased Rebecca,

According to the author, marriage plot especially in Victorian novels acts as a kind of cover, a camouflage, hiding forms of sexuality other than the heterosexual form (158). Marriage becomes a mechanism of containment (Dever 158). It is the containment of the feminine sexuality because the eventual act of marriage is perceived as an equal to sexual virtue (Dever 161). Putting this in the context of the novels, Jane Eyre closes with a containment of Jane’s sexuality in Ferndean, deep in the forest away from people, a place she did not imagine would harbor any form of life. It is the conventional female Gothic closure that accords with the Victorian tenets of virtue. Bertha is eliminated for being sexually deviant while Jane is brought to learn that to be a wife she needs to shed away her sexuality. The novel with its “fairy-tale logic” offers marriage and abandonment of female desire as the only way to confirm with the Victorian dictates (Baldellou, par.

The narrator explores her sexuality after marriage and matures sexually towards the end of the novel. She accomplishes this due to Rebecca’s presence. The narrator welcomes the sexual knowledge offered by Rebecca rendering “her representation of herself as committed to romantic, heterosexual love is fissured from the start” (Horner and Zlosnik, Daphne du Maurier 123). In this respect, Horner and Zlosnik indicate that “[t]here is here an interesting narratorial ambivalence towards male sexuality which we can relate to the narrator's occasional expression of ambivalence towards her marriage” (Daphne du Maurier124). The original gap of maturity between Maxim and the narrator reinforces such ambivalence. The narrator starts her quest as a married young girl. From the very first moment, Maxim proclaims that his attraction to her is due to her innocence and immaturity, a fact that the narrator rejects and acts to change. Her exploration builds up her identity to declare confidently as a mature woman that “at any rate I have lost my diffidence, my timidity my shyness with strangers” (du Maurier 9). She lets herself get indulged in Rebecca’s world. It is true that she does so in supposition that this can bring her closer to Maxim. However, it becomes apparent that that is not her ultimate