INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER
A biography
WRITING CORNWALL
a Setting and plot
b Suspense and mystery
c Daphne du Maurier’s rewriting of Cornwall
d Fact versus fancy
DAPHNE DU MAURIER AND GOTHIC IMAGINATION
a Ghosts in Jamaica Inn
b The « uncanny »
c Boundaries of the self
SYMBOLISM AND lMAGERY lN JAMAICA INN
a Animal farm
b Escape
c Treasure island
1) WRITING CORNWALL
a) Setting and Plot
Jamaica Inn, set in Cornwall, exemplifies Daphne du
Maurier’s greatest writing skills.
ln this undeniably
« Cornish » novel, Daphne du Maurier obviously excels in
presenting Cornwall’s landscape and history,
for her
knowledge of the area was unquestionable. Being a tremendous
walker, Daphne du Maurier knew every inch of the county.
Yet, Jamaica Inn, the inn which inspired the subject of her
book, was discovered by chance. While riding across the
Moors she and her friend Foy Quiller-Couch got lost in
sudden darkness, surrounded by the thick fog of the bleak
landscape of Bodrnin Moor.
Bodrnin Moor is a wild strech of moorland extending from
Dartmoor to the Land’s End peninsula and the isles of
Scilly. This striking landscape is characterized by its
areas of marshland, its few stunted trees and the rocky
formations known as tors. Held at the mercy of this hostile
place, Daphne du Maurier recalls the circumstances of their hazardous expedition in Vanishing Cornwall[[Daphne du Maurier. Vanishing Cornwall, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1972 (145-146).]].
« Bogs, quarries, brooks, boulders, hell on every
side, we led the horses from the slippery track, and
then got up on our saddles again. l remembered an
illustration from a book read long ago in childhood,
Sintram, And His Companions where a dispirited
knight had travelled such a journey with the Devil
in disguise, who called himself The Little Master.
It showed a terrified steed rearing near a
precipice. This was to be our fate, and The Little
Master would come and claim us. »
After several hours spent in the desolate moorland, fear
finally vanished when the « gaunt chimneys of Jamaica
Inn » suddenly appeared out of the darkness.
Once inside Jamaica Inn Daphne du Maurier learnt about
smuggling and wrecking, and about the different stories and
legends of the Moors, where contraband may have been hidden.
The isolated inn, situated almost halfway between Bodmin and
Launceston certainly played its part during the heyday of
smuggling for it was a halting-place for the contraband
intended to be distributed in the surrounding areas. The
unusual and exotic name (for such an area) « Jamaica Inn » may
have taken its origins from the rum trade in which it was
possibly involved. The novel, inspired by the inn, its bleak surroundings and the smuggling activity of the area, became
Daphne du Maurier’s first huge commercial success.
However, the novel’ s obvious connections with wrecking can
still give rise to controversy. Indeed, if smuggling was an
activity which allowed the poverty-stricken people of
Cornwall to circumvent the duties regularly levied on goods,
the tales of the wreckers could possibly be purely
fictional. Rescuing shipwrecks stranded on the reef because
of the area’s rough elemental weather was a routine activity
on the inhospitable Cornish coast, and the locals certainly
left the place with the few things washed ashore by the
tide. But this behaviour had nothing to do with the savage
and barbarie image of the wreckers echoed in sensational
touristic stories.
Yet, it would be inappropriate to think that Daphne du
Maurier’s Jamaica Inn could, at first sight, be part of the
sensational stories relating unfounded facts. Moreover, as
no official document seemed to have established any real evidence about the ‘terrifying’ wreckers[[Jenkin, A.K Hamilton. Cornwall and its people London : David and Charles INC, 1970 (42).]], it gave any
writer a free hand to rewrite this aspect of Cornwall’s
mythical past. Impassioned by what she called the « what has
been » Daphne du Maurier’s endless interest in the past is
for example beautifully expressed in the fifteen chapters of
her ‘almost Cornish’ biography, Vanishing Cornwall.
And it is also in Jamaica Inn that Daphne du Maurier’s
knowledge of the past is revealed, particularly through her accurate descriptions of the smuggling process. ln this
extract, the reader discovers simultaneously with Mary some
of the smuggling methods :
« she began to understand. Packages were brought by
the waggons and unloaded at Jamaica Inn. They were
stored in the locked room. [ … ] as soon as the
waggons were unloaded
they would take
their
departure, passing out into the night as swiftly and
as silently as they had come. » (46)
During the golden age of smuggling, the law hadn’t been
instantly or efficiently enforced by the government, and the
suppression of the smuggling industry only gradually
occurred between 1820 and 1850. As the plot of the novel was
imagined around 1815, the reader discovers more
about the historical facts of that time in the Vicar’s words : « If the
law was stricter, there would be greater supervision », and
later in the novel we are informed that
» His Majesty’s
Government were prepared to take certain steps during the
coming year to patrol the coasts of His Majesty’s country.
There will be watchers on the cliffs instead of flares
[ … ] »(152).
Daphne du Maurier did not only fuel her writing with
historical facts.
Among the various places that Daphne du
Maurier borrowed from reality was the village of Altarnum
and its vicarage which shelters the wicked Vicar in the
novel, and the magnificfent church known as the « Cathedral
of the Moor » which dated from the fifteenth century and
hasn’t faded with time. It is also said that there is still a ‘Jory’ family living in one of the villages of the Moors that might have inspired one of the character’s names (Tom Jory) in Daphne du Maurier’s novel. Maybe her borrowings
from reality find an explanation in one of her letters to
Oriel Malet. Mentioning the relation between her fictional
works and readers she wrote, « It is the mixture of reality
with fiction that gets them »[[Letters from Menabilly. Portrait of a friendship.
Ed. Oriel Malet (the writer Oriel malet was one of Daphne du Maurier’s intimate friends.)
London: Orion Books Ltd, 1994. (246)]]. The mixture between reality
and fiction obviously succeeded in drawing an impressive
portrait of Cornwall, for the descriptions of the moors are,
according to Martin Shallcross, « undoubtedly some of the finest in any Cornish novel »[[Shallcross, Martyn. Daphne du Maurier Country, St Teath, Bodmin, Cornwall: Bossiney Books, 1987.(29)]].
Yet, however accurate the real details used by the writer,
it seems nececessary to set the novel back into its purely
fictional context to understand the subtleties of du
Maurier’s writing. ln fact, the Cornwall described by Daphne
du Maurier was entirely fashioned from her imagination and
it is this very imagination that allowed the writer to
recreate a sense of the past. On this point, Daphne du
Maurier wrote « imagination, yes, but so that you use it to perceive the past and relive it »[[Letters from Menabilly. Portrait of a friendship. Ed. Oriel Malet
London: Orion Books Ltd, 1994. (131)]].
But Daphne du Maurier’s imagination did not only fulfil her
desire to uncover the past, it also allowed countless readers to enjoy the sheer suspense and thrill maintained right from the first chapter when Mary is on the road ta Jamaica Inn, to the denouement when she escapes from the criminal Vicar’s clutches. A study of Daphne du Maurier’s treatment of the plot will reveal how suspense and mystery govern the whole story.
A suivre…
Copyright : Ombeline Belkadi (odalavie@wanadoo.fr).