Double·Metamorphosis·Trouble

Daphne du Maurier (1907-1989) is a celebrated English novelist and playwright in the twentieth century. Her works span almost half a century and cover a broad field such as short story, novel, play and biography. For her novels full of mystery, romance and suspense, she won Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award in 1977. Her masterpiece Rebecca made quite a splash in literary circles when it was first published in 1938 and became an English and American bestseller, which was made into a film by the famous director Hitchcock in 1940. However, du Maurier and her works have not been paid enough critical attention to in Chinese literary world with the absence of relevant monograph and the rarity of scholarly treatises. In the meantime, the foreign studies of the modern Gothic variety—Female Gothic, which comes into being under the dual background of Feminism and the Gothic genre, are relatively mature, systematic and have yielded a rich harvest. Comparatively, the domestic studies are almost blank, or at best, at the threshold. In view of the research situations above, the thesis is intended to give an overview of Female Gothic theory and its historical development, from the perspective of which Rebecca is reexamined through the analyses of Gothic elements and characters as the possible breakthroughs. And endeavors are made to explore the particular function of Gothic elements and women's identity construction and crisis in patriarchy in Female Gothic novels, which Rebecca may mirror.The thesis falls into five chapters. Introduction embraces the literature review and the cause and purpose of the study. Chapter Two briefly introduces du Maurier and Rebecca. The writer's sense of past,mystery and romance and living environment have a profound influence on her writing, especially her novel writing. Her early works are the important foundations for the success of Rebecca. Chapter Three focuses on Female Gothic. The survey of its historical development is made from three stages of Gothic in brief, the early Gothic-genre relation and Female Gothic. Chapter Four reexamines Rebecca in Female Gothic perspective. It discusses the utility of Gothic elements by scrutinizing the typical Gothic space image—the ancient mansion Manderley as an example. And the analyses of the Female Gothic heroine the nameless narrator, the hidden Rebecca and the Female...