Daphne du Maurier: Gendering the Gothic

This thesis examines the ways in which Daphne du Maurier (1907-1989) uses the Gothic as a device to explore her own conflicted gender identity through fiction. Although this is not a new concept, my focus differs from the extant criticism on du Maurier’s work by extending analysis to the critically neglected sections of the author’s extensive and generically varied oeuvre. While the academy has seen a wider resurgence of interest in du Maurier’s life and work since the millennium, many critics continue to ignore her vast collection of short stories, focusing primarily on her more popular “romantic” novels. This thesis attempts to readdress this imbalance by considering much more of the author’s oeuvre and making greater use of the biographical and archival material available to cryptomically decode the autobiographical traces “closeted” within du Maurier’s Gothic writing – her non-normative or possibly non-binary gender and sexual identity – to contend that her fiction can be read as an oblique form of life-writing. My research therefore combines various intersecting theoretical frameworks, including the Gothic, gender theory, queer studies, life-writing and auto/biographical practice, but mainly draws upon the psychoanalytical readings and concepts that inform these fields of research, particularly as they relate to the conventions of the double, spatial settings and spectrality, which form the thematic basis of the chapters.