Written by Hermance L. Written on: April 4th, 2020.
Transcript:
Name: Daphne du Maurier. Profession: Writer and playwright. Date of Birth: May 13th, 1907. Nationality: English with strong French ancestry. Notable works: I'll Never Be Young Again (1932), Jamaica Inn (1936), Rebecca (1938), Frenchman’s Creek (1941), My Cousin Rachel (1951), The Glass-Blowers (1963) and The Birds and Other Stories (1963). Novels adapted in cinema by Alfred Hitchcock: Jamaica Inn (1939), Rebecca (1940), and The Birds (1963).
Work I will be discussing in today’s podcast: The Scapegoat published in 1957. Fun fact: du Maurier got the set-up idea for The Scapegoat when she was in France and saw a man who looked exactly alike someone she knew and immediately began to imagine what secrets they could possibly hide. Pitch: an Englishman named John, depressed and dissatisfied with his life as a French History university lecturer, meets his doppelganger, the Count Jean de Gué, in Le Mans (France) on his way back home from a working holiday. When John wakes up the following morning in his hotel room, he realises that Jean de Gué drugged him, swapped their belongings and disappeared leaving John to take his place as head of the family and estate of Château St Gilles where John is confronted to the complex web of family intrigue, deception and financial problems.
In one of her letters to Oriel Malet, Daphne du Maurier wrote about The Scapegoat that she has tried to: “say too many things at once. How close hunger is to greed, how difficult to tell the difference, how hard not to be confused, how close one’s better nature to one’s worst, and finally, how the self must be stripped of everything, and give up everything, before it can understand love.” (Malet, Oriel. Daphne du Maurier: Letters from Menabilly Portrait of Friendship, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1993)
And she is right when she says that there are too many things that she addresses in The Scapegoat that is why today’s episode I will do my best to analyse the ideas of the double and the self that are at the core of du Maurier’s novel through the prism that Jean and John represent (but mostly John) so that we may be able to discover who is truly the scapegoat in the story.
The theme of the double in fiction has always had a prominent place in literature but it was during the second half of the 19th century that the idea of duality within one being truly took off. The concept of the alter-ego or alternative self present in most 19th century Gothic fiction, as Julia Kristeva points out, was used as a projection of the “stranger within ourselves”. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde is a good example of the duality within one individual who, throughout most of the novel, appear to be two completely different entities due to their opposite nature, Dr.Jekyll being the personification of goodness and Victorian respectability/morality while Mr. Hyde embodying evilness and the Victorian fear of degeneration and immoral behaviours. The same goes for Oscar Wilde’s Portrait of Dorian Gray, the only difference being that Dorian Gray’s double or alter-ego is his very own portrait that he keeps hidden because, like a mirror of some kind, Dorian Gray’s portrait reflects a dark aspect of his soul and this must never be seen by anyone but himself.
The theme of the double in Gothic fiction is all about internalisation of the other self. Mr. Hyde is the refracted image of Dr.Jekyll while Dorian’s portrait is the refracted image of Dorian Gray’s very own soul. Sigmund Freud analysed this in his 1919 essay called The Uncanny when he explained the concept of internal alterity and the notions of heimlich and unheimlich. Dr.Jekyll and Dorian Gray represent the heimlich which means what is “friendly, comfortable, and secure” however Mr. Hyde and Dorian’s portrait represent the unheimlich which means what is supposed to be kept a secret but will be revealed.
The double in late Victorian Gothic fiction is all about the pain and struggle to contain one’s inner self, one’s inner personality, one’s alter ego while being at the root of one’s own suffering. William Day explained this very well in The Circle of Fear and Desires: A Study of Gothic Fiction when he said:
“[The Gothic hero] seeks to dominate his world and acts out the role of sadist is also inflicting pain and suffering on himself as all of his actions lead to his own destruction. This internalization of the sadomasochistic pattern is the logical precondition for the Gothic fantasy’s repeated use of the double. The self is both sadist and masochist, both dominated and dominator, at once submissive and assertive.”
This is why according to 19th century standards, duality is regarded as something that needs to be dealt with, to be put under control or even to be destroyed simply because one’s double is nothing but the manifestation of the worst traits of one’s soul.
And then enters Daphne du Maurier who had been fascinated by the idea of the double or doppelgänger since she was a child going so far as to invent a male alter ego for herself whom she named Eric Avon and who incorporated the trope of the double in some of her novels and short stories such as Jamaica Inn, Don’t Look Now, and of course The Scapegoat.
In The Scapegoat opening chapter we witness the accidental meeting between John and Jean de Gué through which du Maurier subtly mocks “the supernatural and demonic” (Horner, A. & Zisnik, S. Daphne du Maurier: Writing, Identity & the Gothic Imagination, UK, Palgrave MacMillan, 1998, p.147) Gothic aspect of duality by having John describing his doppelganger Jean as the devil:
“I thought for a moment that he must be someone I had met somewhere, whom I ought to recognise, and I called back also in French […] wondering who the devil was.”
Contrary to 19th century and early 20th century authors, Daphne du Maurier doesn’t aim at opposing good and evil or opposing morality and immorality. What she wishes is to deconstruct the classic Jekyll/Hyde antithesis by making John and Jean ‘blurred reflections’ of each other as Nina Auerbach emphasizes in Daphne du Maurier, Haunted Heiress:
“John and Jean are not so much moral opposite as blurred reflections. John puts on Jean’s clothes and begins to melt into a new French self the vibrant “man within” who was there all along.” (p.11)
Jean de Gué is John’s reflection in the mirror and John is Jean’s reflection in the mirror. However, contrary to the Jekyll/Hyde formula, John and Jean are two very distinct physical beings with very distinct personalities who are evolving in different spheres and different countries. And the modernity of the trope of the double in The Scapegoat resides in the fact that we don’t follow both protagonists. Only John, the surnameless protagonist, is important in du Maurier’s novel because only he must be “stripped away from everything” as John, contrary to Jean, is the only character who desires to find his own self. Indeed, Jean simply wants to run away from his responsibilities as head of his family and estate while John simply wishes to belong and reach a sense of self.
In The Scapegoat first chapter, John described his own life in a distant manner by using “He” and “him” instead of “I” and “my” which strengthen the idea of him feeling estranged to his own self as well as his wishes to belong somewhere:
“Who he was and hence he sprang, what urges and what longings he might possess, I could not tell. I was so used to denying him expression that his ways were unknown to me; but he might have had a mocking laugh, a casual heart, a swift-roused temper and a ribald tongue. He did not inhabit a solitary book-lined apartment; he did not wake every morning to the certain knowledge of no family, no ties, no entanglements, no friends or interests infinitely precious to him, nothing to serve as goal and anchor save a preoccupation with French history and the French language which somehow, by good fortune, enabled him to earn his daily bread.” (p.14)
As Julia Kristeva put forward in her book Strangers to Ourselves, John is “detecting the foreigner within himself” and by doing so is “confront[ed] with the possibility or not of being an other. It is not simply […] a matter of being able to accept the other, but of being in his place, and this means to imagine and make oneself other for oneself.”
Contrary to Jean de Gué, John wants to discover the scope of his own identity, of his true self by “releasing the man within” (The Scapegoat, p.14) but he doesn’t know how to free this other self “The question was, how to unlock the door? What lever would set the other free?” (The Scapegoat, p.14).
This is when the charismatic but selfish Jean comes into play. As I said earlier, Jean wants to run away from his duties as head of the De Gué family and from the family business’ financial problems. And if there is one thing Jean is very skilled at is using people to serve his own desires. So when Jean meets his English counterpart John, he sees the perfect opportunity to operate a change of scenery. Of course, Jean isn’t the kind of person who asks first and acts second, absolutely not, Jean de Gué is the kind of man who takes what he wants when he wants. Therefore, it doesn’t come as a surprise when John wakes up and realizes that he was tricked by Jean to masquerade as his double:
“I looked about the bedroom once again, but nowhere, neither in the wardrobe, nor the drawers of the dressing table, nor on the table, was there anything of mine by which I could prove my identity. My clothes had vanished, and with them my wallet, passport, money, notebook, key ring, pen, every personal thing I was in the habit of carrying. There was not a stud or a cuff link here that was mine: everything was his.” (The Scapegoat, p.32)
But by stealing John’s identity, Jean becomes the ‘lever that would set” John’s other self free as he propels John into an environment that is foreign to the Englishman and which will push John to begin a game of pretence and make-believe as though John was anything but an actor and the De Gué’s estate nothing but a stage.
Just like Jean tricked him, John must play the de Gué’s family and it is by fully accepting the role that has been given to him that he succeeds in fooling everyone: Jean’s mother, brother, sister, wife, daughter, and sister-in-law. Everyone but Jean’s mistress and dog.
As soon as John put Jean’s clothes he, John, starts understanding that his self is constituted of a multitude of other selves, and like an actor, he goes from one facet of Jean’s personality to another depending on whose family member he is talking to and even ends up taking pleasure in incarnating Jean’s personalities. And even though this game of pretending could have led John to distance himself from his inner truth, from who and what he really is, John, on the contrary, succeeds in finding his own self through deception.
But there is one moment in the novel when John almost succumbs to his incarnation of Jean’s selfishness. Indeed, as Janet S. Bakerman highlights in And Then There Were Nine – More Woman of Mystery, John is tempted to remain the surrogate count Jean de Gué because he succeeded what Jean never did or never could:
“[he] restore[d] the house of De Gué to an order it has not known for years, he heal[ed] old wounds, right[ed] old injustices.” (p.28)
And John sees:
“his achievements as so good that they are worth continuing at any price and he contemplates murdering the count in the name of redemption and goodness.” (ibidem, p.28)
However, if John were to pursue his idea of murdering Jean de Gué, he would be serving his own selfish desires and would truly become Jean himself. And it is one thing to deceive Jean’s family but it is another for John to deceive himself now that he has finally reached a sense of self.
And though it is hard for John to see Jean coming back to Château St Gilles to reprise his role as father, husband, lover, brother and head of the family business, the Englishman realizes that the simple fact of having been able to experience family life and the vie de château enabled him to get closer to the “self who clamoured for release, the man within” (The Scapegoat, p.14) and that it allowed him to be victorious in finding his own self and let go of the depressed and dissatisfied man he used to be.
Horner and Zisnik explained that very well in Daphne du Maurier: Writing, Identity, and the Gothic Imagination when they said: “At the end of the novel, John sets off for the Abbaye, having lost everything but ‘with and beyond belonging’, possessing a freedom he had not had before.” (p.149)
To conclude, for Daphne du Maurier the concept of the double in The Scapegoat is a tool to help the main protagonist John to find his true self and achieve freedom. But to do that, she strips away John from everything he possesses twice in the novel using John’s double, Jean, as the catalyst for his loss. In this way of thinking, it is logical for the reader to view John as the scapegoat of du Maurier’s novel. After all, at the beginning of the novel, Jean drugs John and takes all of his belongings leaving John forced to impersonate him. And while John solves family issues, re-establishes order, and learns how to manage the estate business, Jean is doing what he does best, creating chaos. Indeed, at the end of the novel when Jean comes back to take his place as head of the De Gué’s family and estate, we discover that when he was living in England and pretending to be John, Jean resigned from John’s university job, sold John’s London flat, and cleared out John’s bank account.
Once again, John finds himself with nothing. But compared to the beginning of the novel when we meet John for the first time, we see a John who, as Nina Auerbach outlined in Daphne du Maurier, Haunted Heiress, was: “a good man because he was an empty one” (p.18). The John that we leave at the end of the novel is a complete being, who doesn’t see himself as a failure anymore and is no longer bound by the constraints of a dull and monotonous life because he discovered his true self and freedom. On the other hand, Jean de Gué remains the same man, someone who is subjected to his own wants and needs and someone who doesn’t understand responsibility and order. Jean cannot let go of his unfulfilled self which is why he comes back to Château St Gilles after a week despite being incapable of incarnating what his family and estate needs him to be. And in the end, we can only wonder if Jean de Gué isn’t just as much of a scapegoat as John was.
Bibliography:
Auerbach, N. Daphne du Maurier: Haunted Heiress, University of Pennsylvania, 2002.
Bakerman, Janet S. And Then There Were Nine – More Women of Mystery, Popular Press, 1985.
Day, W. In the Circle of fear and Desires: A Study of Gothic Fiction, University of Illinois Press, 1987.
Du Maurier, D. The Scapegoat, Virago Modern Classics Book, 2012.
Freud, S. The Uncanny, 1919.
Horner, A. & Zisnik, S. Daphne du Maurier: Writing, Identity & the Gothic Imagination, United Kingdom, Palgrave MacMillan, 1998.
Kristeva, J. Strangers to Ourselves, Paris, Fayard, 1988.
Malet, O. Daphne du Maurier: Letters from Menabilly Portrait of Friendship, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1993.