Daphne du Maurier is hardly the typical author for a light-hearted summer read, but luckily, I wasn’t in a typical summer setting when I picked up her Gothic novel Jamaica Inn. During my 18-hour red-eye flight from Hong Kong to Los Angeles and an equally turbulent freshman move-in day, my mind was trapped in the mystical landscapes of Cornwall, England, the setting for many of du Maurier’s works, including the modern classic Rebecca. Yet instead of stately country houses and carefully-cultivated azaleas, the Cornwall in Jamaica Inn solely consists of uninhabited moors and lonely tors. Indeed, du Maurier lavished more words to describe the Cornish landscape than any of the human characters, and the reader who laboriously drags their eyes across paragraphs of dense descriptions soon becomes a strange embodiment of the story itself. It is, after all, a book about toiling, seeking answers, and being consumed by wars—those fought against others, and those fought within yourself.
For all of du Maurier’s fervent attention to nature—which makes her stylistically more akin to Emily Brontë than to, say, Gillian Flynn—Jamaica Inn is a Gothic psychological thriller packed with all the classic elements of this genre: a helpless heroine thrown into a strange, ominous environment in the first chapter, a menacing patriarchal figure that incites most of her sufferings, a romantic attraction that is fatally passionate, and a central mystery that remains unsolved until the final chapter.
The story opens with Mary Yellan, who, at the dying request of her mother, leaves her hometown to stay in the Jamaica Inn, a decrepit, isolated establishment owned by her uncle Joss Merlyn. She is almost immediately drawn into the inn’s dark secrets and terrifying reputation. Driven by her natural uprightness and a desire to protect her Aunt Patience from her brutish husband, Mary sets her heart upon bringing justice to Jamaica Inn, yet her attempts are constantly hampered by Merlyn’s threats of violence and her entanglement with other equally foreboding male figures.
Jamaica Inn is a tale of sentiments that are painful and uniquely female: as Mary wanders deeper into the moors, the savage landscapes reflect her psychological struggles, generating the raw, desperate energy that propels the novel forward. We are invited to not only place our bets on the tug-of-war between the righteous and the evil, but also (and probably more importantly), on the heroine’s internal conflict between passion and judgment. In fact, many would consider the ultimate “twist” to the story not the answer to the mystery of Jamaica Inn, but rather the somewhat surprising choice Mary makes on the last few pages. We are to feel Mary’s defiance against the brutality of Merlyn, her resentment at her own limited powers, her agonized confusion between her passion and judgment, and, most poignantly, her burning rage against her sex. “I don’t want to love like a woman or feel like a woman,” she cried in one of her lowest points in the novel, “there’s pain…and suffering, and misery that can last a lifetime.”
While such dramatic statements could be colored by impulse, du Maurier makes it explicitly clear that the division between genders is the main source of tension—it would be a completely different story had any of the characters been born of a different gender. Although 23-year-old Mary is perfectly capable of living alone and supporting herself, her mother, on her deathbed, still insists on her going to stay with her aunt and uncle because “a girl can’t live alone … [or] she goes queer in the head or comes to evil.” This grim prediction, rooted in a highly gendered vision of the world, introduces readers to the world of Jamaica Inn: a place where men and women are divided by unbridgeable gaps; where women, despite their wildest efforts, cannot escape their biologically determined “femininity” and all the sufferings it entails. Throughout the story, Mary constantly fantasizes about how events could unfold differently had she been born a man. These imagined alternatives provide a stark contrast to her and emphasize the quintessential “femaleness” in her struggles and sentiments. Here, “femaleness” is not only shaped by the Beauvoirian process of social subordination, but also is burdened with a certain biological determinism – it is as if her dilemma is as much the result of external forces as the physical fact of her sex.
A more modern rendering of the story would likely frame Mary’s “female rage” as a weapon against patriarchal expectations and traditions; du Maurier, writing in the 1930s, seems less optimistic. While Mary is fueled by anger and dissatisfaction, she is also confounded by her gentler feelings and sexual desire for a man she dares not trust. For all her pragmatism and strong principles, Mary becomes romantically involved with Jem, Joss Merlyn’s brother. Neither passion nor rationality could completely overpower the other, and the struggle between defiance and affection dominates the second half of the novel. Such conflict is portrayed as inevitable, governed almost entirely by Mary’s natural instincts: “There was a common law of attraction for all living things,” she thinks after her second encounter with Jem, “This was no choice made with the mind … but something inside her responded to him.”
It is easy to see why Jamaica Inn is seldom branded as “romance” (despite du Maurier often being perceived as a genre romance writer). The romantic love between Mary and Jem appears entirely contingent on the specific setting of the Inn and derives most of its vibrancy from the female’s inner turmoil. Though du Maurier clearly intends to depict Jem Merlyn as a dangerously charming, morally ambiguous anti-hero, his character undergoes so little development that he comes off as almost a plot device. As Mary, influenced by her sexual awakenings, begins to take risks and bend her principles, Jem essentially comes to embody Jamaica Inn’s central question: in a brutally patriarchal society, can a heterosexual woman ever reconcile her desire for autonomy and her amorous attraction towards men? Does being romantically involved with men inevitably entail the surrendering of the woman’s agency?
Jamaica Inn seems to be at a loss with answers. In a world where womanhood is not merely a social construct, but something inescapable and all-powerful to the point of being a deterministic force, Mary’s mother’s rigidly gendered worldview is, to some extent, ultimately proven right. The novel ends with Mary, who has resisted such ideas about womanhood until the end, making a proactive decision in an attempt to answer the aforementioned questions. Ironically, however, her decision also unintentionally complies with her mother’s last entreaty: that “a girl can’t live alone,” that she must relinquish her independence for companionship. The detached, almost impersonal writing style of the closing scene forms a startling contrast with the novel’s previous effusiveness. It is as if du Maurier herself is also uncertain of Mary’s fate. The question faced by her heroine is so extraordinary, that the consequences of any sort of definite action become unthinkable.
