A HAUNTOLOGICAL READING OF DAPHNE DU MAURIER'S REBECCA
Vol.7, Issue 1, 2021, pp. 21-36 Full text
DOI: https://doi.org/10.33919/esnbu.21.1.2
Web of Science: 000658797400003
Author:
Nil Korkut-Nayki https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4528-7098
Affiliation:
Department of Foreign Language Education, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey
Abstract
This essay focuses on the way the main characters in Daphne du Maurier's novel Rebecca (1938) cope with the haunting influence of the past and attempts to read their struggle through the theoretical approach developed by Jacques Derrida in his Specters of Marx (1993). This approach, termed "hauntology" by Derrida himself, revolves around the notion of the "specter" haunting the present and emphasizes the need to find new ways of responding to it, especially because of the existing ontological failure to do so. The essay complements this reading with the earlier comparable theory of the "phantom" and "transgenerational haunting" developed by psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. A "hauntological" reading of Rebecca through these tools yields results that are significantly different from traditional approaches. Suggesting that the main characters in Rebecca are complete failures in dealing with the specter in a Derridean sense, the essay argues that the novel expects from the discerning reader a more insightful approach and a better potential to understand the specter. It is suggested further that a proper acknowledgement of the specter in Rebecca reaches beyond this particular novel, having subtle but significant implications concerning not only literary analysis but also social and cultural prejudices.
Keywords: Rebecca, du Maurier, haunting, specter, phantom, hauntology
Article history:
Submitted: 8 March 2021;
Reviewed: 16 March 2020;
Revised: 24 March 2021;
Accepted: 25 March 2021;
Published: 1 June 2021
Citation (APA):
Korkut-Nayki, N. (2021). A Hauntological Reading of Daphne du Maurier's "Rebecca". English Studies at NBU, 7(1), 21-36. https://doi.org/10.33919/esnbu.21.1.2
Copyright © 2021 Nil Korkut-Nayki
This open access article is published and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0), which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. If you want to use the work commercially, you must first get the authors' permission.
Note: An earlier and partial version of this study was presented at the 9th International IDEA Conference: Studies in English, Malatya, Turkey, 15 - 17 April 2015.
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