Misreading the Body: Mutants and Masks in Three of Daphne du Maurier’s Post-War Stories: “The Little Photographer,” “Kiss Me Again, Stranger,” and “The Blue Lenses”
This article discusses three of Daphne du Maurier’s stories from her 1950s collections which offer scope for discussion of the peculiar iconography of the body in British post-war society. Firstly, two stories taken from her collection, The Apple Tree: A Short Novel and Several Long Stories (1952),...
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| الحاوية / القاعدة: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/jsse, |
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| المؤلف الرئيسي: | |
| التنسيق: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| اللغة: | Anglais |
| منشور في: |
Journal of the Short Story in English
2023
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| الوصول للمادة أونلاين: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| الملخص: | This article discusses three of Daphne du Maurier’s stories from her 1950s collections which offer scope for discussion of the peculiar iconography of the body in British post-war society. Firstly, two stories taken from her collection, The Apple Tree: A Short Novel and Several Long Stories (1952), are analyzed: “Kiss Me Again, Stranger” and “The Little Photographer.” In a collection laced with bodily horror and viscerality, these two stories are of interest because of their portrayal of post-war displacement and an interaction between individuals based upon the reading of physical “norms.” “The Blue Lenses,” from The Breaking Point (1959), provides an interesting counterpoint. Emerging at the latter end of the decade it is still explicit in its engagement of “reading the other”; however, the relationship between cultural narratives and psychology is more prominent. This article considers whether du Maurier’s increasingly psychological approach to the symbolism of the body and ideas of behavioural norms in the late 1950s was personal to her or part of a wider mid-century shift in Western culture as a whole. |
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