Tourists in Lands of Myths: Daphne du Maurier’s Touring of Venice and Crete in “Ganymede” and “Not After Midnight”
This paper examines the critical way in which Daphne du Maurier combines myth with tourism to address the theme of metamorphosis in “Ganymede” and “Not After Midnight.” Fed on classical culture, the homodiegetic narrators of the stories are educated British tourists who project their bookish knowled...
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| Izdano u: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/jsse, |
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| Glavni autor: | |
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Jezik: | Anglais |
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Journal of the Short Story in English
2023
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| Online pristup: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Sažetak: | This paper examines the critical way in which Daphne du Maurier combines myth with tourism to address the theme of metamorphosis in “Ganymede” and “Not After Midnight.” Fed on classical culture, the homodiegetic narrators of the stories are educated British tourists who project their bookish knowledge onto their actual destinations, respectively Venice and Crete, as a horizon of expectations. Loaded with myths, or rather with the specific versions of myths that the narrators bring to them, Venice and Crete take on an unsettling—not to say alarming—quality that is supposedly part of a haunting local context. Such a context springs back to rub off on them and alter them, as if myth had the power to blind those who foster it and to reveal their deficiencies to others. Although the narrators’ metamorphosis stems from ancient myths related to the visited places, it is nonetheless subject to the new myths that each destination has absorbed from the New World. In these two Gothic stories with a detective structure, the protagonists cannot recover their status when they return to England. Almost literally infected by myth, they lose their jobs and move to the margins of society, from where their stories emerge as pathetic pleas framed by irony. |
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