Aurora (2020 - 2023)

Updated 12th Feb 2024

I'm delighted to announce the launch of my new film series, Aurora. It follows my first short film, An Impossible Poison (click the link for full details, to watch for free and to view film festival laurels) which premiered in Berlin in November 2017 and has been selected for numerous international film festivals, screened widely and very generously reviewed. 

Aurora is an esoteric guide, self help guru and quantum soul healing leader. Follow her for healing, validation, acceptance and inner peace. The films were made during lockdown in 2020 and 2021: written during the spring months, then remote directed, rehearsed via Skype, with all costume and make-up consultation done via screens. I painted all the backdrops and sent them to LA, where my star Alessia Patregnani is based, and sent sketches and film, photography and framing references via email. We recorded three-second test clips to make sure the framing was right, then went through at least ten takes of each script, which I assessed at home and edited in the middle of the night here in London. In short it was all the fun of film making, without the fun. Full credits and images from forthcoming clips in the Aurora series are at the bottom. 

You can watch all the Aurora films for free (or check them out here and below
on YouTube, although the colour balance there is mucky). Go to full screen and turn up the sound.

Since lockdown began in March 2020 I found myself working all day at my desk in my study (or trying to work), doing the usual hackwork while listening to various self-styled spiritual leaders, wellness therapists, healers, meditation guides and self-appointed esoteric shamans who use YouTube to speak to vast audiences all over the world. I found myself fascinated by their speech patterns, presentation and phrasing, which they combine to hypnotic effect. The Aurora series, which I'll be adding to gradually until the end of the year, is my response to these persuasive and captivating self-help videos. They're in line with my interest in performativity, fallibility and superstition, the difficulty of distinguishing the fake from the real and the persuasiveness of style and mannerism over content and morality. I've always been interested in con artists who seem genuine people who aren't believed and unwitting fakes who truly believe that they're helping people (for example, pyschics who believe that they're psychic but aren't).

The Bagri Foundation have written a very generous feature and interview as part of their 30 Artists, 30 Years series, which explains my process and provides a good career retrospective, the Writing on the Wall festival have recorded an In Conversation with me which gives a little more and I recently did a quick career retrospective podcast which can be heard via Anchor, Spotify and Apple. And there's a nice interview with Renaissance One here.

CREDITS:

Starring Alessia Patregnani 

Directed, written and art directed by Bidisha 

Produced by Bidisha and Alessia Patregnani 

Hair and makeup for 1st four films by Tracey Anderson 

Costumes for the 1st three films by Natasha Simchowitz and Bidisha

Costumes for films 4, 5 and 6 by Bidisha 

Hair and makeup for films 5 and 6 by Alessia Patregnani

Music from Freesound under Creative Commons license 

An Impossible Poison (2017)

Updated 11th October 2021

I am delighted to celebrate my first short film, An Impossible Poison, which received its premiere at Lettrétage in Berlin on 16th November 2017 as part of an event called Breaking Ground Berlin: A New British Con_Text.  An Impossible Poison received its London premier at the Royal Albert Hall on 7th March 2018 as part of the That's What She Said night (details here). It has been very well reviewed, screened widely and been selected for eight international film festivals so far. 

"all the careful crafting of an art film, from its velvety decor to its heightened gothic colour palette...it is this attention to styling that brings the element of luxury...every frame is a portrait."

Girls on Film, review and interview 

"awe-inspiring...intriguing, chilling, compelling"

Poetry London

"[a] brilliant horror short"

Emerald Street, article on women in film

An Impossible Poison is available to view for free. Turn the sound up and go to full screen. You can also watch my film series Aurora, starring Alessia Patregnani, as well as little fun vlogs and video blips. 

So far, An Impossible Poison has made the Official Selection of the Five Continents International Film Festival, the International Women’s Film Festival, the New York Lift-Off Festival, the 13Horror.com Film and Screenplay Contest 2018, the Fake Flesh Film Festival, the Night of the Short Film Festival in Antwerp, Shorts on Tap in association with Time Out in November 2019  and the Nosferatu Film Festival 2021. All the laurels for these are below. It is also a semi-finalist in the 2017 STIFF San Maurino Torinese film festival. 

The London X4 Seasonal Short Film Festival reviewed it as:

"eerie, atmospheric [and] well directed"

and Club des Femmes, the feminist film collective, have reviewed it as:

 "intriguing and very atmospheric, beautifully shot and edited."

In a perceptive and very flattering review and interview, which can be read in full here, Girls on Film describe An Impossible Poison as having "all the careful crafting of an art film, from its velvety decor to its heightened gothic colour palette...this attention to styling brings the element of luxury...crossing over into installation-worthy territory...every frame is a portrait."

In their official selection notes, 13horror.com reviewed it as:

"a very intense and intimate film …all very intriguing. The first flash of emotion when [the weird stuff happens] was superb. ...The strange, creepy [other thing] which followed gave me chills. Thought provoking stuff and enjoyable to watch. Great job."

An Impossible Poison is an intense 7 minute narrative short feature which dramatises a few lines from some poems of mine, as commissioned by Speaking Volumes, who wanted me to reinterpret the idea of a writer performing her own work. The text deals with the aftermath of deceit, with ritualistic and ceremonial traditions and the continued attraction of a witchcraft tradition in the contemporary world. I'm interested in ritual behaviours, superstition, sublimation, obsession and catharsis. The atmosphere of the film is heightened and carefully designed, the look stylised, with the camera lingering on the details of cloth, jewellery, décor and on the profile and hands of the main character and her props. In the film, a woman enacts an occult ritual over a score of eerie music. It gets steadily more extreme as the woman is absorbed and exhilarated by the ritual, which offers both release from pain and the thrill of encountering the uncanny. 

I consider myself to be an arthouse auteur and don't think in terms of genres or performance style - so it's funny to me that An Impossible Poison is being interpreted as a horror film. I did the cinematography, art direction and sound design myself (as is quite common on a short auteur project) - the soundtrack is actually made up of about seven sound clips plaited together with varying speeds and levels. The wonderful thing about film is that everything you've done in your career up to that point (in my case, art direction, then a long career in TV and radio) can go into it. 

It was also shown on 25th April 2018 at Words with....Bidisha at the Albert Sloman Library, University of Essex, followed by an in-depth conversation (details here); on 16th June 2018 at APT Gallery in London as part of the Gaze symposium; at the Victoria Gallery, University of Liverpool, on Sunday 21st October 2018; and at Samsung KX in Coal Drops Yard in London on Thursday 28th November 2019 in association with Time Out (details here).

The credits are as follows:

• Written and directed by Bidisha
• Camera operator - Amy Cameron
• Editing – Amy Cameron and Bidisha 

Just for fun, a list of some of the films I like can be found here. Links to my film essays and reviews can be found all over the Net, although I recently wrote about Angelina Jolie's work as a director, the portrayal of Syria in documentaries and features, the new generation of millennial film-makers, the documentary Even When I Fall, Wonder Woman and women in action films, The Assassin and the 'wuxia' Chinese swordfighting genre, women in dystopic science fiction films and documentaries on rape camps in the Bosnian wars and child refugees in Lebanon and Syria.

The full text of the main poem (which I don’t use all of in the film), as well as the extra script lines, are below. The first line of the script is “deceit is my friend” and the final line is “not to suffer”.

An Impossible Poison

Deceit is my friend and it hangs over me,

An angelic nurse hovering at my bedside,

Its wings flexing open, rich and exuberant,

Its long feathers dipped in cold holy water,

Casting drops around me like a bare blanket.

Deceit is my life-partner, the only one I need,

My counterpart, my foil, my voice of reason,

My stalwart retainer who never surprises me,

Accompanying me invisibly down the aisle,

A ghost groom in a wedding video on repeat.

Deceit is the ally who remains at my shoulder

As the others drift coolly away in plain disbelief,

Politely receding while I bid them a sad farewell

Like a queen standing in her castle, nobly robed

In betrayal, the heavy cloak I can never cast off.

Deceit is my meat and drink, its claggy taste

Sits in my throat like an impossible poison

I can never fully purge as I toast the company

Who have no clue that all I can taste is lies

Swilling in my mouth like a long deep kiss.

[Extra script lines as follows:]

The offer of blood is the oldest gift

I offer it up, I offer it up

In the failure of law, rightness is restored,

That is only fair.

The slow inexorable ceremony of natural justice always goes the same way.

First, the procession. Then, the sacrifice. Then the shadow walk.

The offer made, the gods collect

And in return they grand the chance to survive.

Not to succeed,

Just to continue struggling,

Brute survival in the cold hard world.

I pay the blood tax to survive,

Not to be destroyed.

Just survive,

Not to suffer.

All images and text (c) Bidisha

Top Girls by Caryl Churchill

This is an extended version of an essay commissioned by the British Library this year.

Caryl Churchill’s play Top Girls premiered in 1982 at The Royal Court and instantly became a classic with its sly reflection of the nascent Reagan-Thatcher era of yuppie individualism, its coruscating take on class, sex and inequality and its interrogation of the hollowness of the capitalist dream and the hidden costs of women’s historical renown, personal ambition and financial success.  

The play starts on a spectacular note, with a fantasy dinner party hosted by Marlene, one character who is a constant throughout the play. Marlene is an executive at the Top Girls recruitment agency, and to celebrate her success she has assembled a group of historical women whom she clearly considers to be her symbolic peers. The setting is a restaurant – a public place, formerly the preserve of male executives, in which Marlene can order stereotypically masculine far like rare steak, wine and brandy, commanding the waitress (who does not speak) to bring extra rounds of food and drink as the party progresses. Here, early on, we see the incisiveness of Churchill’s take on sex and class: Marlene’s success and apparent liberation has ‘enabled’ her to behave towards the anonymous and silent female serving staff exactly as a pompous and dominating man.  The host of the party, Marlene, remains largely private, unknowable, self-controlled and in control – a driven, ambitious 20^th century self-creation – until the raw final scene of the play.

At the opening dinner part, as the women get to know each other, tell their life-stories, preen and bond. Marlene’s guests have all achieved a certain iconic status in history or myth and are all, on the surface of it, from radically different times and cultures: the 19^th century Scottish world traveller, Isabella Bird; Lady Nijo, a13^th century Japanese courtesan who was forced to become a nun after losing her master’s favour and who then travelled all over Japan; and the 9^th century Roman Pope, Joan, who disguised herself as a man and attained the highest ecclesiastical rank in the Empire.

There are also two very different fictional characters, both brought to life by male writers and artists: Griselda, the archetypal medieval good wife, written about approvingly by Chaucer, Boccaccio and Petrarch, whose husband Walter subjects her to all kinds of tests including forced marriage, banishment and separation from her children; and Dull Gret, a heroic folk figure painted by the Flemish artist Breughel as a woman who leads other peasant women to the mouth of hell to fight demons (symbolically resisting the constant wars and invasions in 16^th century Holland) armed with pots and pans from the home.

It becomes immediately clear that the obstacles, oppressions and challenges all the women have encountered are remarkably similar despite their differences of language, culture, country and century. So too is their range of response: some of the women, like Pope Joan and Isabella Bird, are determined from the outset to break beyond the limitations and expectations of sex and gender; others, like Lady Nijo and Griselda work unquestioningly within the rules of their societies; others, like Dull Gret, fight for survival in the absence of all other options. Both Lady Nijo, from Imperial Japan, and Griselda, from feudal Europe, have internalised their submissiveness to male power. They make excuses for the men who abuse them and believe what they are told: that women need protection and definition by men and are nothing without them. All of the women, except Isabella (whose story is not coincidentally the happiest, most uncomplicated and laudatory), are mothers whose children have been given up or taken away from them or whose babies have died. All the women suffer because of the same things: structural inequality caused by the lack of education and rewarding employment for women; male violence; the expectation of conformity to femininity (even Marlene says that she doesn’t wear trousers in the office); female disempowerment and the absence of women’s right to shape their own destiny and that of their children.

Yet despite these similarities, each woman has a different personality and interprets her life’s events and her own cultural context differently. For Isabella Bird, travel is a chosen escape, a source of inspiration and adventure; for Lady Nijo, it is the result of exile, banishment from the court and emotional desolation. Restless Isabella never felt at home in Scotland, even as a privileged and independent lady doing good works in society, while Lady Nijo felt settled at the Imperial court, enjoying her status and perks even though she was nothing more than men’s sexual plaything. Lady Nijo (and Griselda) put their faith in male father-husband-protectors and patriarchal systems, which ultimately used, humiliated and betrayed them, while Isabella answered to no-one but herself and consequently did better, assisted by her class privileges. Isabella regards ladies’ dressing-up as daft and time-wasting while Lady Nijo adores beauty and aesthetics and Griselda allows herself to be dressed in finery as her husband’s trophy.

This first scene also introduces the constant theme of women’s dress as carrying messages about class or propriety or purpose; the judgement of women by appearances; women’s own preoccupation with the way they come across and women’s attempts to influence others’ perception of them through their choice of clothing. In the 1980s scenes later in the play, clothing is a way for women to advance, to remake themselves, to subtly control their image or to allay others’ suspicions.

At the same time there are interesting echoes across the class divide: the highly educated and erudite Pope Joan is self-possessed, ambitious and tough, and so is Gret, an unlettered and mainly monosyllabic peasant woman. Neither of the two resorts to feminine wiles and fake delicacy or identifies with the performative fragility and modesty of Lady Nijo and Griselda. As Joan says, impatient with Lady Nijo’s tears, “I didn’t live a woman’s life. I don’t understand it.” The working-class character, Gret, does not have the luxury of dressing, beauty or courtly ennui, nor does she glory in service to others, marital or sexual masochism, fashion and social duty the way the privileged characters of Griselda and Lady Nijo do.

Despite not living a woman’s life, Joan is still punished – indeed, brutally murdered – by men for having stepped beyond and defied what is expected of her as a woman. When she gives birth during a Papal procession and it is discovered by her colleagues that she has attained her role by dressing as a man, she is dragged into a sidestreet and stoned to death by them. She is murdered by her peers not just for her deception but for defiling the male role of Pope with her very femaleness. Her determination to go beyond sex barriers, to dedicate her life to study, to be active instead of reactive, ambitious instead of dutiful, intellectual instead of defined by her biology, to be patriarchally powerful instead of patriarchally subjugated, to achieve in the outer world, are undercut by nothing more than her biology – and male judgement.  Women want more than mere survival and endurance; but Joan, the one who attempts to climb the highest, is brought down in the most brutal way. Her story horrifies the other guests at the dinner party and unites them in sympathy.

By bitterly perverse contrast, the apparently infantile, dependent, not very bright and grateful-for-anything-that-is-done-to-her Griselda lives out her years as a cherished wife and mother despite everything her husband subjects her to. Yet even female obedience doesn’t guarantee protection: Lady Nijo is cherished in the Imperial court until she falls out of favour with her masters; given that her father is also dead by then, she loses all status and has no home.

As the party progresses and becomes more raucous, alcohol unlocks the women’s rightful pride, valour, hilarity and relish. The ‘ladies’ stop behaving in a ladylike way and begin to speak more frankly. Despite Isabella insisting on her gendered conventionality when sober (“I always travelled as a lady and I repudiated strongly any suggestion…that I was other than feminine”) she suddenly declares “I cannot and will not live the life of a lady” and her most joyful memory is of herself, liberated to wear “full blue trousers and great brass spurs” abroad at seventy. Lady Nijo is obsessed with courtly protocol and fine gradations of class privilege within a suffocating system, yet she schemes with the other courtesans to fight back against male violence within the court and crows, “We beat him with a stick!”  Even timid Griselda admits, “I do think – I do wonder – it would have been nicer if Walter hadn’t had to [test me],” despite having been an apologist for his cruelty throughout.

All the women’s potential is compromised by society, across five different countries and eleven centuries (9^th century Italy to 20^th century England). Instead of finding any fulfilment or outlet, they have to strategise simply to survive; and even then, they don’t always survive. Gret, Joan and Lady Nijo are all subject to overt male violence; Lady Nijo and Griselda are also caught up in wider systems of emotional control and domination, as well as in Lady Nijo’s case sexual exploitation. Historically, the women who adopt patterns of stereotypically male dynamism, male authority, male mannerism and dress and male occupation of space achieve the most. Those who stay clear of personal entanglement (Marlene) or have emotionally undemanding lovers (Marlene, Joan) achieve the most and enjoy themselves the most, and only the 20^th century character, Marlene, is openly critical of macho power systems and of specific men.

At the end of the dinner party, after they commiserate with each other and drown their sorrows, the women celebrate their survival and their adventures. They find each other inspiring, particularly when talking about fighting back. Travelling is a “joy” for the privileged Isabella – as it is for the characters in the 1980s-set scenes which follow, offering novelty, experience and opportunity – the closing line of the first scene is a great cry of relish from her: “how marvellous while it lasted”.

But the question of class is still disturbing and unresolved. Many of the historical characters have centre-stage, sensational stories and have had inspiring adventures. Gret, on the other hand, gains victory and release in fighting the symbolic devils assailing her homeland, but derives no sense of lasting liberation from her actions: “I’d had enough, I was mad, I hate the bastards.” Her actions are undertaken out of desperation, not valour; of being down to her last basic resources, not reaching for victory: “You just keep running on and fighting.” Her abrasive manner and rough attitude – like Marlene’s sister Joyce centuries later – come from dogged survival, from fighting because she is at the bottom of the social ladder and has nothing left to lose.

The early scenes of the play are set Marlene’s favoured territory: the restaurant and the employment agency. Both are public-facing, stage-like, calculatedly designed places where she and other women can impress and exercise power over each other.

The characters we see later in their home settings, like Marlene’s sister Joyce’s garden and kitchen, are trapped, bickering, dreaming, ripping each other apart in their frustration and unhappiness.

Immediately following the grand spectacle of the dinner party, Act 1 Scene 2 is set in the garden of Marlene’s sister Joyce’s house in an anonymous, provincial Northern town with no prospects. Joyce’s daughter Angie is with her friend Kit and is alternately dominating her and trying to impress her. Angie is poor, unhappy, frustrated and desperately claustrophobic, nakedly (yet pathetically) trying to be shocking: “I’m going to kill my mother and you’re going to watch.” The characters’ unhappiness expresses itself in suicidal, homicidal and nihilistic imaginings. Angie is obsessed with war, in between anxiously asking her much younger friend, “Do you like me?”

The young girls have absorbed the language of men’s hatred of women and use it on each other, calling each other “slag”, “silly cunt” and “stupid fucking cow”; Joyce calls Angie, her own daughter, a “fucking rotten little cunt… you make me sick”. Here, the female characters’ world is one of  misery, entrapment and fury, not restaurants or inspirational heroes.

Joyce is a tragic character whose frustration and despair lead her to insult and bully her daughter, yet her rage conceals an intelligence, even a kindness, which have nowhere to go. Joyce’s ex-husband bullied her, Joyce bullies her daughter Angie, Angie bullies her much younger friend Kit. Yet Joyce says perceptively of Angie, behind her back, “She’s one of those girls might never leave home…she’s not simple…she’s clever in her own way…she’s always kind to little children.” Both Joyce and Angie have innate good qualities which have been soured by lack of opportunity.

The central section of Top Girls shows the agency’s employees interviewing prospective clients. These perceptive, almost wince-inducingly exact scenes reveal that the women who have gained a position in the ‘new’ office culture of the 1980s have inherited a specific form of sexist power that cleaves narrowly to the macho values and shallow, misogynist judgements that went before. Sexist judgements about women’s marital status, motherhood, appearance and age have been absorbed by and are replicated by the new generation of women who are succeeding in a man’s world by re-enacting men’s prejudices.  In the real, hard world of the 1980s the women characters are not free to enjoy spectacularly imagined lives of rebellion and iconic achievement or travel. Life is still a daily grind for survival, in which grand ambitions are subjected to petty reasoning, rigid hierarchies and unjust expectations.

In one of the interview scenes we encounter Janine, who is caught between ambition, tradition, shyness, romanticism and female duty. She states, “I wanted to go to work” and, “I want a change…I do want prospects. I want more money….I’d like to travel.” At the same time she apologises for herself and talks herself down: “I expect it’s silly.” But she is apologising for wanting what many men want: to be married but “now and then” leave London to travel for work and get away from family life. 

Just as it was for the historical characters, there is a deep ambivalence about babies and motherhood in the 1980s scenes. There is an unspoken assumption in all the interview scenes that motherhood kills a woman’s career and that women must leave work when they have babies. But, throughout the play, there is also a contemptuous assumption that men, even if they are brutes who hold all the power (all the bosses Top Girls recruits for are male), are themselves babies: “you won’t have to nurse him along” says one Top Girls employee to an interviewee about a prospective boss.

Another candidate, Louise, is told that her age – only 46 – is “a handicap” and that she should hope that “experience does count for something”. She is not encouraged to attempt to earn more than she already does; she should be happy with her station and not overreach herself. Both she and Janine are subtly pressured over their looks and clothing; the capitalist ‘modern’ world is not a meritocracy after all but a game in which women must look and act the part, strategise as objects in order to win.

Louise finds that even success as a working woman doesn’t offer a sense of balance, joy and stability in life. Capitalist attainment is hollow and not worthwhile: “I’ve given my life really”, “If you are committed to your work you don’t move in many other circles”. Despite being in the workplace and having previously done well, she is encountering the glass ceiling in corporate culture as young men she trained are promoted above her. She is the first of a generation of women feeling the anger of discrimination and finding that they have few options either to express that anger or to gain credit, let alone justice, leading to empty statements like “they will notice me when I go, they will be sorry.” In a cruel, rigged system where there is always more talent than there are jobs, they will not notice her and they will not be sorry.

Top Girls has much to say about women’s own internalisation of womanhatred – which Louise betrays when she refers casually to the typing pool at her company as “the girls”. The play also tracks fine sociological differences in age and class: in her mid-40s, Louise is not one of the new yuppie generation and is less entitled than them. The yuppies are, as she correctly hints, a pleasingly visual marketable brand as well as a psychological type: “new, kind of attractive, well-dressed”, they are confident enough to “take themselves for granted” without feeling insecure; they expect to be successful.

The sexism and ageism Louise is encountering in office culture has no resolution. She feels “it’s now or never” and the answer seems to be never; there will not be a triumphant resolution of success in the final act of Louise’s story. The Top Girls staff tell her she’ll be competing against younger men in any new job she goes for, and push her towards cosmetics companies and “fields that are easier for a woman”, just as they pushed the previous candidate, Janine, towards soft furnishings and knitwear companies, stereotypically female items in traditional retail companies rather than the financial services or computing companies of the future.

Despite Marlene’s personal glamour, life in the Top Girls agency is not spectacular and iconic, like the women Marlene invited to her fantasy dinner party. Act 2 Scene 3 is a conversation between Nell and Win, two of the employees at Top Girls. Win embodies the same message that runs throughout the play: the characters who are the worst off and the most humiliated are men’s women, women who grovel to men or place themselves under men’s power. Win is a mistress who romanticises her lover despite her humiliation (such as having to lie down in his car so as not to be seen by his neighbours when he instals her in his marital home for a dirty weekend). She says defensively “it was funny”, but this rings hollow. Her lover teaches her the names of flowers, pointing out that flowers are often named after women: pretty objects with a limited shelf life, to be named by men.

Nell is the opposite type, similar to Marlene, ambitious – “I’ve never been a staying put lady” – and contemptuous of Win’s deluded romanticism. For both of them, however, the office culture of the early 1980s hardly offers a lot of “room upward”; there is “nothing going on here”. Despite the fact that they are succeeding as women in this environment, the cruelty of the capitalist grind, class divisions, professional competition and internalised misogyny suffuse their outlook and conversation. The world they operate in may be all-female but it is still harshly judgemental. Nell and Win see themselves as “tough birds” and Marlene as a “smashing bird” and think the other women in the office are “top ladies” while their young clients are mere “little girls” over whom they wield some power. Yet they themselves are locked into a frustrating hierarchy in which “the top executive doesn’t come in as early as the poor working girl” – in the broader scheme of things they are indeed poor working girls, not the tough birds they see themselves as.

The Top Girls staff are not exempt from the injustices their clients experience. The vision of seamless success and a rise to the top is not something they themselves have experienced; it is a false image, a fantasy of success, which they are selling. Win is actually overqualified, we discover late in the play – she has a science degree and went into medical research. She shares Marlene’s contempt for men and, unlike the generations of women at the dinner party who did not criticise men or patriarchy directly, says men are “bullshitters” who “make out jobs are harder than they are.” Yet despite her tough exterior, like all the women in the play she is restless and struggling to find her place in the world.

Marlene’s past and future come together when her niece Angie comes to visit her at Top Girls. Angie is everything Marlene has fled; this flight involves a wilful rejection of her heritage, so much so that Marlene doesn’t recognise Angie at first and speaks contemptuously of her own sister Joyce who is the “same as ever”. The class difference between aunt and niece is already pronounced: Marlene assumes Angie came up on the train (it was actually the bus, which is cheaper) while her casual offer of  a day of lunch, shopping and sightseeing is seen by Angie as the height of indulgence. Angie idolises Marlene, but this appreciation is not reciprocated. Marlene’s assessment of Angie is correct but stingingly cruel: behind the young girl’s back, she says Angie is “a bit thick”, destined to work in a supermarket and is “not going to make it”.  For Marlene, Angie is tainted with failure and with her own shameful and deprived origins. Marlene’s world is one of hardcore Darwinian survival of the fittest, but, as the play makes clear, there is no natural justice to this fight. Disadvantage and prejudice bedevil the les fortunate characters, while the gains of success are both tawdry and impermanent.

Throughout the play it is the women who are intimately subject to men who suffer the most. The suffering has an agonised, degrading, colluding quality as the women seek to justify their abusers’ actions. Consider the harsh, somewhat cruel characterisation of Mrs Kidd – the only woman in the play who name is her man’s surname, and who has no first name – the wife of Top Girls employee Howard. Like the medieval Griselda she is submissive and apologetic, her world is small and defined by the parameters set by her husband: “I know office work isn’t like housework, which is all interruptions.” She is both pitiful and risible, and is there as an apologist and little defender of her husband, whose job Marlene has been offered. Just like Griselda she over-identifies with her man’s success and suffering, has no feelings or ideas of her own and at once babies and lionises him (“he hasn’t slept…I haven’t slept”, “He’s very proud”, “he’s very hurt”, “He’s in a state of shock”). She is in a terrible predicament: her years of submissiveness towards Howard does not result in him prizing and cherishing her. Instead, she is his emotional punchbag: “it’s me that bears the brunt”. Underlying all this is the threat of male violence, as ever. Mrs Kidd warns, slyly, “You’re going to have to be very careful how you handle him.” Marlene refuses to take on the role of housekeeper to a man’s finer feelings  – “he really is a shit” – and gives Mrs Kidd short shrift. Sad as Mrs Kidd’s plight is, she too, like so many of the 1980s women in the play, resorts to crude woman-hating under pressure, calling Marlene a “ballbreaker” who is “miserable and lonely” and “not natural”. She parrots her husband’s hatred and fear of women in the workplace, along with the Classical and medieval prejudice that ambitious women are monstrous in some way.

The play has been moving steadily backwards in time, providing a sort of origins story for Marlene, who gives little of herself away in speech. At the end of the play as we watch it – but in fact about a year or so before the dinner party that opens the play - Marlene goes back to her hometown to visit her sister Joyce and niece Angie, bringing stereotypically feminine gifts of a dress and perfume. While the ambitious female clients at Top Girls are anxious about how to use such things as tools to navigate corporate capitalism, to Angie they are prized in themselves, giving an all-too-rare taste of luxury, beauty and pleasure.  Angie’s behaviour in this scene is loving, childishly desperate for approval; Marlene is like a fairy godmothers whose visit is “better than Christmas”. Joyce is resentful of the gifts, telling Angie she’s “a big lump”, stupid and a liar. When Angie wants to try on the dress Joyce says “we don’t want a strip show … you better take it off, you’ll get dirty”, although we know from earlier in the play that Angie will, heart-wrenchingly, continue to wear the dress long after she’s outgrown it.

Marlene’s sister Joyce’s unhappiness and spikiness are painful to witness. A gulf has opened up between the sisters since Marlene left: “I don’t know what you’re like, do I?” says Marlene. Just as in the first scene of Top Girls, alcohol unlocks the truth of women’s lives as Joyce and Marlene have it out long into the night and the early themes are reprised: patriarchal control and domination; gendered expectation and stereotypes; class; motherhood and babies; entrapment and flight; male violence.

At first, Marlene is self-possessed, proud of her success, telling her sister with spiteful faux-modesty, “I’m not clever, just pushy” – the implication being that Joyce’s life is as it is because of a lack of pushiness. Marlene utters the ultimate capitalist, individualist exhortation: “If you’d wanted to you’d have done it.” Like Isabella Bird, Marlene sees herself as a great adventurer going “up up up” and “on on into the sunset”; unlike her sister, “I need adventures more”.

The devastating last pages of Top Girls reveal the injustice, cruelty and ruthlessness behind Marlene’s mantra. We learn that Joyce’s husband was resentful, controlling of her attempts to better herself through evening classes, a bad father and unfaithful. Joyce’s life is one of constant work, both physical and emotional. The physical work is underpaid and exhausting – she has four cleaning jobs. The emotional work of visiting their father’s grave and visits their mother once a week is unpaid.  

It becomes clear that Marlene’s success has come at Joyce’s expense. First – a nasty surprise but half-expected – is the revelation that Angie is actually Marlene’s daughter, not Joyce’s. Additionally, we learn that Joyce had also been pregnant but lost her baby due to the stress of caring for Angie. The myth Marlene has been creating around her own drive and vision and self-knowledge and bravery and success is not true. It was Marlene, not Joyce, who got pregnant at seventeen; Marlene, not Joyce, who has been cowardly in avoiding facing their mother’s old age or her daughter’s needs.

We learn that Joyce and Marlene’s father was a manual labourer, wifebeater and alcoholic and their mother had a “fucking awful life…fucking waste.” Marlene’s drive goes beyond mere career goals and is fuelled by a vehement trauma (“I still have dreams”, she says – meaning nightmares) and repulsion, an absolute rejection and horror of domestic life, of being turned into “the little woman” as her sister and mother were; she says she will “never let that happen to me.” It is this understandable fear, hatred and anger, not just pushiness, which have propelled her away from her origins and towards an existence in which she chooses life, life doesn’t just happen to her. She is repelled by all weakness, including her own, and calls Joyce’s legitimate grievances “whining”. She loathes where she comes from culturally and also the way it makes her feel emotionally. Marlene hates “beer guts  and football vomit and saucy tits” – the worst clichés of northern working class life – “I hate the working class,” says, characterising them as lazy and stupid, although it is obvious that Joyce works far harder than she does. Instead, she says, “I believe in the individual”- in time, determination, monetarism, thinking for oneself.

In a rather nasty way the play actually supports the opinion of its most misogynistic characters: that women who succeed are somehow monstrous, cold, unnatural, grotesquely selfish, pathological and unmotherly. Marlene is disgusted by Joyce’s overt suffering and misery and in denial about the domestic mess she left behind. She calls Joyce’s speculation about babies mere “gynaecology” and “messy talk about blood” as if she has absorbed some Pope Joan-era medieval misogyny regarding the unique rankness and corruption of the female body.

Nonetheless, Top Girls shows that one woman’s success does not elevate the fate of all women; advancement, money and status in the office do not make the world fairer or change the system, lessen women’s emotional, sexual and practical exploitation or ease the demands made on them and the dilemmas they are in. “Nothing’s changed for most people, has it?” says Joyce – and we are reminded that these two sisters are probably equal in intelligence. Joyce correctly says, “How could I have left?” and although Marlene is reduced to tears in this scene, she recovers quickly – because in a capitalist framework, she still ultimately has more power on her side, she has achieved more, she is in a stronger position, she has ‘won’ and Joyce has ‘lost’.

The play has moved from the lavish, the celebratory and the international to the tawdry, the recriminatory, the doggedly local. As Top Girls ends, the battle lines are drawn – and they are lines of class, not just sex; culture, not just economics. Marlene and Joyce are emotionally not sisters, not friends and not ideological allies. The play doesn’t debunk the notion of political sisterhood but shows how sisterhood is complicated by class, by women’s absorption and replication of men’s misogyny, by female masochism and also – most powerfully than anything else – by ingrained injustice, exploitation and lack of opportunity.  Marlene’s famous line, “I think the eighties are going to be stupendous”, which always gets a dark laugh, is less affecting now than the lines that follow. Joyce asks, “Who for?” and Marlene says blithely, “For me”. Joyce becomes capitalism’s unseen, uncelebrated collateral damage: still poor despite doing four jobs, with no time to study; bringing up her niece in a town without a future. For Joyce and Angie, there will be no Marlene-like rise into a new age of being “free in a free world.” Quite the opposite: when Angie is older, says Joyce presciently, “her children will say what a wasted life she had.”

Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier

Jamaica Inn was written in 1935 but set in the very early 19th century in Cornwall, between Bodmin and Launceston. The novel is at once a tribute to the impressive local landscape and an atavistic psychodrama steeped in murder, paranoia and sexual threat. The most intense action occurs between the closing year’s shortest day – or, more pertinently, its longest night – and the New Year, with the majority of scenes happening in darkness.

Jamaica Inn’s protagonist Mary Yellan has left her lifelong home, a farm in Helford, following the death of her mother. The landscape of her childhood, where she capably did “the work of a man” after the death of her father when she was six, is presented in softened, heightened terms as a Paradise of “shining waters”, “green hills” and “gentle rain.” Mary feels as though she’s been cast out of Eden and there is a sense of irrevocability and mutual rejection in her departure: “her back turned for ever.” 

It is clear to the reader, although not to the grief-stricken Mary, that the idealisation of Helford is misplaced; she let go of the farm not because of a fated decline that “there was no name for” but because of rising prices, falling stock and sickness among the animals. Nonetheless, she has lost everything: her mother (to whom she was a proxy husband for seventeen years), her home, her work and livelihood, her independence and her social position. 

Despite the bereavement which has brought her to Jamaica Inn, Mary’s inner nature is fundamentally heroic and unafraid. She enjoys a physical prowess which renders her “ alive in every nerve” and is described as “gallant” not just by the author but even her enemies within the novel. Mary carries with her an almost patriarchal pride in her family’s achievements: “the name of Yellan was known and respected in the town.” She says blithely, early on, “I’ve never known anything but this life by the river, and I don’t want to.” Her arrival at the isolated Jamaica Inn, which lies “murky dim in the darkness” and is owned by her Aunt Patience and Patience’s husband Joss Merlyn, is the next stage in her journey from heaven to hell, childhood to adulthood, happy ignorance to tortured knowledge. 

Du Maurier excels at stewing an atmosphere of pagan ritualism, fated Classical tragedy, fairytale-like mystery, mythic inevitability and Hollywood horror. The inn is described with Gothic relish as being steeped in suffering and death. Zombie-like, it is “like a live thing” but has a “cold, dead atmosphere”, it is “a house of the dead” where even the clock ticks “like a dying man who cannot catch his breath”. The house “reeked of evil” and is “rotten, rotten” “like a tomb” where “the very walls…smelt of guilt and deceit”. Outside, the wind shudders “like a man in pain”, the wooden sign looks like a hanging man and creaks “like an animal in pain”. The deathly atmosphere is so strong that it affects even newcomers: Mary sleeps “like a dead thing” on her first night at Jamaica Inn.

These intimations of pain and death – which are also concrete clues as to what the denizens of the inn have been doing – extend to and are fed by the surrounding moors. While Helford represented physical and emotional comfort, Mary has arrived at a “county of stones…and stunted broom”, “marshland and granite”, where the wind sounds like “a sob and a cry” and arises “from the stones themselves”, as though the very land is tormented and weeping. The landscape works against its inhabitants, with its perilous marshes, blinding fogs and rain that is “lashing, pitiless” rather than gentle, as in Helford. This is “alien” territory for Mary emotionally, morally and sociologically. The wind is described as “a chorus from the dead” and this is both metaphorically and literally true: there are murdered bodies buried on the moor and secrets buried in the locals’ souls, always pushing to come to light. 

It is at Jamaica Inn that Mary learns fear for the first time. Having never thought about how her sex makes her vulnerable, she is warned that it’s “no place for a girl”. Penniless and dependent, she goes from being a respected member of a village community to being an isolated, powerless outcast subject to constant terrorisation by local men. The strongest principle keeping her at the inn is a feeling of protectiveness over her aunt, once she has witnessed Uncle Joss’s brutish behaviour: “Mary would rather lie herself into hell than let her aunt suffer”. 

Mary’s dealings with Uncle Joss are charged with his violence and her fear and loathing, yet edged with a half-acknowledged mutual desire. This ambivalence is expressed through du Maurier’s dazzled description of him. Like the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, who consumes grown women and tempts young girls, he is powerful yet cunning, “lean and hungry”, “a beast that walked by night”. A wolf’s smile and his are said to be “one and the same”. 

Uncle Joss’s volatility is tied to the secrets he is repressing. He is the kingpin of a network of “wreckers” who lure ships off-course using a “false light”, cause them to be smashed against the coastal rocks, murder any survivors and steal the cargo. Joss is clever enough to organise the network and cold-blooded enough to murder with his bare hands, store the bodies and loot at the inn and hold his nerve despite the suspicion of the local squire. After murdering a crony who threatens to expose him, the next day he “behaved like a perfectly sober normal man”. 

The abuses which Mary witnesses do not seem credible “in the cold light of day” and she is cowed by the (correct) certainty that she will not be believed. She learns that if you are a woman without any power, there is no particular link between being virtuous, knowing the truth, bringing it to light, being believed and gaining justice, a realisation which leads to an overwhelming loss of faith in “humanity… God… myself”. She fantasises about the physical freedom she would have as a man, when she would be able to challenge and fight her uncle in open combat, “and then away on a horse….with Aunt Patience riding pillion.” Instead, as a woman, she has “no weapons” and is nothing more than “a petticoat and a shawl.” Jamaica Inn rots away at her, just as it has done to Aunt Patience, and the two women now “shared a secret that must never be spoken.” 

Mary’s loss of religious faith has, in fact, been a while coming. As her mother was dying, Mary prayed for her health, noting bitterly that “for answer came sickness, and poverty, and death”. As a result, she thinks bleakly, “she would offer no prayer to God this Christmas.” The bitterness is compounded by Mary finding herself in an environment which du Maurier repeatedly describes as being abandoned by God, absent of God or ruled either by an archaic force or by the Devil himself. Her final collapse of faith occurs after a shipwreck she witnesses on Christmas Eve, when decent people are indoors celebrating Christ’s birth. The events of that night are not just immoral and illegal but because of their timing have an occult sacrilegious dimension, of mocking and profaning God. 

The repressed truth about Joss and his friends’ activities is tormentingly present yet strenuously denied. “I can’t even admit them to myself,” says Aunt Patience. Mary is warned that her hair “would go grey” if she knew the details. And yet it’s the only thing the locals can talk about. The carriage driver who takes Mary to the inn on the first night says “queer tales” give the Inn a “bad name” and nobody speaks up because “they’re afraid.” The inn reeks of death because it is literally used to store dead bodies, and also because it has soaked up the existential pain of the murderers who frequent it. There’s a locked and barred room downstairs, used for bodies and contraband: the perfect both-literal-and-symbolic du Maurier image of a secret which exists openly. 

Uncle Joss’s crimes cast a shadow on his own soul and he himself casts a shadow on others; his shadow is described as being suffocatingly huge, reaching up to the ceiling or across the floor. Later, du Maurier expands the imagery of shadows to include not just the idea of repressed secrets looming large but also the constant possibility of sexual assault: both the shadows on the inn wall and those on the surrounding moors are described as resembling stretching fingers. Joss is haunted by his crimes and in a drunken bout of self-pity describes the men and women he has killed appearing to him “like live things in the darkness” – once again, like zombies. 

Joss Merlyn is tellingly named, after the mythical Arthurian wizard, yet the spell he casts is of black rather than benign magic. When Mary first encounters him, he pulls her “roughly” inside, jeering at her, running his fingers over her face and threatening her implicitly and explicitly with rape and beating, as he does throughout the novel. Mary is repulsed yet can’t help noticing his “exquisite” hands and the “long dark lashes [that] swept his cheek”. Like all the men in the novel except the local squire, Joss manhandles Mary, twisting her arm behind her back “until she cried out in pain” and warning, “that’s like a foretaste of punishment, and you know what to expect.” She is forced into loathing silence and avoidance through the fear of male violence and the absence of escape, painfully aware that for the first time in her life, she is isolated and unprotected and all it will take for him to kill her is to press her neck “lightly with finger and thumb.” 

Uncle Joss’s abusiveness, and that of his friends, has reduced Mary’s once-vivacious Aunt Patience to a wreck. Joss’s domination is so extreme that there is no space to breathe, move or think when he is present. Aunt Patience and Mary are diminished and caught “like mice in a trap”, “like a bird in a net”. Du Maurier writes expertly about the subtle, long-term effects of domestic abuse. In Aunt Patience we see someone whose inner will and powers of concentration have been destroyed because of fear. She is “like whimpering dog trained into obedience” and later “like a shivering dog tethered to its master”. Patience is so afraid of Joss that she lives in “perpetual high anxiety and alert”, “trained by constant cruelty to implicit obedience”. The novel expertly describes the mental and physical consequences of years of intimidation: the victim is left “trailing like a ghost”, “haggard, desperate”, “nervy, shattered”, “strained, haunted”.

Male violence against women is not confined to the four walls of the inn but is normalised amongst Uncle Joss’s cronies. Joss tells Mary that she should be grateful he did not rape her the night she arrived or encourage his friends to gang rape her, and that the only reason they haven’t is out of deference to him, because they believe he has brought her to the inn to abuse for himself. When one of his accomplices does in fact attempt to rape Mary during the pivotal event of the novel – the shipwreck on the night between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, which Mary is forced to witness – du Maurier writes brilliantly about the aftermath of a sexual attack. She describes trauma, inner psychological destruction, defilement and dissociation: Mary feels that “the body lying on the bed did not belong to her” and “she had no wish to live.” She is triggered by flashbacks, shrinking back when Aunt Patience leans over her. When she sees the rapist again she cannot bear to look at him, feeling “nausea and disgust”. Later still, she can’t bring herself to describe what he has done, except to say he “attacked” her.

Uncle Joss and his cronies are described in the language of uncanny transformation and the supernatural. The “people of the moors” are “furtive” and “no more than shadows” as if they have bled out of the darkness itself and are not part of the human race but a separate category of sub-creature: “tramps, vagrants, poachers, thieves”, “shapeless and distorted”, slithering like “dregs” from “every hole and corner”, insubstantial and yet hellishly malign. They shift smuggled goods in the yard in “some weird pattern in a nightmare fantasy” as if hypnotised, moving “in a strange funeral procession” an image which is formed realistically by the deaths the men have brought about. When they torment a simple-minded local man, their “ugly, screaming laughter” resounds like “a tortured thing”. Even the men’s joy is a kind of pain; even when they are mirthful their sin makes itself known. 

Although the action within the novel is intensely compressed, spanning barely a month, it carries behind it the inexorable build-up, not of years, but of epochs. The moors are represented as untouched by Christian morality, which is relatively recent: they are “no godly place”. Rather, they are ruled by a much more ancient principle: “the old gods slept undisturbed” on them. While the activities of the men at the inn infect the land, the land’s “old magic” could be said to have influenced them in the first place. The events in the book are “only a repetition of what had been before, long ago in time”, things which are “best buried deep” and have their origin “in far-off buried and forgotten things.” In the absence of a Christian god, the moors are governed either by an arcane pantheon of ancient deities or, as many of the locals claim, by the Devil himself. The stones ridging the moors resemble pagan altars, while one landmark is described as bursting out of the earth like a devil’s hand. It is as though the malevolent landscape induces men to violence, absorbs the trauma of that violence (and subsequently contains buried “things of evil, rotting”) and then exudes it again, to induce a new generation to commit yet more violence. 

This epic context is in stark contrast to the brightly coloured, modestly-scaled living memory of Helford which Mary has left behind, where the doctor who treated her mother was the same man who delivered her of Mary twenty-three years before. The darkness described repeatedly in the novel is at once literal, moral (describing murder, corruption and death) and emotional (alluding to grief, guilt and depression). The trees, sky, heather, shrubs, hills, water and sky are all separately described as black at various times. 

The novel’s most impressive feat is to take the atmosphere of the uncanny, of midnight terrors and strangely transformed creatures, and concentrate them into a single character who is apparently integrated into the normal day-to-day social fabric of the locality. Francis Davey is the vicar at nearby Altarnun, a “freak of nature” albino with white skin, eyes and hair, who befriends Mary. As with the werewolf Uncle Joss, the shadowy night-creatures who are his cronies and the zombie-like figures of the murdered sailors who haunt them, du Maurier’s descriptions of Francis Davey evoke vampires, spectres and angels; strange pale visitors to whom normal rules of behaviour and appearance do not apply. Davey appears and disappears from the text, nothing more than “two white eyes and a voice in the darkness”, manifesting usually at night and usually on the road, a saviour materialising just when Mary needs him. His “transparent gaze” comes from eyes like “glass”, as if he is a transfigured character in a Hans Christian Andersen story. Like a fairytale trickster he admits multiple times that he “speaks in riddles”. Mary begins to see Davey’s home, which is “like something in an old tale”, in idealised terms. The vicar’s house comes to represent everything she left behind and longs for: “peace and shelter”, “logic and wisdom”. The house is “strangely peaceful”, “peaceful and still”, offering “security and a forgetting of trouble.”

Contrasting strongly with the earthy, talkative, highly physical characterisation of all the other figures in the novel, Davey seems immaterial. He is described as having been overseas, but his past is not fleshed out. His black coat and hat do not indicate anything about him, his speech is unnatural and he is the one character whom it is difficult for the reader to imagine. His presence leaves no trace on the vicarage house he inhabits – there are no religious pictures on the walls and no papers on the desk. Despite being a vicar, he never mentions God. He repeats “I am the vicar at Altarnun” and talks about himself in the third person, as if to convince himself of the truthfulness of the statement, but also to exult in his power and trust within the community. An altar nun is simply a nun who serves at the altar in a church service; but when linked to Davey it contains connotations of sacrifice and connects him not to the altar of the church but to the altar-like black stones on the moors.

Francis Davey is literally and symbolically the “false light” of the novel, leading Mary towards destruction. This duplicity is hinted at strongly: du Maurier describes his face as being “a white mask” four times. Even his smile brings images of pain rather than relief and joy, cutting into his face “like a wound”. Mary finds a caricature he has done, of himself preaching at the pulpit as a wolf – both a fairytale character and a predator, just like her uncle – with his parishioners drawn as sheep, obedient and easily deceived. Mary feels the picture to be not just cruel, arrogant and hypocritical but “blasphemous”, against God, in keeping with all the covert activities in the novel. It is then that she realises that Davey is one of ‘them’, the “people of the moors”, and not any kind of friend.

One of the ironies of the novel, and part of its critique of male abuse, is that despite his intellectual pretensions, Francis Davey is no less a violent, sexually harassing, abusive man than Joss Merlyn and the wreckers. He repeatedly touches Mary, putting his hand on her knee and his arm around her shoulders, urging her to change out of her wet clothes and sit naked under a blanket. His ‘friendliness’ is sexualised and patronising; he reminds Mary that he has heard confession many times and knows the “dreams of women” better than she does. Indeed, his abuse is all the more chilling because it is comes with an overlay of whispering intimacy and superiority, leaving her feeling “like a fool” and “just another woman who [has] cheapened herself.” He violently abducts Mary, gagging and tying her exactly as Joss’s wreckers did. Like a true sadist, he tells her that “your revolt and your disgust please me” and he is “pleased to have touched you on the raw”. Just like the wreckers, Davey threatens to “spoil” her “youth and beauty” and murder her, leaving her “face down.” That is not an empty threat, and Davey’s violence comes with its own traitorous, slinking sadism: he murders alone, by creeping up on people and stabbing them in the back. 

Du Maurier is highly skilled at blurring the line between realism and the ghastly fantastic and leaving open the possibility that Davey is indeed some creature who has existed since prehistory and embodies an ancient dynamic of sadism and sacrifice. He claims, like a vampire or a ghost, to “live in the past…in the beginning of time [when] old gods walked the hills”, describing himself as “a freak in time”. He says he has “looked into the past” and “understand[s] something of the night” as though he has lived for a hundred years and either doesn’t sleep or sleeps during the day and walks at night. He describes himself as “an outcast” who is excluded by, exempt from and indeed superior to everyday morality and religious “dogma”. In dismissing Jesus as “a mere puppet thing” he demonstrates his own sense of being both above God and older than the Common Era. He wishes to express a “grudge against the age” by returning to “an old pagan barbarism” so, spouting nonsense about the Druids, he abducts Mary and makes for the moors, where the harsh conditions quickly make his fantasies look ridiculous. His death – arms outflung on one of the altar-stones – exposes his delusion. In his mind, he has been martyred; in reality he is being shot for murder and abduction.

A final theme running through Jamaica Inn is one of love and sexual desire, which provoke feelings in Mary which are strong and unashamed, yet conflicted. She is painfully aware of the close similarities between Jem Merlyn, the horse-thief she desires, and his brother, her Uncle Joss, the man she hates, and she rues “the weakness of her flesh”. Jem is a thinner, younger, stronger, healthier version of Joss; both are demonstrative, earthy, blunt and talkative. Mary’s desire for and aversion against both men occasionally blur: when she first meets Jem he reminds her of Uncle Joss “throughout the conversation”; when she looks at her uncle the curve of his mouth is “painfully familiar”. Du Maurier is brilliant on the humiliating irrationality of physical desire, where incriminating impulses are “never acknowledged to the sturdy day.”

For Mary, love is more complicated than sexual desire and comes with greater risks. It renders women “fallen and degraded”, “weakened in mind and body”. It upsets her equilibrium, “devastates reason” and turns a woman into a “babbling child” whose “privacy of mind” is undermined. Mary fears the loss of self-mastery that comes with love. Being in love is not described in joyful terms but those of “pain”, “anguish”, “sickness”, of threat to her strong sense of self. She is perturbed by liking Joss Merlyn by instinct, despite her opinion of him: “He stood for everything she feared and hated and despised; but she knew she could love him.” She judges herself harshly, describing herself in the same terms that she has derisively used to describe Aunt Patience’s submissiveness with Joss: “She ranged herself on his side, she defended him…without reason and against her sane judgement.” 

A psychoanalytic reading of the novel might conclude that Mary has linked female love with women’s destruction after witnessing her own mother’s death. Her mother “belonged in body and mind” to her father and had no second husband in the 17 years after his death. Mary’s dying mother links her own demise explicitly to her husband’s death, saying that the doctor is being called “seventeen years too late.” Mary carries from this experience the belief that love is so strong it commits the women in her family for life, but leads to their actual or psychological death; she sees this too in the case of her mother’s sister, Aunt Patience. She vows that “I don’t want to love like a woman or feel like a woman” because women’s loving intensity and good faith lead to “pain…suffering…misery.” 

Throughout the novel, Mary rages at the way women are patronised, exploited, objectified and abused by men. But she also has an aversion to womanhood itself, describing women as “frail things made of straw”. Love is a rigged game in which masochistic women demean themselves to serve abusive men. Mary loathes what Uncle Joss has done to Aunt Patience, but there is also a great deal of distaste in the way Aunt Patience is viewed by Mary. Patience is “useless” in a crisis, acting like a “dummy”, compared repeatedly either with dogs or children and described as ineffective, repetitive, clingy and pathetic. Even though the perpetrators of all the abuse in the book are men, not women, Mary still manages to blame the victim, wondering, “Why were women such fools, so short-sighted and unwise?” 

Even the squire’s wife, a minor character who aids Mary with the gallant words, “I am willing to help you in any way you think best”, has her talk described as “prattle” three times. In her one other appearance in the novel the woman is the butt of a man’s joke, being duped by Jem into re-buying a horse he has stolen from her, her confidence made to look foolish by the trick he plays on her.

A helpful woman character is mocked, while a man’s open misogyny is not just excused but rewarded. Sexy Jem Merlyn says that women “make for trouble and confusion”, that “senseless or conscious, women are pretty much the same” and “there’s two things women ought to do by instinct, and cooking’s one of ‘em.” He is surprised, because he’s never thought about it, when Mary asks him to consider how much his mother must have suffered as the daughter, wife and mother of abusive men. Jem is playful, beautiful and wild and so, like all women who make excuses for men’s hatred of them, Mary “had not the heart to be angry with him.” When she visits his hovel for the first time, she immediately puts on an apron, scrubs the place, finds a tablecloth, makes lunch and serves it to him. 

Once the dramatic events of the book are exhausted, Mary Yellan is still trapped within a patriarchal society. The (male) authorities hustle her away with nice-talking, paternalistic kindness, as if she is “a nuisance and a delay, like every woman and every child after a tragedy.” If she were man, even if penniless she would be free to “go on a ship somewhere” or walk off to find her fortune, with a “heart and soul at liberty.” As a woman, she is once again in need of protection.

In the final lines of the novel Mary grapples with a dilemma: to return to Helford or go off with Jem. In keeping with the post-lapsarian theme of the book, a return to the innocence and security of the past is impossible. Yet so is going with Jem as an equal. “If you were a man I’d ask you to come with me,” he says in his typically direct way. But she is “only a woman” – and his teasing of Mary is ‘only’ a ‘playful’ version of Joss’s tormenting of Aunt Patience. 

Mary joins Jem, in a last-minute happy ending, with a fatalistic and martyr-like pledging of her entire self which reminds the reader chillingly of Aunt Patience’s complete possession by Uncle Joss: “I want to …I must; because now and for ever more this is where I belong to be.” They ride off together, turning their backs against the violence of Jaimaica Inn and Jem’s childhood. One wonders if they have been liberated from the past or if the locals’ repeated assertion that “there’s never been a Merlyn yet that came to any good” will be vindicated and the family’s and region’s dark history will repeat itself yet again.

This is a much extended version of my essay for the British Library's Discovering Literature: 20th Century archive. View the original here.