'A little strain with servants': Gender, modernity and domesticity in Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca and Celia Fremlin's The Seven Chars of Chelsea

Literature and History

Volumn 12, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 36-50

  Giles, Judy ^a  

^a YORK ST JOHN UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950317165     PISSN: 03061973     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.7227/lh.12.2.3     Document Type: Article

References (34)

1. Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca (first published 1938: this edition, London, 1975), p. 176. All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition. Page numbers will follow in brackets.
2. M. Wings, 'Rebecca Redux: Tears on a Lesbian Pillow', in L. Gibbs (ed.), Daring to Dissent (London, 1994).
3. C. Fremlin, The Seven Chars of Chelsea (London, 1940). All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition. Page numbers will follow in brackets.
4. V. Brittain, Women's Work in Modern England (London, 1928);
5. E. Griffiths, Modern Marriage and Birth Control (London, 1935);
6. Northcliffe Press, Modern Woman, (London, circa 1930).
7. R. Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), p. 16.
8. See also M. Nava, 'Modernity's Disavowal: Women, the City and the Department Store', in M. Nava and A. O'Shea (eds), Modern Times: Reflections on a Century of English Modernity (London, 1996);
9. D. L. Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity, (Oxford, 2000);
10. E. Wilson, 'The Invisible Flâneur, New Left Review, 191 (1992), 90-110;
11. J. Wolff , 'The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity', Theory, Culture and Society, 2:3 (1985), 37-46.
12. See M. Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London, 1983);
13. T. Adorno and M. Horkheimer (1947/1979), Dialectic of Enlightenment (London, 1979);
14. W. Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (London, 1973);
15. G. Simmel, 'The metropolis and mental life', in his On Individuality and Social Forms, (Chicago, Ill., 1971)
16. Felski, Gender of Modernity, p. 10.
17. C. Dyhouse, Feminism and the Family in England 1880-1939 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 107-44.
18. Wings, 'Rebecca Redex', discusses the relationship between Mrs Danvers and Rebecca in terms of its lesbian coding but does not consider the class positions of the various characters. Roger Bromley reads Rebecca as a response to the financial and political crises of the 1930s but, perhaps surprisingly, has little to say about the way in which the figure of the servant housekeeper functions in the reproduction of the bourgeois hegemony in which he claims Rebecca is implicated, R. Bromley, 'The Gentry, Bourgeois Hegemony and Popular Fiction: Rebecca and Rogue Male', in P. Humm, P. Stigant and P. Widdowson (eds), Popular Fictions: Essays in Literature and History (London, 1986).
19. Alison Light addresses the ways in which Rebecca explores the pleasures and constraints of domesticity and femininity for women in the 1930s but does not examine the role of Mrs Danvers in the novel, A. Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars (London, 1991), pp. 156-207.
20. M. Forster, Daphne Du Maurier (London, 1994), pp. 27-9, 221-222.
21. F. Jack and P. Preston, The Woman's Book, (London, circa 1930), p. 332.
22. Forster Daphne Du Maurier, pp. 6-9.
23. Jack and Preston, Woman's Book, p. 36.
24. H. Lee, Virginia Woolf (London, 1997), pp. 253-6, p. 605.
25. V. Woolf, 'Phyllis and Rosamund', in S. Dick (ed.), The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf (London, 1985), p. 24.
26. Light, Forever England, pp. 113-55;
27. J. Struther, Mrs Miniver (London, 1989), p. 23.
28. Struther, Mrs Miniver, pp. 38-39.
29. C. Fremlin, War Factory, (London, 1987)
30. Interview with Angus Calder, 17 March 1980, University of Sussex, Mass Observation Archive.
31. Interview with Nick Stanley, 18 September 1981, University of Sussex, Mass Observation Archive.
32. M. Dickens, One Pair of Hands (London, 1939).
33. A. M. Ludovici, Woman: A Vindication (London, 1923), p. 231.
34. I. Clephane, Towards Sex Freedom (London, 1935), p. 212.