Today I’ll be talking about Daphne du Maurier’s novel The Scapegoat. I read this novel in early 2016 at a time when I was fascinated by stories reflecting on the idea of the double, stolen identities and the many aspects of one’s self. Of course, Daphne du Maurier isn’t the first to address these themes. Authors like James Hogg, Edgar Allan Poe, Théophile Gautier, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, Anthony Hope, Virginia Wolfe, and Josephine Tey have all dissected in their own way the question of multiple identities. But Daphne du Maurier is one of the first authors to employ the themes of the doppelganger and the realization of self by adopting a modern take on them.

So without further ado, let’s dive in.

[...]

In one of her letters to Oriel Malet, Daphne du Maurier wrote about The Scapegoat that she has tried to: “say too many things at once. How close hunger is to greed, how difficult to tell the difference, how hard not to be confused, how close one’s better nature to one’s worst, and finally, how the self must be stripped of everything, and give up everything, before it can understand love.” (Malet, Oriel. Daphne du Maurier: Letters from Menabilly Portrait of Friendship, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1993).

And she is right when she says that there are too many things that she addresses in The Scapegoat that is why today’s episode I will do my best to analyse the ideas of the double and the self that are at the core of du Maurier’s novel through the prism that Jean and John represent (but mostly John) so that we may be able to discover who is truly the scapegoat in the story.

Bibliography:

Auerbach, N. Daphne du Maurier: Haunted Heiress, University of Pennsylvania, 2002.
Bakerman, Janet S. And Then There Were Nine – More Women of Mystery, Popular Press, 1985.
Day, W. In the Circle of fear and Desires: A Study of Gothic Fiction, University of Illinois Press, 1987.
Du Maurier, D. The Scapegoat, Virago Modern Classics Book, 2012.
Freud, S. The Uncanny, 1919.
Horner, A. & Zisnik, S. Daphne du Maurier: Writing, Identity & the Gothic Imagination, United Kingdom, Palgrave MacMillan, 1998.
Kristeva, J. Strangers to Ourselves, Paris, Fayard, 1988.
Malet, O. Daphne du Maurier: Letters from Menabilly Portrait of Friendship, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1993.