ABSTRACT
A writer deeply concerned with landscapes and built environments, Daphne du Maurier provides a unique template for theorizing the intersection of spatiality and the fantastic. This chapter claims that far from creating cozy domestic dramas, du Maurier wrote fiction in a fantastic mode to challenge the idealized comforts of home. Scholars on geography and spatiality (Bachelard, Moretti, and Tuan) and the fantastic (Todorov and García) are brought to an analysis of a wide array of du Maurier’s novels and short stories. Where Yi-Fu Tuan distinguishes the familiarity of place from the opportunity of unknown space, and argues that the general tendency of human experience is to turn the unknown of space into the known of place, the Todorovian fantastic in du Maurier’s tales reverses this to transform the known of place into the unknown of space, and disappoints the promise of space by offering no reprieve from the traumas of the home left behind. Her characters frequently assume they can find peace from their identity crises in an idealized home, be it a landscape or a house, but the desire for an autonomous self fails in its dependency on an idealized place. As this chapter shows, it is the fantastic element in the stories that thwarts the characters’ desires for a model place or promising space to start again.
