Outside Within: Natural Environment and Social Place in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca

Abstract

Environmental criticism has held on to its emergent nature. Despite its relatively firm foothold in literary studies, it nevertheless continues to appear as novel, urgent, and slightly agonistic in its quest to unearth what we seem to have forgotten: namely, the role of environment in literature, which is of course just a reverberation of an ever more urgent call to heed the environment in general. In Lawrence Buell’s assessment, this emergent dimension of environmental criticism conceals ancient roots: “In one form or another the ‘idea of nature’ has been a dominant or at least residual concern for literary scholars and intellectual historians ever since these fields came into being.”1 Yet in spite of the undeniable importance of nature throughout the history of literature and arts, environmental criticism has also been, as Buell reminds us, a fairly marginalized discursive stance, often associated with insufficient theoretical sophistication, uncertainty of its disciplinary self-understanding, and looseness in pinpointing its object of inquiry. Insisting on an increasingly comparatist, interdisciplinary, and posmationalist orientation of ecocriticism, Buell suggests that it may best be understood as a “discourse coalition”: a dynamic and evolving set of positions, propositions, and disciplinary debates that seek to examine the question of environmental vision through its literary representations.2