"A Game of Clue"

In an earlier post on “Eisenheim the Illusionist” by Steven Millhauser (March 25, 2015), I explored the theme of “all may not be as it seems.”  Appearances can be deceiving.  In “Eisenheim the Illusionist,” deception is shown to be at the heart, not only of the magician’s art, but of life itself.   

In Millhauser’s “A Game of Clue,” two brothers, their sister, and the older brother’s girlfriend sit around a table playing the famous board game.  What could be more mundane? But, “all may not be as it seems.”  While appearing to be simply playing the game, all four characters are caught up in their own private psychological dramas.  Jacob is angry about his failing career and rocky relationship; Marion is angry at Jacob for being late to the family gathering to celebrate their brother’s birthday and for bringing his girlfriend unannounced; David, turning 15 and preoccupied with sexual fantasies, secretly wants time alone with his big brother; and Susan simply wants to be accepted by Jacob’s family. 

Meanwhile, on the game board, as they move from room to room, the suspects play out their own private dramas.  Colonel Mustard and Miss Scarlet are engaged in a game of seduction; Professor Plum is getting lost in the secret passageways; Mr. Green is paralyzed with social anxiety; Mrs. White is mourning the death of her murdered lover; and Mrs. Peacock, while pretending to console her friend, is harboring a dark secret. 

The murder mystery is popular entertainment, in fiction and film, on stage and television, as well as in puzzles and games.  Perhaps our attraction to this genre is a displacement of our own anxiety about death.  Though there is no real life murder mystery in the lives of the players, the brothers and sister are worried about their father’s health, though they avoid discussing it.  After all “It’s David’s birthday.” It’s fine to play a murder mystery game, but heaven forbid that the shadow of actual death should spoil the occasion.

Similarly, while a murder has occurred just the night before, only Mrs. White seems to have it on her mind.  Colonel Mustard and Miss Scarlet are preoccupied with their own sexual game, just as David cannot stop thinking about women’s bodies as he plays the game of Clue; Professor Plum is lost in his own world of secret passageways, just as Jacob is faraway in his own private world of personal failure; Mr. Green is stuck in a social situation in which he seems unable to act, just as Susan is trying to navigate the social dynamics of Jacob’s unfamiliar family; and Mrs. Peacock is guarding her secret, just as Marion (and the rest) put on their public “game” faces while harboring their secret attractions, resentments, fears, frustrations, jealousies, hostilities, even homicidal thoughts.

Just as the secret passageways are not visible on the game board, so a dark, psychic labyrinth lurks beneath the surface of both the players and the suspects.

The whole story is a multi-layered representation of a Freudian drama in which characters disguise and deny their id-driven pursuits of pleasure and power, their ego-driven rationalizations, and their superego-driven repressions and avoidance.  The surface may appear innocent, but the depths reveal our conflicted, ambiguous, chaotic psychic realities.

At another level, Millhauser inserts periodic descriptions of the bare, physical facts of the room, the table, and the game board, as if to suggest how facts merely scratch the surface of truth. Just as appearances can be mere illusions that hide reality, so observable facts can be irrelevant to hidden truths. 

The story seems to move toward a redemptive conclusion, as the game moves closer to its end, the mystery is about to be solved, and the players join together in a mutual sharing of birthday wishes for David, but in the Freudian world there is no redemption.  The ongoing psychic conflict is never-ending, mysteries persist, and the sense of redemption is just another illusion, perhaps the greatest of all.

Rebecca

I recently watched the BBC Biopic on Daphne DuMarier, *Daphne* (2007), which dramatizes her bisexuality; her seemingly passionless marriage; her unrequited love for Ellen Doubleday, her publisher’s wife; and her affair with actress Gertrude Lawrence, as well as her writing career from the plagiarism trial over Rebecca to the writing of her short story “The Birds.” (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0963169/)

 

It had been a long time since I had read Rebecca (1938), so I watched the Hitchcock film to refresh my memory (1940).  According to Wikipedia, the film is fairly faithful to the novel with a couple of exceptions, namely changing the death of Rebecca from a murder by her husband to an accidental fall when he angrily confronts her and changing the character of Mrs. Danvers to make her younger, more mysterious, and more, well, lesbian. 

 

My own interpretation of the film version of Mrs. Danvers was that she was almost pathologically loyal to Rebecca and resentful of the second Mrs. de Winter, to the point of wanting to get rid of the second wife, almost like a child who hates her step-mother.   Mrs. Danvers is presented as unambiguously evil.  She always wears black and displays a malignant expression.  If you read her as lesbian, it could be because in those days the stereotypical lesbian was often a vampirish predator.

 

I don’t remember the novel well enough to speculate on whether this lesbian association could be found in the original text, but du Maurier may have seen her own same-sex attraction as evil, or at least, deviant.  In any case, her diaries reveal that she saw two sides to her own personality: the conventional wife and mother and the hidden male lover that energized her creativity. (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/935280.Myself_When_Young)

 

What if Rebecca were an expression of these two sides of her psyche?  Why is the narrator of the novel (the second Mrs. de Winter) unnamed?  Why is a crucial scene in the plot based on a costume that both Rebecca and the narrator wear?  Why does Rebecca herself have two sides to her personality: her public image as the beautiful, elegant wife of Maxim de Winter and her hidden side of sexual promiscuity, selfishness, cruelty, and deception?  Identity is clearly a prominent theme.

 

The unnamed second Mrs. de Winter is young, inexperienced, and naïve, compared to the sophisticated, worldly, and manipulative first wife, Rebecca.  The second wife could represent the conventional wife and mother identity that Daphne du Maurier presented in public, while Rebecca represents what du Maurier saw as her dark side of forbidden desire, sexual transgression, and duplicity.

 

So, why is the “good wife,” so to speak, unnamed?  Is that the author’s way of erasing her conventional self?  Is Rebecca’s death a way of symbolically killing off the dark side?  Does the novel express an identity conflict?  Does du Maurier unconsciously, if not consciously, reject both sides of her personality?

 

A Freudian or psychoanalytic critic would have no problem answering in the affirmative, and, I must say, I find that interpretation persuasive.

 

If Mrs. Danvers’ attachment to Rebecca, even after death, is read as lesbian, then her burning down of Manderly could perhaps represent the destructiveness that du Maurier saw, or feared, in her hidden desires.  Fire, of course, also represents the heat of passion.  Danvers’ own death in the conflagration may express du Maurier’s fear of her own self-destructive passion.  Is that why she retreated for the rest of her life into her conventional marriage after the death of Gertrude Lawrence?

 

On the other hand, her own words attribute her creativity to the “male lover” within.  Perhaps she was aware of the Freudian theory that repressed desire will manifest itself indirectly, often in creative work.  Perhaps it is safer to speculate, since speculation it is, that du Maurier was ambivalent about her same-sex desire, seeing it as potentially destructive if acted out and a source of energy if channeled into creative work.

 

I pose this interpretation tentatively and interrogatively because psychoanalytic criticism is often viewed skeptically as a form of practicing psychology without a license and pathologizing an author one has never met or interviewed.  Yet literature is a form of fantasy, and fantasy is often an expression of what has been sublimated, repressed, or denied.  I will leave it to my readers to conclude whether the parallels between du Maurier’s own autobiography and the novel are valid and significant.

 

Other ways of reading the novel include the gothic fear of irrationality and death and the age-old pattern of initiation, or coming-of-age, in which the “innocent” second wife comes to terms with the evil in the world, including, in her case, the knowledge that she loves, marries, and ultimately protects a murderer.  In either case, our narrator could be nameless the better to represent a universal human experience.  Neither of these readings is inconsistent with the other nor with the psychoanalytic interpretation.

"The Gift of the Magi"

In case you can’t find the significance in “The Gift of the Magi,” O. Henry is sure to tell you.

As if the title were not enough, he directly compares the young couple “who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house” to the wise men “who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger.”  And then he declares them “the wisest” of “all who give and receive gifts….They are the magi.”

Unwise because they sell their most valuable possessions, Della her hair and Jim his watch, so that she can buy him a watch chain and he can buy her a set of combs.  Yet wise because their love for each other is greater than their love for their “greatest treasures.”

The message is sentimental, beautiful, and hard to miss:  human love is by far the greatest gift, greater than any material gift, regardless of its value.

I have no quarrel with the message, but it might have been more effectively delivered if O. Henry had just told the story and spared us the commentary.

And forgive me if I find the buying and selling of hair somewhat discomforting, to say the least, but maybe that’s because of my daughter’s recent meeting with the rather strange proprietor of Leila’s Hair Museum in Kansas City (http://oisforobscure.blogspot.com/2011/10/leilas-hair-museum.html).  Beyond that, though, hair is traditionally associated with power and sexuality.  Think Samson and Rapunzel.  Is there a subliminal and, no doubt, wholly unintended message in Della giving up her power and taming her sexuality?  Does she turn herself into the traditional submissive, modest wife of the Victorian era, sacrificing her independence and assertiveness on the altar of love and marriage?  Or am I stretching it a bit?

And Jim, selling his father’s watch.  Would it be a stretch to see that act as symbolic of an Oedipal killing of the father?  Probably.  But, if you see it that way, then, perhaps his newly shorn Della is, Oedipally speaking, a substitute for his, no doubt, very proper Victorian mother.

Now we’ve really gone out on an interpretive limb.  You can be the judge of whether “The Gift of the Magi” is a sweet, simple, sentimental story of love and sacrifice or whether it masks a representation of darker depths hidden in the human psyche.  In any case, Merry Christmas! (Or, should I say "Bah, Humbug!"?)