Author(s)

Sioudina Mandibaye

Department of Letters and Anglophone Studies, University of N’Djamena, N’Djamena, Chad.

The basic core of family institution is marriage but this marital relationship is also seen as capable of being a private hell when being in love with someone who does not return the emotion. And Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and M cousin Rachel are the best known examples of such an attempt to combine the different outlooks of marriage and courtly love. The story of Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel is about jealousy, violence, pain and love. Daphne du Maurier for example, has in her novels watched men and women making love and she knew something was wrong. As a result, she shows love as coming very close to hate. Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel are more about what Rebecca and Rachel went through and what happened to them at the end. Reading the novels Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel, we think about life, the life of our time. This article aims at analyzing the Daphne du Maurier’s qualities in characters in the given novels and attempts to contrast the logical of “dishonests or bad women” characters with the morality of our environment.

Daphne Du Maurier, Marriage, Love, Jealousy, Sexuality, Anti-Value

Mandibaye, S. (2021) Marriage as a Private Hell in Daphne Du Maurier’s Novels: Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel. Open Journal of Social Sciences, 9, 510-522. doi: 10.4236/jss.2021.91036.