“He Doesn’t Belong in This House”: The Uncanny Cousin in Two Mid-Century Gothic Novels

ABSTRACT

While the family unit in the Gothic novel has been widely discussed, the figure of the Gothic cousin has largely been relegated to the periphery of critical scholarship. This paper contends that the cousin occupies a particularly unheimlich position in the family unit: a cousin might be of the same age, or so distant in age that they are almost a stranger; they might be entirely unfamiliar, or raised from childhood with their cousins; they might be an acceptable romantic interest or an entirely taboo one. While clearly a flexible, shifting figure within the family unit, in many Gothic novels the arrival of a cousin causes significant upheaval – either immediate or generational – that undermines, dismantles, or enacts a renegotiation of the domestic order. The intrusions of Charles in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Rachel in Daphne du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel both reflect and reinforce this trajectory. In this paper, we consider the ways in which Rachel and Charles support our interpretation of the cousin as a disruptive figure within Gothic texts.

Family dynamics and the ‘disruption of domestic history” (Bruhm, “The Contemporary Gothic,” p. 267) lie at the heart of many Gothic narratives. The family unit in the Gothic novel has been widely discussed – as Armitt notes, the Gothic “was always a family affair” (p. 16) – but significantly less critical attention has been paid to the figure of the cousin who, while undoubtedly a frequent and essential element of many Gothic plots, has not yet been subject to interrogation. Marriage between first cousins is no longer commonplace in Western culture, but the cousin remains a complex figure in 20th and 21st century texts. In this paper, we argue that the cousin is a disruptive figure whose arrival within the domestic unit causes the upheaval and renegotiation of family relationships. We contend that the cousin occupies a particularly uncanny position in the family: a cousin might be of the same age, or so distant in age that they are almost a stranger; they might be entirely unfamiliar, or raised from childhood with their cousins; they might be an acceptable – even desirable – romantic interest or an entirely taboo one; they might share family resemblance or be utterly unrecognizable. Through this “peculiar commingling of the familiar and unfamiliar” (Royle, The Uncanny, p. 1), which is the uncanny’s essential gesture, the cousin emerges as a flexible, shifting figure within (or on outskirts of) the family unit. In many canonical and contemporary Gothic novels the arrival of a cousin, particularly a cousin who appears as a viable sexual partner for the protagonist, causes significant upheaval that undermines, dismantles, or generates a renegotiation of the domestic order.

While the practice of cousin intermarriage has been widely discussed in the context of a range of 18th and 19th century novels and has been closely linked to the Gothic in a number of studies, particularly in Jenny DiPlacidi’s Gothic Incest and Mary Jean Corbett’s Family Likeness work on family relationships in Gothic texts, very little attention has been paid to the cousin as a Gothic figure in 20th century texts. This is primarily a result of changing legal and cultural positions on cousin intermarriage, which have seen the practice decline from the 19th century onwards (Bras et al., “Relatives as Spouses,” p. 793). While the incidence of such relationships has diminished, cousin intermarriage remains legal and normative in many regions around the world (Bittles, “Consanguinity in Context,” p. 3) and writers continue to exploit the complex position of the cousin in their novels by using this flexible and interchangeably romantic and familial figure to problematize family relationships. The cousin thus becomes a figure whose sexual and familial roles generate conflict in Gothic novels. Key Gothic concerns around inheritance and lineage, sexual deviance, the disintegration of moral hierarchies, and the disruption of social norms are invoked and grappled with via the figure of the cousin.

In this paper, we examine two seminal mid-20th century Gothic texts in which the uncanny figure of the cousin occupies a pivotal role as an intruder on an established domestic relationship, a sexual threat to the structure of that relationship, and an overall disruptor of the domestic order. In Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the arrival of Cousin Charles at the Blackwood family estate upends the sheltered and restrictive routine shared by sisters Constance and Merricat. In Daphne du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel, the eponymous Rachel and her emergence into the lives of Philip and Ambrose, cousins who share a largely paternalistic relationship, brings about an immense upheaval of the previously comfortable relationship the two men shared. In both novels, close domestic relationships supported by the traditions and structures of vast family estates are significantly disrupted by the arrival of the cousin figure, who is at once a viable and desirable sexual partner, a stranger, a member of the family, and a threat to the procedures of devotion and inheritance that govern the relationships of Constance and Merricat and Ambrose and Philip. Both Charles and Rachel are potential romantic partners for their cousins but are also challengers for the fortune and estates of those whose relationships they disrupt. We explore the ways in which the intrusion of the cousin into the domestic life of the protagonists unsettles established order and consider how the uncanny figure of the cousin works as a mechanism for change and conflict in these two texts.

The cousin remains a highly charged and often enigmatic presence in texts of a diverse range of forms, genres, and styles in recent fiction, but here we turn to two of the mid-20th century’s most enduring and evocative Gothic novels to examine the origins of the contemporary cousin figure. In line with Casper and Bianchi Continuity and Change in the American Family and Charles et al. Families in Transition, we see the mid-20th century as the starting point for major changes to Western family structures. We identify the middle of the 20th century as an emergent moment for increasingly flexible conceptions of Western family relationships, gender roles, and domestic arrangements, all of which frames the changing position of the cousin, a figure whose presence has persisted within the family even as its significance has received less and less critical attention. These changes to previous conceptions of the family have shaped family relationships into the 21^st century, as individuals must choose to align themselves with normative roles relating to gender, labor, and conduct or reject them in order to establish alternative, non-traditional domestic orders. Both of the novels under discussion in this paper include protagonists’ strikingly contemporary responses to restrictive social and cultural expectations about the structure of family relationships. We discuss them together here in order to explore the cousin as an uncanny, ambiguous figure in the midst of families in turmoil and uncertainty, attempting to grapple with the fraught but freeing, complex but flexible, conditions of the Western family as it exists from the mid-20th century to the present.

‘Perhaps She Was Two Persons”: representations of the Cousin in Literature

Reflecting trends in psychological scholarship (as noted by Cicirelli, Sibling Relationships across the Life Span; Ittel & Sisler, Siblings in Adolescence; Milevsky, Sibling Relationships in Childhood and Adolescence) and wider literature (as noted by Levin, The Suppressed Sister; May, 2001; Stephens Mink & Doubler Ward, The Significance of Sibling Relationships in Literature), horizontal bonds in Gothic texts have received far less critical attention than vertical bonds. Siblings, for example, are largely examined only in terms of brother and sister incest (see Goetz, “Genealogy and Incest in Wuthering Heights”; Perry, “Incest as the Meaning of the Gothic Novel”; Sanders, The brother-sister Culture in nineteenth-century Literature). However, if sibling relationships have a certain fluidity not only in Gothic and wider literature but also in life – siblings can be peers, confidants, rivals, mentors, and surrogate parents (Fishel, Sisters) – then cousins are flexible to the point of rejecting definition. Unlike terms such as “brother” or “sister,” “cousin” is an ungendered term. The bond can be ascribed to a person closely or distantly related, to someone connected to the family by marriage or by being “like” family through friendship or loyalty but biologically unrelated. Cousins may be close in age (and therefore appear as peers or surrogate siblings) or vastly different (appearing as mentors, surrogate parents, aunts, or uncles). A cousin could be someone fiercely intimate or a faceless stranger, someone invited into the private life of the inner family or on the margins (and, therefore, able to be cast in and out of “closeness” at whim). The uncanny qualities of the cousin ultimately lie in the figure’s slipperiness – the cousin’s capacity to shift between familiar and unfamiliar, which we interpret in line with Freud’s definition of the uncanny as “that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar” (Freud in Royle The Uncanny, p. 124). The uncanny cousin becomes an ambiguous figure whose capacity for disruption is fundamentally connected to its lack of definition, well-suited to the Gothic which, “as a mode of cultural representation that stages ambivalence at times of change, proves to be a rich source of expressing both subversive and conservative notions of the family” (Andeweg & Zlosnik, Gothic Kinship, p. 5).

The ascendancy of Gothic literature in the late 18th and early 19th centuries saw increasing attention paid to the project of dismantling and disrupting the family unit in narrative. In the genre’s seminal texts such as The Castle of Otranto, The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Monk, “[t]he bourgeois family is the scene of ghostly returns, where guilty secrets of past transgressions and uncertain class origins are the source of anxiety” (Botting, Homely Gothic, pp. 104–5), and as the Gothic genre has developed into a broader mode, the family remains the locus of complex negotiations of domestic roles and rights. Jenny DiPlacidi, one of the few scholars to discuss the cousin as a distinct category of family relationship in Gothic narratives, contends:

The characters in the Gothic are driven to participate in cousin marriage from a variety of different motivations (duty and honour, threats, romantic love, sexual desire, financial need). Such a range of motivations and responses to cousin marriage establishes the complicated nexus the cousin as kin and/or spouse position inhabits, being at once legal and questionable, pressed for by family members and alternately repulsed by them. (2018, p. 193)

DiPlacidi’s comment here touches on the familiar/unfamiliar nexus that defines the uncanny, and indeed there are many examples in 19th century literature of romantic encounters between cousins that exploit the slipperiness of the cousin figure. For example, cousin marriage appears in a number of Jane Austen’s novels, most prominently in Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park. As Corbett notes, Pride and Prejudice, in which Elizabeth rejects two attempts at cousin marriage, “normalizes what literary critics, loosely following the anthropologists, call exogamy or … marrying outside the family” (p. 33). In contrast, Mansfield Park offers a radically different vision of heterosexual marriage in which the highly eligible Crawfords are discarded and the mutual attraction between cousins Edmund and Fanny triumphs. Where a cousin might be an appropriate love interest, they may also be a figure of torment or threat. This is the case in Jane Eyre, in which Jane’s cousin St. John Rivers is a viable partner but is ultimately positioned as a threat to Jane’s extra-familial romantic pursuit, or Tess of the D’Urbervilles, where Tess’s attempt to claim kinship with the wealthy D’Urbervilles results in her false cousin Alec pursuing her despite her resistance to his advances, and ends with both their deaths. Novels like Wuthering Heights also contend with contemporaneous debates around inheritance and intermarriage; the marriage between cousins Cathy and Linton is part of Heathcliff’s scheme to claim ownership of both Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights, which speaks to broader cultural anxieties about perceived threats to the established traditions of inheritance and lineage in wealthy families.

In other novels, the cousin is a beguiling figure held at a distance: in George Sand’s Indiana, the titular heroine first overlooks her cousin Ralph as a potential lover but falls in love with him at the end of the novel, while in Elizabeth Gaskell’s novella Cousin Phillis, the protagonist Paul Manning muses on and interferes in the relationships of his beautiful and intelligent younger cousin. In Louisa May Alcott’s Eight Cousins, the orphaned Rose Campbell is cared for by her guardian and raised with seven male cousins – all of whom are largely playmates and encourage Rose’s coming of age, except for cousins Charlie and Mac, who both fall in love with Rose in Alcott’s sequel, Rose in Bloom. These texts, which grapple with questions around inheritance, changing kinship arrangements, the roles, and responsibilities of family members to their kin, and the problems of falsely claiming kin, are demonstrative of 19th century anxieties about changes to the family structure, and the ways in which social upheaval, housing density, labor practices, and industrialization all contributed to a shift in familial arrangements, which impacted all family members and which, as Perry notes, the novelists of the time were exploring in their work (p. 30).

In the 20th and 21st centuries, the social role of cousins changed, and with it the representations of the cousin in literature. However, regardless, the cousin retains its uncanny quality in a number of significant 20th and 21st century texts. In the 20th century in particular marriage plots and romantic tensions remained – and to some extent still persist – as the central focus of cousin relationships in novels like Anya Seyton’s Dragonwyck and Mary Stewart’s Nine Coaches Waiting. In Carson McCullers’ The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, Cousin Lymon is a mysterious and childlike figure who arrives and claims kin with the reclusive Miss Amelia, who shocks her small-town community by seeming to fall in love with him, tenderly ministering to him until he betrays her. In Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which we discuss in the next section, the fragile domestic order of the Blackwood sisters is disrupted by the arrival of their cousin Charles, while the titular Rachel in Daphne du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel is a source of financial and sexual upheaval, at once desired and dangerous. In more recent decades, the cousin continues to appear as a disruptive force in a diverse range of texts from young adult to literary fiction, including Patricia Grace’s Cousins, Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now, Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, Jennifer Egan’s The Keep, Salley Vickers’s Cousins, Andrea Bennett’s Two Cousins of Azov, Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte and Karen McManus’s The Cousins. Our focus is on the 20th century, but the vast thematic, stylistic and generic range of texts here suggests that the position of the cousin in 21st century texts is also an under-considered and rich site for future scholarly discussion.

One significant but under-discussed role the cousin holds across texts from the 19th to 21st centuries is as an intruder: a distant, if not entirely unknown figure whose arrival or return in the text brings about a major disruption to the family’s domestic life. We now turn to Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle and du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel, both of which demonstrate the fluctuating position of the cousin and its mechanics in the Gothic family, to commence an investigation of the cousin’s unheimlich nature and capacity disrupt the domestic order of family units in modern Gothic. The cousin figures in both texts are familiar and strange: simultaneously figures of attraction and repulsion, threat and reassurance and intrusion and completion. In the following analyses we examine the ways in which the cousin figures, Charles and Rachel, play particularly uncanny roles within these Gothic narratives as they fundamentally challenge and complicate the domestic order of the families they intrude on.

“A Ghost Is Sleeping in Our Father’s Bed”: disrupting the Domestic Order in We Have Always Lived in the Castle

In Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the highly ritualized domestic order of sisters Merricat and Constance Blackwood is disrupted and permanently altered by the arrival of their cousin Charles, son of their murdered father’s brother, and whom the sisters have never met. The two Blackwood sisters have lived with their uncle, Julian, in relative solitude for around 6 years since the deaths of their parents, brother, and aunt by arsenic poisoning, for which Constance, the elder of the two sisters, was tried and acquitted. Shunned by the people of the “unchangingly grey” (Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, p. 6) village near their vast estate, they live a relatively idyllic life in their manor house, where Constance occupies the role of mother, carer and, to some extent, wife, to her remaining family members. Her sister, Merricat, is a charismatic and unstable individual, and the real culprit of the murders Constance was accused of. The two sisters share a deep bond, caring for each other and meticulously preserving their murdered family members’ belongings and traditions. Visitors are almost never received at the house, but Charles, who arrives unannounced, is able to enter into the private domain of their home and immediately cause animosity between the sisters.

Charles typifies the uncanny Gothic cousin’s “uncertain status as inside or outside the family” (DiPlacidi, Gothic Incest, p. 197). He is a stranger to the sisters but is instantly recognizable to them for his striking resemblance to their murdered father, which is crucial to his capacity to enter the sisters’ restricted family circle. Throughout the novel he appears simultaneously as a stranger whose intrusion threatens the sisters’ seclusion and long-established domestic routines, and as a viable sexual partner to the elder sister Constance, rendering him capable of reinstating the patriarchal order that was overthrown through the murders. This recalls Royle’s definition of the uncanny as “the peculiar commingling of the familiar and unfamiliar” (p. 1): with his resemblance to the sisters’ murdered father, Charles’ unexpected arrival is indeed a moment in which the familiar and unfamiliar clash for Merricat, who immediately grasps that her repressed crimes have returned to haunt her, and views Charles as “a ghost, but a ghost that could be driven away” (Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, p. 61). While she will eventually succeed in doing so, Charles’ intrusion causes significant disruption to the sisters’ relationship, and ultimately requires Merricat to sacrifice the cherished estate in order to remove the uncanny double of her father who attempts to reinstate the Blackwood patriarchy. Jackson’s novel addresses the “quintessentially Gothic issue [of] legitimate descent and rightful inheritance” (Williams, Art of Darkness, p. 239): the rule of the usurper, Merricat, is challenged by the long-lost relative come to claim his position in the family, but it is the murderer Merricat who triumphs. The revelation of Charles’ status as cousin and his subsequent intrusion on the sisters’ lives is, we contend, the catalyst for destruction rather than salvage of the Blackwood estate and family line. In doing so, the text presents a subversion of the conventional Gothic inheritance plot.

A key indication of the uncanny flexibility of the cousin comes via the way in which Cousin Charles gains entry to the Blackwood house, a fortress of comfort and protection for the two sisters. Unlike any of the categories of intruder or “properly invited” (Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, p. 18) genteel visitor entertained sporadically by the sisters, Charles first enters the kitchen, “the heart of our house,” via a side door only the family uses and which Constance had momentarily left “unguarded” (Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, p. 55). Where all others are either barred from entry or only granted access to the drawing room, Charles is immediately admitted to the private and intimate back rooms of the house where the family spend their time together: his status as cousin allows him to bypass the usual rituals the sisters perform to keep strangers out. Merricat’s narration indicates her dismay and betrayal at this intrusion and anticipates the shifting of allegiances between the two sisters: “He was the first one who had ever gotten inside and Constance had let him in” (Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, p. 57).

Hattenhauer (Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic, p. 175) summarizes the range of sexual, familial and adversarial roles Charles plays within the novel, but does not explore how his status as cousin is precisely the position that allows him to impact the family to such intense and immediate effect. Charles is a stranger to Constance, but she finds it easy to situate him as family, telling Merricat, “It’s our cousin, our cousin Charles Blackwood; I knew him at once, he looks like Father” (Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, p. 57), positioning Charles as the murdered patriarch’s double. The appearance of doubles and “a return of the dead” (Royle, The Uncanny, p. 2) are key tropes of the uncanny. The cousin is a figure who is particularly suited to uneasy intrusions: where strangers entering a household might be more easily recognizable as a threat, the arrival of a cousin is more difficult to categorize – it involves a Gothic “collapse [of] boundaries” (Mulvey-Roberts, “The Female Gothic Body,” p. 2), an unsettling of order that stems from the ambiguity of the cousin’s role within the authoritative hierarchy of a family. This flexibility allows Charles not just entry to the house, but the capacity for him to stay for a seemingly unlimited period of time. His extended presence and interference in the sisters’ carefully observed domestic rituals open up an unprecedented rift: Merricat and Constance’s responses to Charles are diametrically opposed, the former viewing him as a “demon-ghost” (Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, p. 87), the latter as a benign presence, and perhaps, as Joyce Carol Oates suggests, as “a way into a possible new life” (p. 155).

Inheritance is essential to the novel and to the figure of the cousin: his arrival re-animates the unsettled past and raises the question of who the future of the Blackwood estate, fortune and family line really belongs to. When Merricat asks where Charles sat at dinner, Constance replies “In Father’s chair … He has a perfect right to sit there. He’s a guest, and he even looks like Father” (Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, p. 70), an assertion that reflects the cousin’s status as both close family and a visitor, and from which Merricat immediately anticipates Charles’ attempts to make more expansive challenges to what she has claimed through the murders – the estate, the sisters’ way of life and Constance herself, Merricat’s “most precious person” (Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, p. 20). Unlike the sisters’ rare visitors who “never offered to step beyond their defined areas” (Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, p. 23), Charles is able to both seek out and lay claim to more intimate spaces and objects, in particular those of Mr Blackwood, whose possessions are invested with heightened significance for Merricat. Charles quickly proceeds to appropriate the murdered patriarch’s bedroom, possessions, habits and, crucially, his punitive and capitalist values (Carpenter, “The Establishment and Preservation of Female Power in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle,” p. 35).

Charles’ use of Mr Blackwood’s pipe, clothes, and watch are instances in which his status as a male family member reinforces his claim to Blackwood property. These possessions become the primary site of conflict between Merricat’s sympathetic magic, practiced via objects of symbolic power such as her father’s gold chain, which Merricat nails to a tree or a box of his silver dollars, which she buries, and Charles’ attempt to assert an economic logic, as when he finds Merricat has used her father’s scarf to tie shut the gate in an attempt to keep Charles out, and complains “I could have worn this scarf … it’s an expensive thing” (Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, p. 82). After discovering Merricat’s buried box of dollars he shouts “It’s not her money … she has no right to hide it!” (Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, p. 88), repositioning its value in terms of the two traditional hierarchies he is interested in primogeniture, which dictates that Constance as eldest child is the sole inheritor of the Blackwood estate, and gender, which dictates the items belonging to the Blackwood patriarch do not pass to his daughters. He stands to gain even greater access to the sisters’ enormous wealth through marriage to the elder sister, which is also available to him as a cousin.

A stranger’s romantic overtures after such a short acquaintance might be regarded with greater suspicion, and where a closer family member would be incestuous, as a cousin Charles is in a unique, optimal position. In his pursuit of Constance, Charles repositions items that under Merricat’s regime are purely talismanic into commodities, offering Constance an alternative use for her wealth. His attempt to romance Constance as a means of securing the Blackwood fortune and estate is also closely linked to the paradoxical position of the cousin: he can comfortably appropriate minor possessions of the Blackwood patriarch but still, like any stranger, needs a marriage contract in order to gain legitimate possession of the estate itself. While not a common practice in the United States in the mid-20th century, having declined rapidly in the mid-19th century (Paul & Spencer, “It’s Ok, We’re Not Cousins by Blood”), cousin marriage often allows the upper classes to maintain their fortunes, ensuring that strangers, who might redirect or dilute wealth among their own relations, were not brought into the family. Merricat’s depiction of her family’s aristocratic pretensions positions them as exactly the kind of wealthy, inward-looking family who might seek to ensure intergenerational wealth is retained by relatives. Cousin marriage remains legal in many U.S. states including Vermont, which is widely considered to be the location Jackson’s novel is based on, though undoubtedly the “spectre of incest” (p. 103) that Wolff identifies as part of the Gothic tradition hovers over Charles’ attempt to court Constance.

For Charles, Constance represents an opportunity to more fulsomely legitimate his claim to the Blackwood inheritance, while Merricat represents an irritating opposition to his scheme. He can simultaneously occupy the role of “surrogate father” (Mustafa, “Obsessional Neurosis, the paranoid-schizoid Position, and the Bourgeois Family in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle,” p. 132) and romantic interest. Both are within the accepted realm of relations that a cousin might be involved in, a feature that demonstrates the complex flexibility of the cousin figure: for one sister, Charles is a viable partner, while for the other, he is a figure of punitive paternal authority. As Carpenter argues, “The Blackwood family exploited women if they were docile and dismissed them if they were not” (p. 33), a logic that Charles adopts in his treatment of the two sisters. The easy closeness he adopts with Constance – calling her Connie, for example, like a close friend while he uses Merricat’s full name, Mary Katherine, echoing her formal and punitive parents – falls somewhere between a family member and a romantic partner, a position that relies on the fluidity of the cousin relationship.

As a result, Merricat is forced to reckon with what appears to be a resurrection of the father she murdered and whose role as head of the household she has usurped. After a number of smaller attempts to get rid of Charles, Merricat is eventually successful in repelling her cousin by setting a catastrophic fire that destroys the first floor and roof, which draws excited villagers to the scene who then destroy most of the house. The sisters escape the fire and the mob, later returning to rebuild their lives and routines in the small fragment of the house that remains intact. Despite being ousted from the sisters’ lives, Charles’ intrusion causes an irreparable rupture in the previously hermetic estate and in the precise domestic routines that structured the sisters’ shared life. As Hardin notes, “intruders are now tolerated (if not welcomed) on the grounds near the house” (p. 117): tourists take picnics, children play on the lawns, and villagers use the estate as a thoroughfare, undoing the work of Merricat and Constance’s parents, who closed off the grounds to outsiders. The sisters now depend on the presence of others for nourishment, having chosen after the fire to remain entirely secluded in the house, forcing them to live on offerings of food left regularly by villagers out of guilt for the destruction of the house.

The cousin’s intrusion, then, has the function of unsettling the sisters’ secluded lives, but in this novel does not result in the introduction of a corrected social hierarchy. Instead of a reinstatement of the usurper’s domestic order, the patriarchal order is permanently ousted, and inheritance is rejected in favor of an idiosyncratic family structure predicated on enduring intimacy between the two sisters. Charles’ intrusion fundamentally alters the structure of the sisters’ relationship in a way that strengthens Merricat’s position and reinforces the primacy of the sister bond over any revelation of long-lost relative or ongoing family lineage. In line with Merricat’s love of fairy tales, her account of the novel’s events includes an improbable happy ending in which she is not reprimanded or punished for the fire that destroyed the house but, instead, receives everything she has always wanted, a fulfillment of her fantasies in which her murdered parents exclaim “Our most loved daughter must have anything she likes … Mary Katherine must never be punished” (Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, p. 95). Uncle Julian dies, Charles leaves forever, the polite family friends who were a nuisance to Merricat stop visiting, the villagers behave with deference as she has always felt they should, and her wish to be entirely alone with Constance is unequivocally fulfilled. The world they share is smaller and more controllable than ever, and their lives and daily routines are utterly intertwined: there is, finally, no way that Constance will ever leave Merricat, and at last the two of them are entirely insulated from the world.

By removing Charles, Merricat not only succeeds in creating a safer world for herself and her sister but, crucially, brings an end to any possibility that other greedy family members might seek them out by destroying the house and their possessions, so they no longer have any wealth or property that other extended family members might attempt, as Charles did, to claim. Merricat must sacrifice the cherished places, objects, and rituals that comprise their family inheritance in order to protect them from further intrusions, a recognition of family as a threat that far exceeds the threats once posed by the dull hatred of the villagers. Jackson’s novel, with its inversions of the family dynamics and plots associated with inheritance, tyranny, and entrapment that remain integral to the Gothic, uses the intruding cousin as the central figure through which this consolidation of power is achieved. This consolidation affirms the vitality of sibling relationships over the more ambiguous and uncanny cousin who, by the end of the novel, is situated with the rest of the world outside of Merricat and Constance’s sanctuary, affirmed as “one of the strangers” (Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, p. 143) instead of kin. It is, ultimately, Merricat’s interpretation of her cousin that endures: Charles is not rightful Blackwood heir and eligible partner to Constance but “a ghost and a demon” (Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, p. 143), who needed to be “driven away” (Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, p. 61). Charles’ intrusion brings about the establishment of a modified domestic order in which Merricat and Constance must destroy the Blackwood inheritance to protect themselves from a threat that comes from within, rather than beyond, the family.

“Sinuous and Silent, like a Snake”: disrupting the Domestic Disorder in My Cousin Rachel

While Merricat unwaveringly considers Charles an intruder, Philip’s opinion of his cousin Rachel shifts swiftly throughout My Cousin Rachel – one of Daphne du Maurier’s more well-known novels. Set largely in Cornwall in the early 19th century, the novel tracks the growing sexual attraction that Philip Ashley, a naive and unworldly young man, feels toward his recently deceased cousin Ambrose’s wife, Rachel. Their shifting relationship, which is a “complex and ultimately indecipherable mix of sexuality and economics in which the fate of the Ashley estate is at stake” (Horner & Zlosnik, Daphne du Maurier, p. 136), hinges upon Rachel’s slippery, uncanny qualities. Her status as a cousin allows her to shift flexibly from distant relative to surrogate mother and then to surrogate lover and wife to Philip: a unique intrusion to the Ashley family. Similarly to Charles in We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Rachel’s arrival at the Cornwall estate significantly disrupts the domestic order previously established by the patriarch Ambrose and followed regimentally – before Rachel’s arrival – by Philip.

Ambrose and Philip are the first cousin relationship of the novel. Their dynamic reflects the flexibility of cousin figures, in that Ambrose, who is approximately 20 years older than Philip, plays a largely paternal role. Ambrose raised the orphaned Philip from an early age and the beginning of the novel sees Philip in complete adoration of Ambrose. In remembering when he saw a dead man hanging as a child, Philip narrates that “Ambrose must have taken me there for a purpose, perhaps to test my nerve … As my guardian, father, brother, counsellor, as in fact my whole world, he was forever testing me” (du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel, p. 6). Philip credits Ambrose for teaching him how to live by (what the two men consider) a sensible ideology; though, to borrow du Maurier’s own description of men in her memoir, Enchanted Cornwall, the reader can identify this ideology as largely “gentlemanly misogyny” (p. 155). The Ashley household consists of only Ambrose, Philip and their array of staff, and a lack of female influence or presence is something both men take deep pride in. Ambrose “sent [Philip’s] nurse packing” (du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel, p. 130) when Philip was three because she disciplined Philip by smacking his “bottom with a hairbrush” (du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel, p. 14). Ambrose, and also, resultantly, Philip, believe that women “made mischief in a household” (du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel, p. 14), and so Ambrose only employed “menservants” (du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel, p. 14). The established domestic order of the Cornwall estate is a purely male one, heavily guarded against women.

This insular domestic order means that Ambrose’s sudden marriage when abroad in Italy to a distant cousin, Rachel, deeply wound Philip. After receiving troubling letters from Ambrose, advising of Ambrose’s poor health and growing distrust of his new wife, Philip travels to Florence to find that Ambrose has recently died. Philip returns to the Cornwall estate, and the widowed Rachel arrives soon after for a visit: an intrusion which makes the Cornwall estate “the site of threat wherein [Ambrose and Philip’s] apparent stable established values, enshrined in the house and estate, are seen to be in danger” (Horner & Zlosnik, Daphne du Maurier, p. 130). In their excellent analysis, Horner and Zlosnik identify that Rachel’s presence in the narrative “has a destabilising effect” (p. 137). Her presence provides a challenge to the assumed rightful inheritor of the Ashley wealth and Cornwall estate, which otherwise, given Ambrose’s lack of a legitimate son, positions his surrogate son Philip as heir. However, Horner and Zlosnik stop short in locating Rachel’s unique potential for disruption within her status as a cousin. Rachel is a distant cousin of both Ambrose and Philip. Being Ambrose’s widowed wife would have granted her some access to the family: she is inside the family through an affinal tie, but, due to her gender, on the outskirts of the intimate, “exclusively male household” (Horner & Zlosnik, Daphne du Maurier, p. 131) that has long consisted of solely Ambrose and Philp. However, given Ambrose’s general disdain for women, it is unlikely that he would have taken just any woman as his wife. Her status as a cousin – already familial, if distant – is the connection needed for Rachel to make the first insertion into the Ashely line through marrying Ambrose, and it is this consolidation of family ties that later grants her access to the family’s center, the Cornwall estate, just as Charles’s status as a cousin allows his intrusion upon Blackwood estate.

Even before they meet, Philip establishes Rachel as an uncanny figure. His image of her shifts from being “decked out in muslin, with a ribbon in her hair … [while she pout[s] and toss[es] her curls” (du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel, p. 30) to being “a monster, larger than life itself” (du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel, p. 63). As Mitchell (“Beautiful Creatures,” p. 37) notes, Rachel is “essentially unknowable; before her arrival – her invasion, as he sees it – Philip imagines a multitude of possible Rachels.” Her uncanniness is furthered as her image shifts between being elderly, middle-aged, and youthful in Philip’s mind: “One moment middle-aged and forceful, the next simpering and younger than Louise” (du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel, p. 30). This foreshadows Rachel’s shift between playing a maternal role to Philip, and – as an attractive potential lover is still largely associated with “youth” for women – the roles of lover, or wife. Philip’s imaginings of Rachel, of course, reveal his lack of experience with actual women – a lack that forces him to rely on the villainous archetypes established by Ambrose. But his imaginings also locate Rachel in a liminal space, between identities: a key feature of the uncanny (Royle, The Uncanny, p. 1) reinforced by Rachel being half-Cornish (“familiar” to Philip, or to use Freud’s [1976] terminology, heimlich) and half-Italian (“exotic” to Philip, unheimlich). This tension between being both similar and different reflects the position that Rachel initially takes as a cousin within the novel. Rachel is family (a fact that Philip continuously foregrounds by insisting on thinking of her as cousin Rachel), but as she is a woman, she is automatically “other” to the structure lived so far within the Ashley family unit.

Once Rachel arrives at the estate, she immediately takes on a spectral quality. As Philip notes, the “woman who had pursued me through the nights and days, haunted my waking hours … was now beside me” (du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel, p. 91). Her “eyes, startled, like the eyes of a deer” (du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel, p. 93) disarm Philip, and marks the first crack in his unquestionable loyalty to Ambrose. The image of Rachel he constructed, guided by Ambrose’s letters, juxtaposes the woman he meets. Almost instantly, Rachel disrupts the domestic routine of the Cornwall estate: nearby families are invited for tea and Rachel expects Philip to help her entertain them, and instead of sitting in the library after dinner, like Ambrose and Philip did, Rachel asserts that they drink tisane in her boudoir (notably, a space associated more with the feminine). In doing so, she disrupts the patriarchal order established by Ambrose. The domestic routine must change to fit Rachel’s arrival; as Louise explains to Philip, “Your house isn’t fit to receive anyone … Let alone a woman … There hasn’t been a woman staying there in 20 years” (du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel, p. 77).

Perhaps the most significant symbol of Rachel’s disruption is in the way Philip allows – and increasingly encourages – Rachel to cultivate the estate’s impressive gardens, and resultantly Rachel stakes a claim to an activity which used to be a deep passion of Ambrose’s. There are clear connotations with the idea of “mother nature” in cultivating the garden, which symbolically aligns with the maternal role that Philip has begun to perceive of Rachel: “ … looking at my cousin Rachel, I wondered about my mother” (du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel, p. 134). Mitchell discusses how Philip’s question of whether Rachel is innocent or guilty “corresponds to a similarly framed question that preoccupies him earlier in the novel: is Rachel beautiful or ordinary?” (p. 36–37). While Mitchell poses this question as a way to examine how the function of female beauty structures du Maurier’s fiction through prompting questions of ethics and justice, we might also use this binary to explore how Philip sees Rachel as interchangeably separate or part of the family, and interchangeably as “lover” or “mother,” depending on whether he considers her a viable sexual partner at each point in the novel. When Philip still clearly views Rachel as “mother,” he denies her beauty, and insists to Louise that Rachel is “ordinary” (du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel, p. 124). At this point, Philip’s perception of Rachel as maternal rather than as a viable sexual partner is evidenced both through his language and hers: he still largely thinks of her as cousin Rachel (a phrasing that foregrounds the family connection, and which Philip drops simply to “Rachel” once his sexual attraction for her grows later on in the novel), and at church, Rachel gives courtship advice to Philip about Louise, thereby connoting that she is a mentor rather than Louise’s sexual rival (du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel, p. 132). Rachel has a particular talent for gardening. As Tamlyn, one of Philip’s staff, notes: “Mrs Ashley knows more about gardening than I do, or ever will for that matter” (du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel, p. 108). Rachel’s interest in and responsibility for the gardens on the estate replace Ambrose’s. To take the gardening metaphor, cultivating the routines and structures of the Ashley household shifts from a father’s task to a mother’s task, and this shift in power between the genders would be unwelcome (to say the least) to the exclusively male space that Ambrose originally established in the house.

While Rachel is able to alter the gardens (a physical manifestation of her conceptual disruption to Philip’s bond with the deceased Ambrose), it is only when Philip begins to view Rachel romantically that she is invited to alter inside the house itself (such as by ordering Italian silk to make curtains). In shifting from altering the outer, external layers of the Cornwall estate to the internal domestic spaces, Philip’s growing sexual interest in Rachel presents the most acute intrusion into the original domestic order of the Ashley household: as Philip recalls, “I decided, after the New Year, that I wished to make improvements to the property that would be mine. But not only to the gardens” (du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel, p. 234). In pursuing Rachel romantically, Philip and Ambrose transform from a surrogate son and father dynamic to a more horizontal, fraternal bond of sexual rivals: a drastic alteration to the original hierarchy, power dynamic and familial roles. Ambrose, the person Philip always felt closest to, begins to feel like an intruder obstructing Philip’s growing connection with Rachel.

This renegotiation comes to a head at the Christmas feast that Philip and Rachel – “acting out the roles of lord and lady of the manor” (Horner & Zlosnik, Daphne du Maurier, p. 138) – throw for their tenants. The domestic space is transformed from one that facilitates Philip’s exclusively masculine bond with Ambrose, to one that reflects the new, heteronormative domestic order that Rachel’s arrival has instigated. At the feast, Philip gifts Rachel with a pearl collar: a family heirloom usually reserved for Ashley brides, and therefore, a clear indicator of what Philip wishes for their relationship to become. This gift foreshadows Philip’s gift of the Ashley jewels to Rachel on the eve of his 25th birthday – and eventually, his willing relinquishing of his entire inheritance, Cornwall estate, to Rachel. Rachel has sex with Philip on his birthday eve to “thank [him], that was all. [He] had given [her] the jewels” (du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel, p. 314), though Philip misinterprets this action as her agreeing to marry him. That Rachel and Philip have sex is clearly a crucial indicator that Rachel – within her capacity as a fluid, slippery cousin figure – has transformed into filling a lover, or wife, role for Philip, in a far more material way than Charles does for Constance in We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Philip divulges his “engagement” with Rachel at his 25 birthday party the following day, to which Rachel replies, “Have you quite lost your senses, Philip?” (du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel, p. 311). Here, Philip’s bond with Ambrose is significantly altered. They “merge” as one, revealing the two men as uncanny doubles, a figure who questions the integrity and wholeness of the self (Meyers, Femicidal Fears, p. 17) in that the double can be a “twin, mirror image, portrait, split personality, alter ego … or ghostly shadow” (Ascher Barnstone, “Introduction,” p. 1) of the self, which again reveals the flexibility of the cousin within Gothic family arrangements. When looking upon Rachel after she has rejected him, Philip feels that,

[Rachel’s] eyes, so dark and different from our own, started at both of us,

uncomprehending. Ambrose stood beside me in the shadows, under the flickering candlelight. We looked at her, tortured, without hope, while she looked back at us in accusation. (du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel, p. 314)

While this scene is the most acute and uncanny instance of doubleness between Ambrose and Philip, their “oneness” is established very early in the narrative. Rachel frequently notes Philip’s physical likeness to Ambrose; in their first meeting, Rachel’s eyes “widened in sudden recognition” (du Maurier, p. 92). The doubleness between Ambrose and Philip foreshadows a return to the original domestic order established by the patriarch Ambrose following Rachel’s death, albeit an even more restricted one, just like the eventual order solidified between Merricat and Constance in We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

After Rachel refuses Philip’s marriage offer, he soon returns to his original suspicions about the role she potentially played in Ambrose’s death, and he largely assumes her guilt. He knowingly allows Rachel to fall to her death from a broken bridge in the estate gardens. Following Rachel’s death, Philip returns to his solitary and exclusively male domestic space; as Philip notes, in the years that follow, “I have become so like him [Ambrose] that I might be his ghost” (du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel, p. 9). While Philip lives without any family – thereby allowing him to follow Ambrose’s doctrine even more strictly than Ambrose himself ever did, given that Ambrose had Philip for company – Philip does continue to feel a strong emotional and spiritual connection to Ambrose, despite Ambrose’s absence. In this way, following Rachel’s intrusion, the domestic order of the Ashley household – a surrogate father and son bond – is reestablished. As a child, Ambrose was “god of all creation, certainly god of [Philip’s] own narrow world, and the whole object of [Philip’s] life was to resemble him” (du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel, p. 7). At My Cousin Rachel’s conclusion, this typical desire for a father son dynamic is fulfilled, and Philip’s dogged continuation of Ambrose’s legacy ensures that Ambrose remains god over Cornwall estate.

“Intruder Inside”: conclusions

The family unit in the Gothic has always been a site of change and anxiety; a social and cultural group whose boundaries are frequently redefined amid anxieties about changing economic, legal, and cultural constructs (Andeweg & Zlosnik, Gothic Kinship; Botting, Homely Gothic; DiPlacidi, Gothic Incest). The cousin occupies a particularly ambiguous position within the social hierarchy of the family, and this ambiguity has been used by writers to literalize the instability of the family structure, particularly as that structure becomes increasingly private, isolated, and inward in the 20th century, carrying on a process begun in the 18th century of replacing widespread consanguineal ties and a network of familial relationships with the primacy of the conjugal (Williams, Art of Darkness, p. 93). As we have argued in this paper, the cousin is uniquely placed to disrupt family relationships: an uncanny figure whose relation to the family is always characterized by a clash of familiarity and unfamiliarity. The cousin is an unpredictable relative whose very slipperiness of definition gives rise to the disruptions, upheavals, and anxieties of the Gothic mode, which, “while often seeming conservative in its plot closures, also opens up a radically transformative space in which alternative relationships may be configured” (Andeweg & Zlosnik, Gothic Kinship, p. 2).

The cousin figure is capable of not only gaining admission to the family home, but, through the figure’s intimacy as a member of the family, is also capable of unearthing the restless, unsettled core of the family itself. The arrival of the cousin stirs up that which is at the very heart of the uncanny, something that “should have remained secret and hidden, but has come to light” (Royle, The Uncanny, p. 2). In the two novels that we have examined, these are Merricat and Constance’s collusion in the murders of the family and their unshakable commitment to each other over all else, and Philip and Ambrose’s deep misogyny and Philip’s capacity for aggression and violence. In both novels, it is the cousin’s uncanny qualities that set in motion an excavation of buried memories and behaviors. A cousin can simultaneously be family and stranger; can appear as the resurrection of a poisoned father while also being a viable love interest; can be lover and murderer; can be a foreigner and a close relation. In both texts, the cousin is a spectral figure: in Merricat’s conception of Charles, a “demon-ghost” (Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, p. 87) who is malevolent but capable of shifting into the less threatening forms of friend, suitor, and parent. Just as Philip is conscious that Rachel “haunted my waking hours” (du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel, p. 91), Charles is a ghost to Merricat – the past risen up to haunt and horrify her. Both novels register the slipperiness of the cousin as a form of spectrality and characters use the notion of haunting or the figure of the ghost in their attempts to explain or reconcile their cousins’ ambiguous nature and uncategorizable position in the family hierarchy.

In We Have Always Lived in the Castle and My Cousin Rachel, the intrusion of the cousin, a disruptor to the domestic order of the house, also leads to the destruction or transformation of the house itself, which literalizes the instability introduced into the family unit by the cousin. Once the house, the stronghold of familial order and connection, has been breached by the cousin, it cannot continue to exist in its current state. The family is disrupted through not only the renegotiation of previously stable relationships and domestic rituals but through the altering of the house itself or, in the case of Rachel, the part of the house most closely associated with her influence, the garden. In this way, the cousin asserts a lasting presence: while both are ultimately rejected from the house, designated “outsider” by the immediate family, they leave a mark in the way that only family can. The protagonists are haunted by the upheaval wrought by the cousin’s intrusion into their lives.

The only way for the protagonists of both novels to retain their fidelity to a previous (vanishing, unsustainable, idiosyncratic) domestic order is to give up their future: rejecting the cousin figure results in a rejection of the responsibility to continue the family line. Constance and Merricat will always be reclusive and dependent on the villagers for sustenance; Philip will always be haunted by Rachel and reliant on Ambrose’s teachings. The intrusion of the cousins forces the families to renegotiate and reassess the importance of their traditions, assets, and values. Merricat sacrifices the great estate, her cherished routines, and the possibility of Constance leaving and rejoining the world; Philip sacrifices Rachel herself and du Maurier seems to suggest, his potential for a future in which he might carry on the family line through marriage and procreation.

In both cases, the cousin’s arrival brings about an encounter with the quintessential Gothic question of who stands to inherit the property, and in whose control the wealth should be. At stake are two great estates, and two powerfully persuasive but non-normative domestic orders – the sister bond of cherished rituals that defines the lives of Merricat and Constance, and the staunchly male-oriented worldview shared by Ambrose and Philip. What triumphs are individual allegiances to those idiosyncratic, gendered orders, at the cost of the family line: the cousin, and the allegiance they represent to a patriarchal or normative structure of relationships is rejected. At the end of both novels, the intruding cousin has been repelled, but in retaining ownership of the estates, the owners reject the possibility of a life beyond their chosen intimate relationships, and the houses – what remains of them – have no clear future.

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Notes on contributors

Ella Jeffery

Ella Jeffery is a Lecturer in Creative Writing in the School of Humanities, Languages, and Social Science at Griffith University. Her research explores representations of unstable, uncanny, and insecure dwelling in 20th and 21st century fiction and poetry. Her debut collection of poems, Dead Bolt, won the Puncher & Wattman Prize for a First Book of Poems, the Anne Elder Award, and was shortlisted for the Mary Gilmore Award.

Alex Philp

Alex Philp has a PhD in creative writing from Queensland University of Technology, where she currently teaches and researches. She researches representations of sister relationships in fiction. Her short fiction has appeared in Overland, The Review of Australian Fiction, Westerly, and is forthcoming in Griffith Review.