Atmosphere, atmosphere, atmosphere: Deconstructing Jamaica Inn by Daphne DuMaurier

 

 

Part of this analysis was originally written and posted on BookLikes during a Halloween Bingo buddy read in October 2016. Now that BookLikes is essentially dead, I'm moving some of my material here for further exploration.

Be warned: This analysis contains major spoilers.  If you have not read Jamaica Inn and don't want to know ahead of time what happens, you might want to skip this.

Daphne DuMaurier's Jamaica Inn was published in 1936.  In 1939, Alfred Hitchcock turned the book into a film, with lots of major changes.  I do not recommend watching the movie as a substitute for reading the book.  The book is considered a classic of gothic romance; though there are no ghosts or other paranormal elements, the constant threats to the heroine amid a dangerous mystery set in an isolated and atmospheric location qualify for that genre.

Daphne DuMaurier, who lived most of her life in Cornwall, exquisitely uses setting to establish the whole tone of the novel.  She evokes not only the atmosphere of Cornwall but also its contrast to and isolation from the rest of the world.  The real Jamaica Inn still exists on the windswept Bodmin Moor.

Unlike many novels of the later 20th and 21st centuries, Jamaica Inn starts in the middle of that locale, with the atmosphere to create anticipation and mood, but then retreats into detailed backstory.  (I found the same to be true of Gwen Bristow's Jubilee Trail.)
 
I had originally read Jamaica Inn about forty years ago, and hadn't read it again until that rereading in 2016.  Even though I remembered the basics of the plot and one of the major "twists," this was very much like reading it for the first time. I was, however, much more aware of details, of structure and foreshadowing, and the whole use of language as an artistic medium, even when the composition was sometimes, well, sloppy.

Suffice it to say Jamaica Inn was not a satisfying read this second time around.

If you want a mood piece with fabulous descriptions of the harsh isolation of Bodmin Moor, this is it.  If you want a portrait of the worst of nineteenth century Cornish smuggling and wrecking, this is it.  If you want a coherent story with well-developed characters, this is not it.

For seventeen years, Mary Yellan and her widowed mother struggled to maintain a small farm near Helford, at the southern end of Cornwall.  To comply with her dying mother's wish, Mary sells the farm and all her belongings and moves to Jamaica Inn on windswept Bodmin Moor, where her Aunt Patience lives with her husband, Joss Merlyn, the landlord of the inn.  Mary soon discovers her uncle-by-marriage is deeply involved in a huge smuggling operation.

Wow!  Great potential!  But . . . .

At age 23, Mary is not a minor in need of a guardian, even though she is female.  So I'm not sure why she was forced to sell the farm.  The only motivation is that she was doing as her mother wished, but given what her mother had been through during seventeen years of widowhood to hang onto the farm, why let it go?  Maybe that sort of thing didn't occur to the young DuMaurier, who came from comfortable wealth.  After all, Mary had struggled, too, from early childhood to help her mother run the farm, and now she just up and sells it?  Doesn't make sense.  Why would her mother want her to?

Even so, what happens to the money Mary gets from selling the farm?  There's no mention of it, nor of debts that had to be paid off or anything else.  So Mary walks away from the only home she's ever known in a town where she at least knows people and presumably has some prospects for marriage even if she doesn't want to continue to operate the farm.  Okay, fine.

From this beginning, Mary Yellan never came across as a very sympathetic character to me.  First it was because no matter what I did, I couldn't rationalize her selling the farm with no other motivation than her mother told her to.  Had Mary been destitute like the poor, orphaned classic gothic heroine turned out upon the mercy of strangers, this might have made sense, but DuMaurier never describes Mary as penniless and having no other option than to seek shelter at Jamaica Inn with an aunt she hasn't seen in years.  She just mindlessly does it. Later, as the story progressed, I developed an active dislike for her  because she's a.) weak, and b.) inconsistent.  One minute she's saying her life is over and she doesn't care if she lives or dies, the next minute she's plotting her escape from her Uncle Joss.

In many ways, I felt Mary was TSTL -- to stupid to live -- but even more than that I felt she was just poorly created.  There were so many aspects of her characterization that made no sense whatsoever, that I began to see her as a kind of tour guide to Bodmin-in-Winter and not really as a person involved in the drama that was unfolding around her.

DuMaurier could have sent Mary to Jamaica Inn as a companion or help to Aunt Patience, but the opposite is stated.  Patience is set up as the (unnecessary?) shelterer for the orphan.  This proves untrue.  Throughout the book, Patience is little more than a fluttering idiot, completely beaten emotionally by her horrible husband.  And frankly, Mary herself isn't a whole lot better.  Neither is any help for the other.  After I had finished the novel, I began wondering just how many more of DuMaurier's female characters were spineless like Mary and Patience -- and of course the nameless heroine of Rebecca comes to mind -- and why she would write someone so unsympathetic.

I've come to believe that DuMaurier was not writing Mary Yellan's story as much as she was exploiting the gruesome history of Cornish smuggling and wrecking for plot and the oppressive isolation of Bodmin Moor for atmosphere.  There are too many holes in the plot for this to be a character-driven story.

The descriptions of the setting are superb, though I have to admit I'm sometimes a bit confused as to how much Mary can actually see in the dead of a rainy night.  It's not like there would be urban light pollution to illuminate the moors.  That's what I mean by sloppy writing.

For another example, a window is broken out at the end of December, and no one seems to notice or care, neither from outside the inn nor inside.  There's no mention of shutters that could be closed to mitigate the damage from rain or discomfort from the cold. Small things like this bothered me, took me right out of the story, and prevented me from suspending disbelief enough to get back into it.

None of the characters is fully developed except the villainous Joss Merlyn, the huge and vicious leader of the smuggling ring.  He has no good qualities at all, and it was difficult for me as a reader to imagine Patience, who is described as having once been pretty and happy, falling in love with him.  Even when Mary notices the occasional grace of Joss's fingers, that's not enough to redeem him even a tiny bit. His fingers?  Seriously?

So Mary leaves Helford and ultimately finds herself at Jamaica Inn, in the middle of a band of cutthroat smugglers, and she stays because of Aunt Patience, who used to be bright and happy but now is mostly a mumbling, mindless idiot.  Mary, who presumably was born and raised in Cornwall, apparently has no previous experience or even knowledge of "free-trading" and wrecking, which were basic facets of life in Cornwall for centuries.  So when she witnesses several murders connected to Joss and his operation of Jamaica Inn, she seems relatively unaffected by them.  Oh, it's awful, of course, that her aunt's husband and his confederates lure the ships onto the rocks, then drown or bludgeon the crew and passengers to death in order to salvage the cargo, but Mary somehow shoves it all down into the back of her mind and goes about her daily business.

Really?

For entertainment, she wanders the moors, and it's on one of these rambles that she meets Jem Merlyn, Joss's much younger brother.  Jem is a horsethief and lives in a pigsty of a cottage on the moor.  He has very little to recommend himself, but Mary falls in love with him anyway.  Why?  What's the matter with these women that they fall for absolute losers and don't question it?

Mary also meets the vicar of the church at Altarnun, the albino Francis Davey.  Davey is another character who held enormous potential for development and examination, but he became instead just a cardboard villain, the exotic "other" who must be inherently evil, like the albino assassin in The DaVinci Code.

As soon as there's a hint that Joss Merlyn isn't the mastermind behind the smuggling operation, the identity of the true leader is left in little doubt.  Mary, who can't seem to figure anything out, foolishly alerts the vicar to Joss's plan to escape Cornwall, and this spurs Davey to take action to protect himself.  Both Joss and Patience are murdered, and Mary is kidnapped, but the local squire, assisted by Jem Merlyn, arrives to save the day and rescue Mary.

With her aunt and Joss both dead, Mary once again is at loose ends.  She has no family, no home, and she rejects the squire's offer of domestic employment.  She decides to return to Helford, maybe hire out as a farmhand until she can buy her own little place.  (On farmhand's wages? She'd be lucky to get room and board and a pound a year, hardly enough to buy a farm.) But she runs into Jem on the moor; he has packed all his personal belongings on a wagon and is headed off to parts unknown.  Mary just hops up on the wagon with him and they ride off into the sunset.

Huh?  What about her personal belongings?  And Patience's? And what about Jamaica Inn itself?

Just as Mary inherited her mother's farm and sold it, only to have the cash not be mentioned in the story, either she or Jem Merlyn should have inherited the Inn.  Joss Merlyn bought it from the squire, so upon his death it should have gone to either his wife and her heirs, which would be Mary; or it should have gone to Joss's only living relative, which would be his brother Jem.

Though there were hints of some irregularities in Joss's purchase of the inn -- he probably used proceeds of smuggling to come up with the cash -- the squire never seemed to contest Merlyn's ownership of the property.  Yet after the smuggling ring is broken up and the principals dead, the squire just sort of announces his plans for the inn's future.  How did he regain possession of it?

Through the reading, I felt DuMaurier really didn't care about her characters, especially Mary Yellan.  They were props, providing a little bit of action so she could move them around on the stage of Bodmin Moor and describe it.  Mary had no spine, and no sense, and when she impulsively took off at the end, I again got that impression of someone just writing her off the scene.

There's a particular scene where Mary is walking out on the moors, I think when she goes to warn the Vicar about the smugglers, and she covers an enormous distance in a remarkably short period of time.  The notes I made on this excursion in 2016 have been lost in the BookLikes graveyard, but I'll try to find the information in the book, which I still have.

Ultimately, though, the book as a story fails; it's an atmospheric piece at best.  The characters are both unlikable and unrelatable; the plot is nonsensical.

"I have done a very senseless thing in coming here," [Mary] said hopelessly.  "I thought it clever, and I have only succeeded in making a fool of myself and of everyone else."

Yep, that's pretty much it.