Sometimes love is beautiful, and sometimes love becomes a means of emotional blackmail against others.
Daphne's novel "Floating Dreams" tells a story of injury due to love:
The male protagonist lost his parents from an early age, lived with his cousin, and was also his only heir to the property. From an early age, he especially admired his cousin, imitating his walking posture, words and deeds, as well as his courage and boldness.
Once, the male protagonist was taken by his cousin to a street corner of execution, standing in front of the gallows and watching the dry corpse swaying like straw to exercise his courage.
The male protagonist not only respects his cousin like a father and a brother, but also attaches himself to him. After the male protagonist turns 20, his cousin will go abroad alone every year for a vacation, leaving him alone to do housework at home.
Accidents come to its surprise. One winter, my cousin traveled to Italy and never returned. It turns out that he met Rachel's cousin, who is a family relative, in a foreign country, and has flashmarried her.
A kind of jealousy rose in the male protagonist's heart, and it was Rachel, the woman, who took away her cousin and her "father's love".
A year later, the man received a distress letter from his cousin with messy handwriting, informing him that he was controlled by Rachel and was in pain.
With many doubts, the male protagonist went alone to find the italian cousin's house, did not see Rachel, but learned from the next person that his cousin had passed away.
The mystery is rife, was it Rachel who killed her cousin? The man decided to return to his home in England to wait for the mysterious woman who was about to appear.
Shortly after returning home, the man learned that Rachel was going to bring her cousin's relics to the house to deal with the aftermath. He was determined to give the woman a little color to see, and tried to uncover the truth about his cousin's death from her.
Seeing Rachel, the male protagonist felt too incredible. Unexpectedly, Rachel was a very quiet and elegant woman, she and the people who came to greet her talked cordially, and her decent words and deeds attracted the eyes of satisfaction and approval from everyone.
Rachel and the man gave her cousin's clothes to poor tenants, and together with her subordinates, she built a garden and planted saplings of flowers and trees brought from Italy. She knows herbs and can prescribe prescriptions to relieve people's worries and diseases when visiting guests.
The man's heart has changed unconsciously, he has become accustomed to having Rachel by his side, and he has even begun to envy his cousin for having received Rachel's care and love. He just wanted Rachel to be happy now, and he wanted to give away all the property he could inherit at the age of 25 to this woman.
On the eve of his birthday, the man took out the property transfer documents signed by the lawyer and all the jewelry and eagerly handed them to Rachel and proposed to her. The two men hugged each other and laughed feverishly, and they spent a sweet night.
The next day, the male protagonist announced to everyone at the dinner table that he was about to marry Rachel, but Rachel behaved unusually cold and surprised, "Philip, are you crazy?" ”
Rachel finds a girl from the neighborhood as a companion to prevent the man from approaching her again, and informs him that he will leave the house soon.
This caused the man to be hit hard, and he suddenly remembered a letter that the tenant had given his cousin hidden in the futon, telling him that Rachel was plotting. But by then he had lost his mind in front of Rachel, and had fallen into rachel's charm and buried the letter under the cold granite.
Step by step, it became clear that the Godfather was confirmed by the bank notary, that Rachel was heavily indebted abroad, and that she had overdrawn a lot of money and transferred a lot of money abroad during her stay here.
The male protagonist suffered a blow and had a disease, in addition to the common cold headache, there was an additional discomfort. He suddenly remembered the illness that his cousin had told him in the letter, and it felt like déjà vu.
So, the male protagonist began to spy on Rachel, and he found an envelope, and from it poured out was not a letter but a poisonous golden lotus seed. It was exactly the same thing Rachel had thrown away in the plantation, and it was also grown in the Italian house where she and her cousin lived!
The man finds the godfather's daughter to go to Rachel's room to look for evidence that she framed herself and her cousin. The search was fruitless, but in the garden I saw Rachel dying after falling off the suspension bridge.
Rachel held the man's hand, his eyes were painful and confused, and he shouted his cousin's name and died.
With Rachel's death, the truth becomes a mystery. Is Rachel guilty or not guilty? It becomes the focus of a unified film.
"Floating Dream", also known as "My Cousin Rachel", is a novel written by Daphne Dumurière in 1951, which is another peak of her work after the famous novel "Butterfly Dream".
In "Floating Dreams", Daphne inherits her gothic mysterious style, telling his story with Rachel in the form of flashbacks of the male protagonist, and the whole article forms a structural closed-loop system, and the pursuit of the truth is also infinitely circulating.
Rachel, as the heroine of the story, has died, but the reader does not know whether she has committed a mistake, and the suspense under the entire gothic tone is condensed on the heroine, and she becomes a mysterious body to be developed by the readers. The author uses the confusing plot and meticulous description to guide the reader to identify the black and white of the characters, and to experience the author's inner sighs and deep thoughts about the tragedy of life caused by the imbalance of the rights of men and women.
Almost all of Daphne's works carry a certain degree of feminist conception, which is inseparable from the background of the era in which she lived.
At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, the first women's liberation movement broke out in Europe, which not only had an impact on the political field, but also had a profound response in the literary field, and various ideological achievements also broke through the bamboo shoots. Writers have tried to redefine women and the concept of feminism, and they have also emerged in the historical context of their lives.
But Daphne's relatively mild feminist ideas do not seem to be in the same dimension as the radical feminism of the time, and it is precisely this difference that the literary world did not recognize her talent as a brilliant writer for a long time, and she was once criticized as a female writer who was not completely free from the slavery of patriarchal culture.
But I think daphne is not pursuing the binary opposition between non-male rights and feminism in the two sexes, she has been trying to find a balance between male and feminism.
Daphne lived in the era of male power, grew up in the environment of male superiority and inferiority, although she was born in a London artist family, the family is well-off, but because of the lack of children in the family, Daphne was raised as a boy by her eager father from an early age, and her father's parenting style also had a great impact on her.
In the Edwardian era, when girls hardly wore long pants, she wore shorts and ties and liked to dress herself up as a boy. She believes that she has the wrong body, calling herself a "mixed-race child" when she was a child, with "a feminine appearance and a boy's mind and spirit", and a bold, rebellious and fierce personality.
The floating dream is interspersed with a large number of letters, which are not arbitrary, nor are they intended to express enthusiasm, but are a response to the established imbalance between men and women in society. Because the letter was originally used as a popular expression for women, the author mostly used the dialogue between cousins, this invisible male dialogue independent of the development of the reality of the story, which always provoked a wave of waves and panic when the life of the hero and heroine tended to be calm. In fact, in this way, Daphne subtly pointed the spearhead at the dark and terrifying forces that suppressed and persecuted women under the patriarchal inheritance.
Speaking of ourselves, our country has a five-thousand-year history of feudalism, and the idea of "favoring sons over women, and respecting men over women" has also been deeply rooted.
With the development of society, although this feudal thinking has gradually withdrawn from the stage of history, it has shown an embarrassing trend towards the other extreme, many improper value orientations mislead women to be responsible only for their own appearance and figure, and "ten fingers do not stick to the sun and spring water" has even become the standard for many women to define happiness.
This perception of going from one extreme to the other clearly downplays and distorts the true values that women should have and pursue in real life and society.
Therefore, we should not only rationally recognize gender conflicts, but also strive to resolve them. Daphne Dumurier has spent her life trying to rescue the lost spiritual world from the materialistic material civilization, to find the lost self in reason and emotion, to seek a healthy and harmonious mode of coexistence between the sexes, and to reinterpret the classics from the perspective of returning to the family and harvesting happiness.
If you are also interested in Daphne Du mullier's novel, it is recommended to check out its movie of the same name, of course, the best thing is to read the original book
Floating Dream ¥28.6 Purchase