Jealousy PDF
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Jealousy i ii Peter Toohey Jealousy YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS | NEW HAVEN AND LONDON iii Copyright © 2014 Peter Toohey All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publishers. For information about this and other Yale University Press publications, please contact: U.S. Office: [email protected] www.yalebooks.com Europe Office: [email protected] www.yalebooks.co.uk Typeset in Arno Pro by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd Printed in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Toohey, Peter, 1951- Jealousy / Peter Toohey. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-300-18968-1 (alk. paper) 1. Jealousy. 2. Jealousy in literature. I. Title. BF575.J4T66 2014 152.4’8—dc23 2014028282 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 iv For Elaine Fantham v vi Contents Preface viii 1 What is jealousy? 1 2 The meat it feeds on 23 3 Ears mishear and eyes magnify 49 4 Beyond the Bullaburra triangle 80 5 Utopia 99 6 The invisible made visible 117 7 A feast for all the family 137 8 Meeting at the Dingo Bar 162 9 Rattling the cage 185 10 Turning your back on it 205 Readings 224 List of illustrations 243 Acknowledgements 248 Index 250 vii Preface ‘If there was some woman in London that Maxim loved,’ laments the narrator of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, ‘I could fight her. We would stand on common ground. I should not be afraid. Anger and jealousy were things that could be conquered. One day the woman would grow old or tired or different, and Maxim would not love her any more. But Rebecca would never grow old. Rebecca would always be the same. And her I could not fight. She was too strong for me.’ The ‘new’ Mrs de Winter is deeply jealous of her husband Maxim’s late wife. Much of the novel is absorbed with her growing preoccupation with the charismatic, sophisticated and beautiful Rebecca. She struggles against her rival’s shade, which, she fears, haunts the mind of Maxim. She struggles as well with the Cornish estate of Manderley and its staff. From the seething Mrs Danvers, the housekeeper, she learns that ‘the real Mrs de Winter’ used cruelly and deliberately to provoke Maxim’s jealousy, bringing men back for weekends: ‘They made love to her of course; who would not? She laughed, she viii PREFACE would come back and tell me what they had said, and what they’d done. She did not mind, it was like a game to her. Like a game. Who wouldn’t be jealous? They were all jealous, all mad for her . . . everyone who knew her, everyone who came to Manderley.’ How can you possibly deal with a rival whom you cannot confront or combat? Maxim ‘was jealous while she lived, and now he’s jealous when she’s dead’. Maxim also acted on that jealousy; after Rebecca threatens that her illegitimate child will inherit Manderley, he shoots her in the boathouse. The new Mrs de Winter is only freed from her jealousy when she learns the truth about Rebecca, and when the house, so infused with Rebecca’s presence that it seems almost to be alive, burns to the ground. Published nearly eighty years ago, Rebecca is probably the most- read book about jealousy in English. It has never gone out of print, and has been adapted for stage and screen numerous times. That says something about the enduring fascination of the emotion of jealousy. (It also says something about the enduring fascination exerted by popular psychological thrillers and Gothic romances.) Rebecca, which its author called ‘a study in jealousy’, is also a novel crafted from jealousy: du Maurier’s husband, Major Tommy ‘Boy’ Browning, had been engaged to a glamorous woman called Jan Ricardo, who threw herself under a train during the Second World War. Daphne du Maurier harboured a suspicion that Tommy had always remained attached to her. The novel’s love triangle, with a ghostly but still powerful presence at one of its corners, had its roots in real life. After all, the sexual jealousy that the novel circles around is ix
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