Has he heroically resisted and survived one of the women his godfather warns him about, those who “impel disaster”? Or has his own suspicious misogyny made him not a hero, not a victim, but a villain himself? “She was my first, and last,” he tells us, but has his inexperience made him vulnerable to her wiles or liable to fevered obsession and delusions? It’s not just Philip Ashley, our narrator, who will never be able to answer his question about Rachel, but all of us, left by du Maurier suspended in uncertainty and thus in our judgment of Philip himself. My Cousin Rachel is more understated than Jamaica Inn but, in its own way, it is just as perfect. Was Rachel innocent or guilty? Maybe I shall learn that, too, in purgatory. No one will ever guess the burden of blame I carry on my shoulders nor will they know that every day, haunted still by doubt, I ask myself a question which I cannot answer.
0 kommentar(er)
