Explaining why Cornwall is the perfect place, the novel’s Egyptologist, Abel Trelawny, says: The story features the mummy of an Egyptian queen that requires a suitably ancient, foreign land in which to be resurrected. An ancient placeīram Stoker, the author of Dracula, set The Jewel of Seven Stars in Cornwall in 1903. These features provided ample fuel for gothic authors of the time. Increased ease of access to the county through travel also increased the county’s notoriety and what people found struck them as strange. People were also becoming more aware of Cornwall due to an increase in travel narratives, travel guides, folklore collections and stories featuring the county, as part of the rise of a print culture. These include being one of the last counties to be connected to the national railway, the collapse of the mining industry, the birth of tourism, and a period of mass migration out of the county.Īll such changes spoke to more generalised Victorian anxieties of globalisation, modernity and the industrial revolution, which caused concerns about changing economies, collapsing industries, and social (and geographical) mobility.
An early example of American gothic, it follows a man who visits Cornwall with his family, where he loses his mind and jumps from the cliffs.īy the 19th century, these Gothic representations of Cornwall see a sudden boom as the county became increasingly prevalent in the wider British imagination due to a series of rapid cultural changes. This could be seen in Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 novel Wieland. As far afield as the US, Cornwall was perceived as a place of hauntings, madness, and death - a foreign, liminal threat composed of precipices and thresholds which would influence subsequent representations of the county. While Rebecca was published in 1938, Cornwall’s legends, landscape, and distinctive identity lent themselves to the gothic imagination from the end of the 18th century. Du Maurier’s Cornwall was a haunted place and the author was drawing upon a long tradition of seeing the Duchy as spectral and monstrous.
Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca showcases the English county of Cornwall as a Gothic space of tumultuous waters, coarse moorlands, and perilous cliffs.