What is it about the work of Daphne du Maurier that continues to hold to our collective consciousness? On some level, we must recognize that her Gothic novels – tales of hysterical women and gaslighting men tinged with the vague possibility of the supernatural – can be a little ridiculous at times. Nor was her writing always particularly original; her most famous novel, Rebecca, contains so many elements of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre that some might call it a rip-off (although I would consider such an assessment unfair). And yet, her work casts an undeniable spell. In the eighty years since its publication, Rebecca has never been out of print.
Simply put, we still read du Maurier because she tapped into primal obsessions and embodied those obsessions in arresting, complicated characters. She was also an unsung master of atmosphere and suspense. Here’s Parul Sehgal, writing for the New York Times:
“Like Wilkie Collins before her and Sarah Waters today, du Maurier had a preternatural understanding of how to engineer suspense; she knew how to make you wait and want and when to deliver the final blow. ‘The Birds,’ her short story that was the basis of the Hitchcock film, is such a perfect piece of narrative tension, it feels less written than administered; it acts upon you with unerring, hypodermic efficiency.”
“The Blue Lenses” is not one of du Maurier’s most famous stories, but it is certainly one of the best. It was first published in the Ladies Home Journal in May of 1959, and was included in the short story collection The Breaking Point later that year. I read it in the NY Review Books collection Don’t Look Now, edited by Patrick McGrath.
The story concerns Marda West, a woman recuperating from eye surgery. While she has not always been blind, she has been struck by an unnamed condition and is awaiting lenses that will restore her sight. She has been in the hospital for several weeks and has developed close relationships with the nurses there; she has even asked her favorite, Nurse Ansel, to come home with her to be her private nurse while she adjusts to the lenses. She looks forward to finally seeing what all her new friends look like.
This opening section is very smartly written by du Maurier. She omits all visual descriptions. We learn how characters sound, how they smell, how they move, but not how they look. Like Marda West, we are trapped in darkness, piecing together information from what our other senses offer us. Also like Marda West, we come to conclusions about the characters based on this limited information.
Then the day comes that the lenses are fitted. Marda West can see again. But what she sees is entirely unexpected: her surgeon has a dog’s head. Her day nurse has the head of a cow. Nurse Ansel has the head of a snake and her husband Jim, that of a vulture with a “blood-soaked beak.” At first she thinks the nurses are playing a cruel trick on her, but eventually comes to realize that there is no grand conspiracy – she has been granted the extraordinary ability to see those around her as they really are. The lenses have removed blindness both literal and metaphorical.
The metaphor may not be subtle, but it is effective. Their true natures revealed, Marda realizes that the people she thought she knew best – people she intimately trusted – are in actuality dangerous and deceitful. With that revelation comes paranoia. She suddenly remembers it was not she who suggested that Nurse Ansel come home with her, but Ansel herself. Why did Jim go along with it? Why does he spend so much time talking with Ansel in the hallway when he should be spending time with his wife? Does this have anything to do with his insistence that she allow him to become co-director of her trust fund? Things that were once benign take on a queasy undertow of terror.
Marda’s newfound vision puts the reader on edge as well. Like Marda, we have never seen what these characters actually look like. Our first view of them is with their unsettling animal visages. Characters who seemed polite and kind reemerge as predators and we realize that, like Marda, we have misjudged them. One starts to think, who might I have misjudged in my own life? Which of my closest friends, or family members, might be a monster in disguise? In that uneasy suspicion, I was reminded of the work of Shirley Jackson, another writer who saw danger in the ordinary (read my review of Jackson’s “The Summer People” here).
Still hoping that her condition is a deceit on the part of the hospital, Marda sneaks out. Her experiences outside are wild and hallucinatory:
“[The] couple passing her now, a toad’s head on a short black body clutching a panther’s arm, could give her no protection, and the policeman standing at the corner was a baboon, the woman talking to him a little prinked-up pig. No one was human, no one was safe, the man a pace or two behind her was like Jim, another vulture. There were vultures on the pavement opposite. Coming towards her, laughing, was a jackal.”
On the brink of madness, she blacks out and awakens in the hospital. New lenses are affixed. The problem, it seems, was all in her head – the old lenses were pressing against a nerve. All seems right with the world. Marda immediately begins to dismiss what she has seen. Then du Maurier unleashes a final twist that Patrick McGrath describes in an article for The Guardian as “brilliantly grim…an instance of perfect narrative ingenuity.” It is indeed a terrific ending, reinforcing all the paranoia and fear that came before.
The stories in The Breaking Point were written when du Maurier was herself on the edge. Following her husband’s mental breakdown in 1957, du Maurier fought off madness until she reached, in her words, “the limit of endurance.” Like many of the other stories in the book, “The Blue Lenses” reflects du Maurier’s struggle to maintain sanity in spite of a world crumbling around her. While du Maurier is not typically thought of as an author of weird fiction, I would argue that “The Blue Lenses,” in its depiction of a character who battles for sanity after discovering a frightening new reality, fits comfortably within the weird tradition.
(On an unrelated note, I wonder if Jack Vance ever read “The Blue Lenses.” His novel The Eyes of the Overworld, released seven years later and reviewed here, also features contact lenses that alter the perception of the wearer.)
While du Maurier was regarded as little more than an author of popular melodramas in her time, critics have since reassessed their views. She is now regarded as one the 20th century’s finest authors of suspense. The Canadian-Argentine novelist Alberto Manguel wrote, “Her novel Rebecca, her short stories ‘The Birds,’ ‘Don’t Look Now,’ ‘The Blue Lenses,’ and dozens more have an effectiveness that make them seem almost traditional, belonging not to any one author but to the imagination of the world.”
Agreed. “The Blue Lenses” is a wonderful piece of work, perceptive and disconcerting. I look forward to reviewing more of du Maurier’s writing in the future. Perhaps tonight I will dream of Manderlay again.
NEXT TIME: OFFSPRING by Jack Ketchum!
My Weird Life 