Murdering (M)others

Abstract

The Flight of the Falcon (1965), although one of du Maurier’s lesser known novels, is perhaps her most ambitious. Set in contemporary Italy, it attempts to contextualize the dynamics of familial relationships within the patriarchal cultural inheritance of Europe. In so doing, it offers the reader a text in which the conventions of Gothic fiction are used self-consciously within a ‘realist’ framework that furnishes constant reminders of the traumatizing effects of World War Two. Those critics of du Maurier who have categorized her as merely a writer of popular fiction expressing a nostalgic yearning for the past, might well find such categorization difficult to apply in relation to this novel.¹ Likewise, the recent dismissal of her as ‘an agreeable writer of agreeable fiction but not a serious author’ sounds particularly hollow.²