The Coast as a Site of Ecological Haunting in Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea and Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca
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As Alain Corbin has demonstrated, it is only fairly recently that positive attitudes to-wards the sea have emerged in Western cultures. Until the eighteenth century, the sea was seen as a remnant of the Flood, a disturbing reminder of the chaos incompatible with God's ordered creation. This essay reaches back to such pre-eighteenth-century conceptions of the sea and shore and shows how these underlie present-day negative views of the ocean, as is apparent in Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea (1978) and Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca (1938), both of which are set at the seaside. It reads these two novels as examples of a form of literature which, rather than encoding the beach purely as a pleasure zone, gives room to the more uncanny aspects of the sea, and depicts the beach as a site of what can be conceptualised as ecological haunting. Inspired by Derrida, the essay demonstrates that these texts are aware of the environment as a haunting presence which influences and shapes their protagonists' lives in myriad ways. Even when they do not focus on explicitly environmental concerns, such texts can thus be regarded as environmental writing in the sense that they give room to the otherness which surrounds their characters and conditions their individual identities