Lacan identified the beginning of the movement of ideas that finally gave birth to psychoanalysis as being that of…the Romantic notion of ‘pleasure in pain’. …Prior to this moment, the universe was one in which the Unconscious was not yet operative, in which the 'subject’ was identified with the Light of Reason as opposed to the impersonal Night of drives, and not, in the very kernel of its being, this Night itself; afterwards, the very impact of psychoanalysis transformed artistic literary practice (Eugene O'Neill’s plays, for example, already presuppose psychoanalysis, whereas Henry James, Katherine Mansfield and even Kafka do not). It is also within this horizon that du Maurier moves- this space of the heroic innocence of the Unconscious in which irresistible passions freely roam around. There is one term that encapsulates everything that renders this space-and du Maurier’s writing itself-so problematic for contemporary feminism: feminine masochism. What du Maurier stages again and again in a shamelessly direct way is the different figure of 'feminine masochism’, of a woman enjoying her own ruin, finding a tortured satisfaction in her subjection and humiliation

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