• 1 Margaret Forster connects ‘Monte Verità’ with du Maurier’s bi-sexuality and her constant sense of b (...)

2Does it mean it is outrageous to write on ‘Monte Verità’? This is what Margaret Forster, du Maurier’s biographer, suggests when she points out that it is in du Maurier’s short stories rather than in her novels that we can locate ‘the spontaneous, the slightly cruel, the outrageous’ (Forster 256) and she goes on offering a biographical reading of ‘Monte Verità’ as dealing with Daphne Du Maurier’s bi-sexuality.1 And Slavoj Zižek seems to provide an answer to the question in one of the few articles devoted to this short story in which he wonders whether one should read du Maurier today:

• 2 Zižek remarks that in each story, ‘the intrusion of an unexpected dimension disturbs the “normal” r (...)

3According to Zižek, du Maurier’s writing is compelling. If her prose is marked by melodramatic excess, it exercises a ‘tremendous power of fascination’ which is, according to him, due to the fact that it deals with feminine masochism. Referring to Gilles Deleuze’s essay on Sacher-Masoch, Zižek argues that ‘paradoxically, the staging of what appears to be a masochist scenario is the first act of liberation’. According to him, du Maurier ‘is staging elementary fantasmatic narratives’ in her short stories which ‘should be read in the same way that Claude Lévi-Strauss interpreted myths’, that is, ‘through each other’. If we do this, ‘a precise structure’ comes out and we can see they all deal with sexual relationships, the first and the last short stories dealing with a ‘happy’ couple, the other four focusing on the reasons why sexual relationship fails.2 ‘In “Monte Verità”, a beautiful young Anna abandons her husband and potential lover for the “Truth Mountain”, a remote resort in the Swiss Alps, the seat of an initiatic group who leads there a secluded life of eternal ecstatic satisfaction exempted from the traumas of our “world of men and women”—in short, she chooses what Lacan called the Other Jouissance over ordinary phallic jouissance’ (Zižek).

• 3 See footnote 10 of Zižek’s paper: ‘This paper was originally written as an introduction to the Vira (...)
• 4 The Birds and Other Stories displays numerous relations with war (especially in ‘The Birds’ and ‘Ki (...)

4While we may agree that there is a connecting link between the six short stories, Zižek’s Lacanian analysis of ‘Monte Verità’ as a story of ‘a woman enjoying her own ruin’ is certainly interesting but does not fully account for the whole text. In any case, his reading is outrageous enough for his paper to have been rejected, when it was initially meant to be the introduction to the 2004 Virago edition.3 My own point is that some form of outrage—not necessarily sexual—is the connecting link between the short stories of the collection4 and I will dwell on ‘Monte Verità’, the least commented upon and the most cryptic, to prove the notion is central.

• 5 The Larousse dictionary gives the following definition of outrage : ‘Offense extrêmement grave, con (...)

5According to the OED, the word ‘outrage’, which has an Anglo-Norman and Old French etymology (ultrage, oltrage, outrage), contains the prefix ultre, outre, ‘beyond’, which suggests some form of transgression (in word or deed). The word can refer both to an ‘act of violence committed against a person or against society’ and to ‘fierce and overwhelming indignation, anger, etc., experienced in response to some injustice or affront’. The English word thus covers both what the modern French words outrage and indignation⁵ each convey.

• 6 ‘His acquiescence to the total break-up of his life astounded me’, the narrator writes (76).
• 7 ‘“I’ve tried to study it,” he said, “this religion, belief. . . . ”/ “you talk, Victor, as if you b (...)

9Victor, Anna’s husband, first prefers to think that Anna has fallen into a crevasse but he soon has to acknowledge that she has joined the Monte Verità group when she speaks to him from the fortress and pleads with him to forget her. This is experienced as a traumatic event by Victor who will only emerge from this nervous breakdown after a kind of talking cure in which he explains everything to his best friend. He then begins to accept the outrage,6 going as far as to believe the community’s own beliefs,7 and spends his whole life waiting for Anna, going back to Monte Verità every year on a kind of pilgrimage.

• 8 ‘It seemed to me monstrous that an unknown sect, on a mountain side, could, in the space of a few d (...)

10Victor’s best friend is also the narrator of the story and is very much affected when he hears about the tragedy, all the more so since he is in love with Anna. Outraged by what is for him ‘monstrous’ (76),8 he suggests acting, going to ‘our embassy to approach the government of that country, to have a nationwide inquiry, to get the Press on to it, the backing of our own government’ (76). However, his reaction is short-lived; with the coming of the First World War, he forgets about Anna, and Victor and he grows apart. Twenty years later, the plane of this successful businessman accidentally lands near Monte Verità and the narrator starts looking for Anna, manages to enter the walls of the so-called monastery and meets her. He is at first enthralled by what he witnesses, then utterly repelled and leaves the place.

• 9 Three possible endings are imagined by the narrator: either the women become immortal (41), commit (...)

12I will argue that confronting the various understandings of the event and the various responses to it is a way for the author to explore the nature of outrage and raise ethical questions connected with it. The villagers’ reaction to the community’s outrageous doings breeds violence, destruction and probably drives the members of the community to commit suicide (although this is not sure since the ending is open and three options are offered9). This situation raises questions about the legitimacy and possible outrageousness of outrage. Isn’t the peasants’ fury excessive and outrageous? Who is responsible for outrage in that case? Who are the most outrageous in their behaviour, the community or the villagers? Without exactly defending the Monte Verità group, the author points out that they are far from being the only ones guilty of outrage. Du Maurier further asks if what is defined as outrageous is really so. Indeed, for the people in the valley and the mountain the main outrage is the very existence of the so-called sect. They tend to define the community’s unusual behaviour as outrageous, cannot tolerate it and commit outrageous acts in return. If the community’s outrage breeds fury, the villagers’ intolerance breeds outrage too.

• 10 He tells his friend who would like to do away with it: ‘We don’t go about destroying monasteries or (...)

13On the other hand, for love of Anna and without knowing exactly what is going on in Monte Verità, Victor blindly accepts what happens to her: he comes to idealise the place where one supposedly remains immortal and beautiful for ever; living in a dream, he sacrifices his own life for it. Not acknowledging the community’s possible outrageous doings amounts to passivity, blind acceptance, and entails his death. Although a free man, Victor in a way comes to embody exactly what a member of a sect is supposed to be in the villagers’ eyes, i.e., an object of subjection. Concomitantly, Victor indirectly questions the very definition of a sect. He sees Anna as a sort of saint who has been transfigured (74) and considers the community as not very different from a monastic or conventual community.10 In that case, can its existence be regarded as outrageous?

• 11 See footnote 13.

15The story thus turns into a reflection on what we could call the ‘ethics of outrage’11 and the difficulty of accepting difference. Outrage is shown to stem from ignorance, which construes erroneous ideas (the villagers call the community a ‘sect’, concomitantly construing it as a malevolent group), and to breed intolerance. What is outrageous is what is misunderstood. Ignorance can even take the trappings of knowledge and become the doxa as is made clear when Victor reads and learns about the sect’s history and organises his beliefs accordingly:

• 12 Although climbing metaphorises the efforts necessary to ‘come close to whatever Being it is that ru (...)

17On the contrary, Anna and the other members of the community are able to accept beauty and ugliness; they accept the body as such, not necessarily as erotic; they do not consider nakedness as outrageous or ugliness (leprosy or homosexuality) as more shocking than beauty; for them, the moon is not better than the sun, men are not superior to women (they are sexless and all look alike with their cropped hair). In other words, they can go beyond a dualist hierarchical way of thinking; they do not think in terms of exclusion (either/or) but of combination (both/and). This is the form of truth they are looking for: a new way of thinking and a new way of life. It is not really a divine type of truth (‘Here is no creed, no savior, and no deity’ [105]), even if it has messianic overtones,12 but a plural form of truth that they are after and that ‘the Mountain of Truth’ symbolises.

• 13 This is David Scott’s way of synthesising Stuart Hall’s ethics. Although Hall refers to a context w (...)

18Their way of life, because it is different from the norm, appears outrageous just as their way of thinking does. Paradoxically enough, the secluded life Anna has chosen may be understood as a way to open herself to the other (beautiful Anna opens herself to ugliness; married Anna accepts lesbianism: she becomes able to accept the other within herself and to accept otherness, another ethos). While her beautiful damaged face is unbearable for the narrator who significantly leaves the fortress, thus symbolically refusing openness to the other, Anna accepts it. Should this be read as an instance of feminine masochism, as Zižek suggests? Or is it an example of ‘working on the self’ (Scott 15), an ethical attitude since ‘[w]e stand a chance of flourishing better . . . the more open we can make ourselves to our own vulnerability—our own fragile, exposed, receptivity—to difference’?¹³

• 14 McGrath writes: ‘Clairvoyance hints at the existence of a supernatural realm, but can only offer gl (...)

20What may have been an autobiographical short story and a reflection on an outrageous form of sexuality to Victor Gollancz (Forster 257) reads today, in the light of ethical theories, as a story with a much wider scope. ‘Monte Verità’ is, in Patrick McGrath’s words in his introduction to the NYRB edition of du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now, ‘a complicated allegory’ (McGrath x); but while McGrath chooses to define it as an attempt at going into the territory of the supernatural,14 I would read it as an allegory of outrage in which the ubiquitous notion of outrage appears both to enforce ‘the normalizing pressure to repress and subjugate otherness’ (Scott 15) and to resist this pressure. The very ambiguity and indeterminacy of the text, with its array of conflicting viewpoints which make it difficult to locate the author’s own point of view, is in keeping with the ethics of the protagonist, Anna, who favours difference and openness and appears in the end to be the author’s persona.

• 15 A. S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book is probably the best introduction to this. After describing the E (...)
• 16 On this subject, see Macel & Lavigne 54–57. See also Laban’s book in which he defines modern dance (...)
• 17 A video is available on:
  http://traces-du-sacre.centrepompidou.fr/exposition/oeuvres_exposees.php?id (...)

22Taking into account that geographical and historical context sheds a further light on the narrative and orients our reading towards another possible meaning of the short story, which comes as a complement to Forster’s and Zižek’s analyses. The story, indeed, begins in the 1910s at a time when various communities had settled on Monte Verità and the hill had become attractive to nature-lovers (a vegetarian community had settled there in 1905), anarchists (like the physician Raphael Friedeberg), artists and famous people, like Carl Jung, Otto Gross, Max Weber, Paul Klee, D.H. Lawrence, Isadora Duncan, Mary Wigman or Rudolf Laban.15 In the 1910s, Rudolf Laban especially, was in Monte Verità and had his dancers dance in the open air looking for some sort of mystical ecstasy, a dance based on rhythm that meant to voice pent-up emotions and that combined a quest for health, strength and corporeal beauty. This theorist of expressionist dance meant to reconnect nature and the body and taught his dancers to experience time, space and energy intensely through their senses. Expression and impression were thus closely linked for him.16 In the summer of 1913, when Anna is supposed to join the community in Monte Verità, Mary Wigman joined Laban and danced intensely rhythmical dances, hovering between ecstasy and suffering, joy and despair, freedom, vitality and sacrificial impulses. For her as for Laban, the truth of dancing lay in a confrontation with one’s own ‘daemon’. This is what she implemented in 1914 in Hexentanz (‘The Witch’s Dance’),17 trying to reach what Greek tragedy was looking for, that is a cathartic moment.

• 18 According to Nietzsche, for art to develop, as it did in the apex of Greek tragedy, there should be (...)
• 19 Delsarte’s Sytem of Dramatic Expression, his belief in the importance of gestures and attitudes had (...)
• 20 At the same time, in Dresden, the Swiss musician Jaques-Dalcroze was developing his quest for ‘the (...)

24In the 1910s, ‘human character changed’, according to Woolf’s notorious phrase (Woolf 319). If the date has remained a hallmark in the history of Modernism, it is because at around that time, all the arts underwent a major change. They all looked for some form of ecstasy, an ecstatic state connected either with eroticism or a return to primitivism, nature and a fusion with the cosmos, a form of harmony between the mind and the body which owed a lot to Nietzsche’s Dyonisian philosophy as voiced in The Birth of Tragedy18 as well as to François Delsarte.19 This was in itself an outrageous stance and this outrage can be traced in Derain’s ‘Danse bachique’ (1906) or Matisse’s ‘La Danse’, in Isadora Duncan’s way of dancing with bare feet, ample tunics and without bodice, as well as in Nijinski’s, Mary Wigman’s or Martha Graham’s dancing, and especially, in Rudolph Laban’s expressionist dance, which meant to dance life as it is and not as it is supposed to be, to experience the world in its immediacy, both in its light and its darkness.20

• 21 On that subject, see Manning who acknowledges what had been silenced until recently and traces the (...)
• 22 But his opening choreographic piece for the 1936 Olympics was cancelled by Goebbels and Laban subse (...)

25Historically speaking, the Monte Verità community experienced new ways of being which were outrageous at the time because they went against the current conventions and the prevailing dichotomous way of thinking. They favoured a way of thinking and being which, instead of pitting the one against the other (the body against the mind, joy against suffering, etc.) welcomed the other. In her own fictional Monte Verità, du Maurier examines the ambivalent nature of outrage, implicitly pointing at the promise and the potential dangers of some modernist ideas, especially Laban’s theory. Laban, the visionary father of modern dance who explored the potentials of the body is also the one who exposed the body and made it vulnerable (as Anna’s face is and as the bodies will be in the choreographies of Pina Bausch, one of Laban’s heirs). Du Maurier shows how interesting, welcome and enthralling his ideas may have been in pre-war times, how beautifully welcoming to the other and open to difference they were and, conversely, how vulnerable they were to unscrupulous others, how easily, because of their very ethical bend and openness to the other, they could be recuperated by the Nazis.²¹ And it is true that in the 1930s, Laban was entrusted with important responsibilities in Hitler’s Ministry of Propaganda and produced choreographies for them.²² As for Mary Wigman, after a period of success and a tour through the United States in the early 1930s, she became involved with the Nazis and conceived Totenklage, ‘Lament of the Dead’, for the 1936 Olympic Games before her aesthetics was rejected by Goebbels.