Myself when young or growing pains by daphne du maurier

Abstract

The article analyses Daphne Du Maurier's autobiographical novel "Myself When Young", written in 1977. The choice of the aspect is determined by the fact that the problem of autobiographical creation myths became actual in our days, which was repeatedly noted in criticism. It is also necessary to emphasize the ambiguity of its solution in virtue of special subjectivity of the material of this genre (memory, diary notes). Therefore, the genre peculiarity of any autobiographical novel is connected, first of all, with the idiosyncrasy of its literary structure. The purpose of this study is to reveal the literary features of the autobiographical novel by Daphne Du Maurier. This novel, published in 1977 known as "Myself When Young", the writer herself entitled it as "Growing Pains. The Shaping of a Writer". This discrepancy became the starting point of the study. The analysis of genre specificity of the text is formed up on semantic distinctions of these titles. Reasoning from the original title, the attention of a mature author is focused on the period of formation as an artist. It's about childhood and adolescence, which ended in marriage. It is this time interval that is actualized in the version of the title given by the publisher of the novel. The variant of Daphne Du Maurier is rather a metaphor of creative formation. In this connection, the plot of the novel and its structure are analyzed. Particular attention is paid to the character of the narrator, fixing and accentuating the main events of her life. As an inference, it can be argued that author's reflection is caused not just by nostalgia for youth, but by a desire to reconstitute the origins of the creative principle in her life.