53 pages • 1 hour read
Daphne du MaurierJamaica Inn
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1935A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 10-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary
The vicar gives Mary a blanket to wrap herself in so that she can change out of her wet clothes. Mary once again feels compelled to tell him what happened, and she once again feels like a foolish young girl in front of the vicar. She asks in vain if he can intercede on Jem’s behalf with Squire Bassat. She bitterly laments her love for Jem. Instead of comforting her, Francis Davey reminds her that she is still young; she will soon forget Jem.
Francis Davey asks about any new developments at Jamaica Inn. Mary, whose mind had been preoccupied with Jem, almost forgot about Joss’s confession about being a wrecker. She explains to the vicar what Joss told her. Davey’s voice sounds sharper than usual. He asks if Jem knows; Mary says that she told him. The vicar ponders that Jem may be able to save himself if he turns Joss in but reminds Mary that they do not truly know if Jem is working with Joss. When he sees the despair on Mary’s face, he tells her that the government will be cracking down on wreckers at the start of the new year. The vicar exits the carriage at the turnoff to Altarnun and sends it off toward Bodmin and Jamaica Inn.
When the carriage nearly reaches Jamaica Inn, it is ambushed by Joss and his men. Joss shoots and kills the driver, and when he sees Mary inside, he is cruelly gleeful; he is drunk. He pulls her out, holding her by her hair. She is still half-clothed. He surmises that she slept with a man who tired of her company; he calls her a “common slut.” When Mary tries to say that she informed against him, Joss calls her bluff. He rallies his men: the storm is breaking, and they are going to lure a ship to wreck on the rocks.
Chapter 11 Summary
Mary passes out during the torturous ride to the shore. When she comes to, she is alone, and she manages to painfully squeeze through the window, cutting her side in the process. The men are nowhere to be found, and the stillness and quiet are more ominous than their jeering had been. She runs into Harry, the pedlar, surprising him. Mary manages to fight him off and she runs off in a panic.
Mary loses Harry in the fog and crawls along the beach, coming upon Joss and the wreckers silently standing by the shore. She hides behind a rock and watches. To her horror, she sees that the men have lit a flare to draw in a ship. She can see the ship’s light approaching in the darkness. Mary cannot bear it any longer. She jumps up and shouts to get the ship’s attention, despite the distance. The men catch her and bind and gag her, kicking her as she lies on the sand.
Mary is forced to watch as the ship founders and sinks. Joss and his men, drunk and incentivized by their unplanned success, loot the wreckage and the corpses in a frenzy until dawn approaches. Joss brings the men to order and slings Mary over his back because she cannot stand.
The men haphazardly load their loot onto horses and into the carriage. Some desert the group as dawn approaches. Foolishness and panic cause them to overload the carriage which overturns and smashes a wheel. Some of the men who are still obedient to Joss set fire to the carriage; others fight tooth and nail for the farm cart. The men, except for Harry, mutiny, attacking Joss. Harry and Joss shoot two men, winning them the cart. Harry drags the bodies into the fire, and they flee the scene with Mary on the cart. Mary remembers that it is Christmas Day.
Chapter 12 Summary
Mary wakes up in her own bed at Jamaica Inn with Aunt Patience attending to her. Patience tells her she has been asleep for two days. Mary has some of her strength back, but her thoughts are clouded by the trauma of the night of Christmas Eve. Patience begs Mary not to cross Joss again. He has been sitting downstairs with a gun since he returned; Patience fears that he will kill Mary. Mary is tired of suffering for her aunt’s sake, and she becomes angry with Patience.
Joss enters the room, pale, and asks if they heard any voices in the yard. Someone is after him; Joss says that this man will kill all of them, but he will not divulge who he is. The man had warned Joss not to get careless, but Joss did not listen. He blames Mary and Patience for letting him drink. He reminds Mary that it was his presence that night that kept Mary from coming to real harm. Joss drags Mary out into the hall, caresses her face and nearly kisses her, indifferent to Patience. Mary shudders, reminded of Jem.
They go to the kitchen. Joss wants to make a plan. Harry may still be loyal, but he has likely fled. The other wreckers are probably lying low in fear. Patience meekly suggests fleeing, but Joss calls her an “idiot”; the whole countryside will be looking for the wreckers, and fleeing would seem an admission of guilt. Joss knows that the authorities need proof to tie him to the crime. He plans to tell them that he was home with Patience and Mary on Christmas Eve. The dead carriage driver is a potential flaw, but they took his body to the beach and buried it, and his carriage is burned. Joss asks why Mary was in the carriage in the first place, threatening her to tell the truth. She lies that she walked to Launceston to go to the fair, bought a bandana, and hired the carriage to take her home. With no way to confirm her story, Joss has to take her word for it.
They hear a tapping at the window. After some tense minutes, they see that it is Harry. Angry at his own fear, Joss unbars the door and lets him in. Mary is nauseated at the sight of him. Harry recommends that they flee; the whole countryside is looking for them. After some arguing, Harry reveals that his true motive for coming to Jamaica Inn is to divvy up the loot that they brought back from the wreck.
When Harry asks if Joss is taking orders from someone above him, Joss throws him to the ground and points the gun at his neck. Joss locks Harry in the storeroom with the loot. He plans to make Harry load the car for him and then ditch him.
Mary knows that she has to get to Altarnun before tomorrow night. Joss plans to wait up in the kitchen all night. Before locking Mary in her room for the night, Joss touches Mary’s mouth and tells her that he has a soft spot for her; if he were younger, he would have courted and won her. He says that he does not fear the law but others who would come in the night to strike him down.
In her room, Mary touches her mouth where Joss touched her, and she begins to cry.
Chapter 13 Summary
Mary wakes up to Jem throwing pebbles at her window. He struggles to climb up to her window, but he cannot get inside. Jem apologizes to Mary for abandoning her, but he will not tell her why he did it. Mary, who had been delighted to see the man she loves, is affronted by his coldness. Mary again begins to suspect that Jem is involved with Joss’s crimes—he may be the man from whom Joss takes orders. Jem becomes enraged when he sees the scratches and bruises on Mary’s face. He breaks the windowpane and climbs in to examine her. When he gets her to admit that it was Joss that hurt her, Jem vows to kill his brother.
Mary begs Jem to go away from the area; her plan to go to Francis Davey for help might endanger Jem. Jem begs Mary to be careful. He leaves while there is still the cover of darkness.
Mary formulates a plan to sneak out during the day, claiming that she needs to rest before their journey that night. Joss buys it. Mary goes to her room and waits until evening to slip out of her window. She makes it to Altarnun, only to find out from Francis Davey’s housekeeper that the vicar is out of town and not expected to be home tonight.
Chapter 14 Summary
Mary writes a note of explanation for the vicar and sets off for Squire Bassat’s house in North Hill, four miles away. Along the way, she feels let down by the vicar, and she worries if Joss has discovered her absence. When she arrives at Bassat’s manor house, she discovers that he, too, is gone. Taking pity on her, a servant takes Mary to Mrs. Bassat.
Mrs. Bassat informs Mary that her husband went off to Launceston to gather men. He plans on surrounding Jamaica Inn and arresting Joss for causing the shipwreck. Mrs. Bassat suddenly realizes who Mary is and nearly calls for help, but Mary manages to convince her that she is trustworthy.
Mary feels defeated. Her plans have failed, and if Joss discovered her absence, he might have fled before Bassat arrives. Mrs. Bassat promises to vouch for Mary. To keep her mind off of the situation, Mrs. Bassat orders her servants to bring them supper. At eight o’clock in the evening, Mary can bear it no longer and wants to go back to Jamaica Inn to see what has transpired. Mrs. Bassat orders her servant, Richards, whom Mary remembers from the marketplace in Launceston, to drive her back in a carriage.
Mary is apprehensive on the ride back. Richards is confident that they will arrive to find Joss already arrested, but Mary is skeptical. When they arrive at Jamaica Inn, the scene is suspiciously silent. Mary gets Richards to wait behind. Worried about Aunt Patience, she takes a pistol and goes to investigate. Mary carefully looks around the property. The horse and carriage are still in the stable, meaning that Joss and Patience are still there. The doors are locked, except for the kitchen. The inn is dark inside. She does not hear the usual sound of the clock.
Mary finds Joss dead, face down on the floor. He had been stabbed in the back and knocked the clock down as he fell.
Chapters 10-14 Analysis
Joss’s downfall comes to fruition in these chapters; his ending directly echoes statements and predictions from the beginning of the novel. First, just as Jem predicted, alcohol proves to be his ruin, which is true both in the fact that Joss drinks it and smuggles it. After Joss confesses to being a wrecker to Mary, Joss and his men drink at Jamaica Inn in Mary’s absence while she is away in Launceston with Jem. Joss and the wreckers are aware that the law is preparing to crack down on wreckers and smugglers across Cornwall; Joss declares: “Tonight we shall ride in glory, every man jack of us, maybe for the last time; and you shall come with us, Mary; to the coast…” (146). Du Maurier parodies jingoistic language of the British Navy in Joss’s statement—the men feel “glory” on the “coast”—to emphasize their misguided risk in trying to wreck another ship in their inebriated state.
The events of Christmas Eve reinvoke the threat of sexual violence that Mary has been under her entire time at Jamaica Inn. Mary narrowly escapes being raped by Harry, and du Maurier explores the trauma of the incident. When Harry returns to Jamaica Inn in Chapter 12, Mary’s “nausea and disgust returned in force, and she could not look upon him” (168). She has been asleep for nearly two days and has had no time to actively process what she has gone through. Joss also reminds her:
‘[Y]ou know as well as I do I could have had you your first week at Jamaica Inn if I’d wanted you. You’re a woman after all. Yes, by heaven, and you’d be lying at my feet now, like your Aunt Patience, crushed and contented and clinging, another God-damn bloody fool’ (163-64).
Joss’s statement emphasizes the gendered dynamic of sexual threat throughout the novel. Through his comment that “[y]ou’re a woman” (163) and his comparison of Mary with Patience, du Maurier draws attention to his harmful homogenization of women as sexual objects. His comment also has dark implications for what Aunt Patience has gone through at Joss’s hands and emphasizes the depth of the danger Mary has been in this whole time. Despite this, Mary still has a strange attraction to Joss, which she is unwilling to think about in depth. When Joss sends Mary to bed, he momentarily touches her lips. In her room, “for some reason forever unexplained, thrust away from her later and forgotten, side by side with the little old sins of childhood and those dreams never acknowledged to the sturdy day, she put her fingers to her lips as he had done, and let them stray thence to her cheek and back again” (176). Her fixation with her lips recalls the fact that it is Jem and Joss’s mouth to which Mary ascribes their cruel streak. Her attraction to both brothers highlights the allure of criminality for Mary—the same impulse that caused her to lie to Squire Bassat early on in the novel. This demonstrates the theme of The Tension Between Love and Intellect—Mary is well aware of the problems with this allure.
Du Maurier uses Jem’s sudden reappearance in Chapter 13 to continue to delay the resolution of the mystery since he does little to alleviate Mary’s fears, and his behavior actually casts further doubt on his character. For example, he does not offer a valid excuse for disappearing on Christmas Eve. He tells her, “[y]ou can forgive me or not, as you feel; but the reason for it—that I can’t give you. I’m sorry” (178). He goes on to tell her, “[b]e a man for the moment, and send your hurt pride and your curiosity to hell. I’m treading delicate ground, Mary, and one false step will finish me” (178). His instruction to “be a man” reinforces the misogynistic power dynamics in the novel. Because he vows to kill Joss for abusing Mary, and because he refuses to tell Mary what errand he leaves to accomplish, it is natural that Jem is a prime suspect for Joss’s death.
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By Daphne du Maurier
