Dave's Book Blog: "Rebecca" by Daphne du Maurier

"Last night I dream I went to Manderley again" is the first line of this book, made famous by being the first (voiceover) line of the Hitchcock film (which, being made just two years after the book's publication, and starring Laurence Olivier, and winning the Oscar for Best Picture, was probably responsible for the book's enormous success but has subsequently coloured many people's reading of the book).

The novel is narrated by the never-named protagonist (all we are told, in chapter 4, is that she has "a very lovely and unusual name") in the first-person, past-tense. It is introduced (it's a sort of framing device, excpet that in the end we don't return to the frame) by her living abroad in a hotel with a man for whom she cares. She tells her story. As an orphaned young companion to a wonderfully spiteful old woman, she is staying in Monte Carlo when she meets Maxim de Winter. They fall in love and marry; he then takes her back to England where he lives in Manderley, a stately home. She finds it difficult to assume the role of chatelaine of the manor, especially since she has stepped into the shoes of the first Mrs de Winter, the eponymous Rebecca, a woman whom, it seems, the servants and the local community adored; the narrator assumes her new husband is still in thrall to his deceased first wife. Rebecca's shadow hangs heavily over the house, there are even suggestions that her ghost haunts it. There is tremendous conflict, especially from Mrs Danvers, the uber-competent housekeeper, who is still in mourning for the dead Rebecca. And there is a mystery about how Rebecca died.

The book is powered by the character of the narrator. She is an imaginative woman and this leads her to imagine what people are thinking and sometimes her assumptions are wrong, leading her into wonderful faux pas. She is also, at least in the first part of the book, hugely intimidated by the servants, leading her to do things like concealing little mistakes she makes. But when the chips are down, she becomes a tower of strength, powered by her love. (This character arc reminded me of that of the easily-bullied protagonist of my novel The Kids of God, although that takes a rather darker and, I think, more realistic turn.)

The first chapter provides the hook and acts as a sort of prologue or a framing device (without, however a corresponding epilogue to complete the frame). The narrator has a dream of her past life; presently she is living with an unnamed male companion in a sort of exile. Then she starts remembering what happened and the next sixth of the book describes how Prince Charming meets Cinderella while Cinderella's employer provides the ugly stepmother who seeks to prevent the blossoming romance.

The next part of the book, the main part, is a classic Gothic novel. Cinderella becomes the Damsel in Distress, transported to the Big House, whose West Wing is disused. Prince Charming is now the Brooding Hero-with-a-Mysterious-Past and the Housekeeper (described at first sight as "tall and gaunt, dressed in deep black, whose prominent cheek-bones and great, hollow eyes gave her a skull's face, parchment white, set on a skeleton's frame" Ch 7) is the villain who has the Damsel in her power (though this is topsy-turvy in that the Damsel technically employs the villain). The half-ruined house, isolated in a brooding landscape (all those bloody rhododendrons!) is haunted by the memories of Rebecca: there is the classic Gothic trope of the past infecting and contaminating the present. There's even a mad peasant on the seashore who makes cryptic comments which the reader just knows must be crucial to the plot!

Then comes the final quarter of the book which is almost a thriller.

At the heart of the novel, there is a wonderful set piece: the fancy dress balll. It is one of those moments when the reader is ahead of the narrator and understands exactly what the consequences will be. Du Maurier takes her time building up the suspense, putting in delay after delay: I was reading this section as fast as I could. It was glorious. It is also characteristically Gothic: Ann Radcliffe, who wrote A Sicilian Romance, amongst many other books, suggested that terror was created by suspense.

There is some very cleverly constructed dialogue. In a number of scenes, when there is a secret of which some of the participants are unaware, the conversation is wonderfully one-sided. The innocent blather on about trivialities (the weather, social issues) and sometimes tangentially refer to the secret they don't know, while those in on the secret are restricted to replying almost in monosyllables, eg "'Yes,' I said." This device is repeated several times and works very well.

Like in her novel Jamaica Inn, Du Maurier milks the pathetic fallacy to the max. The weather in Cornwall always seems to mirror the narrator's mood, whether providing sun or (far more frequently) rain and, when needed, mist. Nevertheless, du Maurier gets away with this because of the brilliance of her descriptions of the countryside in all its meteorological moods. In her dream at the opening of the book, the narrator imagines a Manderley without its gardeners, where the tamed nature surrounding it has grown wild and reclaimed it; this is a trope of Gothic fiction.

The only bit that slightly let the novel down, I thought, was the rather over melodramatic scene in which the housekeeper, now apparently a madwoman, tries to persuade the narrator to jump out of the window. But all the best Gothic novels have moments of melodrama.

Jane Eyre

The parallels between Rebecca and Jane Eyre are obvious. An orphaned young girl with little social standing meets a wealthy man haunted by his past. He proposes. In JE the marriage is interrupted by the news that the first wife is still alive; in Rebecca they marry but the early days of the marriage are haunted by the memories of the first wife. In the end, after the stately home has burned down, the protagonist becomes carer for the physically (JE) or mentally (R) crippled man.

Maxim de Winter
Maxim de Winter, the Prince Charming/ Man with a Past, is what E M Forster in Aspects of the Novel describes as a ‘flat’ character. Perhaps DdM realised the contradictions inherent in such a character: he is the man who married foolishly and then permitted his first wife to be as unfaithful as she liked until he believed that she had cuckolded him and Manderley, the real love of his life, would be inherited by a bastard at which point he killed and covered up the murder. Then he buggered off to Monte Carlo and (guiltless?) married again, this time to a woman half his age whom he treats as a child. Swanning back home he almost disappears from the pages of the book until he confesses to his new wife that he has murdered his first. Seemingly unafraid of him, she now contrives to cover up his crime, virtually without his help, until they go abroad and he is reduced to a helpless shell of a man. It would be difficult to portray such a man as a ‘round’ character. He is more of a plot device than a character. Some of the book group members suggested that he was a villain and that maybe he exercised coercive control over the 2nd Mrs deW, but it seems to me that he is a helpless victim of his position in the caste system and the responsibilities imposed upon him as owner of Manderley (and the wickednesses of Rebecca and the ongoing schemes of Mrs Danvers whose first act in the book is to marshall the servants in direct opposition to his orders); it is Rebecca and Mrs Danvers who are the villains and it is they who exercise coercive control (and Mrs Danvers also gaslights the narrator).

Is Mrs Danvers in love with Rebecca?
Did Mrs Danvers have a sapphic desire for Rebecca. There is a key scene (ch 14) where the narrator goes to Rebecca’s room in the west wing and is discovered there by Mrs Danvers. Mrs Danvers says: “That was her bed. It’s a beautiful bed, isn’t it? ... Here is her nightdress ... You’ve been touching it, haven’t you? ... Would you like to touch it again? ... Feel it, hold it ... I haven’t washed it since she wore it for the last time ... this is her dressing gown ... Put it up against you ... She had a beautiful figure ... Put your hands inside her slippers.” It’s quite creepy. It is certainly possible to read a (one-sided and latent, unreciprocated) lesbian infatuation into that.

Another suggestion was that the narrator and Rebecca are mirror images. In the Ch 14 scene, the narrator actually sees herself in Rebecca’s dressing-table mirror, and of course in the pivotal fancy-dress ball the narrator is duped into dressing up exactly as Rebecca had a tear before. In other ways, however, they are contrasts. The narrator is smaller than Rebecca was and has limp hair. The narrator comes from a social class that hasn’t been bred to run a stately home. And, of course,the narrator is in love with, and faithful to, her husband.

Miscellaneous points:

The poetry book given by Rebecca to Maxim falls open at The Hound of Heaven by Francis Thompson.
The medicine Taxol, which Mrs Van Hopper takes in the book, was an effervescent salt similar to Eno's; Taxol is now the brand name for an anti-cancer drug which hadn't been discovered when Rebecca was written.

Major turning points (spoiler alert):

Max asks the narrator to marry him 15% of the way through the book. In a delightful foreshadowing, she is eating a sour tangerine which leaves a bad taste in her mouth.
They arrive at Manderley at the 17% mark.
Narrator discovers Rebecca's room in the West Wing: 25%
Beatrice explains about Mrs D: 27%
Narrator discovers the cottage in the cove: 30%
Narrator meets Jack, one of the villains: 42%
Mrs Danvers suggests a costume for the fancy dress ball: 53%
The costume creates a sensation: 57%
The scene in which a hysterical Mrs D tries to persuade the narrator to jump out of the window: 65%
Maxim explains what happened to Rebecca: 71%
They find out about the doctor: 92%

Selected quotes:

"A lilac had mated with a copper beech, and to bind them yet more closely to one another the malevolent ivy, always an enemy to grace, had thrown her tendrils around the pair and made them prisoners." (Ch 1) A dreamed metaphor for Mr and the second Mrs de Winter trapped by the malevolent ghost of Rebecca?
"We can never go back, that much is certain." (Ch 2)
"Not a single well-known personality. I shall tell the management they must make a reduction on my bill. What do they think I come here for? To look at the page boys?" (Ch 2)
"I could tell by the way the sauce ran down her chin that her dish of ravioli pleased her." (Ch 2)
"I remember a well-known writer once who used the dart down the Service staircase whenever he saw me coming. I suppose he had a penchant for me and wasn't sure of himself." (Ch 3)
"They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. They are full of little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and one is so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls to the first barbed word." (Ch 5)
"The past had blown away like the ashes in the waste-paper basket." (Ch 6)
"I was not sure what he meant by modesty. It was a word I had never understood. I always imagined it had something to do with minding meeting people in a passage on the way to a bathroom ..." (Ch 11)
"I had been selfish and hyper-sensitive, a martyr to my own inferiority complex." (Ch 11)
"I wondered why it was that places are so much lovelier when one is alone." (Ch 13)
"He went on looking me up and down in his amused way with those familiar, unpleasant blue eyes. I felt like a barmaid." (Ch 13)
"Now that I knew her to have been evil and vicious and rotten I did not hate her any more. She could not hurt me." (Ch 21)
"Whoever lived within its walls, whatever trouble there was and strife, however much uneasiness and pain, no matter what tears were shed, what sorrows born, the peace of Manderley could not be broken or the loveliness destroyed." (Ch 26)