Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier

Published in 1938, Rebecca, by Daphne Du Maurier has never gone out of print. The film adaptation by Alfred Hitchcock won two Oscars in 1940.

Allison: 

“There are always two deaths, the real one and the one people know about.” Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea.

A hundred and twenty odd years after Jane Eyre was published, Jean Rhys wrote a novel asking us to consider the woman Rochester kept locked in his attic. Bertha—a scandal, a lunatic—whose reveal is so alarming as to inspire great compassion for the despairingly moody Rochester. Bertha was on my mind while reading Rebecca. I haven’t read Jean Rhys’ prequel to Jane Eyre, but I will now. I’m not sure every peripatetic-designed character in a novel warrants her own narrative, but Bertha may be an exception. Especially as penned by such a considered hand as Rhys, who balances the pirated story with a graver dissertation on colonialism, racism, and some other isms regarding mental illness and misogyny. A lesser received novel was dedicated to resurrecting Rebecca in the early aughts, but for whatever reason it never garnered much attention. I am hardly the first to make a comparison between Jane Eyre and Rebecca, their similarities are so blatant. They are both confessional narrations of would-be second wives: young, plain, rescued women, haunted by the enormity of their predecessors—ferocious, gorgeous, wild women. Ghost women.

Rochester’s ghost is still breathing and vindictive. Rebecca, however is dead as dead can be. Dead and mythologized by the denizens of Manderley. The unnamed narrator of Rebecca is confronted with Rebecca in a way that Jane was never offered opportunity. Unnamed cannot escape Rebecca as she is intertwined with the legacy of the inherited estate. What of Rebecca we know is only learned from other people. Mainly voiced through the point of view of Ms. Danvers whose love for Rebecca is severe and strange, borderline obsessive, even commonplace romantic. The mastery of this novel is on par with the contemporary genius of Kazuo Ishiguro. Ishiguro won the 2017 Nobel for literature for his notorious slowburn domestic suspense. I’ve read many of his novels with the growing dread that the characters are willfully not going to make decisions that I will find satisfying, and then inevitably they don’t and it’s maddening and I want to throw the book at someone’s head. (Side note: Dad and I talked a bit about this novel before I completed this essay and he says there is no more maddening a novel than He Knew He Was Right by Anthony Trollope, which by the title alone, I am inclined to agree…) The curious point of Rebecca is that the characters make all the unsavory decisions allowed and we, the reader, are ok with it. de Winter murders Rebecca and his new bride somehow finds it necessary. We learn it is not necessary, but we somehow grow to think she deserved it, possibly even wanted it, and in wanting it, she is vindicated. As for those that despair in Rebecca’s death, we find little sympathy, some, but not much. Rebecca remains, named, TITLED, a spoiler, potential sociopath, forever ferociously winning, and the heroine of the novel.

I keep wanting to come at this book with a feminist critique, but I have none. I am not dismayed by the pathetic Unnamed’s inability to escape her admiration for the tyrannical, mean, and ludicrous de Winter. Lots of sympathetic women love terrible men. Meanwhile de Winter is conquered by Rebecca. I am not even cross at the death of Rebecca. I, myself, am a first wife. A wild ghost. As much as I want Rebecca to survive and enact animalistic revenge, I am satisfied with her murder and forever haunting and seeping psychological ruin of a sad sack of a rich, domineering man. This is the stuff "Dateline." Frankly this is the stuff of love, which sits so snugly against hate. All equals passion, which is life. If we are so lucky.

On Dad’s scale of 1-10, I give this a 1. Loved it. Every salacious, horrid moment.

Wes: 

A romantic murder mystery is just what the doctor ordered this early summer after a rather extended lay-off in our book reviews. The review this month is Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. The story begins with a couple of chapters reflecting the end state after the story is to be told. Those chapters give a rather despondent picture while setting the stage for beginning the story. A common technique in cinema – telling the end of the story first – this was kind of a waste in this case it seems as there was no point of reference for the reader until the end of the book when one is compelled to go back and read those chapters again to get the gist of what was going on in those pages and finally end the story.

Apart from that and a couple of other points, this was a great read. In the early chapters, featuring the narrator’s initial meeting, courtship, and marriage to Maxim De Winter, she becomes an inexperienced heiress to the storied estate of Manderley. I found her curious descriptions captivating. I found myself easily identifying with the young bride as she constantly reflects on the things about her during her whirlwind marriage. She constantly focuses on whether she shall ever experience each moment, feeling, or scene ever again. It was as if she must grasp everything as it occurs so it will never be forgotten. As the story moves on and becomes more and more of a brooding nature, the ex-wife of Maxim’s, Rebecca, becomes the centerpiece of virtually every conscious thought of the newlywed. Every step she takes seems reflected in light of Rebecca’s memory as often articulated through Mrs. Danvers, the senior house keeper of the estate who loved especially her, along with seemingly everyone who ever knew her. This became crushingly evident to the young bride (interestingly we never in the book ever discover the narrator’s name – a rather curious fact not often seen in literature) when, in a random walk with Maxim’s business manager, Frank Crawley, he observes about Rebecca, “I suppose she was the most beautiful creature I ever saw in my life.”

Rebecca suddenly becomes a bugaboo that the narrator found herself constantly measuring herself against with little or no support from her disgruntled and seemingly distant husband. The scope of the young bride’s (she is half the age of her husband) frustration is wrapped up in the following quote which I see as the key quote in the entire book:

"If there was some woman in London that Maxim loved, someone he wrote to, visited, dined with, slept with, I could fight with her. We would stand on common ground. I should not be afraid. Anger and jealousy were things that could be conquered. One day the woman would grow old or tired or different, and Maxim would not love her anymore. But Rebecca would never grow old. Rebecca would always be the same. And she and I could not fight. She was too strong for me."

The source of her husband’s frequent changes in moods becomes evident soon after the quote above. A freighter runs aground near the Manderley beach and, during efforts to refloat her, a sunken sailboat is discovered with a body inside the cabin. When recovered, the body is identified to be Rebecca, long since thought to be buried based on Maxim’s identification of a body washed ashore miles away months prior. The shock comes from Maxim’s confession to the narrator that he murdered Rebecca by shooting her, sinking the sailboat with her aboard, and lying about the other body washed ashore.

Suddenly the whole tenor of the book changes completely from worries about Rebecca and her undying perfection to what kind of a despicable person she really was and, how in the world, Maxim might be able to avoid going to the gallows for her murder. With 100 pages of text remaining after the murder disclosure, Maxim counters every suspicion with a logical rationale for why Rebecca’s death could most likely be considered a suicide. Although the coroner’s inquest rules it a suicide, the boat builder swears by his analysis that someone deliberately punched holes in the hull. The cousin, Mr. Favell, an illicit Rebecca lover, openly blames Maxim for the murder but his rationale is destroyed by his own bad and illogical behavior and the discovery of a possible motive for suicide when it is discovered that Rebecca was pregnant.

The narrator never skips a beat. She is totally all in with her husband’s story and his efforts to clear his name. In the end, he is successful and Chapters 1 and 2 show the end of the story. Manderley is now a cinder, surrendered to the overgrowth and ultimate decay of everything. Meanwhile Maxim and his wife sit quietly in each other’s company but they are certainly not destined to live “happily ever after”. Instead they must contemplate a future of uncertainty – a worrying future whether the truth will ever come back to haunt them. The narrator might worry about her fate in the hands of a confessed murderer but she seemingly has no worries in that regard.

The book is a very interesting read. It started great, slowed down in the middle, and stumbled a bit at the end. There were several questions that are never answered, many never even referred to that were problematic to me. Why did Maxim sink the boat so close to shore – only a few hundred yards off the beach? Why did the body not exhibit gunshot wounds  or evidence of pregnancy? What exactly happened to Manderley – why did it burn down? Why did the narrator so easily succumb to Maxim’s murder rationale with little real justification? Why did Mrs. Danvers leave so suddenly? Why did Mrs. Danvers love Rebecca so much – almost to an obsessive degree – if she did so many vile things? Why didn’t the narrator guess her costume at the ball would be the exact same as Rebecca’s the previous year? This fact practically cried out to happen by the events that led up to it. Where is the ultimate justice in the murder of Rebecca?

Despite my objections, the book was very interesting to me - I especially enjoyed some of the narrator’s descriptions and whimsical depictions. She thinks a lot like I do some times. I am somewhat uncomfortable about the ending. I guess the good guys don’t always win. I read Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment almost concurrently and that book did end with appropriate justice in the end. I guess that’s the difference between the late 1800s and the 1930s. The latter year has a different perspective (depression, progressivism, and rejection of religion) and does not see justice as a good that ought to rule out in the end. I rate this book as a 4 on my scale of 1-10 (1 as best)

Oil! by Upton Sinclair

Oil! was published in 1926. Upton Sinclair ran for Congress twice for the Socialist Party, losing both times. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943 for The Dragon's Teeth.

Allison: 

As I began reading Oil! I realized immediately that I had read it before. The book opens with a rollicking chapter, The Ride, introducing Dad and Bunny, the patriarch and heir of the epic to which we are about to become interminably festooned. It is an epic, this novel, an epic and thorough investigation into the political and socio-economic machinations of pre-WWI America. But before all that, we have The Ride, and a few chapters of Bunny’s adolescence, in which we naively witness the power of Dad’s attention. And Dad is a powerful man, an oil man, hardworking, rulebender, full of proclamations and instructions, cheats and etiquettes regarding the ins and outs of life.  Bunny is the apt pupil, drinking up the specificity of Dad’s decree. Although I had read much of it before, years ago, with motivations I cannot remember, I very much enjoyed these opening chapters. There’s an energetic lilt to the prose, even thick as it is with detail. One really feels the bright, shining curiosity of Bunny’s personality. There is not an observation to be missed and all of it is regaled with an awesome wonderment. It reminded me of perhaps one of the richest scenes of Americana ever written, the opening chapter of Don DeLillo’s Underworld. Underworld too, gave us fantastic fictions of real life characters. Yet, also like Underworld, beyond the opening spectacle, I found Oil! disenchanting. Once Bunny grows up, and his attentions turn to the solidarity of the working class, I’m not sure I want this narrator anymore, this degree of mad, blind enthusiasm that would warrant an exclamation of the word "oil."

This novel is an unabashed political rally. If there were a foil to Ayn Rand, I suppose it is Upton Sinclair, with his own political aspirations and obvious leftish bent. Bunny is a rich kid socialist—scratch that, I’m not quite sure of his leanings. Oh gosh, I’m about it expose my ignorance. I’m so worried I am going to misrepresent some of the politics of this book that went right over my glazed and enervated reading that I think I will avoid addressing it at all. Suffice it to say, Bunny is exactly the type of person I cannot stomach. Wooed by intellectual ruminations, with nothing but time and money to explore his own ego, at one point he even relates himself to the Buddha. I’m a fan of the Buddha and his understated shrug: “there is suffering.” But I’m not a fan of the over-financed, over-educated, white, pseudo-masculine, philosophic musings. (Not for want of trying, mind you. I’ve slept-read through The Razor’s Edge AND Eat, Pray, Love.) Bunny, enamored by the brilliance of those around him whose political manifestations are borne of experience and need and misery—seems innocuous, but he carries no care. Therefore, I cannot care for him. Bunny does carry an acute awareness of his privilege and middling crisis of power. As he matures into his beliefs, he banally flirts with guilt over the hypocrisy of using his father’s wealth for direct mutiny against its source. Here would be an opportunity for some intrigue! But, no. Somehow, the love between father and son transcends this conflict, the one relationship of the book that would be interesting to risk. Even as Bunny is reminded by an oil cohort, Verne, about the disgraceful way in which he is dismantling his father’s legacy—Bunny carries on, and Dad enables him with a mysterious bemusement. Dad, Bunny likes to reminds us, began as a mule driver. It seems unlikely he would allow his life’s effort to devour itself like a grim Ouroboros, building to sustain its own destruction, but he does. And it is spectacularly Boring!

After all, Dad does not bestow the same grace on his daughter Bertie. There is a thread of disdain for the corruption of wealth on the women in this novel. Bertie is shallow and unlikeable, her occasional appearance is an annoying disruption from the work of the novel. The Mom of the book is grotesque in her greed. Bunny has warmth for her, but the reader is not allowed to understand why, as she is as flat a character as could be. The only women of wealth who are given dimension are Vee Tracy and Annabelle. Both are screen actresses, who must work for their money, even if their work consists of keeping their bodies impossibly slim and their boyfriends in the oil industries. Rachel, Jewish, homely and as whip smart and stalwart a character as Bunny’s hero Paul, suddenly falls for Bunny not because he worships her, but the other way around. All Bunny needs to do is kiss her and she’s melted, despite her superior intellect and conviction. I don’t buy it, but I needn’t, because there’s so little novel left at this point, and the inevitable tragedy of it all speeds us recklessly off the cliff.

I didn’t love this book, because I felt like I was being sold something I did not want to buy. I’m not a big fan of big ideas in literature, of didactic lessons, even as they align with my own moralistic leanings. I can see the merit of such pursuits, or, frankly, the propaganda. Oil! clearly represents a time capsule of the American political nuance of the early twentieth century, perhaps with some human compulsion that is absent from political texts of the time. The difference between writing a history, though, is thus: history is relatable by the sheer evidence of the person’s existence through the events they endured. It’s the Buddha’s noble truth, “all life is suffering” to which we can identify. But with fiction, all that exists is the manufactured suffering by the writer. And if I’m to be sold a grand political philosophy through imaginary suffering, there had better be some “life.”     

Wes: 

After a rather long lay-off, our book this time is Oil! by Upton Sinclair. Written in the mid-1920s, Sinclair is clearly trying to reestablish the fame and controversy of his very first novel, The Jungle, written in 1906. This one, however, is not quite of the same ilk, probably because fewer readers are as intimately concerned with oil products as they are with eating meatpacking products from the sordid Chicago stockyards. Instead, most Americans of the time probably recognized oil products as essential for building America’s growing industrial might. As it is, the book is an interesting tale about every conceivable aspect of oil production and refinement with a lot of human interest added into the bargain.

The story is told from the perspective of “Bunny”, a diminutive for J. Arnold Ross, Junior, son of a former California mule teamster but current oil wildcatter and wheeler-dealer. Running from about 1912 to the successful re-election of Calvin Coolidge in 1924, Bunny follows and observes his J. Ross, Senior in his dealings as he develops one oil field near Long Beach and another, at Bunny’s urging, on a property that would benefit one of his youthful friends, Paul Watkins and in future will be his. Considered a practical education, dad works him into his business but also supports Bunny in a life of luxury, sending him to top schools, supporting various romantic and youthful peccadilloes. But they’re always together in dealings with the Paradise field (drilling began on Watkins’ property near Paradise, California). Through the field’s development in his formative years, Bunny sees every aspect of how oil is discovered, leased, recovered, refined, and sold off. His dad’s plan was clearly to groom him to inherit a fortune when the time comes.

The basic conflict of the book is between capital and labor. We see the inner workings of both through Bunny’s eyes plus how both are affected by government bureaucracies, education, journalism, Hollywood, politics, and religion. But Bunny is a complete idealist versus a pure capitalist like his father. Everyone he meets seems to impact his outlook at the moment. He accepts the last person’s position until his next conversation with one of the opposing positions. By the end of the book he settles on the socialist position which, understandably, reflects the author’s real world position. By then, his father has been swindled out of the bulk of his fortune by his partner and the outcomes of President Harding’s Teapot Dome scandal. Bunny ends the book with a fraction of his expected legacy, marries his socialist magazine manager, and plans to build a socialist college (commune) deep in the California hills. 

The book is a very interesting read and was made into a recent movie (I still haven’t seen it but will to see how it relates to the book). I have several problems with some of the author’s descriptions. The most serious is his depiction of the Russian revolution. He touts the White Russians as the monsters killing everyone in sight. He apparently missed the Red Russian methods for achieving dominance after the downfall of the czar (the Bolsheviks killed the czar and his family after all). The Communist tyranny they set up resulted in more than 200 million deaths, primarily among the undesirables (deplorables?) in Russia. I suppose Sinclair deserves some slack as Stalin had only been in control a year or two when this story was written. I guess the Kronstadt incident, murders of the Mensheviks and other atrocities under Lenin were not well known at the time. I also know Sinclair hated Christianity (religion is, after all the “opium of the masses”, according to Marx- the Communist god). Sinclair apparently knows nothing about its real practices but deliberately wanted to mock it, as nearly everything he states in his descriptions of Eli Watkins’ antics is wrong.

Despite my objections, the book was an easy read – not complex or obscure at all. If nothing else, Sinclair is very forthright and honest in his views. He definitely is a good observer of life in general and provides a concise view of the self-interests of many characters in the oil business and the environment as it existed in the roaring 20s. I enjoyed reading it, especially the passages on how oil leases are forged, the technical details of drilling and recovering oil, and techniques for “cracking” the crude oil into its refined products. I rate this book as a 3 on my scale of 1-10 (1 as best).