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)