du Maurier, Daphne - Rebecca

[oyceter]

Our nameless heroine meets the recently widowed Maxim de Winter in Monte Carlo and rushes into marrying him. But when she arrives at his ancestral estate Manderley, there's creepy housekeeper Mrs. Danvers and lots and lots of reminders of the first Mrs. de Winter, Rebecca. Gothic stuff ensues.

I was reading this and having a ton of fun with the era (1930s?), which is modern and yet has enough different social mores to be unrecognizable and very foreign to me. I particularly felt for the narrator in the early parts of the book, where she's a poor companion to a rich, annoying older woman and feels dreadfully young and out of place pretty much everywhere. And unlike most Gothic heroes, I actually liked Maxim from the start when he asked the narrator to sit with him for dinner and added something like, "You don't have to talk to me. You can just sit and eat if you want."

Truly a man after my own heart!

(... I have mentioned being very antisocial, yes?)

The atmosphere at Manderley is appropriately creepy, and Mrs. Danvers is appropriately spooky. I did, however, find it interesting that almost all the hints of Rebecca are completely in the narrator's head. I realize the intent is to make it feel as though Rebecca is haunting the house, but instead, I wondered if the narrator would be speculating so much about Rebecca and obsessing so much over touching the same things Rebecca had touched if she hadn't been so young and unsure of herself.

Of course, I'm sure that's why Gothic heroines are usually young and unsure of themselves, which is why I love Jane Eyre so for knowing what she will and won't stand for.

And then, the Gothic reveal...

MAXIM: They have found Rebecca's body and now our lives are over!
ME: Yes! Reveal yourself as an axe murderer! Narrator, flee in terror!
MAXIM: Everyone will know... I KILLED REBECCA!
ME: *chortles*
MAXIM: She was horrid! She cheated on me! And then she was going to have someone else's baby and raise it as mine!
ME: Oh Gothics, your misogyny never changes, does it? Come on, narrator, bash him over the head and flee for the moors!
NARRATOR, also known as MRS. DE WINTER II, or MDW2: Oh Maxim! You poor dear!
ME: ?
MDW2: We'll cover it up! They can't tear us apart!
ME: ... I think you missed the part about him murdering his wife?
MDW2: Don't worry, you poor thing! We can handle this!
ME: O_o

So, probably like many things that end up creating a genre, this feels very different from what later become the genre tropes. The misogyny and such is still there, as noted, but the tall dark handsome stranger who may or may not be out to kill you, which I thought was a pretty standard Gothic trope, is... a killer you are trying to protect. On the one hand, I was really glad in the beginning that Maxim wasn't an alpha male. On the other hand, I think the narration completely justifying his murder of his first wife for cheating on him kind of ruins that whole liking Maxim thing.

Comments

[mercredigirl]

I never believed that the narration justified the murder of Rebecca, and I don't believe that was du Maurier's intent (though that's my impression from reading the novel, not from engaging w/ her philosophy or anything, so YMMV). I always thought Rebecca was a strong, ordinary woman and that Maxim was trapped by the demands of enforced masculinity (y'know, 'patriarchy hurts men too', policed gender roles, &c.) which led to her frustration. MDW2, on the other hand, is a person who's been emotionally abused all her life, and now she's in an abusive-pattern r/s with Maxim (who is charismatic, yes, but not moral). So, for me, Rebecca is not so much a Gothic romance (though it is a homage thereto) but the portrait of an unhappy marriage, an abusive marriage, and emotionally destructive people.

Sorry for the tealdeer :x You can tell I've been reaaaaally thinky about this book!

[dhobikikutti]

Ah, see, to me the murder was incited by Rebecca because she didn't want to die of cancer. That's what the final revelation was about - that she had once again manipulated Maxim to where she wanted him. She got her way out, and got him into trouble again, both desired outcomes for her. And his retribution was losing Manderley, which was the thing he had let Rebecca blackmail him for in the first place.

It feels strange reading your review of this as a Gothic. I'm sure it is; I just grew up with du Maurier as respectable fiction, before I even knew what Gothic was.
Try reading Fisherman's Creek. I suspect you will adore it.

[bravecows]

Ooh, post and comments so chewy and delicious!

I have a third view, which is that the narrator becomes kind of evil in the course of the novel. I don't remember it that clearly, but -- Maxim is sort of a broken man at the end, isn't he, when they are living out of hotels and things and banned from Manderley forever? And the impression I got at the time was that in a way this is what the narrator wanted, because now he will never leave her!1! I felt you couldn't really rely on her, but also that at the end of the book she has the power, not Maxim.

I couldn't defend this, though! Would have to reread book first.

[mercredigirl]

Ha! I totally agree with this interpretation of MDW2. In a way that abuse victims often replicate patterns of abuse, she has returned Maxim's emotional manipulation with manipulation of her own.

[wealhtheow]

Oh, you're absolutely right that Rebecca wanted Maxim to kill her. She was a cruel and manipulative person, and I'm sure being married to her was pretty awful. But someone saying mean things doesn't really make up for killing them, right? There's really no defense.

[dhobikikutti]

You're right. I think I was reading it a a fucked-up portrayal of involutary accessory to assisted suicide. I have not reread the book in years, and I think at the time of last reading, what I mainly came away with was that they were all fucked up, and a rich person losing his house and having to live in posh hotels the rest of his life was hardly appropriate justice for murder.

[rachelmanija]

So atmospheric! The opening is one of my very favorites ever.

The reveal was not picked up much by later Gothic writers as other elements were, probably because it struck them as incredibly creepy too! Usually either the man is genuinely innocent, or else he's guilty and the conclusion has the heroine alone.

Mrs. Danvers is very clearly in love with Rebecca in the film version.

[jonquil]

Actually, you can make a very good case that Rebecca does not have a happy ending. The narrator goes, as a New Yorker essay I once read, from the heroine acting as unpaid caretaker to a querulous old person to... acting as unpaid companion to a querulous middle-aged person. She goes full circle.

Certainly, the moral ambiguity is intentional.

[jonquil]

Isn't it "in the heat" and therefore unpremeditated? Maxim would certainly go down for murder, but probably not 1st degree. Du Maurier gives the reader an out -- he was *manipulated* into killing her! but the reader also has plenty of textual evidence not to take it. Max is not at all left as a heroic figure.

[oyceter]

Oh, that's interesting! I mean, the way I spin the story in my head is totally that Rebecca is normal, but it's hard for me to tell how unreliable the narrator is supposed to be, especially when the law enforcement is all "Oh don't worry you are fine" to Maxim and the only person accusing him is the rather unlikable cousin.

It'd be really interesting to see what I might have thought if I hadn't been reading it as a Gothic!

[oyceter]

Oh, yes, I definitely think that Rebecca was trying to incite the murder (or, er, that the author wants us to think that), but I still feel he is to blame for pulling the trigger! The version in my head has Rebecca mocking them from the afterlife or whatever.

I do not actually know if it is a Gothic? I read it as such just because I've heard of so many elements of it referred to in other Gothics (esp. Mrs. Danvers and how present Manderley is), but I have no idea if du Maurier wrote it as such or if the genre existed then or if it is like reading Heyer after reading a billionty Regencies inspired by Heyer and realizing the Heyer you read was actually not that romantic!

[oyceter]

He is definitely broken! My impression was more that she was in exile with him kind of like how she followed him to Manderley, but I think the narrator as controlling works too. Especially because so much of the presence of Rebecca haunting the book is within the narrator's own mind.

I was reading it more straight and less unreliable-narrator-ness, but I would have to reread it to see if that is what du Maurier intended.

[oyceter]

The opening is lovely!

And now I want to reread Barbara Michael's Into the Darkness to compare housekeepers!

But yeah, I think I was expecting something more creepy and disturbing in the reveal. I mean, I find the reveal very disturbing for many reasons of my own, but I am still unsure if du Maurier found it disturbing for the same reasons.

[oyceter]

Heh, I think I was expecting something more over-the-top Gothic and wondering why he didn't end up falling off a cliff or something. I kind of like bravecows' reading of the ending/beginning as the narrator almost evilly controlling Maxim's life post-Manderley.

[gair]

I think you may enjoy this YouTube video (a sketch by a British comedy pair called Mitchell & Webb).

[jennifergearing]

Seconding Fisherman's Creek, here. I finished it recently and loved it.

I first read Rebecca as a set text in 9th grade English, and the copy I have now has a foreword by a woman who I remember had a somewhat feminist interpretation which seemed plausible, though I'd need to pull it out again. Rebecca is one of those books that kind of stayed with me from school because idk, the layering of the characters is just kind of delicious, to me.

[lady_ganesh]

This is how I read it too, though I'm never quite sure that was the author's intent!

[lady_ganesh]

Oh, she was in the book too, I think.

[lady_ganesh]

Today's Hitchcock trivia: When they were working on the movie, of course, the second Mrs. de Winter has no first name, which complicated things sometimes. Hitch sardonically called her 'Daphne.'

[oyceter]

Heeeee!

[oyceter]

Ha, I wish I got to read stuff more like this in school! Although possibly then I would not have as much fun with it because I would be looking for serious stuff instead of Gothic crack...

[oyceter]

I am strangely not surprised! I actually kept wanting to call her that too...

[lady_ganesh]

I've meant to read a biography of her for roughly forever, she's so interesting. I kind of wonder if Rebecca was, a bit, about her attempts to reconcile her 'masculine' and 'feminine' sides.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm extremely late, but your thoughts on the book were the author's intentions. Daphne du Maurier was pretty much inspired by her almost obsessive love for her husband and her extreme jealousy when they were apart.