6. Rebecca

By Daphne Du Maurier

I’ve been curious about Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca for some time, but had no compulsion to read it until Ben Wheatley’s 2020 adaptation was released on Netflix.  I heard it was the lesser film compared to Alfred Hitchcock’s version (which I hadn’t seen) so I wasn’t expecting much, but I ended up quite enjoying it.  I’ve basically been on the lookout for a used copy of Rebecca for the past five years.  The books I came across were either too dog-eared or were Netflix editions, which I didn’t want.  Earlier this spring, Olman and I biked over to Encore Books in NDG as I wanted to trade some books I didn’t want anymore and it was there that I found this paperback edition for 8 bucks.  What’s more, they had also accepted the eight or so books I had brought with me.  Huzzah, Encore!

I thought Wheatley did a good job adapting Rebecca, though he kind of modernized it by making the unnamed narrator and Maxim acceptably closer in age.  In the novel, the narrator was about twenty and Maxim in his forties -- their age difference emphasizing her naiveté and inexperience, as well as the imbalance of power in their relationship.  Rebecca was a gothic romance novel with a bit of psychological suspense and Du Maurier brilliantly captured the narrator's insecurities as a young middle-class Englishwoman who suddenly became the wife of an aristocrat and mistress of their estate.  A lot of time was devoted to the interior world of the narrator so you couldn’t help but empathize with her from the start.

The first chapter established the narrator as hired help for a wealthy, older American woman holidaying at an upscale hotel in Monaco. This was how she met the widower Maxim De Winter, who seemed to take a liking to her, despite her humble background. Thanks to Mrs Van Hopper’s sudden illness, she and Maxim were able to spend some alone time together.

    I remembered Mrs. Van Hopper’s warning of the night before about putting myself forward, and was embarrassed that he might think my talk of Monaco was a subterfuge to win a lift. It was so blatantly the type of thing that she would do herself, and I did not want him to bracket us together. I had already risen in importance from my lunch with him, for as we got up from the table the little maitre d’hotel rushed forward to pull away my chair. He bowed and smiled— a total change from his usual attitude of in- difference-picked up my handkerchief that had fallen on the floor, and hoped ‘Mademoiselle had enjoyed her lunch?”

    Even the page-boy by the swing doors glanced at me with respect. My companion accepted it as natural, of course, he knew nothing of the ill-carved ham of yesterday. I found the change depressing, it made me despise myself. I remembered my father and his scorn of superficial snobbery. 

After a somewhat odd, whirlwind "romance", spurred on by the fact that Mrs. Van Hopper was planning to travel to New York and drag the narrator along with her, Maxim impulsively proposed to our protagonist and this was where the story got going, though Du Maurier took delight in her unflattering depiction of Mrs VH.  

I can see myself now, memory spanning the years like a bridge, with straight, bobbed hair and youthful, unpowdered face, dressed in an ill-fitting coat and skirt and a jumper of my own creation, trailing in the wake of Mrs. Van Hopper like a shy, uneasy colt. She would precede me in to lunch, her short body ill-balanced upon tottering, high heels, her fussy, frilly blouse a complement to her large bosom and swinging hips, her new hat pierced with a monster quill aslant upon her head, exposing a wide expanse of forehead bare as a schoolboy’s knee. One hand carried a gigantic bag, the kind that holds passports, engagement diaries, and bridge scores, while the other hand toyed with that inevitable lorgnette, the enemy to other people’s privacy.

… Mrs. Van Hopper, her fat, bejeweled fingers questing a plate heaped high with ravioli, her eyes darting suspiciously from her plate to mine for fear I should have made the better choice.

We’re always aware of the narrator’s constant fish-out-of-water-ness, most especially after she’s been thrown into Maxim’s world. It’s one thing to be an assistant to a gossipy middle-aged American heiress, but quite another to become the wife of an English aristocrat. Even seemingly ordinary details, like underclothes, take on class-conscious significance:

The housemaid Alice had been so superior. I used to sneak my chemise and nightgowns out of my drawer and mend them myself rather than ask her to do them. I had seen her once, with one of my chemises over her arm, examining the plain material with its small edging of lace. I shall never forget her expression. She looked almost shocked, as though her own personal pride had received a blow. I had never thought about my underclothes before. As long as they were clean and neat I had not thought the material or the existence of lace mattered. Brides one read about had trousseaux, dozens of sets at a time, and I had never bothered. Alice's face taught me a lesson. I wrote quickly to a shop in London and asked for a catalogue

of under-linen.

What made Rebecca such an enduring classic was that it was so beautifully written. It was full of evocative prose that was not only vivid and symbolic, but also served to elevate the narrative, such as when the newlywed De WInters were driving towards Manderley and the narrator became overwhelmed by the sudden appearance of blood-red rhododendrons (which were planted by Max’s dead wife):

Suddenly I saw a clearing in the dark drive ahead, and a patch of sky, and in a moment the dark trees had thinned, the nameless shrubs had disappeared, and on either side of us was a wall of colour, blood-red, reaching far above our heads. We were amongst the rhododendrons. There was something bewildering, even shocking, about the suddenness of their discovery. The woods had not prepared me for them. They startled me with their crimson faces, massed one upon the other in incredible profusion, showing no leaf, no twig, nothing but the slaughterous red, luscious and fantastic, unlike any rhododendron plant I had seen before.

The premise of the ghost of Maxim’s wife haunting the Manderley estate sets the gothic tone of the story, and the suspicious circumstances of how she died provided the mystery and suspense.  Mrs Danvers’ repressed yet unhinged obsession with her former mistress, and her barely veiled hostility towards the new Mrs. De Winter added a psychologically menacing atmosphere to the setting.  Mrs Danvers was clearly one of the most memorable villains in fiction.

Mrs Danvers came close to me, she put her face near to mine. 'It's no use, is it?' she said. 'You'll never get the better of her. She's still mistress here, even if she is dead. She's the real Mrs de Winter, not you. It's you that's the shadow and the ghost. It's you that's forgotten and not wanted and pushed aside. Well, why don't you leave Manderley to her? Why don't you go?'

I backed away from her towards the window, my old fear and horror rising up in me again. She took my arm and held it like a vice.

'Why don't you go?' she said. 'We none of us want you. He doesn't want you, he never did. He can't forget her. He wants to be alone in the house again, with her. It's you that ought to be lying there in the church crypt, not her. It's you who ought to be dead, not Mrs de Winter.'

She pushed me towards the open window. I could see the terrace below me grey and indistinct in the white wall of fog. 'Look down there,' she said. 'It's easy, isn't it? Why don't you jump? It wouldn't hurt, not to break your neck. It's a quick, kind way. It's not like drowning. Why don't you try it? Why don't you go?'

So very creepy, and menacing!

Even though it was Wheatley’s adaptation that inspired me to read the source novel, I wanted to recast the characters in my own mind, mostly because Armie Hammer now gives me the ick.  I felt Matthew Goode made a suitable Maxim while a young Carey Mulligan was perfect as our heroine-narrator.  However, I couldn’t find a suitable replacement for Mrs Danvers, mostly because Kristin Scott Thomas inhabited her role so effectively.  

Rebecca wasn’t perfect.  At times, the narrator became over-bearing in her child-like innocence.  I understood that was the whole point of Rebecca, that the narrator had to be blinded by her own youthful naiveté and insecurities, because there was a bit of a twist towards the end… Rebecca was not who she was made out to be, nor was Maxim not who he appeared to be… and the reader is meant to be as surprised as the narrator. Nevertheless, it was still frustrating at times to see the world through her puppyish eyes.

I wished he would not always treat me as a child, rather spoilt, rather irresponsible, someone to be petted from time to time when the mood came upon him but more often forgotten, more often patted on the shoulder and told to run away and play. I wished something would happen to make me look wiser, more mature. Was it always going to be like this? He away ahead of me, with his own moods that I did not share, his secret troubles that I did not know? Would we never be together, he a man and I a woman, standing shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand, with no gulf between us? I did not want to be a child. I wanted to be his wife, his mother. I wanted to be old.

Rebecca was also very English, not only in its awareness of a class-conscious society, but the politeness and propriety that people adopt to mask or avoid unpleasant subjects.  The narrator, in her ignorance, youth and lack of confidence, had built up Rebecaa as this perfect, dazzling, formidable being and had allowed a dead woman to haunt her thoughts rent-free. Rebecca was indeed dazzling and formidable, but not in the way the narrator had conceived.  And nobody thought to tell the narrator that Rebecca was actually a world-class psychopathic bitch because nobody knew what was going on in each other’s minds because everyone was too goddamn English to broach anything that was deemed too unsavoury or sensitive.

They were all fitting into place, the jig-saw pieces. The odd strained shapes that I had tried to piece together with my fumbling fingers and they had never fitted. Frank's odd manner when I spoke about Rebecca. Beatrice, and her rather diffident negative attitude. The silence that I had always taken for sympathy and regret was a silence born of shame and embarrassment. It seemed incredible to me now that I had never understood. I wondered how many people there were in the world who suffered, and continued to suffer, because they could not break out from their own web of shyness and reserve, and in their blindness and folly built up a great distorted wall in front of them that hid the truth. This was what I had done. I had built up false pictures in my mind and sat before them. I had never had the courage to demand the truth. Had I made one step forward out of my own shyness, Maxim would have told me these things four months, five months ago.

In this sense, Rebecca was also a coming-of-age tale told from the unreliable POV of the narrator.  The novel is definitely worthy of re-read at a later point in my life so I’m keeping my copy!  I’d like to watch Hitchcock’s adaptation too, but it hasn’t been available on any of my streaming services.