Rebecca: Daphne du Maurier and Classic Romantic Suspense
Rebecca has one of the most famous opening lines of all time. Even if you haven't read the book you're likely to recognize it. It's become a part of pop culture, a reader's touchstone, along with Call me Ishmael and It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
The novel is generally described as gothic fiction, the pages full of suspense and with something that could be mistaken for romance. Not romance in a modern sense, this isn’t a bodice ripper or even a kissing book (in the words of the immortal Princess Bride). The most intimate moments are absent here, leaving the reader to assume things, to wonder at what must happen behind closed doors.
This is a love story in a more traditional way, defined by the era and the woman who wrote it. It has the flavor of Jane Eyre, a young socially isolated woman dependent on the kindness of strangers and a rich, charming older man who comes in to sweep her off her feet. Plus there's that whole dead and/or crazy former spouse thing.
The two have enough similarities that if you enjoyed one you're bound to enjoy the other. Both are equally brilliant and I've been passionate about them since my early teens.
Thirteen is the perfect age to discover a penchant for people with troubled pasts and a habit of withholding vital information. I, too wanted to live in a grand manor house, wander the deserted countryside dramatically, and possibly discover a soulmate in the form of a emotionally tortured dashing older man that only I could understand.
"You have a very lovely and unusual name."
"My father was a lovely and unusual person."
In Rebecca our narrator goes without a name, though other characters know her, and though Maxim, never Max, comments on how it suits her, we never hear it. In a way it lets the reader step inside the story, this nameless young woman becomes an extension of ourselves, and at the same time it allows the recently deceased Rebecca to overshadow everything.
The only name we are given is Rebecca, the title if physically absent character, the only woman in the whole book who really matters.
Rebecca.
We meet our nameless narrator in Monte Carlo, a paid companion to an older woman who enjoys putting the young woman in her place. She is alone in the world and set aside, a spectator, quiet and unassuming. Then Maxim de Winter, recently widowed and dashing, walks into the hotel and changes everything. And of course her story, her life, doesn’t really begin until she meets her man. A whirlwind romance follows and soon enough we arrive at Manderley.
On the surface it’s a May/December romance, a young woman and an older man, navigating a fresh and unsteady marriage. But beneath that, curling like smoke on water, is tension and secrecy. Maybe you can't officially classify it as a ghost story, there is no touch of the supernatural, and yet Rebecca is a very real presence on every page.
Rebecca is in each room, each moment, in the shadow on Maxim's face, in the eyes of Mrs. Danvers.
As the book moves on there is this feeling of intense pressure building, the oppressive silence of the house and Maxim's dark moods. Our narrator is driven close to madness, forced to live within a dead woman's shadow, haunted and chased through a place that was meant to be her home. But of course, Manderley always did, and forever would, belong to Rebecca.
Mrs. Danvers makes sure of that.
Something that has always struck me, stayed with me, is a scene at the beginning of the novel. Maxim tells our narrator about the wildflowers that grow around Manderly. Beautiful and wild, perfect in nature and without equal. He stresses that wildflowers do not come into the house, not ever. Inside their bloom is ruined, their freshness gone. Only roses and other greenhouse varieties come into the house. Flowers specifically cultivated for the indoors.
It's a parallel between the narrator and Rebecca, the hot house rose and the wild bluebell. Being indoors saps bluebell’s beauty, it wilts when it comes inside. Of course that's exactly what happens to our narrator. Maxim brings her home because he thinks he'll be able to keep her freshness, her innocence, her naïveté.
But within the walls of Manderly he realizes that he's taken away the thing that made him love her. She discovers the truth about Rebecca.
Our narrator is very much the flower he picked in the wild and brought home.
This was also the novel that made me want to marry a rich older man and move to the English country side so I could live in a big fancy house and have more than enough time to read. I saw the story though the eyes of a child, it all looked good to me. Now, as an adult with a couple of divorces under my belt I truly understand the loneliness and isolation of the narrator, the intense desire to please and be loved. She wants to be inside of something extraordinary. Instead she is a constant stranger and an observer in an unbalanced and lonely marriage.
The last time I read Rebecca was only a few weeks ago and it was with a whole new set of eyes. I'm older, wiser, and I've had more world and relationship experience. All of this influenced how I related, or failed to relate, to our nameless narrator. I was frustrated with how she reacted to situations, how she put Maxim above herself and let him dictate the terms of their relationship. She fawned and put everything of herself aside out of fear of upsetting him or doing the wrong thing. But for the time it's authentic, a woman was not really her own person in 1938; society and the laws of the day are now archaic, beyond old-fashioned and into tyrannical.
There is also a sharp contrast between our narrator and her submissive naiveté and Rebecca's brazen strength and selfishness. Maxim has truly chosen the exact opposite of the woman he had previously been married to. He is now in the position of power, of control. With our narrator he's older and wiser, taking a woman he can mold over time, bend to fit him, in a way that Rebecca would never allow herself to be.
Despite the issues I have with it now, as a modern reader and more experienced woman, I love the book. It's a time capsule, honest to the reality of Daphne du Maurier's world. Even now it's honest to some modern relationships.
Rebecca accomplishes so much. It is an all consuming piece of fiction, drawing you into a story that showcases how lonely some marriages can be, the way jealousy and insecurity can eat at a person, exposing the shadows the dead cast on the living. The suspense as all of these things come together, the isolation of a large house and the obsession of a housekeeper, the inexperienced woman, and a man with a dark secret are irresistible.
I return to Rebecca in the way our narrator returns to Manderley; in a dream state, charmed even by the wildness and decay of the place, the way something beautiful on the surface has been revealed to be much darker than expected, a façade before a yawning chasm, a prison instead of paradise.
"Colour and scent and sound, rain and the lapping of water, even the mists of autumn and the smell of the flood tide, these are memories of Manderley that will not be denied."