It took me awhile to find my way to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. Mentions of the book kept following me around my digital space, popping up in must-read lists, referenced loosely in discussions tied to my absolute favorite Jane Eyre. It sounded intriguing in its Gothic ways, but was also on the fringe of my literary knowledge. I couldn’t place du Maurier in any historical context, though I suppose this should have been a catalyst to read Rebecca and not a deterrent. As fate would have it, I read one final convincing plea to read it, and so I did.
The book begins with a flashback in which we’re immediately introduced to Manderley, the former coastal estate of our unnamed narrator and her husband, Mr. de Winter (Maxim). The descriptions of Manderley are rich throughout the book; luscious gardens that fill the house with flowers, a forest dense enough to get lost in, all perched on the water-crashing cliffs of the sea. But we know from this initial introduction that Manderley is a foreboding presence, the house itself looming large and uninviting, buried in a barely passable thicket of trees. We quickly learn that the narrator is Maxim’s second wife and that his first wife, the titular Rebecca, drowned at sea the previous year. We also know that the narrator and Maxim are no longer living at Manderley, though after this first flashback sequence we are trying to make heads or tails of things alongside the narrator as she enters Maxim’s life. (I will try not to give away too many of Rebecca’s surprises here.)
What struck me most about Rebecca was the way du Maurier lets us into the narrator’s inner world. As a second wife myself, I found the passages about the narrator trying to figure out what it meant to live in her predecessor’s space to be incredibly explicit. Several times I laughed out loud in recognizing my own responses to those first raw months. I never doubted that du Maurier knew the narrator inside and out, and the novel is as much a psychological portrait as it is an intricately developed story. We are privy to the narrator’s thoughts and vivid imaginative world as she projects her own fears and insecurities onto her marriage and relationships with other denizens of Manderley. du Maurier herself acknowledged the book as an examination of jealousy, and it is certainly the driving, and most destructive, force of the story.
It isn’t just the jealousy of the narrator, however, that sends the story spiraling, and while the narrator’s unrest is largely a function of youth and naivety, the same can not be said of the dark figure that is housekeeper Mrs. Danvers. Mrs. Danvers is much more of a ghost than Rebecca as she lurks in the background, her intentions always suspect and she always poised to meddle just enough to feed the narrator’s deepest fears. It is never possible to feel at home in Manderley with Mrs. Danvers and she wields enough power to invert the narrator’s understanding of who is truly employing whom. Mrs. Danvers is the anchor that keeps pulling us back to Rebecca, keeps forcing us to ask questions, and to remain uncomfortably chilly.
I read a few comments suggesting that Rebecca is a retelling of Jane Eyre, and while there are certainly common elements, I didn’t really make this connection myself. Like Jane, the narrator is very constricted by her circumstances; she is young and employed as a companion to an older woman. Her social and financial status leave her very few options, like governess Jane. But unlike Jane, Rebecca’s narrator remains naive and aloof. Where Jane maintains a moral high ground and ultimately gains her independence, Rebecca’s narrator dives headfirst into the dysfunction of her economic reality. Living with a suspected murderer, it seems, isn’t so bad when you have no other prospects for subsistence. While Jane is offered another life, Rebecca’s narrator never is, but the power of Rebecca is that somehow we start to root for her to stay.
The narrator’s relationship with Maxim is markedly not affectionate, and as Maxim is 20 years her senior, he is more of a paternal figure to her than a companion. It is a relationship built on mutual need; someone to help fill up Maxim’s vacuous space, and a benefactor for the narrator. What’s love got to do with it? There is no indication that the relationship is ever consummated, though the horror of the book’s great reveal finally creates a flicker of passion. They become united in secrecy, carrying the burden of this becomes a common purpose, finally, and in gaining this they find more equal footing.
In keeping the narrator unnamed throughout the entirety of Rebecca, I think du Maurier is suggesting that the narrator could be any of us, or rather that she is all of us. The narrator is a universal totem for self-doubt and co-dependence. The trade-off for being complicit in Maxim’s secret is that she becomes primary, his one-and-only. Any moral misgivings are usurped by the desperation of wanting to be loved, in the way that jealousy and resentment make us all mad. The problem is that we understand this, and like her have become a little mad. We forgive her because we know we’d want it too.
It’s been quite a while since I read a book as powerful as Rebecca, and I’m so glad to have found it when I did. Rebecca will rekindle your faith in fiction, it will remind you exactly why you read, and it will leave you wandering aimlessly through Manderley’s gardens long after its final page.
*Feature image credit: Tino Ellerman
Does it feel more like an exercise in psychology than an attempt to tell a story–even the geography simply seems like an emotional projection?
No, not at all. I just didn’t want to give away much of the story! There’s a lot going on, actually, but piecing it all together is part of the experience.