Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier’s most famous novel not out of publication since its 1938 release, was initially insulted by the label “woman’s novel.”
No help was du Maurice herself, who wrote in her pre-draft notes:
“Very roughly, the book will be about the influence of a first wife on a second...until wife 2 is haunted day and night…a tragedy is looming very close and crash! Bang! Something happens.”
Rebecca has been a part of my literary life since age ten, when I first read it and had the initial young-girl-captivated-by-a-romantic-English-novel reaction. What did I know?
It wasn’t until I returned to Rebecca in graduate school and realized how much more there was to it. While Rebecca is set contemporaneously in 1938 and the English class system is about to topple, it is very much about the refreshing nature of uncomplicated love. Maxim’s attraction to the young woman he meets in Monte Carlo cannot be more absurd, by the standards of his lord-of-the-manor background. She is American, she is penniless, and she is working for the oppressive Mrs. Van Hopper as a “paid companion.” I can almost hear the equally-oppressive Lady Catherine de Bourgh, of Pride and Prejudice, admonishing Elizabeth when talk of marriage to her nephew, the formidable Fitzwilliam Darcy ensues: “The upstart pretensions of a young woman without family, connections, or fortune. Is this to be endured!”
Of course Rebecca is also one of the greatest ghost stories ever written, complete with English manor, brooding husband, and evil householder, Mrs. Danvers, who, in Hitchcock’s film could not have been played more perfectly by Judith Anderson.
Rebecca is also about facades, and the emotional exhaustion it takes to keep them up in order to not lose face in society. The unnamed narrator of the story, who becomes the second Mrs. De Winter, knows nothing of facades because she is the definition of “what you see is what you get.” She has nothing to hide; indeed, she wouldn’t even know how to hide something were she asked to do so.
Until the forced circumstances of living up to mistress-of-the-manor expectations prove to be too much. It is at this precise point that she begins to crack, just like the china cupid she knocks over onto the floor. She has been indoctrinated into the need to have secrets. Clearly, you cannot live at the grand Manderley without them.
Ultimately, though, I love Rebecca for its timelessness and its universality; the way in which this novel could have been written in almost any era of the 19th or 20th centuries:
“The room would bear witness to our presence. The little heap of library books marked ready to return, and the discarded copy of The Times. Ashtrays, with the stub of a cigarette; cushions, with the imprint of our heads upon them, lolling in the chairs; the charred embers of our log fire still smoldering against the morning. And Jasper, dear Jasper, with his soulful eyes and great, sagging jowl, would be stretched upon the floor, his tail a-thump when he heard his master’s footsteps.”
Autumn is upon us and a cool breeze has descended. What a perfect time to put on a pot of tea and curl up with one of my many copies of the divine Rebecca.