There were times when I had my doubts about whether I was right to propose Daphne du Maurier’s classic novel Rebecca as my and England’s contribution to the Business School Wives Book Club. Maybe you actually had to be a repressed English woman with a fetish for cardigans and a longing for Cornwall to appreciate this book? Maybe my international reading ladies would turn away in distain and incomprehension from this haunting and rather strange vision of the English male.... Maybe also the novel’s presentation of the English female is rather polarised, rather introverted – and completely wide of the mark.You have probably all guessed that I was, as usual, worrying needlessly. The first clue came when one of our number accosted me the day after I gave her the book to say that she had sat up reading until four in the morning and that since then she had watched the Hitchcock film on the internet. The mood at yesterday’s meeting was very much of the “I couldn’t put it down variety” and tonight we are meeting again to watch the film together – so conscience saved.
For those of you who have not read the book – this review does not contain
spoilers, so you can carry on reading. Rebecca is the story of a nameless girl, her strange marriage to an older widower, her discomforting command of a grand house and the overshadowing of her life and loves by another woman. The action of the book opens with our heroine and narrator living the life of a paid companion to a social climbing bore in Monte Carlo. She is a shy and self-conscious girl who is horrified by the vulgarity of her employer, and only too pleased to meet the enigmatic widower, Maxim de Winter with whom she immediately connects. Maxim is twenty years the senior of his new friend and he is a man with a myth. He is the wealthy master of a house, legendary for its grandeur and beauty – Manderley in the heart of Cornwall. He is also recently widowed – his late wife Rebecca, famed for her staggering beauty and charm, having been drowned in a boating accident. In person, he is not charmless, but he is cold, taciturn and clearly keeping much from our narrator. A short romance is followed by a swift wedding and the inevitable return of Mr and the new Mrs de Winter to Manderley.
Here, our narrator will struggle with her new role, appearing to be more of a servant than a mistress, more of a pet than a wife, more of a backcloth than a character. More than anything she will come to be tormented by the spectre of her deceased predecessor Rebecca, convinced that she can never compete with her, never expunge her memory from the house or its inhabitants, and consequently, never be happy. But Manderley is a house within which there are many dark secrets and unexpected turns. The last third of the book is a thrilling tale of revenge and recrimination – a kaleidoscope of reality and mythology – a bearing of souls that will lead to a new, and altogether different love story.
I have called our nameless narrator the heroine, as for me, that is what she is. With her endless struggles, her self-knowing eagerness to please and the unfairness of her position, she rather stole my heart. That is not to say that she does that to everyone. She has an almost total lack of natural authority and her shyness can be infuriating. She does not seem to be arm
ed with the worldly wisdom or the cynicism that she so badly needs. In this, as in everything, she contrasts sharply with the memory of Rebecca. Beautiful, assertive, defiant, imaginative, Rebecca was a perfect chatelaine who seems, through the dark glass of memory to have held effortless superiority and charm in perfect balance. Du Maurier presents these two visions of womanhood – one bright, the other apparently, pale, and the reader will inevitably choose between them.I have included a few stills from the various dramatisations of this wonderful novel. For Rebecca-aholics I recommend the reviews of Fanoosh at Prolific Living in a Perfectly Ordinary World, Andreea at Passionate Booklover, Amy at My Friend Amy, Trish at Trish’s Reading Nook, Casey the Bookish Type and Jackie at Farm Lane Books Books Blog (warning: spoiler): all excellent reviews with different points of view.
