Rebecca

I could fight with the living but I could not fight the dead. If there was some woman in London that Maxim loved, someone he wrote to, visited, dined with, slept with, I could fight her. We would stand on common ground. I should not be afraid. Anger and jealousy were things that could be conquered. One day the woman would grow old or tired or different, and Maxim would not love her anymore. But Rebecca would never grow old. Rebecca would always be the same. And she and I could not fight. She was too strong for me.

The eightieth anniversary of the initial publication of Rebecca seemed reason enough for me to pick it up this year, and what a delight to discover that I had zero clue what the story was about. If there could be other readers out there who don't know the basic plotline, I'd wholly recommend going in cold like I did: I was consistently surprised and charmed by the story's turns. There's something of the old-fashioned, Gothic-Brontë-Romance-Novel about Rebecca, but there's also astutely observed characters and setting and a weird interiority to the narrator that makes this a unique read unto itself. I enjoyed everything about this, was consistently entertained, and can't quite believe that this quasi-thriller hadn't been ruined for me; can't quite believe that I've never read any Daphne Du Maurier before, but this certainly won't be the last.

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

One of the most famous opening lines in English fiction and I never grasped how haunting the implications. Barebones plot setup: A twenty-one-year-old Englishwoman, orphaned and doomed to act as a paid companion to a rich and vulgar American matron, happens to meet the handsome and haunted (and recently widowered) Maximilian de Winter in a swank hotel in Monte Carlo. After spending some innocent, carefree hours driving and dining together, when the unnamed narrator tells Maxim that her benefactress has announced suddenly that they are to make their way to New York, he offers the unlikeliest of proposals:

“Either you go to America with Mrs. Van Hopper or you come home to Manderley with me." 

"Do you mean you want a secretary or something?" 

"No, I'm asking you to marry me, you little fool.”

(It's ridiculous, but with our protagonist's heart pounding in her throat, tears sprang to my own eyes at this most unromantic of propositions.) A quickie wedding, a rushed honeymoon, and the bride – young, shy, untrained for high society – is brought to Manderley; the imposing country manor of the de Winter line; a marvel of architecture whose depiction the narrator had once bought on a postcard as a child. It has all the hallmarks of a fairytale: the orphan, the handsome prince, the castle...the looming menace:

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. I glanced at Maxim. He was smiling. “Like them?” he said. I told him “Yes,” a little breathlessly, uncertain whether I was speaking the truth or not, for to me a rhododendron was a homely, domestic thing, strictly conventional, mauve or pink in colour, standing one beside the other in a neat round bed. And these were monsters, rearing to the sky, massed like a battalion, too beautiful I thought, too powerful; they were not plants at all.

Soon enough, the second Mrs. de Winter is introduced to her staff, and the housekeeper Mrs. Danvers (with her “skull's face, parchment-white, set on a skeleton's frame”) soon lets her know that she will never replace Manderley's true mistress: the beautiful and charismatic – and tragically dead before her time – true Mrs. de Winter, Rebecca. Everyone tells the bride that Rebecca was extraordinary – men, children, and dogs were helplessly attracted to her – and Rebecca's tastes and choices were everywhere on permanent display throughout the home. Our narrator is so overwhelmed by her unsuitability for stepping into Rebecca's shoes (slim, delicate slippers which Danvers insists her new mistress place her hand within) that she trembles before the staff and attempts to hide from visitors. Noting how haunted her husband Maxim still appears to be, the narrator finally understands that she will never replace Rebecca in his heart either.

We're not meant for happiness, you and I.

Back to the beginning of the book: After the first, extraordinary chapter – in which the narrator has dreamt of returning to a nightmarishly twisted Manderley – the next chapter describes a calm, middle-aged life of pleasant married routine, lived in exile on the continent. Naturally, throughout everything I outlined above, I kept wondering how the couple gets from point A to B (and couldn't quite remember if it's made plain that the narrator is with Maxim de Winter on this exile; rereading that chapter now, it's never said outright) and that lent much tension to what follows. Nothing at Manderley is quite what it seems, and secrets are kept, and walls of politeness are erected between people, and surprising turns of events transform Rebecca into a different kind of story than I was expecting.

I believe there is a theory that men and women emerge finer and stronger after suffering, and that to advance in this or any world we must endure ordeal by fire. This we have done in full measure, ironic though it seems. We have both known fear, and loneliness, and very great distress. I suppose sooner or later in the life of everyone comes a moment of trial. We all of us have our particular devil who rides us and torments us, and we must give battle in the end.

And it is this transformation of character that was such a delight to witness. The narrator – as young and as untrained as she may be – has such an extraordinary habit of constantly playing out imaginary conversations and situations in her head. This often works against her (as she imagines the conversations that the locals are having, comparing her to Rebecca), but hers is a mind always away on flights of fancy:

I wondered why it was that places are so much lovelier when one is alone. How commonplace and stupid it would be if I had a friend now, sitting beside me, someone I had known at school, who would say: “By-the-way, I saw old Hilda the other day. You remember her, the one who was so good at tennis. She’s married, with two children.” And the bluebells beside us unnoticed, and the pigeons overhead unheard. I did not want anyone with me. Not even Maxim. If Maxim had been there I should not be lying as I was now, chewing a piece of grass, my eyes shut. I should have been watching him, watching his eyes, his expression. Wondering if he liked it, if he was bored. Wondering what he was thinking. Now I could relax, none of these things mattered. Maxim was in London. How lovely it was to be alone again.

The sense of unreality is added to as the narrator frequently compares her life to events from a play or a book: I glanced out of the window, and it was like turning the page of a photograph album...Oh, God, I thought, this is like two people in a play, in a moment the curtain will come down, we shall bow to the audience, and go off to our dressing-rooms...I thought of all those heroines of fiction who looked pretty when they cried, and what a contrast I must make with a blotched and swollen face, and red rims to my eyes. We don't even know the narrator's name – other than Maxim noting early that it's lovely and unusual (and I loved that she had this one moment of wit in the book to reply that it was because her father had been lovely and unusual) – and it felt twisted for this to be the case in a book literally named for another woman. The housekeeper whispers poison in her ear, she's reluctant to ask her husband any questions she'd rather not have answered, and so knows nothing of his truths, and perhaps worst of all, is the way that the narrator allows Maxim to treat her like a child:

“Listen, my sweet. When you were a little girl, were you ever forbidden to read certain books, and did your father put those books under lock and key?” “Yes,” I said. “Well, then. A husband is not so very different from a father after all. There is a certain type of knowledge I prefer you not to have. It’s better kept under lock and key. So that’s that. And now eat up your peaches, and don’t ask me any more questions, or I shall put you in the corner.”

What kind of fairytale is this, living with a brooding and unknowable husband? Is he Bluebeard? The Beast? The Big Bad Wolf? But then a moment comes when Maxim needs his wife's support and the narrator finally decides, “This is my husband and Manderley is my home and neither of them belongs to Rebecca anymore.” It is a coming-of-age, a moment of triumph, but as we know from the beginning, it's to be a short-lived victory and the journey from here is a tense one. I can see why this was filmed by Hitchcock (I also had no idea that his movie “The Birds” was based on a Du Maurier short story), and now I want to see the movie, too. This was a wonderful read (just short of whatever it is that makes me award a fifth star) and I'm delighted to have finally made Rebecca's acquaintance.