Daphne du Maurier – Rebecca, first edition 1938
Many remembered reading this novel in their teens or early twenties while at college. Daphne du Maurier was a best-selling novelist and her novels, often dark and brooding, with hints of romance, attracted a wide readership. Today Rebecca would be classified as a Gothic novel or a psychological thriller.
Three women figure prominently in the novel. The narrator herself who remains unnamed, Maxim de Winter’s deceased first wife Rebecca who dominates the novel, and the housekeeper, Mrs Danvers, who arranges the affairs of the estate of Maxim de Winter, Manderley. The novel can be seen as the journey of the second Mrs. de Winter from a hesitant and insecure naïf, kept in thrall by the domineering presence of Mrs. Danvers, to the confident mistress who rescues Maxim de Winter from his pathetic guilt-ridden state.
“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again,” is the famous opening line. The word ‘dreamt’ makes the reader throb with expectation, just as ‘Manderley’ with its hint of Mandalay makes one think of a mysterious locale. The reader is drawn into the story from the very beginning although it is not very exciting to read about the narrator’s life at first as a young handmaid and companion to an older woman on her travels.
The rescue from that life is almost a non-starter; Maxim de Winter says: “Instead of being companion to Mrs Van Hopper you become mine, and your duties will be almost exactly the same.” It does not exhilarate to be requisitioned as a wife into a role analogous to that of a travelling companion. Mrs Van Hopper's prediction of calamity is about to come true, although the narrator believes she is ‘dreadfully’ in love.
We learn how important it was to keep up appearances in the world in which Maxim de Winter moved. Maxim de Winter contributes nothing to making his new wife gain her rightful stature at Manderley, weighed down as he is with his own guilt. But it is the narrator’s ability to surmount that guilt and enable Maxim de Winter to survive, that gains her the freedom that she should have had from the beginning. The destruction of Manderley at the end is her final ascendancy. Women can rejoice now that Daphne du Maurier was a feminist, despite her reputation as a romance novelist.
