Bill Kerwin's Reviews > Rebecca

A woman, a man, another woman's shadow; a landscape, a house, a hidden history. These six elements have informed the gothic impulse from Udolpho and Jane Eyre to The Thirteenth Tale. Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca is crucial to the genre, for in it du Maurier simplified and organized these six elements, refining the narrative, concentrating the mythic, and enriching the ambiguity of her tale.

What du Maurier understood is that the heart of the romantic gothic is the struggle between two women, one waking up to a new life and one not content to remain a ghost. The man may be their conflicting goal, the house and landscape their arena, but it is the battle between these two women, for life and power and autonomy, that is the essence of the tale.

In Rebecca, the man is the haunted, moody Maxim de Winter who has married a never-named young woman--a naive paid companion--whom he has met during a recent stay in Monte Carlo. The two return to Maxim's ancestral estate of Manderley, but the new wife soon finds the old house and grounds--as well as the mind of her increasingly melancholy husband--dominated by the spirit of Rebecca, his dead first wife.

The author's simplifying genius resides in the fact that in Rebecca the spirit of the dead woman animates the house and the landscape and obsesses the man. Consequently, every attempt of the new Mrs. de Winter--the narrator--to adjust to the house and staff (including the daunting housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers), to explore the house and grounds, or to comprehend the past events that interfere with her present happiness are part of the novel's central struggle and its secret history. The second Mrs. de Winter's descriptions may be nuanced and leisurely, occasionally painful in their innocence, but every encounter, each exploration, brings us closer to the heart of the mystery of Rebecca and Manderley too.

Beside the exemplary construction of the narrative, the other things I liked most about the book were the detailed descriptions of Manderley, the lingering power of the first two chapters (the only two set in the present), and the intriguingly ambiguous fate of the narrator of the novel, the second Mrs. de Winter, the woman with no name.

One of the guilty pleasures of a good gothic is the description of a magnificent old house, so precise and rich in detail that you can fantasize about how delightful--or how scary--living in such a mansion might be. Manderly is a place that comes alive for the reader, and it is particularly pleasant to have it described to us by a person who is experiencing it--and attempting to master it--for the first time.

The first chapter is justly famous for the narrator's account of a dream in which she returns to the now ruined Manderley estate. Its description of overgrown nature reclaiming the martyred grandeur of Manderley is an expertly executed mood piece, inaugurating the narrative as effectively as any opening passage in literature. (I do not exclude my favorites: the first scene of Hamlet, the first chapter of Bleak House, and the description of the Sternwood mansion in the first pages of The Big Sleep).

Personally, though, I find the second chapter of the book even more interesting. It describes Maxim and the narrator--who now calls the two of them "happy"--as they live their life on the continent in a series of hotels. But something about our narrator's description strikes me as inexpressibly sad: the two of them sound to me like an affluent, aging couple, frittering their final years away on superficial pleasures and trivial pastimes. Yet the wife, the woman who is telling us this--we find out later--is now barely in her thirties. Could this indeed be "happiness"? This question continued to haunt me throughout my reading of the book, and even now affects my shifting impressions of its themes.

I ask myself, weeks after finishing this novel, what is the narrator's fate? Has she achieved a certain degree of happiness--however modest--having triumphed over the dominating Rebecca, having gained the haunted Maxim for her own? Has she merely accepted the empty social forms and dull routine that Rebecca--whatever her sins might have been--was fighting so furiously against? Or is she "happy"--the interpretation I currently flirt with--because she, in her passive-aggressive way, dominates Maxim in his reduced state more thoroughly than Rebecca ever could? Even so, isn't such happiness inferior to the promise she once showed briefly, when she believed she could still be mistress of Manderley--after Rebecca's ghost had been exorcised, before she learned their world had burned down?

I don't know the answers to these questions, and I must say I like it that way. For me, at least, the novel will always be haunted by ambiguities, and that is a good thing. It is one of the reasons I find Rebecca such a rich, rewarding work.