How would I have scratched the itch of being a jealous woman in love in the early 20th century? I’d devour confessional writers like Annie Ernaux in the latter half, but did anyone earlier capture so perfectly the woman’s lapse into an almost anti-feminist self-effacement in naïve first love? The Second Sex came in 1949 – Simone de Beauvoir brought to existentialist clarity these murky taboos. But Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) first brought the feminine condition to terrible life in a gothic classic.
Reading Rebecca is like looking into a truthfully unflattering mirror. The more I identify with the nameless narrator, a young woman who splinters with insecurity when she marries a widower, I grapple with what it means to love as a woman: “One is not born, but becomes woman”, writes de Beauvoir. Loving a man forces du Maurier’s narrator to traverse the murky reality of “femininity”: Is it found in the fine china of teacups that our narrator clumsily breaks? Is it the frills of lacey petticoats, is it Rebecca’s mysterious perfume of white azaleas? Du Maurier tells us being woman, being human, is much more. Maxim de Winter’s dead wife, the eponymous Rebecca, is the apotheosis of femininity, beauty, and charm. Rebecca is the flowering petals of Manderley’s famous rose garden, she is the din of the stormy sea outside the bedroom window. She is simultaneously desired and envied by the characters she haunts: Maxim, the narrator, and even the housekeeper Mrs. Danvers who worships Rebecca’s remnants in an erotic fashion.
Du Maurier was herself haunted by femininity, feeling like a “boy in a woman’s body”. The author modelled Rebecca after the woman her husband was briefly engaged to, whose love letters were signed with an elegant sloping initial ‘R’, which terrifyingly graces the book’s cover. The narrator’s description of cowering at Rebecca’s signature seems autofictional: the author exempted herself from a charade of femininity, dressing boyishly and in childhood adopting an alter ego ‘Eric Avon’. She was closeted, in love with women, but from within a boy’s skin. However, it’s the narrator who is weakly subordinate in the story, whereas Rebecca is punished for her masculine transgressions.
Reading Rebecca, for me, was like reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and poring over the self-betrayal that woman endures. Daphne du Maurier hated being labelled a “romantic novelist.” Does writing about love as a woman make trivial fiction? Rebecca was marketed as an ‘exquisite love story’, but the author saw it as “grim”. It’s difficult to see how jealous agony can be manipulated into a fairytale… The novel’s famous first line, “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again” begins with the narrator’s fatalistic dream of her marital home engulfed by snarling trees and overgrown twisted flowers laying waste to her dream of first love. Our narrator succumbs to those naïve dreams drummed into every little girl– to be demure, virginal, maternal, and subservient to the male. “It is in man’s eyes that the woman believes she has at last found herself”, writes de Beauvoir. Instead of being appalled at her husband’s treatment of Rebecca, the mystery that occupies the novel, the narrator simply rejoices that he never loved her.
Who wins in the end? Our narrator is blindly obedient and enslaved to Maxim, and the magic of Manderley disappears without Rebecca: “I looked upon a desolate shell, soulless at last, unhaunted, with no whisper of the past about its staring walls”. Yet, no one is so self-aware of her own feminine shortcomings as the narrator who compares herself to Rebecca. She is in awe of Rebecca, who takes from life assertively, ignoring mediocrity, uncompromising in her perfection. She avenges herself from the dead, destroying her husband and his institution of male hegemony with just her memory, which is burned into the reader. A woman with a sovereign existence is dangerous, evil, and yet it’s Rebecca who has lived authentically and in “good faith”. Rebecca’s indelible memory leaves its traces in celebrated “female manipulator” tropes such as Gone Girl, but Gillian Flynn’s 2012 novel and David Fincher’s 2014 movie adaptation don’t occupy this thorny taboo of an unreliable narrator in the throes of jealousy. Rebecca rises out of the ashes not only du Maurier’s novel: Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation of Rebecca (1940), though masterful, was made in the Hays Code era of Hollywood censorship, missing the scandalising ingredients of sex, homoeroticism, and bloody murder that make du Maurier’s potion so intoxicating. Ben Wheatley’s 2018 Netflix adaptation was merely a superficial remake of Hitchcock’s disguised in streaming-era flashiness. If Rebecca is never again done justice, it’s fitting that she remains a vengeful woman.
