Returning to Manderley
On Daphne du Maurier's misunderstood love story
“I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say.”
The above words are spoken by the narrator of Daphne du Maurier’s most poplar novel, Rebecca, often referred to as one of the greatest love stories in literature, and give some indication of the complex story which is about to unfold.
Rebecca contains one of the most famous literary heroines, yet the narrator who speaks these lines remains unnamed throughout the book. This cannot have been unplanned: in a novel where the first wife dominates the narrative, the ‘gauche’ young heroine apparently has no agency over her own life.
An orphan, the narrator first appears as a young companion to a rich, overbearing American, Mrs Van Hopper, touring the French Riviera in the opening to the book, where we find them in Monte Carlo. After a chance meeting with the enigmatic, grieving Maxim de Winter, recently widowed of his famously beautiful and accomplished wife Rebecca, Maxim and the narrator engage in days out together, where Maxim drives her around the coast in his sports car.
When it is time for Mrs Van Hopper and her companion to leave the hotel, Maxim speaks to her privately, and tells her he will marry her young companion, taking her back to Manderley with him as his second wife. Though the young narrator is clearly in love with Maxim, his proposal of ‘I’m asking you to marry me, you little fool’, is hardly a term of endearment or an indicator of the equal balance of power in the relationship.
The book, which was once dismissed as a Gothic romance and has been later revered as an extraordinary psychological thriller, not least thanks to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film version, taps into the overriding fear of the rival in love: the irreplaceable first wife. The writing is crammed full of hallucinations and dream sequences, borrowing from both the Gothic novels of the 19th century and the modernist writing of the early 20th century.
Crucially, du Maurier herself did not see the story as a romance, claiming that it was a ‘rather grim’ and even ‘unpleasant’ novel. Her publisher however saw it differently, publishing it as a love story, where it has often remained in the minds and hearts of readers, meaning it has never gone out of print since its first publication in 1938.
‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again’.
One of the main elements of the Gothic within the narrative appears in the form of housekeeper Mrs Danvers, who has an obsessive infatuation with her late mistress. The character of Mrs Danvers has been referred to as one of the greatest female villains in literature, and she manages to convince the second Mrs de Winter that she will never be able to replace Rebecca, either in the running of Manderley, or in the affections of Maxim, whom she claims is still very much infatuated with his first wife.
The narrator’s visions and actions soon come to mirror Mrs Danvers’ own, visiting the dead woman’s rooms and smelling her scent everywhere she goes. The story twists into a ghostlike vision of the dead coming back to haunt the living.
A climax comes when Mrs Danvers convinces the narrator to dress as one of the paintings hanging at Manderley for her first ball as mistress of the house. Little does the narrator know that this was the very costume worn at the last ball given by Rebecca, and Maxim’s anger leads to her rejection by him, with Mrs Danvers almost convincing her to throw herself from Rebecca’s bedroom window.
This is where the story takes another turn, however, and reminds us of how skilled a novelist du Maurier was.
That night, following a storm, the remains of Rebecca’s body are found in the sunken boat upon which she drowned. This causes various problems for Maxim, as he had previously identified another woman’s body washed up on the shore as his wife’s. Further plot twist: she has a gun shot wound, and Maxim confesses to the narrator that he shot her in a moment of jealous rage as she confessed to having various affairs and falling pregnant, likely with her cousin’s child.
This might seem like the moment when the narrator picks up her things and leaves Maxim de Winter. However, remarkably, du Maurier’s heroine comes into her own after this point. Far from being worried about her murderous husband, she is delighted that he never actually loved the enigmatic Rebecca. She proceeds to support him through a police investigation and inquest into Rebecca’s death, where it is revealed that she was dying of cancer and could not have been pregnant. A verdict of suicide is recorded, and it seems that the ‘good’, quiet girl has triumphed over her wild and sexually driven rival; the ‘bad’ girl.
The ending proved a struggle for Hitchcock when directing the film version, as film censors would not allow Maxim de Winter to be a killer and get away with it. In his version, Rebecca is killed whilst attacking Maxim, banging her head in the beachside cottage where they are fighting.
The novel ends with the couple spending their lives in quiet solitude in anonymous foreign hotels, after Maxim’s beloved Manderley has been set ablaze by the erratic Mrs Danvers.
Feminists have seen Rebecca as a novel about powerful women and how they are often penalised in literature for their sexual freedoms. The unnamed narrator wins out because she is a loyal and dutiful wife; Rebecca’s punishment comes as she challenged the patriarchal society and chose a life of pleasure.
But Rebecca perhaps reveals as much about du Maurier as it does about the psyche of a young woman in love.
Born in London in 1907, du Maurier was the daughter of Sir Gerald du Maurier, a well-known actor-manager of the time. He was said to be a critical and teasing father, whilst also adoring his young daughters, and they reportedly dreaded causing him disappointment, something which can be seen in the narrator’s relationship with Maxim de Winter.
As a young reader, du Maurier had developed a male persona, which she called ‘the boy in the box’. She reportedly hated wearing feminine clothing, and enjoyed more male pursuits, such as sailing, referring to herself from a young age as a ‘half-breed’; female on the outside, ‘with a boy’s mind and a boy’s heart’.
She was a shy young woman, much like the narrator, and had fears over her sexuality. Her passion for her American publisher’s wife, Ellen Doubleday, which was not reciprocated, was said to have inspired her 1951 novel My Cousin Rachel, again a story of sexual jealousy and loyalty.
She also had relationships with men and at just 22, married Lt Col Sir Frederick Browning, staying married for 33 years and having three children together, despite her engaging in a love affair with Gertrude Lawrence, whom also had an affair with her father.
It is complicated to consider du Maurier’s sexuality in the light of her shyness and unassuming persona. ‘Transgender’ was not yet in common usage, and she fought against her desires for women, which she feared. She was committed to her marriage, despite feeling she was stuck in the wrong body.
It has been claimed that much of this sexual confusion can be channelled within Rebecca. The narrator refers to herself as an ‘androgyne’, offering herself to Maxim as a ‘friend and companion, a sort of boy’. She then allows her narrator to speculate over the body and physical appearance of Rebecca. Mrs Danvers, meanwhile, appears to encompass an erotic, all-consuming love for her dead mistress. In a scene charged with erotic interpretation, she forces the narrator to feel inside Rebecca’s slipper and fondle her nightdress, whilst she speaks of the way her clothes were torn from her body when she drowned.
Rebecca was written when du Maurier was 30 years of age, living in Egypt with her husband, pregnant, bored, and homesick. She did not suit the life of an army wife, and struggled with entertaining and giving orders to servants, mirroring the second Mrs de Winter in the novel.
To aid her homesickness, du Maurier dreamt about the 17th century house she had seen in Cornwall, ‘Menabilly’, and which she leased from the owners for 20 years. Manderley was directly based on the house, which du Maurier loved and upon which she spent much of the money she earned from the sale of her books.
Du Maurier herself has said that she associated with both the central female characters of Rebecca. Her shyness and lack of housekeeping skills she put into the unnamed narrator, whilst her sexuality she poured into the enigmatic Rebecca, with her love affairs and her liking for more traditionally male pursuits of sailing and riding. This mirroring of her own life and personality facets feeds into the mirroring within the book, which allows us to glimpse both Mrs de Winters’ and judge for ourselves where our sympathies lie.
It is a more subversive book than it first appears in a sense, in that it feels right to sympathise with the narrator, yet that allows for Maxim de Winter as murderer to escape any form of punishment.
But it is easy to see the cracks in this story, and the way the youthful narrator has been manipulated into marrying a much older man and placed in a position for which she is wholly unprepared. When she is being terrorised by the terrifying housekeeper Mrs Danvers, for example, Maxim merely laughs at her inability to manage the household staff and becomes irritable, like a disappointed father.
It is reported that when Hitchcock cast Joan Fontaine for the part of the second Mrs de Winter in the film, he told her that everyone on the set hated her, allowing for a natural unease in the role. Unethical as methods go, it paid off; the film won 11 Oscar nominations and is still a classic version of the book, despite the change in ending.
On the question of the book as romance, du Maurier insisted the story was one of power, specifically, the balance of power in marriage, and that the book wasn’t about love. Apparently, the idea for the novel was born out of du Maurier’s own jealousy at the woman her husband had been briefly engaged to, Jan Ricardo, who’s signature – a large, elegant “R” - du Maurier mined for her title character’s belongings.
She had said before that she would like to retell the story of Jane Eyre, and on first publication of Rebecca, du Maurier faced accusations of plagiarism. A certain uncanny similarity within the innocence of the young narrators of both books can be seen, as well as the looming figure of the first wife, whether locked in the attic or found dead off the Cornish coast. It appears that in both texts, the first wife’s fate affects the happiness (or otherwise) of the second.
What has perhaps kept readers (and audiences) interested in this story is that nothing can ever be taken as it appears. Was Maxim de Winter taunted by the dead Rebecca, or does he merely wish to manipulate the story in order to satisfy his new young wife? And is the narrator of the story to be trusted? After all, it is merely her side of the story we hear.
What comes across clearly when reading the novel is that the central character is still the dead Rebecca of the title. Du Maurier’s choice of title allows us to see that, even in death, a powerful female could not be held down. Rebecca still holds the power over the newly married couple, because despite Maxim’s explanation as to her death, by the end of the book, the exiled couple are still reeling from her shadow. It is her story as much as it is the narrators, who has the dubious satisfaction of living out her still youthful years as the companion of a father-like figure.
‘Boredom is a pleasing antidote for fear’.
Du Maurier creates a Gothic, atmospheric and affecting novel in Rebecca, in which we see the imbalance of power within the de Winter’s marriage. It could be argued that both the Mrs de Winter’s were victims of this power imbalance: Rebecca because she dared to rebel, and the second Mrs de Winter because she chose to stay with a murderer.
What is remarkable is that the novel, despite du Maurier’s feelings that it was ‘gloomy’, still continues to feature on the favourites list of many readers.
She built an erotic, wild story, in-keeping with the wild Cornish coast upon which it is set; where jealousy, rage, and desire are met with violent consequences, and the ghostly Rebecca reigns.
I love Rebecca, too, and I find it so interesting that women's fiction in general is always relegated to insulting categories. It is a masterpiece and to call it romance is so short sighted. It's like putting the books of women into the dreaded "women's fiction" category. Do we categorize the work of the other sex as "men's fiction"? Rebecca is an extraordinary work of fiction but I often think about where booksellers would categorize these older novels if they were to come out today. If Rebecca was a brand new novel, would it be sold under psychological thriller, literary fiction, romance, beach read, women's fiction? It's interesting to think about. Thanks for the post!!
This essay is fantastic! I'm working on a close reading of Rebecca's handwriting and loved getting back into the thematic overtones of the novel with your insights. It's so heartbreakingly clear, throughout the novel, that the second Mrs. de Winter is exactly that: second. It's so hard to understand why she would endure what she does for a less-than-pleasurable marriage to Maxim, but your connections to what sounds like du Maurier's own body dysmorphia and complex romantic relationships offer so much interesting, thought-provoking context. Love it.