"Maxim!" I cried. "Maxim!"
"Yes," he said. "It's all right, I'm here."
"I had a dream," I said. "A dream."
"What was it?" he said.
"I don't know. I don't know."
Back again into the moving unquiet depths. I was writing letters in the morning room. I was sending out invitations. I wrote them all myself with a thick black pen. But when I looked down to see what I had written it was not my small square handwriting at all, it was long, and slanting, with curious pointed strokes. I pushed the cards away from the blotter and hid them. I got up and went to the looking glass. A face stared back at me that was not my own. It was very pale, very lovely, framed in a cloud of dark hair. The eyes narrowed and smiled. The lips parted. The face in the glass stared back at me and laughed. And I saw then that she was sitting on a chair before the dressing table in her bedroom, and Maxim was brushing her hair. He held her hair in his hands, and as he brushed it he wound it slowly into a thick rope. It twisted like a snake, and he took hold of it with both hands and smiled at Rebecca and put it round his neck.
"No," I screamed. "No, no. We must go to Switzerland. Colonel Julyan said we must go to Switzerland."
I felt Maxim's hand upon my face. "What is it?" he said. "What's the matter?"
I sat up and pushed my hair away from my face.
"I can't sleep," I said. "It's no use."
"You've been sleeping," he said. "You've slept for two hours. It's quarter past two. We're four miles the other side of Lanyon."
It was even colder than before. I shuddered in the darkness of the car.
"I'll come beside you," I said. "We shall be back by three."
I climbed over and sat beside him, staring in front of me through the windscreen. I put my hand on his knee. My teeth were chattering.
"You're cold," he said.
"Yes," I said.
The hills rose in front of us, and dipped, and rose again. It was quite dark. The stars had gone.
"What time did you say it was?" I asked.
"Twenty past two," he said.
"It's funny," I said. "It looks almost as though the dawn was breaking over there, beyond those hills. It can't be though, it's too early."
"It's the wrong direction," he said, "you're looking west."
"I know," I said. "It's funny, isn't it?"
He did not answer and I went on watching the sky. It seemed to get lighter even as I stared. Like the first red streak of sunrise. Little by little it spread across the sky.
"It's in winter you see the northern lights, isn't it?" I said. "Not in summer?"
"That's not the northern lights," he said. "That's Manderley."
I glanced at him and saw his face. I saw his eyes.
"Maxim," I said. "Maxim, what is it?"
He drove faster, much faster. We topped the hill before us and saw Lanyon lying in a hollow at our feet. There to the left of us was the silver streak of the river, widening to the estuary at Kerrith six miles away. The road to Manderley lay ahead. There was no moon. The sky above our heads was inky black. But the sky on the horizon was not dark at all. It was shot with crimson, like a splash of blood. And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea.
Afterword
Rebecca, first published in 1938, was Daphne du Maurier's fifth novel. It was to become the most famous of her many books; over sixty years later, it continues to haunt, fascinate and perplex a new generation of readers. Yet its enduring popularity has not been matched by critical acclaim: Rebecca, from the time of first publication, has been woefully and willfully underestimated. It has been dismissed as a gothic romance, as "women's fiction"--with such prejudicial terms, of course, giving clues as to why the novel has been so unthinkingly misinterpreted. Re-examination of this strange, angry and prescient novel is long overdue. A re-appraisal of it should begin, perhaps, with the circumstances under which it was written.
Du Maurier began planning it at a difficult point in her life: only a few years had passed since the death of her adored but dominating father, the actor-manager Gerald du Maurier. She was pregnant with her second child when at the planning stage of the book, and, by the time she actually began writing, at the age of thirty, she was in Egypt, where her husband, Frederick Browning, an officer in the Grenadier Guards, had been posted with his battalion. What many would regard as the quintessential Cornish novel was therefore begun, and much of it written, not in Cornwall, not even in England, but in the fierce heat of an Egyptian summer, in a city du Maurier came to loathe: Alexandria.
Du Maurier was desperately homesick; her longing for her home by the sea in Cornwall was, she wrote, "like a pain under the heart continually." She was also unhappy: this was the first time she had ever accompanied her husband on a posting, and she hated the role forced upon her in Egypt by her marriage.
Shy, and socially reclusive, she detested the small talk and the endless receptions she was expected to attend and give, in her capacity of commanding officer's wife. This homesickness and her resentment of wifely duties, together with a guilty sense of her own ineptitude when performing them, were to surface in Rebecca: they cluster around the two female antagonists of the novel, the living and obedient second wife, Mrs. de Winter, and the dead, rebellious and indestructible first wife, Rebecca. Both women reflect aspects of du Maurier's own complex personality: she divided herself between them, and the splitting, doubling and mirroring devices she uses throughout the text destabilize it but give it resonance. With Rebecca we enter a world of dreams and daydreams, but they always threaten to tip over into nightmare.
At first, du Maurier struggled with her material. The novel had a false start, which she described as a "literary miscarriage"--a revealing metaphor, given the centrality of pregnancy and childbirth to the plot and themes of Rebecca, and given the fact that du Maurier's second child, another daughter--she had hoped for a son--was born during the time she worked on it. She tore up the initial (fifteen-thousand-word-long) attempt at the book, the first time she had ever done this, and an indication, perhaps, of the difficulties she sensed in this material. She began again while still in Egypt, and finally completed it on her return to England.
She sent it off to her publisher, Victor Gollancz, in April 1938. He knew little about the novel at that stage: du Maurier had briefly described it to him as "a sinister tale about a woman who marries a widower... Psychological and rather macabre." Gollancz must have been somewhat nervous as he awaited that manuscript. Du Maurier's previous novel, Jamaica Inn, had sold more copies than any of her previous books, bringing her to the brink of bestsellerdom; but she was an unpredictable author, and difficult to categorize. Two of her earlier novels, I'll Never Be Young Again and The Progress of Julius, had sold much less well, and the sexual frankness of both books--especially the latter, which dealt with father-daughter incest--had been met with distaste from critics.
Gollancz's reaction to Rebecca was relief, and jubilation. A "rollicking success" was forecast by him, by his senior editor, and by everyone to whom advance copies were sent. Prior to publication, du Maurier's was the lone dissenting voice in this chorus of approbation. She feared her novel was "too gloomy" to be popular, and she believed the ending was "too grim" to appeal to readers. Gollancz ignored such pessimism: Rebecca was touted to booksellers as an "exquisite love story" with a "brilliantly created atmosphere of suspense." It was promoted and sold, in short, as a gothic romance.
On publication, some critics acknowledged the book's haunting power and its vice-like narrative grip, but--perhaps misled by the book's presentation, or prejudiced by the gender of the author--they delved no deeper. Most reviews dismissed the novel with that belittling diminutive only ever used for novels by women: it was just a "novelette." Readers ignored them: Rebecca became an immediate and overwhelming commercial success.
The novel went through twenty-eight printings in four years in Britain alone. It became a bestseller in America, and it sold in vast numbers throughout Europ
e. It continues to sell well to this day: in the sixty-four years since first publication, it has never been out of print. Its readership was swelled by the Oscar-winning success of Hitchcock's memorable expressionistic film version, and has been increased since by countless theater, radio and television dramatizations. Like Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (1936, and another novel that concerns women and property), Rebecca has made a transition rare in popular fiction: it has passed from bestseller, to cult novel, to cultural classic status. Why is that? What is it about this novel that has always spoken to readers, if not to critics?
Rebecca is the story of two women, one man, and a house. Of the four, as Hitchcock once observed, the house, Manderley, is the dominant presence. Although never precisely located (the word "Cornwall" is never actually used in the novel), its minutely detailed setting is clearly that of an actual house, Menabilly. Du Maurier discovered Menabilly, on its isolated headland near Fowey, as a young woman, when she first went to live in Cornwall; she wrote a magical account of the first time she saw it. Eventually, after the war, and after Rebecca, she was able to lease the house. She lived there for over twenty years, using it as the location for several other novels; it lit her imagination, and obsessed her, for much of her life. Du Maurier's own term for Menabilly was the "House of Secrets," and when she placed it at the heart of Rebecca, she created an elliptical, shifting, and deeply secretive book. The plot hinges upon secrets; the novel's milieu is that of an era and social class that, in the name of good manners, rarely allowed the truth to be expressed; and suppression coupled with a fearful secretiveness are its female narrator's most marked characteristics.
By the time du Maurier wrote Rebecca, she had mastered the techniques of popular fiction. Her novel came well disguised as bestseller material: an intriguing story of love and murder--a "page-turner" in modern parlance. But examine the subtext of Rebecca and you find a perturbing, darker construct, part Grimm's fairytale, part Freudian family romance. You also find a very interesting literary mirroring, of course, an early example of intertextuality--and that is rare in a "popular" novel, certainly one this early. Rebecca reflects Jane Eyre, but the reflection is imperfect, and deliberately so, forcing us to re-examine our assumptions about both novels, and in particular, their treatment of insanity and women.
None of these aspects of Rebecca was noticed by critics at the time of publication--and few have paused to examine them since. Instead, Charlotte Bronte's gifts were used as a stick with which to beat an impious, hubristic du Maurier over the head: she was Bronte's inferior, how could she dare to annex a classic novel? The critics moved swiftly on, not pausing for thought, and shunted du Maurier into the category of "romance" writer--a category she detested and resented, but from which she was never able to escape. Thus was du Maurier "named" as a writer. The question of how we name and identify--and the ironies and inexactitudes inherent in that process--is, of course, of central importance in Rebecca. Both female characters--one dead, one alive--derive their surname, as they do their status, from their husband. The first wife, Rebecca, is vivid and vengeful and, though dead, indestructible: her name lives on in the book's title. The second wife, the drab shadowy creature who narrates this story, remains nameless. We learn that she has a "lovely and unusual" name, and that it was her father who gave it her. The only other identity she has, was also bestowed by a man--she is a wife, she is Mrs. de Winter.
That a narrator perceived as a heroine should be nameless was a source of continuing fascination to du Maurier's readers. It also fascinated other writers--Agatha Christie corresponded with du Maurier on the subject--and throughout her life, du Maurier was plagued with letters seeking an explanation. Her stock reply was that she found the device technically interesting. The question is not a trivial one, for it takes us straight to the core of Rebecca--and that may well be the reason why du Maurier, a secretive woman and a secretive artist, avoided answering it.
The unnamed narrator of Rebecca begins her story with a dream, with a first sentence that has become famous: Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again. Almost all the brief first chapter is devoted to that dream, describing her progress up the long winding drive, by moonlight, to Manderley itself. The imagery, of entwined trees and encroaching undergrowth that have "mated," is sexual; the style is slightly scented and overwritten, that of a schoolgirl, trying to speak poetically, and struggling to impress. Moving forward, with a sense of anticipation and revulsion, the dream narrator first sees Manderley as intact; then, coming closer, she realizes her mistake: she is looking at a ruin, at the shell of a once-great house. With this realization--one of key importance to the novel--the dreamer wakes. She confirms that Manderley has indeed been destroyed, and that the dream was a true one. ("Dreaming true" was a term invented by du Maurier's grandfather, George du Maurier, author of Trilby; it was a concept that fascinated her all her life. Daphne was aware of Freud and Jung: George was not.)
Du Maurier's narrator can now begin to tell her story--and she does so in a cyclic way; she begins at the end, with herself and her husband Maxim de Winter living in exile in Europe, for reasons that as yet are unclear. Their activities, as they move from hotel to hotel, sound like those of two elderly ex-pats. They follow the cricket, take afternoon tea; the wife selects dull newspaper articles to read to her husband, since--again for reasons unexplained--both find dullness reassuring and safe. The narrator describes a routine of stifling monotony, but does so in terms that are relentlessly optimistic and trite. This may be a marriage but it is one carefully devoid of passion, and apparently without sex.
It therefore comes as a considerable shock to the reader to discover, as the story loops back to this couple's first meeting, that this narrator is young. The lapse of time between this present and the past she will now describe is unspecified, but it is clearly only a few years. This makes de Winter a man of about fifty, and his childless friendless wife around twenty-five. Their life in Europe is never mentioned again, but this is the "grim ending" to which du Maurier referred. It is easy to forget, as the drama unfolds, that the aftermath for the de Winters will be exile, ennui, and putting a brave face on a living death.
The plot of Rebecca thereafter will be familiar: it has echoes of Cinderella and Bluebeard as well as Jane Eyre. The narrator, working as a paid companion to a monstrous and tyrannical American, and staying with her in a palatial hotel in Monte Carlo, meets Maxim de Winter, a widower twice her age, who is the owner of a legendary house, Manderley. She marries him after a few weeks' acquaintanceship, returns with him to Manderley, and there becomes obsessed with Rebecca, his first wife. Patching together a portrait of Rebecca in her mind, she creates a chimera--and an icon of womanhood. Rebecca, she comes to believe, was everything she herself is not: she was a perfect hostess, a perfect sexual partner, a perfect chatelaine and a perfect wife. This image she later understands is false, but before she can grasp the truth about Rebecca's life, she has first to be told the truth about her death. Rebecca did not drown in a yachting accident, as everyone believes: she was killed by de Winter, who from the days of his honeymoon (also in Monte Carlo) loathed his wife.
Mrs. de Winter, once enlightened, accepts without question her husband's version of her predecessor as a promiscuous (possibly bisexual) woman, who was pregnant with another man's child when he killed her, and who taunted him that she would pass off this child as his. De Winter's confession--and a very hollow melodramatic confession it is--is accompanied by a declaration of love--the first he has made, despite months of marriage. There is also the suggestion--very subtle but it is there--that their marriage is consummated, and for the first time, after this confession (note the references to single beds in the novel, and the heroine's embarrassment when there is speculation as to whether she is yet pregnant--something that recurs frequently. Modesty may explain that embarrassment, but in a du Maurier novel, it may well not).
Without hesitation, Mrs. de Winter then gives her husband her full support--her one concern
from then onwards is to conceal the truth and protect her husband. Thus, she becomes, in legal terms, an accessory after the fact: more importantly, she makes a moral choice. This is the crux of du Maurier's novel: de Winter has confessed, after all, to a double murder. He believes he has killed not only Rebecca, but also the child she was carrying--a heinous crime, by any standards. Here, du Maurier was taking a huge risk, particularly in a novel aimed at a popular market. To have an apparent "hero" revealed as a double murderer, one prepared to perjure himself, moreover, to save his neck, could have shocked and alienated readers in their thousands. Hitchcock, when he came to film the novel two years later, ran a mile from this scenario, which he knew would be unacceptable. In his version, there is no murder, and Maxim's crime is at worst manslaughter since, during a quarrel, Rebecca falls, and (conveniently and mortally) injures herself.
How does du Maurier occlude this issue? She does it with immense cleverness: so involved have we, the readers, become in Mrs. de Winter's predicament, and so sympathetic to her, that we conjoin with her. Because she loves her guilty husband, and he appears to love her, we too begin to hope that he will escape justice. If Mrs. de Winter is culpable, therefore, so is the reader who endorses her actions--and that issue ticks away like a time bomb under the remaining chapters of the book.
This final section of the novel, which is brilliantly plotted, concerns de Winter's attempts to suppress the truth, and--with his loyal wife's assistance--escape the hangman. And so he does, but not without cost. Returning to Manderley from London, with information that gives Rebecca a motive for suicide and thus saves him, both partners are uneasy. De Winter senses impending disaster; in the back of the car, his wife is asleep, dreaming that she and Rebecca have become one, and that their hair, long and black, as Rebecca's was, is winding about de Winter's neck, like a noose.