Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier

Well, Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. A huge bitch or a (brazen) heroine? Manipulative, spiteful and insane? Or independant, clever and intriguing? Perhaps both? 

Rebecca tells the story of a young, naive girl whisked off her feet by a haughty middle aged man, Maximilian de Winter. This girl narrates the story throughout the book. Maxim, as he's usually called, marries her and installs her as mistress of his stately home, Manderley. From the moment she meets him, she is plagued with the fear that she will never measure up to his deceased first wife, Rebecca.

Quite understandable. We are told Rebecca was sophisticated, charming, 'well bred', and, time and time again, remarkably beautiful. She is described as having long black hair, a slim figure and the white skin so fashionable in those days (around the 1920s). By contrast, our narrator believes herself childish, plain and shy. She is convinced Maxim is still completely in love with his late wife, still longing for Rebecca, besotted with her.

So what a shock our narrator receives when her new husband reveals Rebecca was actually a rather despicable character, so much so that Maxim was unable to resist murdering her and dumping her body in the ocean.

Maxim tells his new bride of Rebecca's crimes; they'd started mere days after he and Rebecca were married. Maxim describes how Rebecca had agreed to run his house as long as she was allowed a free rein to do as she pleased. That is, lead a life completely separate to Maxim's, including having as many lovers as she desires (undertones of the book suggest male and female), taking a house in London for her own use during the week, while also having as much money as she requires courtesy of Maxim.

Maxim explains how Rebecca finally tips him over the edge a few years into their marriage, by telling him that she is pregnant with someone else's baby. Rebecca mocks that this baby will grow to inherit Manderley without there being anything Maxim can do to prevent it. Aside from shooting her in the heart of course, a course of action he duly takes. Our narrator understands and sympathises with what her new husband has been through, and she realises he's truly in love with her, not Rebecca. This realisation apparently completely overrules a murder confession, so naturally she vows to stand by him.

So far, so straightforward romance. Rebecca is the devil woman, Maxim the wronged husband and our narrator the romantic heroine; Rebecca's foil and Maxim's saviour.

And yet, it is Rebecca I am drawn to, whilst struggling to find any empathy towards the narrator. When Maxim asks the narrator to marry him, he does so by saying 'I'm asking you to marry me, you little fool'.

Not the most romantic of propositions, despite what our young narrator seems to think.

Then, once the newly married couple are back at Manderley, Maxim treats her like a small child, or a puppy. He disciplines her, patronisingly encourages her, and comments several times how pleased he is that she's not mature or sophisticated.

So, that leads me to wonder what Maxim may have been like with Rebecca. The same? If so, I can absolutely understand Rebecca being a bit put out. Maxim himself admits to marrying Rebecca because he was assured by other people she had the right combination of 'beauty, brains and breeding.' And it is evident she did indeed have all three of those things, but clearly not the kind Maxim wanted.

It seems he quite fancied a show wife, one who his society would approve of and who would competently be able to run Manderley for him. When Maxim realises Rebecca is not content with a life waiting on him, but instead is brazen enough to want to pursue her own life, he gets annoyed and feels rather cheated. Cheated enough to kill her.

Our narrator is, in Maxim's words, 'young... lost', desperate to please at all costs the husband she never dreamt she could attract. Indeed she barely blinks an eye upon hearing that her husband not only murdered his wife and her unborn child, but then launched a large scale cover up. She accepts Maxim’s story without question, never considering it may either be untrue, or, even if it is factual, that Rebecca perhaps did not deserve to be murdered for her ‘crimes’. When Rebecca was first published it was classified as a romance, with the narrator assuming the part of the romantic heroine.

But Rebecca is more my kind of heroine, and, I believe, the one du Maurier intended to be thought of as such. She is confident, beautiful, brazen and unwilling to sacrifice her own life for the sake of Maxim's. Her story is exciting and intriguing, I wanted to know more about Rebecca’s history and why she was the way she was. I think I considered the narrator’s equally mysterious background only once until I began writing this. Even Rebecca’s own murder was one of her successes - she baits Maxim into shooting her in order to escape the long drawn out death from the terminal illness she has discovered she has.

The unnamed narrator is cut from the same cloth as Twilight's Bella; Rebecca has a cloth all of her own. Rebecca does not actually ever appear in the book at all, she is spoken of only through other characters, yet she haunts every page and is the one that stays in the mind long after the narrator is forgotten. For a character to do this must surely secure Rebecca's position as the rightful heroine of this gothic, mysterious and excellent novel.

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Happily, author Sally Beauman has written a book authorised by the du Maurier estate, Rebecca’s Tale. Hopefully it will provide a closer look at Rebecca’s background. I’ll be ordering it soon, and it will be featuring on here in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!