Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

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.

As the curtain drops and the book comes to an end, these last lines linger as du Maurier produces the last twist in her delicately crafted story. The famous and mostly remember opening line is iconic: Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again, but its effect is only completed when we have heard the whole story, when Manderley, more than just a place, has become a moment in time, a memory impossible to hold onto.

Writing a review for this book, has proven to be harder than I first thought, as there is so much I want to say, but can’t easily find the words to express it. In the surface, one can be misled to believe this is a gothic romance, a rags-to-riches story, where the heroin has to endure many hardships to achieve her happy ending; but this is by no means a romance and the narrator is not a heroin.

Who is the protagonist of this story? Is a question I asked myself quite often while reading, and I have come to the conclusion that it can be different for each reader and the interpretation one chooses to give the story.

We follow the unnamed narrator, as she first remains under the wing of snobbish Mrs. Van Hopper, she then meets widower Maxim de Winter, a man twice her age, with who she grows fascinated. Being a dreamer, and used to create scenarios in her head, she imagines the perfect life that would await for her when Mr. de Winter proposes, envisioning an escape from the dull, unsubstantial life she has lead so far, though a poisonous seed has already been planted and threatens her fairytale ending, the memory of his ex-wife Rebecca, who tragically passed away. They wed and subsequently move to Manderley, where her torture will begin.

There was Manderley, our Manderley, secretive and silent as it had always been. More than just the setting, it stands as a character of its own. On the outside is the perfect place to host parties, a beautiful garden, with a view of the sea: the dream house, but on the inside it is rotten, because the people living there are rotten.

Upon arrival she meets Mrs. Danvers, who will make it her life’s mission to remind the new Mrs. de Winter how Rebecca, her predecessor was all the things she is not. She takes Maxim‘s reluctance to speak anything about his late wife as a sign that he is consumed by grieve, still in love with her, so in order to emulate her essence, she erases herself, wrongly assuming that that is what her growing-distant husband wants from her. Being young, and unexperienced about the formalities of high society, she is thrown hopelessly and unaccompanied into a world dominated by appearances, hidden in the shadow of Rebecca, whose light shines brighter even in her death.

Rebecca doesn’t have a voice, but she is an ever-present force, the story revolves around every character’s obsession with her; an obsession that comes in different ways: For Mrs. Danvers is idolatry, a blind loyalty towards her, she is an angel who could do no wrong. For Maxim is the opposite, a demon, his obsession lies in the secret that ties him to Rebecca, and as much as he wants to forget, her image is vivid, walking beside him.

For Mrs. de Winter (the current one) the obsession is the most consuming, she didn’t know Rebecca when she was alive, so every bit of information she gets about her comes from the person who idolized her, because the one who despised her doesn’t want to talk about it.
Aa the story progresses, the tension builds, and the reader realizes that every assumption one makes is biased by Mrs. de Winter perception of things, molded by her submissive character and the way she processes the events occurring around her, influenced by the insecurity she feels fueled by Rebecca’s pervasive presence. The sympathy one could have felt for her at the beginning of the book fades as her character wilts and her antagonistic colors are shown.

Whenever you touched me I thought you were comparing me to Rebecca, I said. Whenever you spoke to me or looked at me, walked with me in the garden, sat down to dinner, I felt you were saying to yourself, ‘This I did with Rebecca, and this, and this.

Mrs. de Winter and Rebecca mirror each other, but their differences make them two sides of the same coin. The first falls into the role of the obedient, complacent wife, willing to stay by her husband’s side until the end, no matter how dull and colorless her life turns out to be. On the contrary, Rebecca was unapologetically herself, she was sexually liberated (even scandalous today, one can imagine in the past) manipulative, assertive, all around fascinating, which were traits more likely connected with men; but eventually whether one thing or the other both women suffer in the hands of the pathetic troubled man that is Maxim de Winter.

In my opinion, at its core, this is a feminist exploration of womanhood, because even when there is not a clear feminist heroin, as in, let’s say Jane Eyre (which it often gets compared with, because it has similar archetypical characters) its feminism is not evidenced in the behavior of its characters, but in the exquisite critique the author makes.

Du Maurier knew how to create a haunting tale with very little, it is strange that it conveys such a lingering, cinematographic atmosphere, with exquisite, unique characters (specially Mrs. Danvers) while having deep social and psychological underlying themes, that will stay with the reader long after finishing the book.

It’s always Rebecca, Rebecca, Rebecca.