Reading Rebecca

[radfrac_archive]

seaopaque and I are reading Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca because her mentor suggested it as a reference point for seaopaque's own novel (her novel! I love saying that), and because I, having minimal ability to generate structure in my life independently, do better if I have a reading project.

I think my comrade is mowing through Manderley at speed; I'm following along at an amble -- I'm on page 121 of 302. This is partly because of the weird motility of Du Maurier's prose. It flows forward, brisk and fluid. Yet the action it describes is so profoundly uncomfortable, while withholding for a long time the source of this discomfort, that reading Rebecca is a bit like being guided through an awful party without a visible exit. In this, the novel reminds me of Shirley Jackson or Patricia Highsmith. All three authors are experts in evoking the excruciating in the apparently ordinary, and the alarming psychological excrescences beneath banal situations. It's beautifully done, but it is designed to make me tense and it does, so I take breaks.


From the first page -- dream, house, vanished past -- we know we're in the gothic district. Young Nameless shares a neighborhood with Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Anne Radcliffe -- a neighborhood populated almost entirely by troubled men with secrets, who are also, more importantly, men with houses.

It seems to me that this kind of house gothic is a fantasy of the landless and houseless -- to find love and a secure place to live. That narrative has a lot of power for me, too. (I wrote a ten-minute story about it one time.)

If the house is, as the gothic scholars say, representative of the psyche of the gothic heroine, her internal explorations, I propose that we can't discount its materiality, the fact that it is a physical space in which one can spend time growing a psyche in material, if not psychological, security. That's why Jane Austen is in this neighborhood too -- she knows about men with houses.

The interesting thing about Nameless is that her book isn't named after her (we never learn the protagonist's name), or after her house, but after the vanished first wife of her husband Maxim. If Rebecca is what the heroine is hunting for through the house and through the book, then Rebecca must be what she wants -- as alternate self? As fantasy? Undetermined.

Charlotte Bronte startled her audience by making Jane Eyre actively plain, and next to no one has been that brave since. Du Maurier goes Bronte one better and describes her protagonist as plain, dull, timid and not very bright. I liked this strategy for stripping away everything that is conventionally supposed to make a heroine appealing, and giving it instead to the lost Rebecca, but the protagonist insists on her own dullness so often that at one point I began to wonder why I would want to read about someone so tepid. Of course this is not what she is at all, and I had obediently fallen for Du Maurier's misdirection.

The protagonist of Rebecca has -- or, really, is, especially at first -- an incredibly sensitive instrument: a kind of hyper-empathy, joined with the finely tuned intuition of the dependent. This is about survival: she has to work out the feelings of the person in whose power she lives her life -- first her boorish employer and then her (troubled, imperious, heavily housed) husband.

Even before there's an active secret in her life, in the absent person of her husband's first wife, Nameless is constantly terrified of uttering the wrong words and losing what little she has. This silence, this control of secrets, this refusal to speak and to know, is at the heart of the gothic. (The return of the repressed and all that.)

Du Maurier has beautiful control of information -- that insistence on the character's banality peaks just as the narrative begins to unspool its secrets. It's like a magic trick, a wave of the hand to veil the protagonist's almost uncanny perspicacity. She puts on an abandoned coat and from a few missing buttons and a handkerchief in the pocket begins to distill an entire narrative.

The book begins with a dream, but the protagonist lives in this kind of reverie much of the time. She is constantly imagining elaborate, scenarios to explain other people's emotions and actions. These visions are so convincing, so hallucinatorily real that as readers the reflex is to accept them as truths.

I love that I looked up after 100 pages and realized that while every page was saturated with foreboding, I had been given nothing to feel foreboding about as yet, except that the protagonist might embarrass herself at tea.


I've seen the movie several times, though not recently (googles, starts streaming movie) and it seems to me that it captures the mood of the book better than any other adaptation, or anyway any adaptation I'm currently able to access in memory. I know it well enough that, beginning to read, I wasn't sure if I might actually have read the book before.

{rf}