![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Sometimes I pick up books in odd places. One of the oddest was earlier this August when I was housesitting for my cousins, and I found a trade paperback copy of Daphne du Maurier's classic Gothic romance Rebecca in the pantry.
Well, somehow in all my adventures in Gothic lit I'd never read Rebecca--except for Sarah Rees Brennan's Gothic Tuesday version (http://sarahtales.livejournal.com/192435.html)--plus my Classics book club (the one I haven't been to in a year) is reading it this month, so I stole it borrowed. Borrowed without permission, but with every intention of giving it back. (Which I did.)
My initial thoughts are that Rebecca is one of the absolute house-iest iterations of the "girl meets house" style of Gothic that I have ever, ever read. The book is a weird sort of love triangle between our nameless heroine, her broody and much-older husband, and her husband's dead first wife, except that it's really more of a triangle between the girl, her husband's house, and the dead first wife's influence within the house. Or possibly it's a love triangle between Max and Rebecca and the house, and the heroine is just watching it all trying to figure out what the hell is going on, which she's not very good at (admittedly, neither was I).
Our heroine is never given her own name, and is known throughout the book predominantly as Mrs. de Winter, or often "the second Mrs. de Winter." This is not really entirely because her individual identity is subsumed under her husband's as it is because the psychological conflict surrounding her ability to take on the role of Mrs. de Winter--within the house, within the local society, within the minds of all the people who knew Rebecca--is a driving theme. Being Mrs. de Winter has at least as much to do with being mistress of Manderley as it does being a companion to Max.
Max is, by Gothic romance standards, not all that terrible. This is a low, low bar, since Gothic romance boys are generally creepers of the highest order. Max is about twice as old as our narrator, which is pretty sketchy, and he is, of course, terribly broody, but at least unlike many other terribly broody Gothic heroes he is not all like LET'S TALK ABOUT HOW BROODY I AM ALL THE TIME and seems to be mostly trying to move on and think and talk about other stuff, he's just not good at it. He's also kind of obtuse about what an enormous lifestyle change he's thrust upon our narrator, formerly a penniless middle-class schoolgirl whose only previous occupation was a traveling companion to a hilariously obnoxious American woman, and he ignores her entirely too much once they return to Manderley. There is also the small matter of THE BIG TWIST AT THE END where we learn about what *actually* happened to Rebecca, which I think is where the real literary genius of this work comes in.
(HERE THERE BE SPOILERS)
So the heroine has spent most of the book thinking that Max loved Rebecca and is sad and haunted that she died tragically, but it actually turns out that he hated her and murdered her when she told him she was having somebody else's child. The heroine is THRILLED at this news that Max is a wife-murdering murderer, having lived in the shadow of everybody (especially Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper) making a lot of noise about how awesome Rebecca was, and some other people making noises about Rebecca that were really vague and which the narrator assumed were about how awesome Rebecca was. How exactly Rebecca is awful is left rather vague in a very literary and infuriatingly Victorian fashion (PS this book was written in the 1930s), but it appears she slept around, was a drug addict, was sleeping with her cousin (oddly enough the fact that it was her first cousin did not seem to weird out any of the characters as much as it did me; the times, they have a-changed apparently), and was cruel to horses and to their mentally disabled neighbor/tenant. Other than that it's just like "she was selfish and rotten" and that is told more than shown, which is unusual for this book, although I think there is enough textual evidence to support the idea that she was highly controlling and narcissistic (as a temperament, not trying to diagnose literary characters with anything here). Anyway it twigged enough of my Ugh I Have Known That Asshole (not ones quite as skilled, thank God) buttons that I too was right on board with Max shooting her, except for the fact that she seems to have been deliberately goading and lying him into it in order to make sure she could still mess with him even after her death. And this is the sort of thing that literature has to be really, really good to accomplish, because I am HIGHLY anti-men-shooting-their-wives as a rule. There are also good solid reasons in real life why you can't go around shooting That Asshole just because they're That Asshole and I am generally on board with keeping those rules in order to have a non-murdery and civilized society, but in literature things are allowed to be more messed up than that.
All in all, while I'm not sure Rebecca is the most romantic of the Gothic romances in the sense we currently use the term "romantic," it's certainly one of the Gothic-iest that I've read in a while, and very much one of the most romanticism-y. It's dark and full of secrets. In addition to the big crumbling house and family mysteries, there's an almost absurd emphasis on natural beauty, mainly the sea and all the flowers around Manderley. The flowers are used to almost every literary purpose that flowers can be used, from being a creepy blood-red to set a creepy tone to being the focus of a weird power play between the heroine and Mrs. Danvers keeping alive the will of the dead Rebecca (JUST PUT THE STUPID VASE OF LILACS WHEREVER OMG). The heroine is highly sensitive and imaginative, and despite failing to pick up on any of the clues about what actually happened with Rebecca, she's more than capable of picking up on every slight and bit of judgment directed at her, of being excruciatingly and paralytically aware of when she doesn't fit in, and generally being an anxiety-brained basket case such as I myself am prone to being. She also spends nearly as much time playing out scenes of how she imagines things have gone or will go in her head as she does actually reporting on stuff that she witnesses happening, which is definitely something I relate to. I actually found myself getting sucked into the heroine's head and going along with whatever she thinks very easily, because not only is the book well-written enough to pull a reader in convincingly, but I actually have a lot in common with the heroine personality-wise and thought-patterns-wise. (Her and Catherine Moreland from Northanger Abbey. Deep down, I essentially am a dimwitted British Gothic novel heroine.)
Apropos of nothing I'm sure, who's going to see Crimson Peak with me this fall?!
My initial thoughts are that Rebecca is one of the absolute house-iest iterations of the "girl meets house" style of Gothic that I have ever, ever read. The book is a weird sort of love triangle between our nameless heroine, her broody and much-older husband, and her husband's dead first wife, except that it's really more of a triangle between the girl, her husband's house, and the dead first wife's influence within the house. Or possibly it's a love triangle between Max and Rebecca and the house, and the heroine is just watching it all trying to figure out what the hell is going on, which she's not very good at (admittedly, neither was I).
Our heroine is never given her own name, and is known throughout the book predominantly as Mrs. de Winter, or often "the second Mrs. de Winter." This is not really entirely because her individual identity is subsumed under her husband's as it is because the psychological conflict surrounding her ability to take on the role of Mrs. de Winter--within the house, within the local society, within the minds of all the people who knew Rebecca--is a driving theme. Being Mrs. de Winter has at least as much to do with being mistress of Manderley as it does being a companion to Max.
Max is, by Gothic romance standards, not all that terrible. This is a low, low bar, since Gothic romance boys are generally creepers of the highest order. Max is about twice as old as our narrator, which is pretty sketchy, and he is, of course, terribly broody, but at least unlike many other terribly broody Gothic heroes he is not all like LET'S TALK ABOUT HOW BROODY I AM ALL THE TIME and seems to be mostly trying to move on and think and talk about other stuff, he's just not good at it. He's also kind of obtuse about what an enormous lifestyle change he's thrust upon our narrator, formerly a penniless middle-class schoolgirl whose only previous occupation was a traveling companion to a hilariously obnoxious American woman, and he ignores her entirely too much once they return to Manderley. There is also the small matter of THE BIG TWIST AT THE END where we learn about what *actually* happened to Rebecca, which I think is where the real literary genius of this work comes in.
(HERE THERE BE SPOILERS)
So the heroine has spent most of the book thinking that Max loved Rebecca and is sad and haunted that she died tragically, but it actually turns out that he hated her and murdered her when she told him she was having somebody else's child. The heroine is THRILLED at this news that Max is a wife-murdering murderer, having lived in the shadow of everybody (especially Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper) making a lot of noise about how awesome Rebecca was, and some other people making noises about Rebecca that were really vague and which the narrator assumed were about how awesome Rebecca was. How exactly Rebecca is awful is left rather vague in a very literary and infuriatingly Victorian fashion (PS this book was written in the 1930s), but it appears she slept around, was a drug addict, was sleeping with her cousin (oddly enough the fact that it was her first cousin did not seem to weird out any of the characters as much as it did me; the times, they have a-changed apparently), and was cruel to horses and to their mentally disabled neighbor/tenant. Other than that it's just like "she was selfish and rotten" and that is told more than shown, which is unusual for this book, although I think there is enough textual evidence to support the idea that she was highly controlling and narcissistic (as a temperament, not trying to diagnose literary characters with anything here). Anyway it twigged enough of my Ugh I Have Known That Asshole (not ones quite as skilled, thank God) buttons that I too was right on board with Max shooting her, except for the fact that she seems to have been deliberately goading and lying him into it in order to make sure she could still mess with him even after her death. And this is the sort of thing that literature has to be really, really good to accomplish, because I am HIGHLY anti-men-shooting-their-wives as a rule. There are also good solid reasons in real life why you can't go around shooting That Asshole just because they're That Asshole and I am generally on board with keeping those rules in order to have a non-murdery and civilized society, but in literature things are allowed to be more messed up than that.
All in all, while I'm not sure Rebecca is the most romantic of the Gothic romances in the sense we currently use the term "romantic," it's certainly one of the Gothic-iest that I've read in a while, and very much one of the most romanticism-y. It's dark and full of secrets. In addition to the big crumbling house and family mysteries, there's an almost absurd emphasis on natural beauty, mainly the sea and all the flowers around Manderley. The flowers are used to almost every literary purpose that flowers can be used, from being a creepy blood-red to set a creepy tone to being the focus of a weird power play between the heroine and Mrs. Danvers keeping alive the will of the dead Rebecca (JUST PUT THE STUPID VASE OF LILACS WHEREVER OMG). The heroine is highly sensitive and imaginative, and despite failing to pick up on any of the clues about what actually happened with Rebecca, she's more than capable of picking up on every slight and bit of judgment directed at her, of being excruciatingly and paralytically aware of when she doesn't fit in, and generally being an anxiety-brained basket case such as I myself am prone to being. She also spends nearly as much time playing out scenes of how she imagines things have gone or will go in her head as she does actually reporting on stuff that she witnesses happening, which is definitely something I relate to. I actually found myself getting sucked into the heroine's head and going along with whatever she thinks very easily, because not only is the book well-written enough to pull a reader in convincingly, but I actually have a lot in common with the heroine personality-wise and thought-patterns-wise. (Her and Catherine Moreland from Northanger Abbey. Deep down, I essentially am a dimwitted British Gothic novel heroine.)
Apropos of nothing I'm sure, who's going to see Crimson Peak with me this fall?!