Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier

 

Rebecca

Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca is a gothic novel about a woman haunted by someone she never met, and the haunting is more thoroughgoing than any supernatural plot could achieve — because it operates entirely through the normal mechanisms of social comparison, insecurity, and the way powerful personalities persist in the spaces they once occupied.

The narrator — she is never named, which is the novel's first and most important formal decision — marries Maxim de Winter while she is still young and uncertain and employed as a companion to a vulgar American socialite. Maxim is older, wealthy, marked by some private suffering she cannot fully read, and she falls in love with him with the intensity of someone who cannot quite believe their luck. They marry quickly. She becomes the second Mrs. de Winter.

Manderley receives her as a verdict. The house is magnificent, the kind of architectural achievement that is also a declaration of identity — and its identity belongs entirely to the previous Mrs. de Winter, the first wife, Rebecca, who died the previous year. Every room is arranged as Rebecca arranged it. Every flower is the flower Rebecca preferred. Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper, performs her role as the house's efficient manager while simultaneously ensuring that the new wife understands she is an interloper in another woman's home.

Mrs. Danvers is one of fiction's great villains, and her villainy operates entirely through legitimate means — she is doing her job perfectly, maintaining the household her employer loved, honoring her memory. The new Mrs. de Winter cannot complain about her without seeming petty, cannot challenge her without seeming frightened, cannot escape her without leaving Manderley. Danvers understands all of this, and du Maurier's portrait of her uses it without melodrama.

Rebecca's absence becomes more dominating than most characters' presence. She is beautiful, capable, socially brilliant, perfectly suited to the demands of Manderley in ways the narrator could never be, and she is dead — which means she is immune to revision, to the normal process by which real people reveal their flaws. The narrator is competing with a myth, and the competition is, for most of the novel, entirely unequal.

When the novel's central mystery resolves and Rebecca's reality emerges in place of her myth, du Maurier handles the reversal with careful control — neither sensationalizing it nor deflating it. The gothic atmosphere doesn't break; it simply shifts its source. What was a story about a ghost becomes a story about marriage and secrets and the way powerful, complicated people leave damage in their wake. Rebecca herself, finally revealed, is a more frightening figure than the idealized phantom that preceded her.

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