It's been too long since I read Daphne Du Maurier's classic Gothic suspense novel, Rebecca, peopled with intensely satisfying, but pathetically limited characters: a young heroine who vaults from the frying pan of a horrible job as companion to a frustrated, jealous older woman to a newly horrible job as the wife to a rich Downton Abbey type with a terrible secret. He's as miserable as she is, his modus operandi "forget the past!" and his marriage proposal an insult: "I'm asking you to marry me, you little fool," he answers when she mistakes his proposal for the offer of a secretarial position.
As a child on a seaside vacation with her non-aristocratic parents, the nameless heroine buys a postcard of his family manse, Manderley. Little does she imagine (oh, but she dreams) that one day she'll become the princess of that castle. The main conceit-- we know plenty about this nameless young princess and next to nothing about her dead predecessor but her name--Rebecca--has always impressed critics. The heroine's "unusual," she says, name is never given, but lately we've arrived at the usual suspect, incest. Du Maurier, apparently asked strangers what they thought of it, only hinting at her own story. But her nameless heroine marries a man twice her age and treats him exactly as a five-year-old might treat an adored, and strict, father: the young wife never asks questions and blames all his bad moods on herself. She fails to resent his grumpy-to-outright hostile, his patronizing behavior. He's just wonderful, she thinks, no matter how cold, how uncommunicative, how breathtakingly insensitive. Are they even having sex? When his sister asks if she's "starting an infant" and hopes she's not doing anything to prevent it--because Max, the meanie husband, wants a son and heir--the heroine's certain she's not pregnant. When the most intriguing malevolent character, Mrs. Danvers, passionately loyal to the dead Rebecca and passionately jealous of this young whippersnapper of a bride who dares to take her place--invites the young woman to jump out the window, we see how cruel women can be to other women. And how far a jealous mother might go?
By the end of the book, we've seen a desperate young doormat of a heroine in the narrator; the wickedest of stepmothers in Mrs. Danvers, whose hypnotic powers remain chilling; a woman whom we might call a feminist or free spirit in Rebecca, whose daredevil ways have charmed Mrs. Danvers since Rebecca's childhood, who laughs at all men and tells "Danny," that she'll live the way she wants, meaning she'll take lovers if she feels like it; who taunts Max, her husband, that she might be pregnant but that the unborn lord of the manor isn't his son; who enjoys stirring up the adoration of "Danny," so bereft that a year after Rebecca's death she's still fondling her shoes and sniffing her never-washed nightgown. One more thing (and spoiler alert!) we're given to understand that Rebecca had "a certain malformation" of the uterus, which meant she could "never have a child" but she never seems to have wanted one--a sure sign of a bad girl back in 1938--and her punishment is that she has cancer of the uterus, still incurable today and then untreatable. Re-reading the novel I realize I'd gotten my first ideas about any cancer that strikes women from Rebecca: I believed, and I must have been about ten when I first read the novel, that Rebecca had cancer because she was evil. She must have done something---I couldn't have told you, but back then I believed in good girls and bad girls and I'd figured out that she was bad. Of course good girls won--the ending of the novel rather complicated my theory, but I won't spill the beans. Read the novel: it's enough to make you throw your phone in a drawer and ignore your email.
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