I am currently reading Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, I am just about finished with it now, and I have to say that I think it is an absolutely fabulous book. The first chapter for the book was one of the most gripping and stunning opening I have read and the prose work is poetic and absolutely beautiful all the way through. I of course love the way in which the book does draw from the old Gothic style, and there is a haunting quality which carries throughout the book.
~WARNING~
There will be spoilers posted beyond this point
But there is one thing which struck out at me as particularly interesting within the story, and that is the fact that everything the reader knows about the character of Rebecca comes through channels of unreliable recourses and all the information given by the other characters is then presented to the reader via the narrator, so it comes 2nd hand from a source already questionable, while the narrator herself is hardly to be trusted and has proven to be wrong on more than one occasion in her interpretations of other people and her perceptions and has a to say the least delicate grip upon realty:
You have the narrator who is given to these sorts of delusional fantasies in which she does not always seem able to distinguish the reality from what she conjures up in her mind and proves not to have the best perceptions of other people. The assumptions she makes constantly prove wrong, and are often created through the conjurerings of her mind.
There is Ben who does not seem to have all of his wits together, and only drops vague elusive hints in which it is up to are narrator to interpret the meaning of, and of course initially she is completely oblivious to what he is telling her, and only fills in the blanks after she gets the story from Maxim, and so then it is easy to make his words fit into what she knows.
Mrs. Danvers who proves herself to be deceitful, dishonest, secretive, malicious, and who we know has already fallen to tricking and misleading the narrator and Maxim. She hates the narrator, has a vendetta against Maxim, and is biased towards Rebecca. So honestly how much of what she says can truly be believed?
Then there is Maxim who was keeping quite a large secret, and so in that he himself proved to be dishonest, and he was always aloof and distant, never shared his own thoughts, and has every reason and motive in the world to spin the story so that it comes out as favorably on his side as possible.
And of course the narrator passing the story onto the reader is heavily biased towards Maxim and delusional in her own love for him.
So all in all if everything is taken into consideration what grounds does the reader have to truly completely accept the characterization of Rebecca as being such a wicked, evil, horrible person, when every single person whom spoke of her, and in the context in which they did so had good reasons to be dishonest and misleading about their version of the story?
There is another side to the Rebecca story that goes completely untold.