The Untold Story Behind Rebecca

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.

I haven't read it in many, many years, but I recall it was an excellent work. I can't speak to the alternative view of Rebecca, but thanks for bringing it back to me. :)

I loved "Rebecca." The movie is good, too.

You have a point, Dark Muse, that they all seem to have an agenda and that there is another story to tell. Maybe you should write it. :)

In that, Rebecca reminds me of "Jane Eyre" and "The Wide Sargasso Sea" which tells the story of Mrs. Rocshester, who, as you remember was locked in the attic of her mansion home by her husband.

I would tend to think that Maxim was telling the truth. all of us are going to have a tendency to tell a story that is favorable to ourselves, but he, of all of the characters, had the least motive for lying.

if I can remember it. "Last night I dreampt of Manderlay again." I think it goes. The book is good, but the Hitchcock film is even better. It won the academy award in 1940. It follows the book pretty well except for one point to stave off the censors ... but I'll let you discover that. The cast is magnificent with a young Laurence Olivier, John Fontaine as the new Mrs De Winter, Judith Anderson as Mrs. Danvers, and the employer of Joan Fonataine at the first of the movie, when Max Dewinter meets his future wife, is absolutelty marvelous. George Sanders, ex-husband of one of the Gabors who is now departed (a suicide), who has been accused of having a perpetual smirk on his face, is resplendent in his role as Rebecca's cousin and paramour. Don't miss it! The newer version with the English woman who hosts Mystery, I can't think of her name, as Mrs. Danvers, is not nearly as good as the 1940 version in glorious black and white. If you like Du Maurier, be sure to read The Scapegoat, another thriller. Frenchman's Creek is also good. It's nice to see you're back to normal reading and not sidetracked by Lolita.

Another ineresting novel in the Du Maurier family is Peter Ibetson by Daphne's ancestor, George Du Maurier.

There is a movie about Daphne made by the BBC. Right after the movie was made, she had to go to the US and defend herself in a plagarism suit concerning Rebecca. Of course she won the case but it is a revealing movie which gives quite a lot of background on Du Maurier's life, but I wont tell you more and spoil it for you.

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Originally Posted by qimissung

I loved "Rebecca." The movie is good, too.

You have a point, Dark Muse, that they all seem to have an agenda and that there is another story to tell. Maybe you should write it. :)

In that, Rebecca reminds me of "Jane Eyre" and "The Wide Sargasso Sea" which tells the story of Mrs. Rocshester, who, as you remember was locked in the attic of her mansion home by her husband.

I would tend to think that Maxim was telling the truth. all of us are going to have a tendency to tell a story that is favorable to ourselves, but he, of all of the characters, had the least motive for lying.

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In reading this story I did have the same thought, that Rebecca would be the perfect canidate for a Wilde Saragasso Sea counterpart. She deserves to have her story told from her own point of view and not just through what others would say about her, and those not being very belivable sources at that.

DM - a 'prequel' has already been written: Rebecca's Tale by Sally Beauman.

There's also a sequel: Mrs De Winter by Susan Hill.

You may also be interested in The Rebecca Notebook by Daphne du Maurier, jottings she made while writing Rebecca.

I enjoyed Wide Sargasso Sea but have never been very taken with the vogue for prequels and sequels that grew a few years ago: somehow it seems a cheat for new authors to take up someone else's creations - they ought to be making their own characters, imo!

Hmm. The plagiarism suit against du maurier. I think I read that she settled out of court, ----from what I read about the novel from which she supposedly drew ( by a south american writer I seem to recall) -- there were quite a few things that coincided. Even if she had read that book, and drew inspiration from it -- for me that doesn't lessen the originality or power of Rebecca as a work of art.- Just think how many stories, characters, and plots Shakespeare borrowed.

There's an interesting study by Nina Auerbach on Du Maurier- available in google books
Haunted Heiress

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Originally Posted by kasie

DM - a 'prequel' has already been written: Rebecca's Tale by Sally Beauman.

There's also a sequel: Mrs De Winter by Susan Hill.

You may also be interested in The Rebecca Notebook by Daphne du Maurier, jottings she made while writing Rebecca.

I enjoyed Wide Sargasso Sea but have never been very taken with the vogue for prequels and sequels that grew a few years ago: somehow it seems a cheat for new authors to take up someone else's creations - they ought to be making their own characters, imo!

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Those works sound interesting, I will have to look into them.

She did not settle out of court, but won the case. The case was decided by a US judge who could find little similarity between the litigant's work and Du Maurier's. Edwina Lewin MacDonald wrote a magazine article (fiction) entitled "How I Planned to Murder My Husband" then expanded it into a novel called "Blind Windows". When Rebecca won the academy award in 1940, MacDonald sued Du Maurier and her publisher. The judge ruled that while the circumstances were similar, the words of the three stories weren't. An idea cannot be copyrighted as the words can. Du Maurier won the suit in 1944, which probably would not have come about if Rebecca had not won the academy award. Case dismissed.

Rebecca is basically what every second wife/new partner thinks. How can they live up to the grandeur of the first? Therefore they create an unpleasant person, a phantom, in order to dispel this fear. And of course, the man just wants to move on.

The second Mrs. De Winter was a very non-agressive person swept off her feet by Max De Winter. When she arrives at De Winter's home, Manderlay, she finds the household run with an iron hand by Mrs Danvers, who had been Rebecca's personal maid before her marriage to De Winter. Danvers had even preserved Rebecca's room with her night clothes laid out. The second Mrs. De Winter never attacked Rebecca's memory, but was soon overpowered by Danvers' pesonality plus some tricks Danvers used to make wife #2 look bad in De Winter's eyes. Without giving any more away, at the end of the story, the dead Rebecca's true personality and Danvers complicity in preserving her memory as an icon of wifely virtue come to light.

[QUOTE=dfloyd;885871]She did not settle out of court, but won the case. The case was decided by a US judge who could find little similarity between the litigant's work and Du Maurier's. Edwina Lewin MacDonald wrote a magazine article (fiction) entitled "How I Planned to Murder My Husband" then expanded it into a novel called "Blind Windows".

Yes you're certainly right there. I was thinking actually, of another book by a Brazilian writer, called The Successor, whose author, it turns out, didn't bring suit . From Wikipedia:

Shortly after Rebecca was published in Brazil, critic Álvaro Lins and other readers pointed out many resemblances between du Maurier's book and the work of Brazilian writer Carolina Nabuco. Nabuco's A sucessora (The Successor) has a main plot similar to Rebecca, including a young woman marrying a widower and the strange presence of the first wife — plot features also shared with the far older Jane Eyre.

According to Nabuco's autobiography, she refused to sign a contract brought to her by a United Artists' worker in which she agreed that the similarities between her book and the movie were mere coincidence.[12] Du Maurier denied copying Nabuco's book, as did her publisher, claiming that the plot used in Rebecca was quite common.[13]

I suppose hundreds of novels known and unknown have been based on Jane Eyre.

It's a bit weird how Maxim and second Mrs DeWinter's relationship improves in light of the crime.

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Originally Posted by kelby_lake

It's a bit weird how Maxim and second Mrs DeWinter's relationship improves in light of the crime.

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Yes, I think they both need serious psychological help.

They are perhaps one of the most dysfunctional couples.

No matter which way you look at it, even if one is inclined to full believe that Rebecca was truly this unquestionably, horrible, vile, evil person, when it comes down to it, Maxim murders his first wife, because it is easier than getting a divorce, and he did not want the scandal of a divorce.

Not the mention that fact that it is not just that Rebecca was such an awful person, she had been since the start of their marriage, the thing that really pushes him over the edge was her implication that she was pregnant, so untimely when Maxim shoots Rebecca it is really because he wants to kill the unborn child.

And the narrator, is completely unphased by the fact that her husband offed his first wife because he no longer wished to be married to her, she is just thrilled to learn that he never truly loved her.

You would think she would be at least a little concerned about what would happen to her, if she displeases Maxim.

Just an update on Rebecca’s supposed relationship to Carolina Nabuco’s novel The Successor. When I read a review of Auerbach’s book in LRB, I came away with the impression that Du Maurier somewhere down the line may indeed have been inspired by Nabuco’s novel which had ( supposedly) been submitted to her publisher before she completed Rebecca. This for me would not have lessened her achievement or discredited her- it would have opened an interesting window on the writing of one of my favorite books. After stumbling into this forum, I did some research, thinking that there had to be something more concrete, since the issue was raised by such an illustrious critic. The only thing I turned up was a comment on some website that both plot and some episodes were identical – but more specific references could not be found. I was intrigued, tho’ – what episodes and in what way identical?
Coincidences, even uncanny ones, do happen.
Things I did find out: The Rebecca chapter of Auerbach’s book, which was visible on Monday on google books, before I wrote the post, wasn’t accessible any longer on Tuesday, so I couldn’t read it to check her original comments. The Successor was translated into Italian, but nobody seems to know how to get hold of the Italian edition. Several people are looking for it, though. The original in Portuguese is not visible on google books. If anybody knows any more about The Successor, will you share what you know?