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'm glad you're enjoying Rebecca, which has one of the greates opening lines ever ..
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.
Du Maurier and her American publisher were both sued ...
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.
I don't think that's true in the case of Rebecca ...
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.
I did not get that from the story - .....
that Max De Winter wanted to kill his wife for any reason. Rebecca had been flaunting her affairs to Max for some time, especially her affair with her cousin. When Rebecca found from her doctor she had an incurable cancer, she goaded Max into killing her. This would be her ultimate revenge: Max being tried for her murder. In the movie, Hitchcock had to change this a bit. Rebecca commits suicide, but angles it so it looks like murder. The Hollywood censors would not permit Max to go free if he did kill Rebecca, even though she goaded him into it.
The second Mrs De Winter and her husband Max do not seems dysfuntional to me. Just entirely human. A man can only take so much from a person as self-centered as the evil Rebecca. Rebecca knew this and essentially perpetrated her own death.
You are, of course, entitled to your opinion ....
but your opinion differs greatly from how Daphne Du Maurier's story influenced this reader. Maxim didn't kill Rebecca simply because she told him she might be with child. He killed her because she goaded him into it, teeling him she could provide a heir to his beloved Manderlay and there was nothing he could do about it. It was more a matter of manslaughter, not a premeditated murder. And she really wasn't pregnant. Rebecca wanted him to kill her.
The second Mrs. De Winter was in love with Maxim. She knew the evil of Rebecca. She says, in fact, Rebecca can't hurt me any more. The fact that Maxim shot Rebecca was tragic to her, but she realized how far Rebecca had pushed Maxim. She knew it was now all over, and Rebecca couldn't hurt her or Maxim again.
I wont further try to change your mind, but having seen both movie of Rebecca, the 1940 one and the BBC one, the directors of both understood Du Maurier's book to be the tragic story of how an evil woman can ruin lives. You should see them.
You keep talking about an unreliable narrator ....
but in actuality the narrator is Daphne Du Maurier speaking through one of her characters. The naivity of the second Mrs De Winter makes her story ring true. Consider the following:
1. For months, even years, since their marriage, Rebecca had had illicit affairs and trysts at her beach house. Her affair with her cousin was especially loathsome to Maxim since as her near relation he had the run of Maxim's house. Socially, Rebecca was the beautiful wife of the handsome Maxim de Winter. Privately, she was an adultress who flaunted her affairs to Maxim.
2. When Rebecca returned from her London doctor, she knew she had terminal cancer. In 1938, there was no chemo-therapy or other treatments other than intrusive surgery. Rebecca hated Maxim. She probably hated most men with the possible exception of her cousin who was about as corrupt as Rebecca.
3. She decided to goad Maxim into killing her. She knew that flaunting her affairs wouldn't do it. Maxim ignored her infidelities primarily because of his social status. And he no longer slept with Rebecca.
4. So she announced she was pregnant. Maxim knew it wasn't him, but he didn't know by whom. Then she reiminded Maxim that his estate was entailed. This means that by law, the estate would be inherited by Rebecca's child. This meant that his beloved Manderlay would someday belong to Rebecca's child, even if he remarried and had other children. This entailment would have been a part of the marriage contract. Before Maxim knew what Rebecca was like.
5. This was the last straw for Maxim. He did what Rebecca wanted him to do: he killed her. Rebecca committed suicide as sure as she held the gun herself. She didn't know that Maxim would find such a unique way of disposing of the corpse. She thought Maxim would be tried and convicted of her murder and subsequently hanged, which was a pretty sure thing in those days.
6. You have to understand 1938 British law and what entailment meant. Manderlay was not just a house. It was an estate, and judging from the French name De Winter, it had probably been in his family since shortly after the Norman invasion.
7. When Mrs. Danvers burnt down Manderlay, it released the De Winters from the any hold that Manderlay had on Maxim. They were now free of the past. Maxim was not a Bluebeard. The new Mrs de Winter knew he wasn't a killer. She was in love with him and knew he would never kill again.
This is a very psychological novel. I think your misunderstanding of it stems from not being cognizant of entailment and British law. And by the way, Rebecca was never pregnant. This was said to make Maxim pull the trigger.