Talk to Each Other, People!

 

I started Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier three times this summer, but something else would always pop up that needed reading "right now." (Funny enough, this post is out of order, too - I read this book in July and started the post then, but got distracted by other things. Poor Rebecca!) It wasn't until the third time that I finished the book, and I have some mixed feelings about it.

On the one hand, I've enjoyed Gothic romance since I was a teenager and read a copy of Victoria Holt's Mistress of Mellyn that my mother had. On the other - maybe because of living in the 21st century after the "Me Too" movement - I am pretty squeamish about the relationship between the narrator and her husband. Spoiler alert! - Everything that follows is going to reveal key plot points, so if you've not read this book yet, skip this post, read the book, and then come back and let me know if you agree.

The narrator is a young, shy, naive woman who at the beginning of the book is working as a companion to an older woman. While in Monte Carlo, she meets Maxim de Winter, a wealthy widower twice her age who owns an estate called Manderley. Thanks to the older woman coming down with the flu, the narrator and Maxim get a chance to meet, and they have a whirlwind romance. She falls madly in love with him. When the older woman decides to leave Monte Carlo early, Maxim asks the narrator to marry him, and despite the fact that she met him only weeks before and knows practically nothing about him, she agrees. After a honeymoon in Italy, they go back to Manderley, and that's where the trouble starts.

The issue is that Maxim's first wife, Rebecca, overshadows everything in the narrator's life. The furniture is stuff Rebecca picked. The household routine is what Rebecca wanted. Everyone who knew Rebecca talks about how beautiful she was and what a magnetic personality she had. Worst of all, the narrator suspects her husband is still in love with Rebecca and that she herself will never be able to live up to his memories of the perfect first wife. 

I'm not going to talk about everything that happens, but here's the major spoiler: Rebecca was not the perfect, loving wife, and Maxim didn't pine for her; actually, he hated her. Actually, he murdered her during an argument about her cheating and possibly being pregnant with an illegitimate child that would end up being Maxim's heir to Manderley (which, I guess, was more than he could bear). He shoots her, hides her body in her boat, and makes it so the boat will sink and no one will find her. Except, of course, someone finds the boat and the bones. The last section of the book focuses on the investigation and how Maxim is able to keep the secret and get away with murder, thanks to a friendly ruling of suicide on the part of the magistrate and Rebecca having a convenient case of terminal cancer.

That's where things went sour for me. The "hero" of the story is a murderer, plain and simple. We can try to justify it by saying Rebecca was so bad, but as ADA Jack McCoy often said on Law and Order, "Was killing her really your only choice?" And the narrator doesn't bat an eye about it. She's completely a stand-by-your-man kind of character, willing to lie if necessary to save him. I might be able to accept that if he had been a "good" husband to her throughout the rest of the book, but really, he wasn't. 

The poor narrator is thrown head-first into this toxic environment with absolutely no preparation. It's bad enough that she has to step into Rebecca's role, but everything is made worse by Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper who was utterly devoted to Rebecca. Mrs. Danvers does everything she can to make the narrator miserable and to drive a wedge between the narrator and her husband. And what's worse is that the narrator has no information about how her husband feels about the whole situaton; he doesn't communicate with her on anything more than a superficial level. In fact, there are times when he gets really angry and blows up about something the narrator has done or said (of course, we find out later that it is because it reminds him of his hated Rebecca). The narrator is left to assume meanings and motives, and as any insecure person will do, she turns it on herself.

I know a lot of the lack of communication is to help the mystery of the plot - does he love her, or is he pining for Rebecca? Still, I think we could have had the big reveal about the murder even if Max had confided in her that he and Rebecca didn't have a great marriage. And actually, it would have made it a little easier for me to swallow that the narrator is willing to cover for him and go on living with him if we had seen him being open and caring to her, like maybe explaining why he got so angry when she accidentally wore the same outfit that Rebecca wore to a costume ball. But the way it is written, I'm just left with the impression of a woman who is emotionally abused by a cold, controlling husband. And I don't see much romantic about that.