For no particular reason I have just re-read Daphne du Maurier’s drawing-room Gothic Rebecca. I vividly remember my first read-through, a high school kid staying up through most of the night, somehow ardently compelled by the vividness of the concocted world, thrilled by the Big Revelation that happens at the three-quarters point. The Hitchcock movie remains a fine vision of the novel, the Masterpiece Theater with Diana Rigg less so.
This time around I was taken with du Maurier’s scrupulous attention to the dull, uneventful life of a country manor showplace on the coast of Cornwall. Nothing much happens to these people. The entire Manderley establishment centers around the care and feeding of the de Winters, husband and wife. Mostly feeding, it would seem. The de Winters spend plenty of time eating—lavish breakfast, full-course lunch, afternoon tea promptly at 4:30, dinner around 7:30-ish or so in the big formal dining room, and you can rest assured that they dress for dinner, even if it’s just the two of them.
Presumably husband Maxim spends his day overseeing the estate, taking care of the planting and the tenant rents and all that, although for the year prior to the novel’s opening it has been managed just fine by an agent. But the wife—who narrates and whose actual first name we never know—has nothing to do beyond approving the daily menu and taking care of her correspondence, of which there is next to none. She can go for walks through the gardens and down to the rocky cove; she can go visiting; she can go shopping; she can sit around and knit. That last seems to be her primary occupation. Although she is said to enjoy painting and sketching, at no point during the novel does she actually ever paint or sketch anything.
They sit and talk, sit and read the newspaper, sit and pet the dogs. It’s not hard to imagine why the young, unsophisticated newlywed Mrs. de Winter becomes obsessed with the looming memory of her deceased predecessor, Rebecca. There isn’t much for her to think about, after all. Small issues loom large; a broken knickknack, a handkerchief in a raincoat, a remark made over afternoon tea. For much of its length, Rebecca is a novel about nothing, really, almost the Seinfeld of Gothic romances. The most searing drama occurs when the young wife gets duped into wearing a costume associated with the dead Rebecca at the Manderley dress-up ball. Even then, her faux pas is discovered before the guests arrive and she has time to dart upstairs and change into something else. For most people, this would be an “oops” moment at worst. For this callow woman, it’s Waterloo.
That’s not meant to criticize du Maurier’s characterization or the novel, because both are superb. The novel takes its sweet time in building up the posthumous Rebecca de Winter as a walking saint, while simultaneously emphasizing the ineffectual gawkiness of her intimidated successor. We’ve come along considerably since the 1930s and so when the Big Revelation comes—that Rebecca was actually a sociopath and nymphomaniac—du Maurier is obliged to hint around that second word—we aren’t likely to be quite so shocked. The idea of a strong, intelligent, beautiful woman screwing everything in sight isn’t the jaw-dropper it would be for the middle-class British matrons who were the primary readership for the novel in its initial publication. That Rebecca’s sexual largesse wasn’t necessarily limited to the opposite sex requires even more scrupulous tip-toe-ing by du Maurier, who manages to get the point across in the repressed chill of Mrs. Danvers, hands-down the most interesting character in the book. To hear Mrs. Danvers tell it in her big curtain speech, Rebecca used sex to express her scorn and contempt for the male of the species. Well, maybe. That’s probably Mrs. Danvers’s wishful thinking talking. My guess: the younger Mrs. Danvers had shepherded Rebecca through her early adolescent sexual awakening, and stayed on thereafter as faithful acolyte, content with the role of confidant and scrupulously discreet lady’s maid.
Incidentally, we never hear anything about a Mr. Danvers, neither past nor present. One wonders if the “Mrs” is bestowed by tradition—housekeepers in fancy houses are always Mrs. Whatchamacallit—rather than actual marital status. If there was a Mr. Danvers, he couldn’t have been a particularly happy hubby. Or maybe he had his own hobbies, mostly male.
But I digress. Once the Big Revelation about Rebecca is made—simultaneously with Gasp Number Two, that Maxim had murdered her—the novel expends very little time or energy in mopping up. Maxim de Winter gets off the hook with astonishing ease, by way of a deus ex machina in which Rebecca is found to have had advanced-stage ovarian cancer; the murder is chalked up to suicide. How convenient. Can’t have the lord of the local manor dumped into the hoosegow for murdering his wife, even though the local constable is pretty certain that’s precisely what happened. He’s willing to cast a blind eye in the interest of maintaining the status quo, even if that status quo consists of little more than buttered scones at 4:30 PM and the occasional fancy dress ball.
Despite du Maurier’s rendering of Manderley as tantamount to an earthly paradise, she was not blind to the fragility of such outmoded dinosaurs, having leased one for a good quarter-century. I suppose I could rail against the ridiculousness, the wastefulness, and the unfairness, of an entire household staff—the whole upstairs/downstairs megillah—put to the maintenance of the big old house and its two occupants. However, Manderley, like many of those grand country estates of England’s past, plays a central role in the area’s economy; it is the primary employer, ensuring the livelihoods of no end of cooks, maids, footmen, fishermen, stablehands, and the like. This being the coast of Cornwall, it’s not as though these folks can find a job by moving into town; there is no town to move into. The estate has stood for generations, with staff no doubt being generational as well, sons taking over their fathers’ positions. Thus while the economic model was extremely old-fashioned, a remnant of feudalism when you get right down to it, it worked well enough.
Daphne du Maurier’s original version of the novel fated Manderley to become a posh country club, a more realistic outcome than the published edition in which Mrs. Danvers, having realized the truth about Rebecca’s murder, torches the place. I can envision a third ending in which the de Winters return to an unmolested Manderley and live out their days in stuffy dowdiness. In all three versions the de Winters wind up as an utterly boring and friendless couple who do nothing but sit around, read the lighter parts of the newspaper aloud to each other, eat, and go on the same daily walks along the same daily paths. Whether at Manderley or some unnamed Mediterranean town, they’re pleasant, courteous, harmless, colorless nobodies.
Rebecca highlights the wasteful futility of those big country manors, and their owners, even while it celebrates them. That they continue to exert a fascination can be seen by the current popularity of Downton Abbey and of Upstairs, Downstairs before that. People would like to be the lords and ladies of Manderley. Or would they? It’s not much of a life: day after day, sitting there, knitting and reading the paper. A Hogwarts grad could zap these professionally courteous people into porcelain figurines and nobody would much notice, or care. It’s the house that matters, an edifice requiring constant maintenance and supervision, and therefore providing employment. All in all I prefer Manderley’s alternate fate as a country club; it remains more or less intact, and continues to anchor the local economy. And there are still buttered scones daily at 4:30 PM.