Coming into Halloween, I wanted something a little spooky to read. Alas, I am a total wimp and I tend to stay away from true horror. I decided to pick up “Rebecca”, by Daphne Du Maurier. I thought perhaps I was going to be jumping into a gothic romance, but it was so much more.
The true horror of Rebecca lies in the all too familiar theme of women being lost and forgotten to the men around them. A theme that is still as relevant in today’s society as it was when this book was written in 1936. The story itself is even marketed as a “sinister tale about a woman who marries a widower.”
Though the story is narrated by a woman, she is nameless till her marriage and even after that she is only referred to as a “Mrs” or “Lady” despite having a “lovely and unusual name.”
She is constantly compared to the namesake of the novel itself, Rebecca, the first wife who we learned died in a tragic accident. We are meant to grieve with the widower and see the narrator as a companion of convenience, a place holder, an interloper into what was presented as a happy marriage. Rebecca is the ghost that is present everywhere in the story. She is in the narrator’s thoughts, the house decor, and the loyalty of the servants. We start to question the sanity of the narrator along with her, as she herself questions her new life altogether. In the end, even as we discover that Rebecca is not the true villain (the twist got me hard), the narrator still finds herself in the position she had originally feared, merely a companion to her husband. So much so that she does not even earn her own name back.
I want to point out that the author herself is a fascinating woman who becomes a Dame of the British Empire. Her work would inspire Alfred Hitchcock several times over, and Rebecca itself comes back to popular culture with the most recent film adaptation on Netflix. It should be noted that her work was often dismissed with prejudice as “women’s fiction”, despite so many men profiting off of it. Daphne Du Maurier’s sensational writing was a point of conflict between herself and her husband, a career soldier and very traditionally-minded, who felt that his wife should occupy the traditional roles of the “ideal wife”. We are shown glimpses of the author’s struggle and her madness in Rebecca, which makes this work so relevant today.
Borrowed from my local library b/c libraries rock!