Mrs Danvers’ goal of humiliation is achieved. Rebecca had worn an identical costume the year before. Mrs Danvers encourages her to dress as Caroline de Winter, one of her husband’s ancestors, whose imposing portrait graces the mansion’s hall.īut when she makes her grand entrance, her husband angrily orders her to change.
When Manderley hosts an annual costume ball, for instance, the second Mrs de Winter is anxious to impress her new husband and his guests. Mrs Danvers’ snide comments constitute Rebecca’s continuing manipulations, even beyond the grave. She is imprinted on the house and on its housekeeper, the silent and sinister Mrs Danvers, whose passionate obsession with her former employer is echoed in Carol Ann Duffy’s poem, Warming Her Pearls (1987). The name “ Rebecca” means to tie or to bind, a further allusion to the first Mrs de Winter’s stranglehold on her home and its inhabitants even after her death. Now, night after night, she must dream of Manderley again - of its beauty, to be sure, but also, too, of its oppressiveness. Retrospection taints the novel with a pervasive sense of inevitable doom and a desperate sympathy for the naïve young narrator. The novel begins at the narrative’s end, retelling the events leading to the couple’s nomadic life. The dual spectres of Rebecca and Manderley haunt de Winter and his bride but the circularity of the narrative makes escape impossible. He swiftly rescues her from drudgery, proposes marriage, and takes her back to England to live in his beautiful and ancient estate, Manderley.
In Monte Carlo, our narrator meets Maxim de Winter, a tall, dark and handsome aristocrat, recently widowed. She is exceedingly young - shy, inexperienced, and under the thumb of a wealthy lady who has employed her as a travel companion. She is quite simply, not Rebecca - her husband’s late first wife.
It is the novel’s unnamed narrator who speaks that first line - the second Mrs de Winter, a woman perpetually in her predecessor’s shadow. Newly discovered Du Maurier poems shed light on a talented writer honing her craft This is the strange paradox of Du Maurier’s novel: its characters are doomed to refer (and defer) endlessly to Rebecca, who “always” did things, perfectly and elegantly, a certain way, while Rebecca herself never appears. “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again,” the book begins - though it is not Rebecca who speaks. Its opening line perfectly encapsulates the narrative’s core theme. Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier (1938), belongs to this elite collection. A small group of novels are famous for their first lines: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) and Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1877).
0 kommentar(er)
