@forinborin
Everything you say is true, but don't you think it could add to the tension and ambiguity? We are all constructing false (or at least elaborately curated) narratives about ourselves on social media, all the time. Where is the line between acceptable social convention and actual lying?
This is a very interesting perspective. Rebecca as an online influencer with a carefully crafted online presence, which haunts the second Mrs de Winter. Mrs Danvers could be replaced with a FOMO- inspired faceless crowd of online followers, blindly in love with Rebecca's ghost and gutturally hating the second Mrs de Winter without even knowing anything about her. Maybe add a conspiracy theory that Rebecca wasn't dead at all.
I was just about the respond when I saw this
yes, I think it could be brilliant, though a very different novel. In fact, some novels do exist along these lines, though not Rebecca rewrites I've just finished reading one, Sympathy, by Olivia Sudjic, which is very good, about a young woman who internet stalks an older Japanese writer with a 'carefully crafted online presence', and uses what she finds out to insert herself into her life in NY. She's excellent on curated online lives, and on obsessively hitting refresh as you wait to see something new posted by your obsession, or stalking all their friends to try to find a back way into finding out about them if they've blocked you.
Interestingly, I was just reading a Jon Ronson book called So You've Been Publicly Shamed, which has a fascinating chapter on 'black ops reputation management' -- companies who will craft you a new online life, basically, by putting out new stories about someone so that whatever unpalatable fact is out there about you (a crime, revenge porn etc) gets pushed down onto page 4 or 15 of the search results when someone searches you.)
Would Rebecca have had two entirely separate online identities -- one the chatelaine of Manderley, the other her London self who slept around and 'was not even normal' (whatever du Maurier may have thought her readers would understand by that...)?