Horribly let down by Rebecca

[MsAmerica]

I love the Hitchcock movie of Rebecca, my second or third favorite Hitchcock, and I've always heard that the book was good, so when I recently came across a cheap copy, I bought it.

What a disappointment! Hated all the excessive description of greenery. Impatient at the overkill. But, worst, while the character of Max is slightly pleasanter than Olivier in the movie, the unnamed narrator is unbearable - a whiny, insecure bore.

Ugh!

No, you're right!

Aw I love the book but read it before seeing any of the movies Hitchcock films have pretty snappy pacing so not surprised if you're used to that.

Jamaica Inn is an amazing film to watch if you haven't already! I might prefer that.one to the book but it's been a while since I've read it.

I second the biography,it's fantastic.

I love the book and the film and enjoyed the Joanna David tv version.

According to Joan Fontaine, Olivier was horrible to her during the filming because he'd wanted his wife, Vivian Leigh, as the girl (hard to imagine VL as the girl). Also the divorced Jeremy Brett and Anna Massey - she didn't talk to JB throughout the filming because he'd gone against her wishes re their son apparently!

Anna Massey's narration on audible is great and I listen to it often.

Those saying they like Rebecca, I think she was an absolute psychopath. Charming people when it suited her etc. The description of her breaking in the horse 😱!! I don't think she's behaving this way because she's reacting to Max or anything else she does is a reaction to anything or anyone. She acts, not reacts!!

Rebecca is an early example of the ‘modern’ novel, complete with unreliable narrator, chronological shifts and psychological twists. It was mismarketed as a ‘romance’ upon publication, much to Du Maurier’s dismay, and the film propagated this misunderstanding.

If you look at it from the perspective that Maxim is a deeply repressed, cold narcissist, a snob and misogynist, the narrator unreliable and biased with no insight into her own or others’ behaviour, Rebecca’s character seems much more nuanced.

It’s a very very dark book indeed and I love it. I have also taught it for A Level and students always enjoyed it. The opening is brilliant but I have always found the ending horrifying, with the narrator trapped…

When I first read Rebecca at 15, I thought it was soooo romantic and Maxim the perfect hero. How stupid was I? 😀I didn't even get that she was trapped as a live-in carer for a murderer.

Thanks for the tip about the bio of Du Maurier. I will read it.

I think she was not behaving in a way women were not expected to in those days - the horse incident was awful but probably not too far from the truth in that I’m sure it wasn’t unusual for horses to broken in that way by men of the time.

Yes, I was the same with Brief Encounter. I thought it was so romantic!

DdM said that the setting for Manderley is Menabilly, by the sea with the long winding approach. But the house is based on another, bigger and grander house.

I went to a party at Menbilly once many years ago and the winding driveway is very atmospheric...

Yes I see what you mean @SirChenjins. As all the memories and anecdotes of Rebecca are from people who love or hate her it's not a reliable picture. I still think she is a psychopath - especially when I'm actually in the middle of the book!

I like the fact that the characters are all flawed and the girl has moved on and grown up but is still beguiled by Max. She's not grown up in a way that is satisfactory. Much more interesting than a lovely ending.

Going against Miss Prism: The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.

According to Joan Fontaine, Olivier was horrible to her during the filming because he'd wanted his wife, Vivian Leigh, as the girl (hard to imagine VL as the girl). Also the divorced Jeremy Brett and Anna Massey - she didn't talk to JB throughout the filming because he'd gone against her wishes re their son apparently!

I've read that too about Olivier. Vivien Leigh is almost the image of Rebecca in my mind's eye, not suitable for the role of the second Mrs De Winter at all!

Brief Encounter is not romantic? I find it unbearably so.

Has anyone read “Rebecca’s Tale” ( a supposed prequel to “Rebecca “. ) Obviously it’s not as good as Rebecca but I quite enjoyed it!

I did too 😊

Gosh, no. She stays in a marriage she's not happy in at the end. She goes to the friends flat to have sex and it starts to feel sordid and wrong.

She's yearning for something she can't have because society says she should be a good mother. Something Daphne Du Maurier understood and explores in Frenchman's Creek

Agreed, although I don't think she's actively unhappy until she meets Trevor Howard and gets a sudden glimpse of new possibilities. She ends up settling for what she already has, dull and predictable though it is, because she can't bear to hurt her husband and children, but also she would lose her reputation. I also think she's thinking of Trevor Howard's wife and, even more so, his children. And the status quo is safe. I wonder how things would have turned out in the end. I think her husband had more than an inkling of what might have been happening.

(I love this film and have seen it many, many times, hence the overthinking!)

I'm going to be in Yorkshire next week and am hoping to visit the Brief Enounter station.

That's really interesting. I've never thought about that being why I might find very descriptive books boring, or why I skip over long passages describing scenery.
I tried to visualise the red star and literally all I see is blackness. I can't even see my family's faces.

Hitchcock’s film had to be different, because in 1940 the Hollywood production code (Hays Code) was in action, and stated that a the murder of a spouse in a film could not go unpunished, all criminal action had to be punished, and neither the crime nor the criminal could elicit sympathy from the audience. Hence Hitchcock’s Max doesn’t kill R. She falls and hits her head during their argument.

Which of course flags up the key point of the novel, in which most readers most of the time are egging on the mousy heroine to aid and abet a murderer who killed his vivid, independent first wife, not because she was unfaithful, which he’d known about since the honeymoon, but because she threatens his beloved house (in that she pretends it will be inherited by a child that is not his).

It’s a brilliant narrative coup. And yes, a rewriting of Jane Eyre in its most Bluebeardish aspect, where the plain, poor orphan triumphs and ends the novel in a somewhat dubious ‘happy ever after’, married to a weakened, disempowered Bluebeard. But with a hefty dose of British Empire nostalgia (DdM wrote it in Egypt) for traditional aristocratic/feudal ways of life. And the rebellious, free-spirited, unfaithful first wife killed off. (R is so powerful she needs to be triple-killed by the narrative— shot, drowned, cancer. Quadruple if you count the burning of the house her spirit still haunts.).

Jane Eyre is also one of my favourite books and I hadn’t even thought about that clear parallel! The house burning down as well. I love books about houses where the house is like a character/key to the narrative(/and of course symbolises the patriarchy!)

Re descriptive passages, I do have a very strong “mind’s eye” and visual “film” in my head, but I can still be bored by too much description and scene-setting. I do like it in Hardy, but I was surprised when I read the odyssey in full (translation not the Greek!) how much excruciatingly dull description there is. And it often puts me off newly published novels unless it’s done really well.

How dare you..

Which of course flags up the key point of the novel, in which most readers most of the time are egging on the mousy heroine to aid and abet a murderer who killed his vivid, independent first wife, not because she was unfaithful, which he’d known about since the honeymoon, but because she threatens his beloved house (in that she pretends it will be inherited by a child that is not his)

You know what, this has never occurred to me before, but Maxim actually admits to killing a pregnant woman. He doesn't even hesitate when she tells him she's pregnant, and it's only later on that he finds that she isn't. And yet he hates her so much that there's not a word of contrition - just how much blood there was and that he's forgotten. So he has actually killed before (in WW1, presumably).

(R is so powerful she needs to be triple-killed by the narrative— shot, drowned, cancer. Quadruple if you count the burning of the house her spirit still haunts.)

Like Rasputin, Rebecca is so powerful one death isn't enough.

So do people root for the girl, the second Mrs DeWinter? I like the fact that one feels ambivalent about her and her "growth" and that it's complicated. I think we're programmed (most of us?) to believe in the person narrator of a book. I'm always thinking "what would I do?" If I were the girl. First saw the Joanna David/Jeremy Brett version and/or the Hitchcock film when I was very young so easier to imagine than!

Such a lot of reading and rereading to be done, now!

I didn’t root for the narrator as such - I thought she was naive and gullible, but also a victim of the whole situation - marrying someone like Maxim is a chance for a life she couldn’t have otherwise (because patriarchy), so on a cynical level it makes sense. I didn’t like it when she accepts his story and stays with him. But I think the book is partly about how all three women, the narrator, Rebecca and Mrs Danvers, react to the patriarchal hand they’re dealt. How they can claim or find some power or agency, within or outside the role they’re in.

I think part of the coup a PP mentioned is the way Maxim says he murdered a pregnant woman and it’s all set up so that it’s justified and he gets away with it, after all she was bitch. It’s a bit like Trump saying he could shoot someone (besides talking about sexually assaulting women) and it would make no difference to his popularity. And that’s who the narrator is dealing with.

The Bluebeard story really fascinates me and has so many meanings but one of them for me is about men letting women know they’re dispensable.