Some Notes on Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca (or Victims of Maxim de Winter)

I met Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca a few years ago. At that time, probably due to the influence of the famous show The Crown, the cover of the Ithaki Modern edition of the book reminded me of Princess Diana. Unfortunately, I already knew that the plot involved a dead wife, a manipulative and Lana Del Rey-style rich husband (let's imagine a slightly more flamboyant and aristocratic one), and that we would read about a naive girl trapped in a bad marriage. However, the urge to read Rebecca did not leave me alone so I ended the war and bought the book.

First things first, I finished the book very quickly, the narration was gripping. It is useful to know that this book is gothic fiction, hence, we read a lot of internal struggles decorated with psychological thriller elements. Funnily enough, when the book was first published, it was belittled by critics as a novelette (colloquially, a cheesy romance novel). One reason for this is the author's harsh attitude towards Jane Austen and similar novelists. I don't need to point out that the book is definitely not a shoddy novel, the characters are multi-layered and if you read it carefully, you can actually smell the criticism of patriarchy, but we are not going to dive that deep.

At the beginning of the book, we are introduced to a young woman in her 20s, from a poor family, shy and not very socially skilled. She is our beloved narrator, her tone does not change much until a certain point in the story. She is a “paid friend” of a rich woman. The woman is traveling and our character hangs around her and does her little chores. At one point, we say that maybe what makes this character special is that she draws pictures, but it's not. Is she so beautiful? No, it is repetitively mentioned that she is not strikingly beautiful. She is such a character that you know she exists, but you can't believe that anything interesting will happen to her. 

Correlatively, the thing that surprised me the most about Rebecca is that the name written on the cover is not the name of the main character. The main character is indeed referred to as Mrs. de Winter throughout the book, but there is also a dead ex-wife called Rebecca and people call her Mrs. de Winter as well. Our main character keeps being nameless until her marriage to Maxim, basically she “is named Mrs. de Winter” when she becomes his wife. This name issue stands as an interesting point because our names are part of our identities. We are given a name when we are just a baby and we continue to live with that name. The name becomes us and we become our names, in some contexts, we form an identity around it. Obviously, she is having difficulty in making this name her own. She is constantly compared to the perfect ex-wife because she inherited the name from her. She becomes more and more crushed under the weight of her makeshift identity and what is worse is that she neither turns into a replica of the person in question nor can she end her own identity war.

Maxim, on the other hand, really reminds me of a father figure rather than a husband. The age difference between the two characters clearly gives Maxim this dominating power. Maxim de Winter is a wealthy and experienced man in his 40s, much older than our narrator. From the first moment, he makes our narrator’s legs shake, he looks complicated and has a way with words (he is good at confusing Mrs. de Winter's mind). Right after their honeymoon, he quietly steps aside and leaves behind his holiday persona that tricked the young girl's heart. Now the new Mrs. de Winter is the one who must confront his past and his long-suppressed trauma. We constantly read that Maxim, who is emotionally and physically invisible in their marriage, has an influence everywhere in the house, and even if he is not there, his influence continues on Mrs. de Winter. His attitude of not taking his young wife seriously throughout the book. The efforts of Mrs. de Winter to communicate do not work for Maxim, and we do not see much from this character in terms of healthy communication until almost the end of the book. I found this to be because he doesn't really see his wife as his "equal" to talk to, he is older, wiser, and better. He even sometimes talks about her wife as if he is talking about a child.

Young Mrs. de Winter's only wish is to heal Maxim's "wounded" heart. Her devotion to Maxim looks more like obsession than love. She is fading day by day in their so-called home, which is filled with people and furniture and the thought that there is no such wonderful wife as Rebecca. She never feels enough, she struggles with severe social anxiety, and she is never listened to respected, or appreciated. Mrs. de Winter's sole function in Maxim's life and his house is like a television that we turn on for sound and never watch.

Again, while Mrs. de Winter struggles with all these confusions, doubts, and feelings of inadequacy, Maxim continues to treat her like a little child. Yes, I returned to the same place again, but let me explain why. Although no clear information is given, we can more or less understand that these two characters never had sexual intercourse during their marriage. Personally, I couldn't help but attribute the reason to their strange father-daughter dynamic (Freud would be so proud of me). This marriage seems to me a story of "a manipulative father with depression and a dewey-eyed, chronically introverted daughter".

This "Rebecca" problem, which is growing unspoken between them, condemns this marriage to be a play house until it is openly discussed. Their first-ever honest conversation about Rebecca was the first moment when Maxim stopped hiding his vulnerable side. When he is honest about everything, Mrs. de Winter also magically goes through a transformation. The root of their marriage, created by the worry that consumes and follows her at every step suddenly disappears (not completely though). The moment she realizes that Rebecca is no longer a barrier between her and her husband, Mrs. de Winter begins to shine. The space created by this communication allows things to improve with Maxim during the darkest days of their marriage. This "late bloomed equality" in their marriage ceases the father-daughter dynamic and we finally see a relationship between two adults. We don't know how long this will last though, or how radically things have changed. Years later, she is still trying to please Maxim and is blaming Rebecca and that house for everything.

Another point that baffled me while reading the book was whose story this was: Rebecca the ex-wife or the unnamed new wife? Well, everything about the book is related to Rebecca in one way or another, even the title of the book. Even our main character seemed to be a surrogate for Rebecca. Rebecca is so different from our main character, the best thing we know about her is that she is rebellious and dominant and this is very much disliked by Maxim.  While the story we are reading is Mrs. de Winter's, Rebecca reveals herself even there. Clearly more loved and respected by everyone, Rebecca is the root of Mrs. de Winter's greatest insecurities. 

There is one very simple thing that unites Rebecca and Mrs. de Winter: Maxim de Winter. Unlike her rebel predecessor, Mrs. de Winter struggles in Maxim's small castle, obedient and ready to devote her life to her husband. All she gets is a tolerant world and a marriage in which she knows that her love will never be reciprocated. Rebecca, on the other hand, is the exact opposite of whatever obedience is; everything that Maxim, and perhaps many other authority figures would disapprove and loathe, is her worship. In the end, both of these characters’ battle is with Maxim and they both lose to him. Maxim's affection for Mrs. de Winter comes from his hatred towards her ex-wife's disobedience, and Mrs. de Winter is actually the opposite of Rebecca ensures his place as a masculine power. In the end, one of them sank to the bottom of the sea and the other barely survived on the shore (spoiler alert).  They both lost to patriarchy, so to say (clink!).

If this short and lazily prepared analysis has aroused your interest even a little bit, but you are not sure about buying the book, if you say "Meh, it seems like a boring one" and you don't want to tire your eyes, there is a version of the book adapted for the big screen by Alfred Hitchcock in 1940 with the same name. Also, an adaptation was made for Netflix in 2020, I leave it to you to decide which one to watch.

See you again!