Screen shot from Rebecca, copyright © 1940 Selznick International Pictures.

When I was researching my post on jealousy in Rebecca, there was a sentence in an interview with Kit Browning, Daphne Du Maurier’s son, that gave me pause. He said that it’s only Max who gives us the idea that Rebecca was a horrible person.

It’s somewhat true; the only person (almost – more on this later) who actually says anything that could make us think badly of her is Max, but we’d been thinking badly of her for a long while beforehand; our opinion of Rebecca is shaped by the heroine’s feelings and our thoughts of Mrs Danvers. And it’s wrong, really. Rebecca isn’t Mrs Danvers and the heroine had nothing to do with the first wife.

It’s the haunted atmosphere that first forms in us an opinion. As much as we can’t attribute the heroine’s feelings to Rebecca herself, at minimum we feel she haunts the place. And haunting is seen as a negative thing thus we feel worried, even if we don’t notice we do. We get glimpses of who Rebecca was: a person supposedly good at running a house, at playing host, at fancy dress, and these glimpses affect our opinion of her.

It’s Mrs Danvers who takes it up a step. Mrs Danvers’ obsession, her manipulation of the heroine, the subtle threats, the hint that throwing oneself out of the window is the right thing to do – all these seem to reflect Rebecca because whilst we don’t know for sure how Rebecca felt, we assume Mrs Danvers’ love was reciprocated. And in the absence of Rebecca herself, Mrs Danvers becomes her substitute, her stand in. That Max later says Rebecca was horrible only seems to back it up.

Should we consider Mrs Danvers’ mental state? Either she’s suffering from her loss of Rebecca so much it has caused her to become a supposed monster or she has some evil in her – that fire does not speak of a stable mind but as other stories and real life shows, a person can do something extreme because they are lost, hurt, and in need of help. Yes, this paragraph does smell of trying to make amends for bad things, like people are trying to say now that Henry VIII was bad because of this, that, and the other, but in Mrs Danvers’ case we know she was close to Rebecca.

Beatrice isn’t nasty about Rebecca, but she doesn’t seem enthralled, is instead quite blaïse and therefore we don’t really consider her thoughts once we’re further along. Jack, appearing shifty, does what Mrs Danvers does – infers a horrible person by association, though at least in this case Max’s revelation has more in it that applies directly to the person. Frank likes the heroine, does so from the start, which may signal a distaste for Rebecca – certainly the contrast between him, Max’s friend, and Mrs Danvers, Rebecca’s friend, seems a bit of a literary decision, a balancing of the scales.

But then there’s Ben, who tells the heroine Rebecca threatened to place him in an asylum if he told anyone that he’d seen her doing… well, we’re not sure, but it was something she obviously shouldn’t have been doing. The potential problem with Ben is that he’s presented as unreliable, but considering we already know about Mrs Danvers, we might consider him more reliable than the heroine herself might. We don’t know much else about Ben, so perhaps we shouldn’t believe him, but then there’s also no reason not to. Ben is a minor character, so perhaps Kit Browning forgot him, or perhaps the whole idea that Ben is unreliable, unstable, was enough to make him irrelevant in this respect – should we trust Du Maurier’s son’s omission as a sign Ben is unreliable?

As for the book itself, Du Maurier ensures we are spooked and considering she wants us to dislike Rebecca, that the book is about jealousy, we don’t really have much chance to feel differently unless we make a decision to read in a different way than we ‘should’ do, disbelieving the author herself at every turn. Rebecca’s written as controlling, promiscuous, horrible; there’s the hint that she was as nasty as Mrs Danvers – perhaps it was that her place in society meant she had cause to hide it.

Rebecca never really had a hope; Kit may be right insofar as the book’s concerned, that it’s only Max who gives us the idea, but his (Kit’s) mother wanted us to think that anyway so it could well be said Du Maurier gives us the idea herself. Just think of that ‘R’ – the text is written to make us dislike Rebecca.

Should we be thinking anything about Rebecca, characters and author aside? Society and common sense would tell us to listen to what people say but to also meet the person… at least meet her as much as we could. In worldly terms we should be thinking twice about befriending her but holding off on a final judgement. Perhaps it’s due to this conflict of advice that Du Maurier is able to grip us so well.

The commonly accepted idea is that we should read a book without letting our views of the author and our knowledge of the author’s life play a role, but in this book it’s a bit different. It’s not simply that Du Maurier’s feelings are included, as it is Charlotte Brontë’s in Villette, or the plethora of writers whose works have been panned because their views are offensive – Du Maurier’s book revolves around her thoughts in a different way that’s hard to explain. I don’t think she’d mind if we chose not to listen to the gossip she writes and to push aside any manipulation, but to like Rebecca would be to miss the point of the book.

Your thoughts?