Bad guys and slippery language in Rebecca
A lot has been written about the novel Rebecca, most of which, to be honest, I probably haven’t read. I do know it’s well acknowledged that Max de Winters isn’t exactly Mr Perfect, while the unnamed narrator seems to have gotten away with her foibles, for want of a better word. The afterword in my edition, for example, says that in fact Max de Winters kills not one wife but two, with the narrator enduring a slow death via their exile in Switzerland, after Manderley has been burned to the ground. In this analysis, she’s painted more or less as an innocent victim turned reluctant accomplice.
As far as I’m concerned though, much of Rebecca’s enduring and subversive power comes from the fact that the narrator is a cold-hearted, twentieth-century Becky Sharpe who perhaps even fools herself with her own artfulness. She is consumed not with love but with a desire for power, specifically power over Max, who represents to her the upper class, which in turns represents a kind of ultimate source of control.
This isn’t exactly obvious on first glance, mainly because the story’s told from her point of view; it’s only through the prism of her language that we’re allowed take in what happened. And her language is as slippery as it gets. Elegant, refined, and always with a veneer of reasonableness, we take in everything she says without question. She always says the good guy thing because she’s the good guy. I mean, she shows us from the very start that she’s just a helpless innocent, all the emphasis on her ‘smallness’, on how she is ‘a youthful thing and unimportant’, as she trails ‘Mrs Van Hopper like a shy uneasy colt’. Mrs Van Hopper’s vulgarity, by acting as contrast, only serves to heighten all this, with her ravioli sauce dribbling down her chin and the way she greedily eyes Max when he arrives in their hotel.
You have to look closely to see the weird bits. Things that she says but also things she doesn’t dwell on at all.
Like the fact that she goes straight from the moment she accepted Max’s proposal of marriage to their driving through the gates of the Manderley estate, thereby skipping over the wedding and the honeymoon. You might make the ‘happiness writes white’ point – that this was skipped over because there was no conflict in these moments of bliss and so they don’t make for good fiction. But, surely a paragraph or two at the least, giving a sense of how their initial feelings deepened into something? But no. And then we get this weird line:
I dreaded this arrival at Manderley as much as I longed for it in theory. … I wanted to be a traveller on the road, a bride in love with her husband.’
Of course, you think. Makes sense. Then you think again. Wait, what? You longed for a thing in theory? (the implication being, not in practice.) This is a thing humans can do? If so, it’s news to me. You either long for a thing or you don’t. And note she’s not saying she was a bride in love with her husband. She’s saying she wanted to be a bride in love with her husband. Which is of course not quite the same thing.
Of course, you can’t exactly blame her for not loving him. It’s in this same scene that he turns to her, just as they’re making their way up the driveway of his terrifyingly impressive ancestral home, and says:
Put your funny little fur straight. Poor lamb, I’ve bustled you down here like this, and you probably ought to have bought a lot of clothes in London.
Surely a contender for one of the most passive-aggressive things anyone ever said to anyone in modern literature.
And it is at Manderley that the fundamental inequality inherent in their relationship is laid bare. A large part of the novel is about her flailing in this intimidating scene, struggling equally in trying to deal with servants and with guests, without any help from him. All the while, the grieving Mrs Denvers finds in her a target for her own pain. But even within this, here and there when the subject of her love for Max is reared, she always seems to conflate the idea of romantic love with having a balance of power; as though they are one and the same thing. For example, about midway through the novel, people call over and she gets flustered serving the tea. She feels embarrassed and socially awkward, and afterwards, watching him speak to someone else:
I wished something would happen to make me look wiser, more mature. Was it always going to be like this? He way ahead of me … Would we never be together … with no gulf between us?’
And when the real test of character comes – when Max confesses his murder of a pregnant Rebecca, whose body is soon to be discovered – there is zero sign of any moral dilemma, or even of a struggle in terms of reconciling this New Information about Max with her idea of her beloved husband. She is holding his hand when he begins his story of what really happened that night and she is still holding it at the end. Not only does she never question his demonisation of Rebecca, but immediately, she knows she will do anything to help him, including perjuring herself. And that’s because it’s with this conversation that the tables have turned; Max’s life now depends on her, instead of the other way around. No wonder she finds she is ‘so happy’ despite the fact ‘our little world was so black’.
After his confession, she goes to the morning room, where up to now she always felt Rebecca’s overbearing presence to the extent she hadn’t been able to do the things expected of her, like decide the menu for dinner or write letters. This time, though, it’s different. She wonders ‘why it had seemed so hard for me before’. For the first time, she is unkind to a housemaid, and seems to take pleasure in doing so, rebuking her sharply for not changing the flowers in a vase. Where before, she worried about all the food waste, now she tells Mrs Denvers to prepare something new instead of giving her leftovers from the disastrous fancy dress party. And there are tons of leftovers! Overnight, she seems to have morphed into her own monstrous version of Rebecca.
It’s not really Rebecca that has been obsessing the narrator of this story. It’s Rebecca’s equal footing with Max.
If this isn’t clear yet, it definitely is in the drive back from London, where Rebecca’s doctor has given good reason to suspect suicide, thereby getting Maxim off the hook. (Unless of course his beloved second wife decided to shop him in, something that’s never even implied – she wouldn’t dream of it, surely!) This and the first bride-and-groom journey to Manderley, at the start of the novel, serve as bookends: one a mirror image of the other. While in that first journey, she felt her inferiority so keenly, and he made her feel even worse, this time he is the one all anxiety and fretfulness while she is having a great old time! When they stop at a restaurant, ‘dark and cool’ with its fat and smiling maitre d’, she eats her lobster – ‘very fresh and very good’ – ravenously, while Max doesn’t touch his. She orders herself a second brandy, despite Max’s obvious desire to be back on the road. She encourages him to eat up:
‘Your lobster will be cold,’ I said. ‘Eat it, darling. It will do you good, you want something inside you. You’re tired. I was using the words he had used to me. I felt better and stronger. It was I now taking care of him. He was pale, tired.
For the rest of the journey, she sleeps in the back, a blanket wrapped carefully around her by Max, as he drives the six hours home. While she feels content, managing to more or less ignore those pesky dreams that send up unwelcome messages, he grows increasingly fearful, driving faster and faster until they see the light in the sky that she initially mistakes for the dawn.
Anyone would think she was the one that had started that fire.
She didn’t of course. Not technically. She only said to Mrs Denvers (in the ‘we want something hot for dinner, not all these leftovers’ conversation), the morning after Rebecca’s body has been discovered - Rebecca who Mrs Denvers clearly loved - this line:
‘I am Mrs de Winters now, you know.’
Like all the other slippery lines, this one presents as a reasonable, quietly assertive thing to say to the mean bully Denvers. But the narrator would surely have known how devastating it would be to Denvers. I don’t mean to say she knew it would result in Denvers setting the place on fire. But it’s strange how the mind works, some deep part of it maybe more intelligent that the part we know. It was a violent thing to do, you could say, saying such a thing to Denvers on that particular morning. It was an act that would have consequences.
And at the very end (which is the beginning of this circular novel), when they are living in their bland hotel in Switzerland, she says
I suppose it is his dependence on me that has made me bold at last. I am very different from that self who drove to Manderley for the first time, handicapped by a desperate gaucherie and filled with an intense desire to please.
No kidding. This weird hotel existence in Switzerland where they pass their days, grateful we are told to be bored, feels like a kind of hell. There is no indication of any physical intimacy or tenderness; instead they pass their time eating ‘dull, indifferent’ hotel food, Maxim ‘smoking cigarette after cigarette’ as she reads to him because she has apparently ‘developed a talent for reading aloud’. Not even interesting stuff; she reads him things like ‘English news and sport’ and ‘an article on wood pigeons’. Talk about a fate worse than death.
The take home, you could say, is that this couple isn’t one for power sharing. Either one person is the victor, or the other is. There’s a sense that she has gotten what she wanted – victor status – and it’s awful but she will have it anyway. Just as he did when he was the one with the power. It is a cold place to live, their relationship, just like Switzerland, just like his name.
Would it be as good a novel, if it really was a love story? If she really loved Max? Would we find it as compelling, or would it seem far-fetched, implausible? Because regardless of its many long knives – shipwrecks, hidden murders, costume parties that go horribly wrong, melodramatic confessions – the story has a ring of truth about it. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t still be reading it.
I think that’s because what it really chronicles is a cold-blooded fight for power by one person over another. And in this, it’s saying something about how what we really want is reflected in what we get, and how if you only want for yourself, you won’t get anything much at all. A case of be careful what you wish for, or reaping what you sow. The thing Dostoevsky said about hell being the inability to love.
The only thing that feels implausible is the fact it’s considered a love story.
Note: I have decided to only post one of these little articles every fortnight from now on. That’s because they’re not as little as I expected them to be and they’re taking a bit more time than I thought they would. So the next one will be posted on 14 July. Hope you stick with me!