BENGALURU: Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” Well, not literally so, but I did find myself in the British countryside of Maxim De Winter’s Cornwall mansion —figuratively so — when I finished re-reading Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca.
Bang in the middle of the Great Depression, but far from the American Dream ushering in hopes of individuality and success, Maurier published her story of a naive, unnamed 20-something-year-old who was almost on the verge of losing the dregs of her identity withing the walls of Manderley, walled in by its housekeeper, Mrs Danvers and her stories of the unnamed woman’s dead predecessor, Rebecca.
The naive narrator gets acquainted with Maxim, the male protagonist of the novel, when she was in Monte Carlo, working as a companion to a rich American woman. She instantly falls in love and accepts his proposal of marriage. What first strikes the reader is how the narrator remains unnamed through the initial chapters meant for familiarisation.
This prompts many to think that maybe like Nick Carraway, she will only remain an observer of incidents in the story. However, it’s quite the contrary, as the narrator, only identified as ‘The Second Mrs De Winter’, ‘my wife’ and ‘my dear’ is actually the protagonist. Only once in the novel is she announced at a ball as ‘Caroline’. However, to readers, it is quite clear that just like the costume she had worn, it wasn’t her name.
A little-known fact about Rebecca is that the seed of the story lies in Maurier’s own jealousy of her husband’s first fiance. The narrator feels like an intruder in Rebecca’s world. Before she can come to her own, Mrs Danvers lets her know that Rebecca, though dead, is omnipresent everywhere through her larger than life presence.
Speaking of this same burden, the narrator says, “I suppose sooner or later in the life of everyone comes a moment of trial. We all of us have our particular devil who rides us and torments us, and we must give battle in the end.”
Though there are a number of literary works in which extremely strong female narrators have been unnamed — Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ for example -- but critics are of the opinion that this happened mostly to strengthen the storyline than because of sociological reasons.
In the climax, the narrator falls for Mrs Danvers’ trick and dresses in Rebecca’s old costume for the annual Manderley ball. Her husband, whom she thinks will never love her like Rebecca, is aghast and later, the narrator is close to committing suicide when a commotion at the port recovers Rebecca’s body from the waters.
The narrator who had been made to feel insecure because of the godly Rebecca finally learns that the first Mrs De Winter was hardly a wife to Maxim as she indulged in her own infidelities and managed to provoke him to kill her as she had learnt that she was dying.
At the end, though the second Mrs De Winter finally finds security, love and her individuality; she gains everything but a name.