Review: Rebecca

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It isn’t easy to review this book. I have been a long-time fan of the Hitchcock movie “Rebecca” with Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, and also very much liked the mini-series version with Emilia Fox and Charles Dance. Hence, this book has been on my wishlist for years and was very keen on reading it when I first started.

But, then everything went wrong… ***From this point forward, the review may contain spoilers; so, proceed with care.*** (view spoiler)[I hated Maxim de Winter who treated his second wife as a child or a dog as the wife narrating the story rightly observes. Even worse he repeatedly humiliates his wife in front of other people and the servants. However, I was also annoyed by the second Mrs de Winter (her name is not revealed in the book, suggesting thereby that her existence is almost irrelevant) who indeed behaved like a child and loved her monster of husband despite his awful behaviour. For example, Maxim de Winter has not even thought about apologizing by his wife for assuming she did something on purpose (see the fancy dress ball) which she obviously did not. And she kept thinking it was all her fault when it clearly was not. The whole marriage was indeed a failure as, again, the narrator herself clearly observed: they were no partners in anything (very likely not even in sex), communication was practically non-existent between them. Because of this the second Mrs de Winter was living in a world of daydreams, where all the communication and events were only happening in her imagination. The only normal person was Frank, the agent of de Winter with whom she had more communication than with her own husband. I was about 2/3 into the book when I felt a real annoyance – wanted to slap the husband and shake the wife – and also a kind of anxiety, which did not let me sleep at night, and was seriously considering giving up. But I continued…

And then came the turn of the events when we find out about Rebecca’s real personality and what happened on the day she died. From this point forward, their relationship seems to improve, not that it made me any happier, because suddenly, I realized that the story is irreconcilable with my own moral compass. Thus, I finished the book with a very heavy heart and was also very annoyed by its ending. The book begins with a prologue which implies many things that happened in the end; still, the ending was very abrupt and did not answer a lot of questions I had: What happened to the servants and especially, to dear Jasper? Why don’t they have any children? Is Mr de Winter blind now? If yes, how did it come about? And if no, how comes that Mrs de Winter reads aloud a lot?

In the end, I was pretty disappointed and also astonished how I could have loved this story. Thankfully, my edition contained an afterword by Sally Beauman who explained that the story can be read in two ways: as a romantic story and as a story about two women’s fight against patriarchal power. Hitchcock but also the mini-series clearly went with the first approach. Hitchcock even changed the events of the day Rebecca died because he knew the original story would have been unpopular. Though the miniseries is truer to the book, it also romanticizes the love between these two people. Upon reading Beauman’s explanations of the second approach, I must say that that way of reading this book is how I read it this time. Thus, even though this book was inspired by the story of Jane Eyre, for me, Rebecca is, in contrast to Brontë’s novel, not a romantic novel, it is the tragic story of a young woman who is and will never be more than “the paid companion to a petty tyrant” – be it Mrs Van Hopper or her husband. (hide spoiler)] Being a hopeless romantic as I am, I have no desire to read this story ever again.

For all the above reasons, I could give this book one star, if I only based my rating on the story itself. However, I thought the writing itself was excellent – five stars. So, based on these two ratings the average or my final rating is three stars.


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