Last Night I Dreamt I Was a Little Girl Again
Early i morn, almost a century ago, a immature woman trespassed on the grounds of a house called Menabilly. The Cornish sea was pink with sunrise, and blackbirds were singing in the hedge; a five-kilometre path unwound between banks of scarlet rhododendrons, and the lawn was wet with dew. Hither she stood, gazing at white windows shuttered fast and grey walls concealed behind tapestries of ivy. It was, she said, "similar the sleeping beauty of the fairy tale, until someone should come to wake her". And indeed the house was woken, and has never slept since: the trespasser was Daphne Du Maurier, and the firm slumbered on until she began to write Rebecca, with Menabilly rechristened Manderley.
Rebecca begins, "Last nighttime I dreamt I went to Manderley again." Every novelist since has footing their teeth in envy: hither is all the enchantment of a child's story, with an irresistible melancholy hung about it. The narrator is on a winding path alone, and her way is barred. The dreamer is the 2d Mrs de Winter (we never know her proper noun), and Manderley has been to her both a heaven and a hell.
Employed as companion to the wealthy vulgarian Mrs van Hopper, she meets Maxim de Wintertime in a Monte Carlo hotel. He owns the famous Manderley, and is perfectly calibrated to the needs of an ardent virgin: he is sardonic, sophisticated, occasionally morose; he is Mr Rochester at the wheel of a motor car. Reader, she marries him. In due course she is conveyed to Manderley through rhododendrons blooming "slaughterous red, luscious and fantastic" and is greeted by the black-clad housekeeper Mrs Danvers, her "skull'southward face, parchment-white, set on a skeleton'south frame".
Du Maurier holds up the gilded mirror in which Manderley is reflected, but outset she bankrupt the glass
Manderley is "a thing of grace and beauty, exquisite and faultless" – but information technology is haunted by the spectre of Rebecca, the beginning Mrs de Winter, who drowned out in the bay. Her body may exist rotting in the family crypt, but her spirit is vital and seductive: she lives in the inscription on the flyleaf of a book, the perfectly called drapes and ornaments, the evening gowns yet hanging in her closet. Rebecca, it seems, was beautiful but boyish, dauntless but gracious, an attentive hostess and a loving married woman. How can the 2d Mrs de Winter, with her sparse hair and dispiriting wearing apparel, compete?
This, all the same, is not a book to be trusted. Du Maurier holds upward the gold mirror in which Manderley is reflected, just first she broke the glass. For Rebecca lives also in Mrs Danvers's curiously bitter grief and in Maxim'southward restless fits of acrimony; in the boathouse with its mouldering books and furnishings, and in the stuttering terror of the savant Ben, who digs for seashells on the shore. Nor tin can you lot trust the innocent narrator. For all her insistence that she is drab, shy, uncertain of herself, we certainly know this: the name we're never told is "lovely and unusual", and it becomes her well; she lands herself a wealthy lover in a Monte Carlo hotel; her passions are ignited as much by violence as past ardour. Before long the reader wanders from room to room "a footling fearful, a little afraid", with the "odd, uneasy feeling" that they "might come upon something unawares".
Rebecca sold in vast numbers, and has never been out of impress. In the 80 years since its publication it has inspired prequels, sequels and an opera, with Manderley built and rebuilt for television, film and phase. During the second World War a copy was used past German intelligence every bit a lawmaking book. Information technology is non a novel: it is an institution. Its wild success and superficial resemblance to a love story earned its author the dubious title "romantic novelist". On her death the New York Times, in tones less obsequious than accusatory, called Du Maurier "the author of Rebecca, and other highly popular Gothic and romantic novels". But she was certainly no romantic: she declared, with the faintest trace of mischief, "At that place is no such matter as romantic dearest. This is a statement of fact, and I defy all those who hold a contrary stance." No romantic novelist, then, simply certainly a Gothic 1. Rebecca is in the one thousand, disruptive tradition of the Gothic: it is deliciously transgressive, enticing the reader into complicity; it shocks all the more considering its menace blows in on Rebecca's azalea scent; it creates a habitation place inside which every furtive longing of the human heart seems not only possible just permissible – if you can stand up the penalisation.
The careful reader will discern Du Maurier's preoccupation with gender and sexuality, which grows more than pertinent with passing years, not less. Information technology is telling that the second Mrs de Winter muses on Rebecca's short pilus, her sporting courage, her distaste for male attending; she has liberated herself from the social confines of her sexual practice, and her successor – eager to play the dutiful married woman, with manners and dress in a higher place reproach – looks on with troubled awe. In this respect Rebecca recalls Du Maurier's own sexuality and gender anxiety: as an agog young lover of women as well every bit men she adopted the identity of the dashing "Eric Avon", the "boy in the box" who was her secret cocky, and in one case wrote of her adored cousins, "They are boys. Hurrah for them!"
I offset read Rebecca at peradventure xiii, half-drowsing in the back of the family car. Arrested at in one case by that opening line I said to my mother, "Where is Manderley?" She turned in her seat and said, "Oh, somewhere in Cornwall, I suppose," with such an air of stating fact that it was years earlier I realised I could never buy a ticket to the house and gardens – would never see the boathouse, the Happy Valley, the sloping lawns. Simply it is equally real to me as the bricks-and-mortar houses where I have lived. The proper noun arouses in me not the pleasing recollection of a well-loved book but a response rooted in the senses that is indistinguishable from memory.
The boat that Rebecca sailed single-handed in that glittering Cornish bay was called Je Reviens – "I Return". And then it is for me, and for other readers of this masterful, troubling and wickedly seductive novel: nosotros sigh, shut the comprehend, put the volume dorsum on the shelf; but again and again, when the scarlet rhododendrons are in blossom, we return to Manderley.
This is the introduction by Sarah Perry, writer of After Me Comes the Overflowing and The Essex Serpent, to the 80th-anniversary edition of Rebecca, by Daphne D u Maurier (Virago Modernistic Classics, £14.99)
Source: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/last-night-i-dreamt-i-went-to-manderley-again-rebecca-and-me-1.3402476
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