Daphne du Maurier

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again...

Working as a paid companion to a bitter elderly lady, the timid heroine of Rebecca learns her place. Life is bleak until, on a trip to the South of France, she falls in love with Maxim de Winter, a handsome widower whose proposal takes her by surprise. Whisked from Monte Carlo to Manderley, Maxim's isolated Cornish estate, the friendless young bride begins to realise that she barely knows her husband at all. And in every corner of every room is the phantom of his beautiful first wife, Rebecca.

Rebecca is the haunting story of a woman consumed by love and the struggle to find her identity. 

Rebecca

Rachel Livingston

There were no shadows between us any more, and when we were silent it was because the silence came to us of our own asking. 

Rebecca, always Rebecca. Wherever I walked in Manderley, wherever I sat, even in my thoughts and in my dreams, I met Rebecca...I knew the scent she wore, I could guess her laughter and her smile. If I heard it, even amongst a thousand others, I should recognise her voice. Rebecca, always Rebecca. I should never be rid of Rebecca. 

Perhaps I haunted her, as she haunted me...Did she resent me and fear me as I resented her? Did she want Maxim alone in the house again? I could fight the living but I could not fight the dead.

Maxim was not in love with me, he had never loved me. Our honeymoon in Italy had meant nothing at all to him, nor our living here together. What I had thought was love for me, for myself as a person, was not love. It was just that he was a man, and I was his wife and was young, and he was lonely. He did not belong to me at all, he belonged to Rebecca. He still thought about Rebecca. He would never love me because of Rebecca. 

The wind is Rebecca, searching her out, coming to comfort her? The sea embodies Rebecca. 

It would not be quiet like this anymore. A board creaked in the gallery. I swung round, looking at the gallery behind me. There was nobody there. The gallery was empty, just as it had been before. A current of air blew in my face though, somebody must have left a window open in one of the passages...I wonder why the board creaked when I had not moved at all. The warmth of the night perhaps, a swelling somewhere in the old wood. The draught still blew in my face though...I looked towards the Archway above the stairs. The draught was coming from there. I went beneath the arch again, and when I came out on to the long corridor I saw that the door to the west wing had blown open and swung back against the wall. It was dark in the west passage, none of the lights had been turned on. I could feel the wind blowing on my face from the open window. I fumbled for a switch on the wall and could not find one. I could see the window in an angle of the passage, the curtain blowing softly, backwards and forwards. The grey evening light cast queer shadows on the floor. The sound of the sea came to me through the open window, the soft hissing sound of the ebb-tide leaving the shingle. 

I did not go and shut the window. I stood there shivering a moment in my thin dress, listening to the sea as it sighed and left the shore. Then I turned quickly and shut the door of the west wing behind me, and came out again through the archway by the stairs. 

This represents what she thought the night be like vs what it turned out to be. The firework show is her excitement building, but equally dying in the explosion, leaving behind the dull harsh reality in the disasters wake. 

Manderley stood out like an enchanted house, every window aflame, the grey walls coloured by the falling stars. A house bewitched, carved out of the dark woods. And when the last rocket burst and the cheering died away, the night that had been fine before seemed dull and heavy in contrast, the sky became a pall. 

"Sometimes, when I walk along the corridor here, I fancy I hear her just behind me. That quick, light footstep. I could not mistake it anywhere. And in the minstrels' gallery above the hall. I've seen her leaning there, in the evenings in the old days, looking down at the hall below and calling to the dogs. I can fancy her there from time to time. It's almost as though I catch the sound of her dress sweeping the stairs as she comes down to dinner." She paused. She went on looking at me, watching my eyes. "Do you think the dead come back and watch the living?... Sometimes I wonder," she whispered. "Sometimes I wonder if she comes back here to Manderley and watches you and Mr de Winter together." 

I was aware of a growing sense of horror, of horror turning to despair...The night dress was inside the case, thin as gossamer, apricot in colour. I touched it, drew it out from the case, put it against my face. It was cold, quite cold...I folded it, and put it back into the case, and as I did so I noticed with a sick dull aching in my heart that there were creases in the night-dress, few texture was ruffled, it had not been touched or laundered since it was last worn. 

For one desperate moment I thought that something had happened to my brain, that I was seeing back into Time, and looking upon the room as it used to be, before she died...In a minute Rebecca herself would come back into the room...

As she runs back towards the house, she thinks she runs to safety. But the description of the woods shows how she really runs back to the problem, back to Maxim. Maxim is the trees & roots, growing close, capturing her, tripping her. The brambles & the eucalyptus tree are also Maxim (death/dying/decay OR old world vs new world), and she is the stream. Choked by him, poisoned by him, trying to escape to the beach. Perhaps like Rebecca? Perhaps she was fleeing Maxim too, that could be how she drowned... 

I had not realized how closely the trees grew together here, their roots stretching across the path like tendrils ready to trip one. They ought to clear all this, I thought as I ran, catching my breath, Maxim should get the men on to it. There is no sense or beauty in this undergrowth. That tangle of shrubs there should be cut down to bring light to the path. It was dark, much too dark. That naked eucalyptus tree stifled by brambles looked like the white bleached limb of a skeleton, and there was a black earthy stream running beneath it, choked with the muddied rains of years, trickling silently to the beach below. The birds did not sing here as they did in the valley. It was quiet in a different way. 

I glanced back over my shoulder at the cove. The tide had begun to run and was swirling slowly round the arm of the harbour wall. Ben had disappeared over the rocks. The beach was deserted again. I could just see the stone chimney of the cottage through a gap in the dark trees. I had a sudden unaccountable desire to run. I pulled Jasper's leash and panted up the steep narrow path through the woods, not looking back any more. Had I been offered all the treasures in the world I could not have turned and gone down to the cottage or the beach again. It was as though someone waited down there, in the little garden where the nettles grew. Someone who watched and listened. 

And as I sat there, brooding, my chin in my hands, fondling the soft ears of one of the spaniels, it came to me that I was not the first one to lounge there in possession of the chair; someone had been before me, and surely left an imprint of her person on the cushions, and on the arm where her hand had rested. Another one had poured the coffee from that same silver coffee pot, had placed the cup to her lips, had bent down to the dog, even as I was doing. 

Unconsciously, I shivered as though someone had opened the door behind me and let a draught into the room. I was sitting in Rebecca's chair, I was leaning against Rebecca's cushion, and the dog had come to me and laid his head upon my knee because that had been his custom, and he remembered, in the past, she had given sugar to him there. 

...That corner in the drive, too, where the trees encroach upon the gravel, is not the place in which to pause, not after the sun has set. When the leaves rustle, they sound very much like the stealthy movement of a woman in evening dress, and when they shiver suddenly, and fall, and scatter away along the ground, they might be the patter, patter, of a woman's hurrying footstep, and the mark on the gravel the imprint of a high-heeled satin shoe.

Rebecca

Reviews

Highlights