The Australian stage actress Judith Anderson was perfectly cast in that film as Mrs. Alfred Hitchcock realized as much when he adapted the book into a claustrophobic, Gothic masterpiece, in 1940. Danvers’s desperate yearning for Rebecca stands in contrast to Maxim’s aloof frostiness toward his young bride it’s also what provides much of the story’s terror. It’s soft, isn’t it? You can feel it, can’t you? The scent is still fresh, isn’t it?” Mrs. “She looked beautiful in this velvet,” she says. Danvers stops to cuddle the dead woman’s clothing. de Winter around Rebecca’s old room, in one scene, Mrs. There is, as plenty of scholars have detailed, a latent sapphic energy between Mrs. Danvers keeps Rebecca’s chambers as they were before she mysteriously drowned the second wife is not allowed in these rooms and must sleep in far smaller quarters on the other side of the estate. Danvers, are bizarrely affronted by her presence, and somehow seem still to be working in service of a dead woman, Maxim’s ex-wife, Rebecca. de Winter finds both her new husband and her vision of her future much changed Manderley’s staff, and particularly the frigid housekeeper, Mrs. Which would you choose?) When she returns to England, the new Mrs. (Her choices are to continue to eat plates of dry “ham and tongue” with her grotesque employer or become the mistress of a hulking seaside palazzo. Instead, she rushes into a marriage, a decision born of both hope and pragmatism. Van Hopper on a holiday in Monte Carlo as a lady’s maid, she learns quickly that he is a recent widower, but she doesn’t really press the issue. When the narrator meets the dashing (and, in the novel, much older) Maxim de Winter while accompanying the aging socialite Mrs. What haunts the narrator is not a presence but an idea, the idea of the beloved wife who came before and to whom she can never compare. No spectres pop out of closets no oil portraits come to life after dark. The book’s famous first line-“Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again”-initiates a journey in her memory, back to the sprawling English countryside estate where she had once lived as a wealthy man’s second wife.ĭu Maurier made it clear in her notes for the novel that “Rebecca” was “ not a ghost story,” at least not in the traditional sense. de Winter-as she recounts a particularly vivid nightmare. In a letter to Victor Gollancz, the head of the publishing house, Collins wrote that the novel “brilliantly creates a sense of atmosphere and suspense,” and also, “I don’t know another author who imagines so hard all the time.” The allure of “Rebecca” lies in how du Maurier places the reader, right away, inside the nervous mind of its protagonist-an unnamed, docile young woman who is referred to by others in the book only as Mrs. He saw money in the book, and maybe even literary value. Collins, for his part, breathed a sigh of relief upon turning the pages. Du Maurier was only thirty years old at the time, and this was her fifth book, but she had yet to have a runaway commercial hit. In April of 1938, the manuscript for Daphne du Maurier’s new novel, “ Rebecca,” landed on the desk of her British editor, Norman Collins.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |