Literary Adaptations Week: Rebecca (1940)

2 years ago

Literary Adaptations Week: Rebecca (1940)

I WISH I WERE A WOMAN OF 36, DRESSED IN BLACK SATIN AND A STRING OF PEARLS!

By Michelle Said

There’s a saying: words have meaning, but names have power. Rebecca, originally published in 1938, is, perhaps, literature’s most powerful proof of this adage. Written by Daphne du Maurier, the book is told from the viewpoint of a nameless, faceless protagonist who is only referred to as, “darling,” “Madam,” or “Mrs. De Winter.” I suppose this wouldn’t be entirely terrible if she didn’t share these titles with a dead woman, the eponymous Rebecca.

An instant bestseller when it came out, it was quickly optioned to become a movie. Studio head David O Selznick hired obscure director Alfred Hitchock to bring the novel to life. As in the tradition of Old Hollywood, there was a revolving door of actresses auditioning for lead role of the second Mrs. De Winter, including Scarlet herself, Vivian Leigh, who was also paramour to the lead actor of the film, Laurence Olivier. The role eventually went to plainer Joan Fontaine. Fontaine was allegedly treated terribly by the mercurial Olivier, who had lobbied for his girlfriend to get the role. This mistreatment was apparently not enough for Hitchcock, always eager to get as much out of his actors as possible, who apparently instructed the crew on set to treat his lead actress poorly, in order to get the best (in this case, meekest) performance out of her. These may or may not have been the nudges that lead her to get the nomination for Best Actress, an honor shared by her co-star and reported tormentor, who received a nomination for Best Actor. Of course, always the one-upper, Rebecca (the film) went on to win Best Picture, the only work of Hitchcock’s to receive the honor.

Sometimes I hear Rebecca referred to as a gothic romance, which is, to put it bluntly, wrong. There’s absolutely nothing romantic about this tale or the relationship between the main character and her ~~keeper~~ husband Maximilian de Winter. If you’re not familiar, (and you should be, because I am going to SPOIL THE HELL out of this story), a nameless young woman without family working as a secretary/companion for an obnoxious socialite, tells the story of how she came to marry rich English gentleman, Maximilian Fortescue [SomethingSomething] de Winter, which is probably the best name of all time and definitely worth marrying for that alone. Not only that, he happens to have the best English estate EVAR: Manderley, a property that’s as grand as it is terrifying, located somewhere along the English coast. Swept up in a secret whirlwind romance in Monte Carlo, she is about to be forced to go to New York with her boss when Maximilian, between shaving and having breakfast, almost yawningly asks her if she’d like to marry him. And she, naïve, unassuming, weak girl that she is, accepts.

The happy couple.

The movie excellently shows that this is probably the least romantic way you could be proposed to, the actual delivery, “I’m asking you to marry me, you little fool,” being the least of the problems. Max nearly forgets the marriage certificate from Monte Carlo’s City Hall and then, seeing a wedding party pass, encounters a rare moment of realization and remembers that he has actually gotten married. “You would have liked a bridal veil, wouldn’t you?” he asks. “Or at least—” He quickly pays for a ragtag bunch of carnations and gives them to his new bride, and almost smothers her with the impromptu bouquet. She fawns over his present—shoddy, last-minute, and thoughtless though it is. This is a young woman (the book places her at approximately 21 or 22) who has never been given anything in her life, has nobody, and accepts any act of decency with the same grateful disbelief of an abused pet. Little does she know that things are going to get worse before they get better.

“Worse” turns out to be a prim lady in black, who acts as the lead of Manderley’s servants – Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson). Everything she says, everything she does, is with intent to remind the second Mrs. De Winter that she is not, nor will she ever be, Rebecca. One moment in the film that’s especially telling is after our main protagonist enters the closed-off West Wing—Rebecca’s room. Mrs. Danvers walks the second Mrs. De Winter through all of Rebecca’s possessions, noting how she liked to position her brushes, how she (Mrs. Danvers) used to comb her (Rebecca’s) hair at bedtime, and, most creepily, what undergarments she wore to bed. “Did you ever see anything so delicate?” Mrs. Danvers asks, putting a hand underneath the fabric admiringly, eyes feverish. “You can see right through it.” Here, Hitchcock goes one step beyond du Maurier, putting a sensuality behind the ghostly presence of Rebecca.

There is just so much going on here psychologically that it would not be hard to write a thesis on the motivations of the characters. The second Mrs. De Winter operates throughout the majority of the novel under the assumption that she is a lesser version of the first Mrs. De Winter and that she should act up to Rebecca in order to gain the love that she still has not clearly won from her cold, critical husband. His mixed signals are dizzying; at one moment he’s telling his new bride to speak up and talk back to the domineering Mrs. Danvers and to stop biting her nails, and, the next, instructing her to dress up like Alice in Wonderland for a costume ball, and telling her that he hopes she will never “be thirty-six.” He, too, seems confused as to whether he wants her to be her own girlish, uncertain woman or if she should bring more Rebecca into herself.

Mrs. Danvers eventually tricks the second Mrs. De Winter into wearing the exact costume Rebecca wore the year before for the masquerade. Upon seeing her, Max goes into a rage, leading our protagonist to rush upstairs and confront Mrs. Danvers, who uses the opportunity to convince the second Mrs. De Winter to commit suicide. “ Why don’t you go? Why don’t you leave Manderley? He doesn’t need you. He’s got his memories. He doesn’t love you, he wants to be alone again with her. You’ve nothing to stay for. You’ve nothing to live for, really, have you? Look down there. It’s easy, isn’t it? Why don’t you? Why don’t you? Go on. Go on. Don’t be afraid…”

Enticing though it is, she doesn’t. (Most likely because that would make for a very short, very dull story.) Saved by the shots from an offshore ship that also spell the doom of Manderley, our protagonist escapes the hypnotic power of the most loyal servant to ever hit the silver screen. But not Rebecca.

The first Mrs. De Winter’s body has been found at the bottom of the ocean. In a bold confession that alternately relieves and horrifies our protagonist, Max admits that he absolutely despised his late wife and that he “put her there” in the sunken ship in the seas. This is also where we come to the problematic difference between the book and the movie: in the book, he kills her in a cold-blooded rage whereas, in the movie, although he says that he wanted to kill her, he simply watches her hit her head and opts to not do anything about it. Where the book brings the sinister nature of Max out in the open and truly transforms the book from the movie’s potential romance (the nice girl desperate for love finally wins the haughty heart of the man who framed for a crime he did not commit), into a murky horror of loving a murderer and giving up your own self-identity forever in order to gain his tainted love. This is a toxic relationship at its most insidious.

But let’s not entirely blame Hitchcock for this change in the story—the early days of Hollywood were full of codes, one of which was that cinematic husbands and wives could not go unpunished for the murder of their spouses. Lame, I know.

After Max gets off scot free and Mrs. Danvers gleans the truth of the matter, she decides to burn Manderley to the ground. Although the book is oblique about the origin of the fire and the fate of Mrs. Danvers, Hitchcock poetically leaves her to burn with the ghost of Rebecca. Max and his wife are free, now, to begin their life again, without the shadow of Rebecca looming over them. It is, it would seem, a happy ending. Or, at least, as happy of an ending as one would get from Hitchcock.

It surprised me that Hitchcock omitted an earlier part of the novel, where we are introduced to a deeply unhappy couple, living from hotel to hotel, unable to go home again: Max, haunted forever by his actions (and his murdered wife) refuses to hear anything about England, and his (living) wife, gloomily accepting that the storybook romance she originally signed up for is not exactly what it was cracked up to be. Du Maurier puts none too fine a point on the complexity of the relationship between Max and the second Mrs. De Winter and the repercussions of their actions.

But, of course, that part of the story has nothing to do with Rebecca. And, as Hitchcock knew well, a good director doesn’t spend too much time on supporting characters.

Michelle Said is a writer living in New York City who is pretty sure Jasper the dog is the most likeable character in the whole story. She tumbls here.