Last Night I Dreamt I Went to Manderley Again What Does This Do to the Reader
Early one forenoon, near a century ago, a immature woman trespassed on the grounds of a business firm called Menabilly. The Cornish bounding main was pink with sunrise, and blackbirds were singing in the hedge; a five-kilometre path unwound betwixt banks of red rhododendrons, and the lawn was moisture with dew. Here she stood, gazing at white windows shuttered fast and grayness walls concealed behind tapestries of ivy. It was, she said, "like 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 house slumbered on until she began to write Rebecca, with Menabilly rechristened Manderley.
Rebecca begins, "Concluding dark I dreamt I went to Manderley again." Every novelist since has basis their teeth in envy: here is all the enchantment of a child's story, with an irresistible melancholy hung about information technology. The narrator is on a winding path alone, and her way is barred. The dreamer is the second Mrs de Winter (we never know her name), 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 Winter in a Monte Carlo hotel. He owns the famous Manderley, and is perfectly calibrated to the needs of an agog 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's face, parchment-white, set on a skeleton's frame".
Du Maurier holds up the gilded mirror in which Manderley is reflected, just kickoff she broke the glass
Manderley is "a thing of grace and beauty, exquisite and faultless" – but information technology is haunted by the spectre of Rebecca, the starting time Mrs de Winter, who drowned out in the bay. Her body may be rotting in the family catacomb, only her spirit is vital and seductive: she lives in the inscription on the flyleaf of a book, the perfectly chosen drapes and ornaments, the evening gowns still hanging in her cupboard. Rebecca, information technology seems, was beautiful but boyish, brave only gracious, an attentive hostess and a loving wife. How can the second Mrs de Wintertime, with her thin hair and dispiriting clothes, compete?
This, however, is non a volume to be trusted. Du Maurier holds upward the gilded mirror in which Manderley is reflected, but commencement she broke the glass. For Rebecca lives also in Mrs Danvers's curiously bitter grief and in Proverb'south restless fits of anger; 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 you trust the innocent narrator. For all her insistence that she is drab, shy, uncertain of herself, we certainly know this: the name nosotros'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 past violence as by ardour. Before long the reader wanders from room to room "a trivial fearful, a picayune afraid", with the "odd, uneasy feeling" that they "might come upon something unawares".
Rebecca sold in vast numbers, and has never been out of print. In the 80 years since its publication it has inspired prequels, sequels and an opera, with Manderley built and rebuilt for idiot box, moving-picture show and stage. During the second World State of war a copy was used by German intelligence as a code book. It is not 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, "In that location is no such thing as romantic love. This is a statement of fact, and I defy all those who concord a contrary stance." No romantic novelist, then, but certainly a Gothic ane. Rebecca is in the yard, disruptive tradition of the Gothic: it is deliciously transgressive, enticing the reader into complicity; it shocks all the more because its menace blows in on Rebecca's azalea scent; information technology creates a home place within which every furtive longing of the human heart seems non but possible but permissible – if yous can stand the penalization.
The careful reader will discern Du Maurier's preoccupation with gender and sexuality, which grows more pertinent with passing years, non less. It is telling that the 2nd Mrs de Winter muses on Rebecca'due south short hair, her sporting backbone, her distaste for male attention; she has liberated herself from the social confines of her sexual practice, and her successor – eager to play the dutiful wife, with manners and clothes above reproach – looks on with troubled awe. In this respect Rebecca recalls Du Maurier's own sexuality and gender anxiety: as an ardent 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 self, and once wrote of her adored cousins, "They are boys. Hurrah for them!"
I get-go read Rebecca at maybe 13, half-drowsing in the back of the family unit car. Arrested at one time by that opening line I said to my female parent, "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 before I realised I could never buy a ticket to the house and gardens – would never see the boathouse, the Happy Valley, the sloping lawns. But it is as existent to me as the bricks-and-mortar houses where I have lived. The name arouses in me non the pleasing recollection of a well-loved book but a response rooted in the senses that is indistinguishable from retention.
The boat that Rebecca sailed unmarried-handed in that glittering Cornish bay was called Je Reviens – "I Return". And and then information technology is for me, and for other readers of this masterful, troubling and wickedly seductive novel: nosotros sigh, shut the cover, put the book dorsum on the shelf; but again and again, when the scarlet rhododendrons are in bloom, we return to Manderley.
This is the introduction by Sarah Perry, author of Later Me Comes the Flood and The Essex Snake, to the 80th-ceremony edition of Rebecca, by Daphne D u Maurier (Virago Modernistic Classics, £fourteen.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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