A review by joyride
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

4.0

Manderley was ours no longer.
Manderley was no more.

I gave this book its first try a few months ago. As is a bad habit of mine, I took a very shallow read of the first two or so chapters and tossed it aside. I found it slow, and narrated by a pathetic main character.

Soon after, I began to take an interest in the musical version (it's a long story). It began to bother me that I didn't understand the source material despite loving the music, and finally decided to give it another go.

This is a rich book. It feels cheap to say I found it 'fun', because it was more than that; it was a rich, melancholy and dark tale that I thoroughly enjoyed following. I enjoyed not just the twisting plot, but turning over what du Marier had to say about gender, sexuality, etc (just one thing that struck me was the upheld ideas of masculinity the book presents; we do not get swarthy & hearty men as the paragon of Male-ness but instead a brooding, thin, charismatic and aloof...). I liked her take on the Gothic as well. As someone who grew up on older authors like Poe, I've been finding myself a little weary of the old-world setting and kind-of-stuffy tropes/characters. Rebecca feels oddly modern, combining thriller and even crime novel elements into a novel that is, still at it's core, a classic Gothic 'haunted/menacing house' type story. The ending chapters reminded me more of a Christie than We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and I found it really refreshing.

All the characters are sketched out well, but I have a special love for the main character. I initially found her annoying and pathetic; she was so easily cowed, so scared, mousey. But upon my second read, I began to unpack my anger and found it arose out of feeling, "I would never do that. I would never bow to Mrs. Danvers, in this situation I would be clever instead of upset...." But would I? Would I have done any better in her situation? And I found the answer was, no. Once I reached that point, I began to really feel for her (in my mind I've named her Daisy ☺). She was lost, unloved, scared and completely out of her depth. No wonder. Because she is such an, ultimately, sympathetic main character, the book is able to have such strength. We become invested in her story, trust her word, feel like she is a friend. The writing of her character was *great*. 

And this is a personal thing, but it's pretty rare for me to finish a fiction book and want to look up academic articles about it. I'm so curious what scholars read the oddly homosocial and homoerotic relationships between Frank and Maxim (although here, Frank is moreso oddly gendered; he's almost a maternal figure to Max), Danvers and Rebecca. Would love to read what they have to say!