Tag: Daphne Du Maurier

What an exceptional read.  Reading Rebecca is like reading My Cousin Rachel all over again.  Because I know Du Maurier’s writing style, that she was capable in destroying or even killing off main characters that readers grow to love, it was quite a nerve wrecking experience reading Rebecca.  On top of that, Du Maurier was gifted in writing suspense novels as well as breathing life to her characters.  This makes Rebecca a thrilling read, from start to finish.

One year ago, after reading the library copy of My Cousin Rachel, I love the book so much that I bought a copy for my keeping.  While I was at it, I bought a copy of Rebecca too.  I have been wanting to read Rebecca for quite some time.  Haven’t got around to.  On our recent trip to Hong Kong, I brought it along as my reading companion.

Although Rebecca was first published in 1938, I found it as entertaining as some of the modern literature published today.  There are four major components in this book.  Manderley, which is an estate dominating the entire story, with a west wing facing the sea and an east wing facing a rose garden.  Max de Winter, who owns and lives in Manderley.  Rebecca – Max’s first wife and is dead.  The narrator – Max’s current wife and remains nameless throughout the book.

Rebecca is intriguing in a couple of ways.  Rebecca is dead, since the beginning of the book.  Yet, under the hands of Du Maurier, this character has come alive through the recollections of others, the metaphors that represent her, the legacy Rebecca has left behind, even the drama that still continues.  It is as though her presence and physical dominance is felt strongly throughout the book, as a dead character.  It is only fitting that the book is titled as such.

The narrator – also presence throughout the book – on the other hand, is very different from the Rebecca character.  She is shy and young.  Coming from a humble background, the narrator is socially awkward and unsophisticated.  She is the opposite of Rebecca, and without a name.  She is the living Mrs de Winter but with an identity slowly dissolved away, what good is her existence?  The dualism of Rebecca and the narrator is striking, best to be explained by Sally Beauman in her afterword.

Shy, and socially reclusive, [Daphne Du Maurier] detested the small talk and the endless receptions she was expected to attend and give, in her capacity of commanding officer’s wife [in Egypt].  This homesickness and her resentment of wifely duties, together with the guilty sense of her own ineptitude when performing them, were to surface in Rebecca: they cluster around the two famale antagonists of the novel, the living and obedient second wife, Mrs de Winter, and the dead, rebellious and indestructible first wife Rebecca.  Both women reflect aspects of du Maurier’s own complex personality: she divided herself between them, and the splitting, doubling, and mirroring devices she uses throughout the text destabilise it but give it resonance.  With Rebecca we enter a world of dreams and daydreams, but they always threaten to tip over into nightmare.

The way this story is narrated is worth a mention too.  It starts with a dream by the narrator, on the house Manderley.  It then transits to a present day narration that gives hints to what the ending of the story may be.  The narrator reading a story aloud to a nameless partner that brought her back in time years ago when she was the paid companion for a Mrs Van Hopper doing similar things.  What a full circle.  The flow in time is so smooth that it took me several repeated reading of those pages in order to fully appreciate it.  The story ends with a dream – the only two true dreams in Rebecca – that wraps it back to the beginning.  The ending is so abrupt that left me speechless.

I am torn between My Cousin Rachel and Rebecca.  Till now, I am still unable to decide which one is my favorite.

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An excerpt below demonstrates how Du Maurier brings Rebecca to life literally through the narrator.

[Maxim] did not look at me, he went on reading his paper, contented, comfortable, having assumed his way of living, the master of his house.  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, and 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.

And as in her previous book My Cousin Rachel, there is some interesting observations that may still ring truth today.

‘You have qualities that are just as important, far more so, in fact.  […]  … but I should say that kindness, and sincerity, and – if I may say so – modesty are worth far more to a man, to a husband, than all the wit and beauty in the world.’

I normally do not read books that are written before I was born.  I mean, way before I was born.  This book “My Cousin Rachel” was published in 1951.  I cannot even relate to what the world was like back then.  Inside a library, deflated by my return of a book that I was not able to even get through the second chapter, I was looking for one that is nourishing, yet easy to read.  I was attracted by this book’s hardcover design.  Very unique, and elegant.  I flipped to chapter one and immediately, I was hooked.

They used to hang men at Four Turnings in the old days.  Not any more, though.  Now, when a murderer pays the penalty for his crime, he does so up at Bodmin, after fair trial at the Assizes.  That is, if the law convicts him, before his own conscience kills him.  It is better so.  Like a surgical operation.  And the body has decent burial, though a nameless grave.

I was intrigued.  What is going to happen next?  I read on.  Before I realized, I was reading in the library, continued reading at Subway over my lunch, and I read it while waiting for Cynthia to leave the office.  I read it in the evening and in the morning over breakfast.  I could not stop.  It became, briefly, my obsession.

The narrator Philip from Cornwall is 24 years old (or shall I say four-and-twenty like in the novel?) when he inherits his elder cousin Ambrose’s estate and wealth.  Ambrose has died in Italy and at that time, was married to his cousin Rachel (who is half English half Italian).  Did Ambrose really die of brain tumor?  Or was he murdered by his new young wife?  Now that Rachel is heading to England, what is her motive and what will happen when the two meet?

“My Cousin Rachel” is a mystery novel, a masterpiece of its genre.  There are layers upon layers that are built onto the story.  There are hooks within the story that lead you onto seeing the characters from different perspectives.  What if this is true?  What if that is true?  Which one is the truth?  Characters come alive by the hands of Du Maurier.  Philip is young and inexperience, arrogance yet innocent.  Rachel is charming and mysterious, unpredictable and full of mood swing.  Both characters are acting on impulse.  Philip’s actions are rather predictable but Rachel’s not.  Other characters too.  Such as Philip’s wise godfather who is always cautious and selfless, knows where to draw a line and when to step aside.  His godfather’s daughter who has always been a good friend of Philip no matter what.  As well as Philip’s servants.  The characters are alive, even those who are dead.  Such mastery in literature, it is a rare gem I have found in recent days.

The center theme, to me, is about the collision of the two worlds – Philip’s and Rachel’s.  It is jealousy and obsession mixed with delusion and deception.  Because Philip is blinded by his background (he has not been raised or around women in his childhood), his infatuation, and his lack of experience, it is hard for the readers to truly decipher who Rachel is, through a man’s and through such a man’s eyes.  This rift could also be caused by the cultural difference between England and the Continent back in the old days whereby there was a certain expectation on a woman’s role in the society in England.  Should a woman yield to money, gift, and power when it came to her marriage?  Could a woman decide for herself?  After reading the novel once, I must admit that there are still much I am unable to grasp.  I feel as though I am hopelessly charmed by Du Maurier’s writing yet at the same time rendered helpless, wondering what the truth is.  I may never find the answer.  It could as well be a mysterious that Du Maurier has taken to the other world.

Part of this book has invoked a powerful and vivid recollection of my younger days.  I am sure most of you can relate too.  The days when we were young and innocent, thinking that anything is possible.  Days when we could give it all without reservation, just gambling everything away.  Days when we first fell in love, the silly things we thought, said, and did.  The clumpy things we did to the opposite sex.  The misunderstanding.  The make ups and the break ups.  The frustration, the infatuation.  Hope and despair.

On a side note, this version I am reading contains an introduction by Sally Beauman.  It is beautifully written.  If I am to take her words for it, “My Cousin Rachel” could well be Daphne Du Maurier’s best work in her entire career.

The next bit of this entry are some of my favorite quotes that I wish to share.  First, on women whom some men cannot live with, cannot live without.

‘I don’t know what’s come over you,’ she said; ‘you are losing your sense of humour.’  And she patted me on the shoulder and went upstairs.  That was the infuriating thing about a woman.  Always the last word.  Leaving one to grapple with ill-temper, and she herself serene.  A woman, it seemed, was never in the wrong.  Or if she was, she twisted the fault to her advantage, making it seem otherwise.  She would fling these pin-pricks in the air, these hints of moonlight strolls with y godfather, or some other expedition, a visit to Lostwithiel market, and ask me in all seriousness whether she should wear the new bonnet that had come by parcel post from London – the veil had a wider mesh and did not shroud her, and my godfather had told her it became her well.  And when I fell to sulking, saying I did not care whether she concealed her features with a mask, her mood soared to serenity yet higher – the conversation was at dinner on the Monday – and while I sat frowning she carried on her talk with Seecombe, making me seem more sulky than I was.

Perhaps it is a high time to note that literature written in the old days has a foreign touch to it.  Fortunately, this book is highly readable.  I found myself chuckle at times by the unfamiliar usage of words.  I find it charming.

Du Maurier describes the scenery well.  The era of the story is unknown.  There is something magical when reading how she paints the picture with words.  Such enchantment.

In December the first frosts came with the full moon, and then my nights of vigil held a quality harder to bear.  There was a sort of beauty to them, cold and clear, that caught at the heart and made me stare in wonder.  From my windows the long lawns dipped to the meadows, and the meadows to the sea, and all of them were white with frost, and white too under the moon.  The trees that ringed the lawns were black and still.  Rabbits came out and pricked about the grass, then scattered to their burrows; and suddenly, from the hush and stillness, I heard that high sharp bark of a vixen, with the little sob that follows it, eerie, unmistakable, unlike any other call that comes by night, and out of the woods I saw the lean low body creep and run out upon the lawn, and hide again where the trees would cover it.  Later I hard the call again, away from the distance, in the open park, and now the full moon topped the trees and held the sky, and nothing stirred on the lawns beneath my window.

Yet another view of a woman through the eye of the narrative (written by a woman!)  I approve the entire paragraph.

Why, in a sudden, had she changed?  If Ambrose had known little about women, I knew less.  That warmth so unexpected, catching a man unaware and lifting him to rapture, and then swiftly, for no reason, the changing mood, casting him back where he had stood before.  What trail of though, confused and indirect, drove through those minds of theirs, to cloud their judgement?  What waves of impulse swept about their being, moving them to anger and withdrawal, or else to sudden generosity?  We were surely different, with our blunter comprehension, moving more slowly to the compass points, while they, erratic and unstable, were blown about their course by winds of fancy.

This quote is my favorite.  Because it seems so true.

My tutor at Harrow, when teaching in Fifth Form, told us once that truth was something intangible, unseen, which sometimes we stumbled upon and did not recognise, but was found, and held, and understood only by old people near their death, or sometimes by the very pure, the very young.