sophia_sol | Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier

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Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier

Rebecca is a justifiably famous book! Extremely compelling, very more-ish, and with all sorts of interesting complexity going on.

Going into this book for the first time, I actually already knew pretty much what to expect, because I'm familiar with a musical version of Rebecca. Not that I've ever watched the musical! But there's a euro musical about her, and there's a demo album translating that musical into english -- with, and this is key, bits of narration between the songs telling the listener what's happening. So I already knew all the major emotional beats, the characters, and what to expect out of the plot. Because I've listened to that demo a LOT.

And actually the most surprising thing about reading the book was how unsurprising it was? I expected the musical to have taken more liberties with the text! But in fact it hews remarkably close.

The two things the musical does differently:
1. Maxim kills Rebecca accidentally in the musical (he shoves her, and she falls and dies), whereas he directly shoots her in the book. I will say though that I kind of always read his protestations in the musical as him trying to downplay his culpability tbh. Which means that the knowledge he shot her in the book feels very right to me!
2. The musical is generally more positive about the romantic relationship between Maxim and his nameless second wife, whereas the book is like....this is NOT going to have a happy ending. And this difference is, I believe, related to point one!

Something that gets lost in the transition to musical from novel is the tenor of the protagonist's narration. She is constantly getting carried away with her imaginings of the future or the past or someone else's internal life, to the degree that she seems almost to live more in her imagined version of the world than in reality. I loved this, and how much it added to both a) the constant feeling of foreboding in the novel, and b) the sense of how young and naive and powerless she is.

She's a fascinating character to see through the eyes of; you're encouraged, as the reader, to get drawn into her point of view, to be on her side, to want what she wants, because she seems like just about the only non-sinister thing in the entire book! (well okay, Mrs Van Hopper doesn't seem sinister, just banal and unpleasant)

And somehow, being on her side means that when Maxim finally reveals the truth about Rebecca and what happened to her, you continue to be on the protagonist's side.....where her side is being glad of the news that her husband is a murderer because it means he does love her after all!!! Her one great desire in life is fulfilled, to be loved by someone! And that overwhelming desire to be loved above all else is part of what makes the ending (the beginning) so bleak, because you don't actually get a sense that Maxim loves her, they're just going through the motions of a constrained little life together where she's entirely subservient to him and his moods and his needs, with nothing that actually brings her any joy or inspires her to any of the passions you know she's capable of. She's been smallened by him, because she thinks this is the most she can hope for, the happiest life she thinks she can have.

So yes it turns out the protagonist is a horrible person too, just like most other people in the book, and it's great. And you still care about her!

The other important thing in the book, beyond the protagonist and her narrative perspective on things, is Rebecca and Mrs Danvers being evil lesbians. Because they ARE and it's DELICIOUS.

Actually this is something thing that I think the musical does even better than the book, though the book also does a great job. But musicals are MADE for letting someone take the stage in proper dramatic-evil-lesbian fashion, and Mrs Danvers DELIVERS. Mrs Danvers is all "did u kno Rebecca is a beautiful immortal with magic powers who scorns men, and she loves me very much and would never leave me, and I WILL use this information to bully you to death via song." Amazing.

The song that singlehandedly got me interested in Rebecca back in the day, though, was the Hungarian version of Maxim's confession song, because the actor playing Maxim is just great. (Bereczki Zoltán! He's also great as Mercutio in Rómeó és Júlia, among other things.) There used to be a copy of it on youtube with English subtitles, but at this point unsubtitled Hungarian is your only option, if you want to watch the song.

And if you want to listen to the whole English demo version.......I don't know where to find it online anymore, but uh, I'd be willing to share!!

Besides Evil Lesbians, the other thing I think the musical does better than the book is feeling like it has an ending. The ending of the book is REALLY abrupt. The ability of a musical to do a reprise of a song from the beginning of the story means that it can end in the same place as the book but deliberately point you to think about how the ending ties into the beginning thematically, whereas the book just left me feeling adrift.

Anyway the last thing I have to say about this book is that since becoming interested in birding I have been paying entirely too much attention to what birds authors do and don't mention in their books, and this book has just enough birds to know that du Maurier knows birds exist, but few enough birds that I doubt du Maurier knows anything at all about birds. (There are: blackbirds singing in a flowered valley, one mention of an imagined owl at a dramatic moment, occasional pigeons, and lots and lots of gulls. Did you know gulls are the ONLY kind of bird you get by the sea.)

(the other book that annoyed me recently bird-wise is a reread of The Raven Tower, which contains: ravens and gulls. Did you know gulls are the only kind of bird you get by the sea!!)

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As I am obsessed with the art of adaptation, especially of books I love, I super enjoyed reading your thoughts here.

Btw, have you read My Cousin Rachel? It's my favorite du Maurier, and given what you enjoyed about Rebecca, I think you'd love it too.

Thanks!! And ooh tell me more about what you love about My Cousin Rachel, I've never heard of it before!

IT'S SO GOOD. The summary is uninteresting but: this guy's uncle goes to Italy and marries a woman named Rachel, uncle dies under mysterious circumstances, Rachel comes back to Cornwall and dude is suspicious but also attracted to her. Things progress from there.

More relevantly, some things I love about it: majorly unreliable narrator who is truly awful but has no idea he's truly awful, the main character Rachel is so interesting and mysterious and trapped in the patriarchy and trying to navigate it in ways that are complicated, it's never entirely clear whether she did Bad Thing or not (although everyone who reads it has an Opinion on this), general good du Maurier writing. I absolutely recommend it!

That sounds fascinating, thanks so much for letting me know about it! Adding it to my to-read list :)

Yay!

okay so I'm partway in and also have read a bunch of reviews and I'm dying to know, what's your opinion on whether or not Rachel is guilty?

I actually bounce back and forth? I have definitely had, "She did it AND GOOD FOR HER!" feelings but also, "This woman is unjustly accused!" feelings. I need a reread to see how I feel atm!

oh extremely legit!

currently I'm about a third of the way in and I'm at feeling she's unjustly accused, but there's plenty more book to go to provide evidence in multiple directions!

I'm super excited that you're reading it!

I just finished my cousin rachel and I am overcome with many feelings about it, it is SO GOOD, thank you again for recommending it! It may take me a while though to muster thoughts into a proper review, we'll see how that goes!

Currently I think I'm about 50% "Rachel was unjustly accused" and 25% "Rachel did it and GOOD FOR HER" and 25% "can I enter the story and murder some people on Rachel's behalf"

I am BOUNCING with excitement! I am so so excited that you loved it! (And delighted that you read it so quickly!)

Currently I think I'm about 50% "Rachel was unjustly accused" and 25% "Rachel did it and GOOD FOR HER" and 25% "can I enter the story and murder some people on Rachel's behalf"

So so understandable!

I did not know there was a musical until I read your post!

yeah I don't think it's well known in the english-speaking world!

I linked below a youtube video going into why the transfer to Broadway never happened. (Money fell through, basically.) But man, I'd've loved to have seen it.

Anyway the last thing I have to say about this book is that since becoming interested in birding I have been paying entirely too much attention to what birds authors do and don't mention in their books, and this book has just enough birds to know that du Maurier knows birds exist, but few enough birds that I doubt du Maurier knows anything at all about birds. (There are: blackbirds singing in a flowered valley, one mention of an imagined owl at a dramatic moment, occasional pigeons, and lots and lots of gulls. Did you know gulls are the ONLY kind of bird you get by the sea.)

LMAO. To be fair, there are a lot of gulls by the sea!! And you squint at them for a long time trying to see if there's a red dot or a black dot on the beak and what colour the legs are and if they look mottled like a first year gull or a second year gull and are those black wingtips?

I've been learning bird calls and it's kind of hilarious because I can't seem to turn this ability off any more, so my mind tries to automatically identify any bird calls in film or something. There was one movie I was watching where there was a very quick chickadee call in the middle of the dialogue in the background (so not one where the sound team put it in), and yeah, that scene was not filmed in Italy, it was definitely filmed in the Americas :) Thanks brain, that was definitely useful canonical knowledge.

du Maurier also wrote The Birds! (Though I read this many years ago before I got into birding. I can't remember if there's detailed bird description there.)

Wait--The Birds is an adaptation???

I'm now wondering if my story problems in the film are fixed in the book.

Yes - the Hitchcock movie is based on the short story!

Hahaha it is true that there are a LOT of gulls! I haven't been to the seaside since before my sudden interest in birds so I can't even speak with experience to what else one might see, I just know that my bird book spends like, half its pagecount on birds one mostly sees near large bodies of water. (And so far I've been avoiding learning things about gulls because they seem intimidating!)

Learning bird calls: also intimidating! So I'm super impressed how much identification you're able to do, even in films! Although chickadees are like...the one bird I do know how to recognize by sound, so even I might have caught that one :P

That's a lot of page count for gulls! :)

I love chickadee calls, they're so cute! It is intimidating but I was really motivated to do so, because I would go birding and look around, and then also check what other people had seen, and realize they had seen way more than me, and a lot of that is bird song. I actually took a course from Cornell Ornithology (they run ebird and Merlin and such) which was really helpful. I don't think you have to take a course - there are many bird books which try to break it down. It helped to have it explained to me what to listen for (a buzz? a trill? is it going up in pitch or down? how many times does it repeat?) as well as to see spectograms (i.e. audio represented visually) while listening. They started people off with really distinctive sounds, like the song sparrow, the red-winged blackbird, etc.

I was actually just last night listening to a several-years-old webinar from Cornell about bird calls, which I thought was going to be more informative than it was, it was mostly just the dude explaining why you should buy his book on bird calls! That kind of guided course experience does actually sound very helpful in terms of figuring out how to approach the whole learning process, I'm going to have to consider that. I have tried listening through bird calls on merlin to try to learn what to listen for, and just got overwhelmed with a) how many there are and b) how similar a lot of them are

Oh, that's not very helpful!

I agree, I tried also listening on Merlin, but it's overwhelming to try to remember (especially as birds have songs and calls and some have multiple kinds or variants!) Chip calls are super similar too, IMO. This is the link to the course I took https://academy.allaboutbirds.org/product/be-a-better-birder-how-to-identify-bird-songs/ It does have a free first lesson - the next ones are recordings with many birds singing at once, and then breakdowns of what to for, spectograms, qualitative descriptions to help describe what you can hear, etc.

ugh yes chip calls sound IDENTICAL! rude of the birds to all sound so similar tbh. Anyway thanks for linking me to that course, it looks really helpful and like just what I need at this point!

Um...I would love to have the demo of the Rebecca musical?

Coincidentally, the youtuber wait in the wings just did a whole video about why the Rebecca musical never made it to Broadway, and since watching that I've desperately wanted to hear it.

I read this book in middle school, at I think too young an age to get how incredibly SHIT it is to find out your husband murdered his first wife. I was totally bought into the great romance of it and that of COURSE Rebecca brought it on herself. Then I recently watched the most recent (not great) adaptation and was like MY GOD EVERYONE IN THIS HAS APPALLING JUDGMENT.

Also, when I borrowed this from the library, the librarian spoiled the ending for me. I don't know why. Maybe she thought I was rereading?

I don't know how the cool kids are sharing files these days, but if you give me your email address I am happy to email you the demo! :)

Thanks for linking that youtube video also, I'm looking forward to watching it. I had no idea Rebecca had ever gotten that close to actually having a broadway version made, what a tragedy!

Oh man, reading books in middle school and being too young to realize how terrible everyone is: A MOOD. This was me and Jane Eyre.

The thing that I've been thinking about recently is the ways in which this book in direct conversation with Jane Eyre, with similar thematic shapes ('this house is haunted by the last wife who was here') and very parallel endings ('and, as a result of that, it burned down, equalizing the power and wealth differential between me and my much wealthier husband!') which to me makes it feel like an even more pointed contrast that protagonist-chan's desire to be loved so completely drowns out whatever moral center she might have (in comparison to Jane, whose stubborn, triumphant refusal to be morally diminished is the centerpiece of the novel.) But I have to reread to see if it is as much in conversation as I remember or if I'm bringing that to the text out of my own English-major head ...

Oh!!! I mean this is certainly a meaningful parallel to draw, which says interesting things! I have no idea if it is all intended by du Maurier, but tbh I don't think it needs to be, it is there for the reader to draw on! I love the comparison between Jane's determined morality and protagonist-chan's disinterest in morals when it's in conflict with what she wants.

I also think you could say interesting things about Jane's prioritization of her own self and her trust in her instincts and in her abilities and in her judgement of right and wrong, in contrast to protag-chan's interest in making everything be about other people; something something individualism? and/or taking to extremes what's considered to be a ~good wife~?

yeah!! Jane's stance throughout the book is that love from others is a nice-to-have but the most important thing is for her to love and respect herself, without which anything else is pointless; protagonist-chan never even starts to build herself that foundation and without it everything else crumbles, including, literally, Manderley.

this is delicious and I want to read an entire paper about it now tbh

I have never seen the narrator of Rebecca called protagonist-chan before and it's so perfect? I feel like it really perfectly encapsulates the kind of relationship the text builds between her and the reader.

right?? I started calling her that as a joke -- it's something I've seen people use to refer to the player characters of visual/otome novels -- and have gotten increasingly attached to it.

I love Rebecca and Daphne du Maurier in general. (So excited to see upthread that you're now reading My Cousin Rachel! I might love it even more than Rebecca... no, I can't love anything more than Rebecca... but AS MUCH as Rebecca, which is a LOT.)

But YES, I love how deeply the narrative takes you into protagonist-chan's headspace, and how much of that is thoughts about what might happen, or what people might be saying about her, or what Rebecca might have been like... I read this book when I was in high school and I was SO immersed that it genuinely did not occur to me that there was anything off about her reaction "Maxim killed Rebecca! YAY, that means he loves me!" (It's not that I was in favor of wife-murder but it just did not enter my head that she could have thought, say, "OMG he's a wife-killer, will I be next??")

The Rebecca/Mrs. Danvers subtext went completely over my head at the time (obvs I noticed that Mrs. Danvers was Very Extra about Rebecca, but then EVERYONE seems to be Extra about Rebecca) but at some point I should reread it with a specific eye toward the Rebecca & Mrs. Danvers bits.

I've never been fully satisfied with a Rebecca adaptation, because the internal monolog just doesn't seem to carry over. (It occurs to me that this is the same reason I struggled with the recent We Have Always Lived in the Castle: the narrator has a VERY distinct voice and even a voiceover can't make it all-pervasive like it is in the book.) There's a recent My Cousin Rachel that I've been meaning to see, which might have the same problem, although I don't think Philip's voice is quite as absorbing as protagonist-chan's? But definitely his unreliable narration is key to the way the book works.

I am also amused by your bird-based reading & it makes me want to add more birds to my next book (I'm sure that gulls are the ONLY seaside bird in my books too), not least because this would force me to fulfill my long-held ambition to Get Interested in Birds.

I'm enjoying My Cousin Rachel SO MUCH! I'm about halfway through it at this point, and it's a very different experience than Rebecca but super fun. The narrator is a truly remarkable jerk and tbh Rachel OUGHT to poison him :P

Yeah when I was younger I too was not great at nuance like "maybe the protagonist is not actually trustworthy in what they're telling you to think/feel about things," I bet if I'd read Rebecca as a teen I would also have been 100% in protagonist-chan's corner and probably thought of it as a happy-ending love story.

Tbh I am uh not always great at noticing romantic/sexual subtext, because I'm so firmly aro-ace that I forget that other people might have motivations relating to sexuality if it's not spelled out for me, so I actually don't know if I would have noticed the Mrs Danvers/Rebecca subtext in the book if I hadn't been primed for it by hearing about it from other people. As you say, Mrs Danvers is intense about Rebecca but everyone's intense about Rebecca! The musical helpfully makes it explicit that Mrs Danvers thinks that men were beneath Rebecca (and that Rebecca also felt men were beneath her) which helps lead you to lesbians.

I do feel like you're right that books that feature an unreliable narrator are much harder to translate into visual media. I think it probably can be done in a way that creates a good piece of visual media, but it's inherently going to be a different story than the book, for better or for worse. I think maybe you have to approach it in the way the writer of The Princess Bride did, where it's not about a 1-to-1 translation of book to screen, but thinking through what kinds of effects would evoke a similar experience in the reader, rather than doing the same thing. But Princess Bride is a different sort of thing than what du Maurier is doing with her unreliable narrators, and I do not have the right skills to be able to come up with a suggestion on how to do it right!

If you do add more birds to your next book that would delight me! (I love your books btw!) Getting interested in birds is 100% worth it for its own sake though, because birds are wonderful :D

TBH maybe it was nothing to do with being a teenager and I'm just not noticing that characters are unreliable when I'm in their heads, because I definitely didn't notice Philip's jerkishness till I'd finished the book and thought about it for a bit. (Well, I did notice it when certain things occurred later in the book, but I didn't realize that it had always been such a big part of his character.)

Having said that, even as a teenager I didn't think the ending of Rebecca was happy! I mean, how could it be, when Manderley has been destroyed... and that's how protagonist-chan and Maxim end up in the weird half-life that protagonist-chan describes at the beginning. It's like they're play-acting at being elderly people even though protagonist-chan is approximately 23.

(My impression is that Rebecca thinks EVERYONE is beneath Rebecca, not just men, although maybe ESPECIALLY men.)

I feel that knowing birds would enrich my life! I would take my walks and I would see a small bird and I would go "Ah, a chickadee," or whatever. Right now all small birds are sparrows to me, just as all seaside birds are gulls in books.

I have, a bit embarrassingly, developed a habit of reading through a bunch of Am I The Asshole posts on reddit every day, which I think is actually a really good training ground to learning how to recognize unreliable narrators; there are a lot of people posting to AITA who are definitely assholes who have no idea they're assholes, and you need to read between the lines to see it! I also think that for me at least, my habit of writing book reviews for nearly every book I've read in the last dozen years means that I've put a lot of effort into figuring out how to think about a book, and now I often can't help but apply that even before I'm done a book, which also gives me a hand up in noticing unreliable narrators.

Oh Rebecca absolutely thought everyone was beneath her. Mrs Danvers was beneath her, even! And I think Mrs Danvers wouldn't even dispute that? Mrs Danvers lived to serve Rebecca after all!

It's so delightful every time I see a bird I recognize these days! And it's also delightful to realize just how many more kinds of birds one can easily see just around town than I ever previously thought, once you've learned to notice the differences between birds, even if I haven't learned to actually ID all of them yet. I watch birds flying overhead and recognize that they have different wing-beat patterns and must be different birds, even if I don't know how to recognize anything by wing-beats at this point, for example! Becoming interested in birds means the world is constantly full of bird friends to say hi to, bringing little spots of brightness into every day.

Mrs. Danvers would personally stab anyone who dared to suggest that she might be Rebecca's equal. How DARE, such an insult to Rebecca to suggest ANYONE might be her equal!

Mrs Danvers knows her place, and more importantly, she knows Rebecca's place, which is ABOVE GOD

For anyone who wants to venture into the wonderful world of YouTube recordings...

There are several English-subtitled German video on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtfpQVyXUXVZAFddrarG99eDlxAISiYm4 (pretty sure Maxim is Uwe Kröger, may be original cast)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYkT1Rh7Zvo (Stuttgart act 1; Patten, Ammann, Douwes)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buudlB9-pYk (Stuttgart act 2)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2kGxht2iW0 (another one; Jastraunig, Ammann, Soetenga)

There are still several Hungarian versions up as well, some with muuuuuch better video quality, but no subs at all. They followed the book plot so closely that I think between the English demo album and knowing the book it's probably possible to follow all the important parts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xd6fMew5osA (Part 1; Szinetár, Szabó, Polyák)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awKMXN0h2Jg (Part 2)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=185c9OY1CDI (Part 1; Vágó Zsuzsi, Szabó, Nádasi)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQrZP7A9X5o (Part 2)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMIZxDYa4Wo (Szinetár, Bereczki, and I think Polyák Lilla as Danvers)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UQ1P0RRklg (Vágó Bernadett, Szabó, Janza)

IMO Szabó P. Szilvezster is the most book-Maxim; Bereczki is compelling AF but feels a bit too charismatic and maybe more sympathetic? (Hommonay Zsolt plays him almost fatherly towards wife #2, which is...a take...but no videos of him up that I know of.) All the Danvers actresses are great, but Polyák Lilla is my fave. Vágó Zsuzsi is my favorite "I", followed by Szinetár Dóra - Detti is a bit too Disney Princess in the role, IMO.

Maxim kills Rebecca accidentally in the musical (he shoves her, and she falls and dies), whereas he directly shoots her in the book.

I think this adjustment was taken from the Hollywood movie, which for code reasons couldn't explicitly make Maxim a murderer, IIRC.

whereas the book is like....this is NOT going to have a happy ending. And this difference is, I believe, related to point one!

Did your version have the cut epilogue Du Maurier wrote? It was definitely..."they are forever haunted by the past."

Anyway, I found it to be a really horribly accurate depiction of anxiety and Second Wife is SO very fucked up - I feel like Ben and Frank are both relatively sympathetic (I also think it's sort of implied that Frank might be gay and not entirely objective re: Maxim) and I guess Bea is fine, but otherwise...everyone is horrible. Except for the horse Rebecca beat to death that Danvers tells as some kind of charming story (!), aka one of the reasons I cannot with "Rebecca did nothing wrong, actually" readings.

I get more of a weird maternal vibe than Evil Lesbians in the book - I think the lesbian reading is something that got leaned on in adaptations and then people brought it back to the book - and I'm also not sure Rebecca felt any more real affection for Danvers than she did for anyone else who wasn't Rebecca.

I think this adjustment was taken from the Hollywood movie, which for code reasons couldn't explicitly make Maxim a murderer, IIRC.

Yeah I figured that might be the case about the movie, but they didn't HAVE to go with that in the translation to musical, since the code wouldn't be a concern, so it comes across as a choice specifically made because they want Maxim to be a slightly more reasonable love interest

Did your version have the cut epilogue Du Maurier wrote? It was definitely..."they are forever haunted by the past."

what the heck I had no idea there was a cut epilogue, no, my version defs didn't have that! gotta go figure out where to find that now!!!!

I feel like Ben and Frank are both relatively sympathetic (I also think it's sort of implied that Frank might be gay and not entirely objective re: Maxim) and I guess Bea is fine

Ben is relatively sympathetic, yeah, but the way he's treated by all the characters (and the narrative) is pretty uncomfortable, even if understandable given the perspective on intellectual disabilities at the time, so I really don't know WHAT to think of him and his presence in the book. Frank....idk I didn't really like him, even if I think he was supposed to be one of the few sympathetic-ish characters in the book! And Bea ditto!

Except for the horse Rebecca beat to death that Danvers tells as some kind of charming story (!), aka one of the reasons I cannot with "Rebecca did nothing wrong, actually" readings.

YUPPPP, yikes, I had no idea there were "Rebecca did nothing wrong" readings out there but yeah this anecdote puts her firmly in the camp of "actually genuinely terrible"

I get more of a weird maternal vibe than Evil Lesbians in the book - I think the lesbian reading is something that got leaned on in adaptations and then people brought it back to the book - and I'm also not sure Rebecca felt any more real affection for Danvers than she did for anyone else who wasn't Rebecca.

Yeah, that's fair about the maternal vibe, though I think it can be maternal and lesbian at the same time? But I'm not one to be able to accurately judge when a book is or isn't intending to convey sexual or romantic interest; I do not have a good track record in that regard :P

And I think you're absolutely right about who Rebecca does and doesn't care about! Mrs Danvers' obsession with Rebecca is merely useful for Rebecca, rather than something she reciprocates

I'd love to hear that musical!! Love me a Gothic and a musical, and I love Rebecca.

happy to share! what's your email address to send it to?

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Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier

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