Rebecca (1938)
Aims of Lecture
• Consideration of Rebecca as an adaptation of
Jane Eyre, to be itself adapted by women
writers
• Introduction to Du Maurier and specifically her
fifth novel
• Consideration of genre and narrative voice
• Analysis of dominant themes and tropes in the
novel
• The construction of femininity and class
• Endings and beginnings
Literary Heritage
• Homage
to Jane Eyre (1847), complete with spectre
of first wife, Grace Poole character, Rochester-like
hero and fire
•Also elements of Bluebeard story
•Jean Rhys rewrote Jane Eyre from the point of view of
Rochester’s first wife in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
•Two ‘sequels’ to Rebecca – Susan Hill’s Mrs De
Winter (1993) and Sally Beauman’s Rebecca’s Tale
(2001)
•Also Divine Victim by Mary Wings, an ironic lesbian
appropriation of Rebecca (1993)
Rebecca’s impact
• Has one of the most famous opening lines in English
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Literature
Was adapted as a stage play in 1939
In 1938 Neville Chamberlain was said to have a copy of
the novel in his briefcase as he flew to Munich in the
hope of ‘peace in our time’
Hitchcock directed a film version in 1940
Novel accused of plagiarism by two authors and is said
to bear a strong similarity to A Successora (a Brazilian
novel by Caroline Nabuco – the similarity explained
away by their resemblance to Jane Eyre
As the model for romantic fiction ever since
Genre: romance, gothic, crime thriller?
Romance fiction
• The courtship is the plot
• Hero older/richer/powerful
• The couple are the only people
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who don’t realise they’re perfect
for each other
Heroine has no family ties
Action often takes place
somewhere alien or ‘foreign’
Any love rivals melt away
A crux point is when the power
dynamic shifts and the brutish
hero becomes nurturant and
caring
Gothic
• Medieval, continental
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settings
Large ancestral piles,
and locked rooms
Virgins in peril
Haunting, spectres and
the uncanny
Sexual deviance, incest
Murder and concealment
Narrative Voice
• Use of first person – older
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women narrating her young,
more diffident self
Flashback – the beginning
reflects on a past which will
become the main topic of the
story
Fantasies obscure
perception and reality,
Relationship with reader –
how is empathy
encouraged?
Narrative tone –irritatingly
self-effacing; masochistic?
‘I am very different from that
self who drove to Manderley
for the first time, hopeful and
eager, handicapped by a
rather desperate gaucherie
and filled with an intense
desire to please. It was my
lack of poise of course that
made such a bad
impression on people like
Mrs Danvers. What must I
have seemed like after
Rebecca?’ (Chapter 2)
Heroes and heroines
• Maxim – ‘he belonged to a walled city of the fifteenth
century, a city of narrow, cobbled streets and thin spires
where the inhabitants wore pointed shoes and worsted
hose.’ (chapter 3)
• The anonymous narrator – ‘I felt like someone furtive
peering through the keyhole of a locked door, and a little
furtively I laid the book aside… I wished he were less
remote; and I anything but the creature that I was in my
shabby coat and skirt, my broad-brimmed school-girl hat.’
(chapter 4)
Dominant imagery and themes
• The house as a living being – Manderley substitutes for
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Rebecca
Nature represents unbridled sexuality
Use of colour (espec red) to express danger and passion
Secrets and obsessions
‘a husband is not so very different from a father after all. There
is a certain type of knowledge I prefer you not to have. It’s
better kept under lock and key. So that’s that.’ (chapter 16)
Hauntings and possession
Dreams, nightmares and fantasy
Corruption – ‘Rebecca was incapable of love, of tenderness,
of decency. She was not even normal
Femininity as doubled or binary opposition
• ‘Both women reflect aspects of du Maurier’s own complex personality:
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she divided herself between them, and the splitting, doubling and
mirroring devices she uses throughout the text destabilise it but give it
resonance’ (S. Beauman, Afterword, 430)
East wing v. west wing; innocence v. sexual knowledge; maturity v
youth;
Maxim imagines his second wife as Alice in Wonderland for the
costume ball; but at this point she ‘becomes’ Rebecca
‘I don’t want you to look like you did just now. You had a twist to your
mouth and a flash of knowledge in your eyes. Not the right sort of
knowledge.’ (chapter 16)
‘She had all the courage and spirit of a boy, had my Mrs De Winter.
She ought to have been a boy, I often told her that.’ (chapter 18)
Rethinking romance
• ‘romance fiction deals above all with the doubts and
delights of heterosexuality, an institution which
feminism has seen as problematic from the start.’
(Light 327)
• ‘A great deal of our satisfaction in reading these
novels comes, I am convinced, from the elements of
a revenge fantasy, from our conviction that the
woman is bringing the man to his knees and that all
the while he is being so hateful, he is internally
grovelling, grovelling, grovelling…’ (Modleski 1982:
45)
Class
• The narration of the near past inspires nostalgia for a
lost order the vanishing ‘great houses’ and the loyal
servant
• When narrator breaks and conceals the china cupid:
‘Is not that the sort of thing the between-maid is
supposed to do, Mrs Danvers?’ (chapter 12)
• Of Favell: ‘Those hot blue eyes, that loose mouth, and
the careless familiar laugh. Some people would
consider him attractive. Girls in sweet shops giggling
behind the counter, and girls who gave one
programmes in a cinema’ (chapter 16)
• Of Beatrice: ‘They had guts, the women of her race.
They were not like me.’ (chapter 17)
Endings (and beginnings)
• How does Du Maurier have us as readers
endorse the concealment of a crime?
• We do not return to the flashback at the
beginning, so how do we finish this book?
• Aren’t romances about ‘happy endings’?
• Is Rebecca victorious?
• What do we make of the fact that by the
end, the narrator is still a young woman?
‘The house was a sepulchre’
• ‘We have no secrets now from one
another. All things are shared. Granted
that our little hotel is dull, and the food
indifferent, and that day after day
dawns very much the same, yet we
would not have it otherwise… We both
appreciate simplicity, and we are
sometimes bored – well, boredom is a
pleasing antidote to fear’ (chapter 2)
Hitchcock and Du Maurier
• On being asked by Francois Truffaut ‘were
you satisfied with Rebecca?’ Hitchcock
replies:
‘Well, it’s not a Hitchcock picture; it’s a
novelette, really. The story is old-fashioned;
there was a whole school of feminine
literature at the period and though I’m not
against it, the fact is that the story is lacking
in humour.’
Rebecca (1940;1997): Lecture Aims
• Consideration of Hitchcock’s film and Selznick’s role in it
• Relationship of Director to producer to studio and industrial context
• Stars and casting
• Lighting and cinematography
• What is adapted? What is transformed
• Paratextual relations
• Consideration of TV serial
• The different shape and context of a TV adaptation
• The impact of the 1990s on ‘classic adaptation’ and heritage
movies
• Casting, properties, location and historical location
• Thematic shifts
• Visual pleasure and TV series traditions
Hitchcock v. Selznick
• ‘No film adaptation can be analyzed as an independent entity;
instead, it must be assessed as one entry within a range of
decisions by the corporation and the broader fields in which
literature and film circulate.’ (Edwards, 33-4)
• Selznick International Pictures – a small studio which
attempted to refine its ‘brand’ through Gone with the Wind
(1939), Rebecca (1940) and Jane Eyre (1944)
• ‘the original script provided for two scenes of vomiting on
boats… David O. Selznick, however, was outraged by these
scenes, as well as by other changes Hitchcock had made, and
he insisted that Hitchcock delete the offensive scenes in order
to remain true to what he considered the feminine spirit of the
book.’ (Modleski, 42)
• Selznick credited with imagining the responses of the female
audience and therefore contributing to the growth of the
women’s film – its success consciously linked to the impact of
Gone with the Wind
Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980)
• Rebecca was his first
Hollywood movie
• Directed an adaptation
of Du Maurier’s Jamaica
Inn in the UK in 1939
• Also directed Du Maurier
short story The Birds in
1963
• Rebecca won Best
Picture and Best
Cinematography Oscars
‘Joan Fontaine’s dress was beautiful and
expensive looking, but it was also on loan
from the wardrobe of Gone with the Wind.’
(Edwards, 42)
The stars
• Laurence Olivier – Hollywood ‘royalty’ (along with his then
wife, Vivien Leigh). Played Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights
(1939) and Darcy in Pride and Prejudice (1940)
• Joan Fontaine – a relative unknown at this point; goes on
to reprise the role, to an extent, in Jane Eyre (1943); won
Oscar in Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941)
• George Sanders – often played urbane scoundrels (Oscar
for best supporting actor, All About Eve (1950)
• Judith Anderson – Australian by birth and a respected
theatre actress before moving into films in 1930s
The haunting of Mrs Danvers
• ‘Mrs Danvers was almost never seen
walking and was rarely shown in
motion. It she entered a room in which
the heroine was, what happened is
that the girl suddenly heard a sound
and there was the ever-present Mrs
Danvers, standing perfectly still by her
side.’ (Modleski quoting Truffaut)
‘the fascination of the film, like the novel, turns not on the
trajectory of the heterosexual romance but in the portrayal
of the force that threatens to derail that romance, Rebecca
herself, who is realised only as an evanescent ghost-like
presence that haunts the house and the imagination of its
occupants, in particular, the imagination of the narrator
heroine. While the heroine’s obsession with Rebecca is
partly explicable by her desire to become the mistress of
Manderley that she thinks her husband wants her to be, it
is mediated by the sinister figure of Mrs Danvers, who
harbors what novel and film portray as a “perverse” erotic
attachment to her dead idol. In her identification with
Rebecca, the heroine not only mimes the idolatry that she
imputes to her husband but she also mimes the idolatry of
Danvers in a way that renders her own fascination with
Rebecca “perversely” erotic.’ (Allen, 312)
Paratexts & Key Narrative Shifts
• ‘the “Rebecca luxury
Wardrobe” (produced,
sold and distributed by
Kiviette-Gowns, Inc.)
and “Rebecca Makeup
Kit” contributed to the
prestige brand-concept,
and implicitly advertised
the upcoming release of
the film, and promised
ancillary income for the
company.’ (Edwards, 38)
• Maxim does not murder
his wife
• Mrs De Winter stays at
Manderley while Maxim,
Julyan, Crawley and
Favell go to London
• Mrs Danvers perishes
with Manderley
Rebecca (1997)
• ‘the emphasis is on equality between the sexes, and on high
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production values which make much of cars, costumes and
settings. The opening tracking shot is of the heroine, sketching
a beautifully sunny coastline in Monte Carlo. The gentle music
shows us that this will be a romantic drama.’ (D’Monté,169)
The displaying of Rebecca: ‘the more “real” a person Rebecca
comes, the less firm her hold on the narrator’ (D’ Monté, 170)
Setting of the 1920s
Maxim tries to save Mrs Danvers (who, as in Hitchcock is
shown as deliberately setting fire to the house)
The ending showing Maxim as having sustained injuries from
the attempted rescue (a la Rochester)
Features
• Clanging string-heavy score
• Casting:
• Vamping up Mrs Van Hopper (Faye Dunaway)
• Star casting for Mrs Danvers (Diana Rigg)
• Charles Dance (usually villain or person of intrique) 51 at film’s release
• Emilia Fox (mother played the same role 23 at film’s release
• Actual date given – 1927 (why?)
• It is the second Mrs De Winter who keeps uttering the name
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‘Rebecca’
Interpolated cocktail scene where Maxim storms out
Has scene of meeting with grandmother
Maxim strangles rather than shoots Rebecca
Mrs Danvers rarely seen in motion and never blinks (Hitchcock
homage?)
Location and heritage
• Manderley ‘looks like a National Trust
property, not a foreboding, gloomy
mansion which dwarfs the central
character’ (D’Monté, 170)
Further Reading
• Allen, Richard. “Daphne du Maurier and Alfred Hitchcock”.
A Companion to Literature and Film. Eds Robert Stam
and Alessandra Raengo. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. 298325.
• D’Monté, Rebecca. “Origin and Ownership: Stage, Film
and Television Adaptations of Daphne du Maurier’s
Rebecca.” Adaptation in Contemporary Culture: Textual
Infidelities. London: Continuum, 2009. 163-173.
• Edwards, Kyle. ‘Brand name Literature” Film Adaptation
and Selznick International Pictures’ “Rebecca” (1940),
Cinema Journal, Vol 45. No. 3, Spring 2006, 32-58.
• Modleski, Tania. The Women who Knew Too Much:
Hitchcock and Feminist Theory. London: Methuen, 1988.