Last Night I Dreamt I Went to Manderley Again
Early 1 morning, nearly a century agone, a young woman trespassed on the grounds of a house called Menabilly. The Cornish sea was pink with sunrise, and blackbirds were singing in the hedge; a five-kilometre path unwound between banks of scarlet rhododendrons, and the lawn was wet with dew. Here she stood, gazing at white windows shuttered fast and grey walls curtained behind tapestries of ivy. Information technology was, she said, "like the sleeping beauty of the fairy tale, until someone should come up to wake her". And indeed the business firm was woken, and has never slept since: the trespasser was Daphne Du Maurier, and the business firm slumbered on until she began to write Rebecca, with Menabilly rechristened Manderley.
Rebecca begins, "Final night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." Every novelist since has ground their teeth in green-eyed: here is all the enchantment of a kid'southward story, with an irresistible melancholy hung about it. The narrator is on a winding path lone, and her way is barred. The dreamer is the 2nd Mrs de Winter (we never know her proper noun), 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 Wintertime in a Monte Carlo hotel. He owns the famous Manderley, and is perfectly calibrated to the needs of an ardent 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 cherry, luscious and fantastic" and is greeted by the blackness-clad housekeeper Mrs Danvers, her "skull's face, parchment-white, attack a skeleton'due south frame".
Du Maurier holds up the golden mirror in which Manderley is reflected, just first she broke the glass
Manderley is "a thing of grace and dazzler, exquisite and faultless" – just information technology is haunted by the spectre of Rebecca, the start Mrs de Winter, who drowned out in the bay. Her trunk may be rotting in the family crypt, but 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 all the same hanging in her closet. Rebecca, information technology seems, was beautiful only boyish, brave but gracious, an attentive hostess and a loving wife. How tin the second Mrs de Winter, with her thin hair and dispiriting clothes, compete?
This, however, is not a book to exist trusted. Du Maurier holds up the gilt mirror in which Manderley is reflected, but first she broke the glass. For Rebecca lives also in Mrs Danvers's curiously bitter grief and in Maxim'due 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 can you trust the innocent narrator. For all her insistence that she is drab, shy, uncertain of herself, we certainly know this: the proper name we'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 by violence equally past ardour. Soon the reader wanders from room to room "a fiddling fearful, a petty afraid", with the "odd, uneasy feeling" that they "might come up upon something unawares".
Rebecca sold in vast numbers, and has never been out of print. In the 80 years since its publication information technology has inspired prequels, sequels and an opera, with Manderley built and rebuilt for television, film and phase. During the 2d Earth State of war a copy was used by German intelligence as a code book. It is non a novel: information technology is an institution. Its wild success and superficial resemblance to a dearest 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 pop Gothic and romantic novels". Only she was certainly no romantic: she declared, with the faintest trace of mischief, "At that place is no such thing as romantic dearest. This is a statement of fact, and I defy all those who hold a opposite opinion." No romantic novelist, then, but certainly a Gothic ane. Rebecca is in the g, 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; it creates a abode place within which every furtive longing of the human being heart seems non only possible only permissible – if you tin can stand the penalization.
The careful reader will discern Du Maurier'south preoccupation with gender and sexuality, which grows more pertinent with passing years, not less. It is telling that the second Mrs de Winter muses on Rebecca'due south short hair, her sporting courage, her distaste for male person attention; she has liberated herself from the social confines of her sex, and her successor – eager to play the dutiful wife, with manners and dress to a higher place reproach – looks on with troubled awe. In this respect Rebecca recalls Du Maurier'south ain sexuality and gender feet: equally an ardent immature lover of women equally well as men she adopted the identity of the dashing "Eric Avon", the "boy in the box" who was her hush-hush self, and in one case wrote of her adored cousins, "They are boys. Hurrah for them!"
I start read Rebecca at perchance 13, half-drowsing in the back of the family car. Arrested at once by that opening line I said to my mother, "Where is Manderley?" She turned in her seat and said, "Oh, somewhere in Cornwall, I suppose," with such an air of stating fact that information technology was years earlier I realised I could never buy a ticket to the house and gardens – would never run across the boathouse, the Happy Valley, the sloping lawns. But it is every bit real to me equally the bricks-and-mortar houses where I accept lived. The name arouses in me not the pleasing recollection of a well-loved book simply a response rooted in the senses that is duplicate from memory.
The boat that Rebecca sailed single-handed in that glittering Cornish bay was chosen Je Reviens – "I Return". And so it is for me, and for other readers of this masterful, troubling and wickedly seductive novel: nosotros sigh, close the cover, put the book back on the shelf; but again and again, when the scarlet rhododendrons are in bloom, we render to Manderley.
This is the introduction by Sarah Perry, author of Subsequently Me Comes the Flood and The Essex Serpent, to the 80th-ceremony edition of Rebecca, by Daphne D u Maurier (Virago Modern Classics, £14.99)
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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