I Was Walking with a Ghost: The Seductive Power of Rebecca

I’m a sucker for a gripping first line, and Daphne du Maurier’s Gothic romance Rebecca starts with a real grabber:

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me. There was a padlock and chain upon the gate. I called in my dream to the lodge-keeper, and had no answer, and peering closer through the rusted spokes of the gate I saw that the lodge was uninhabited.

The second Mrs. de Winter will never return to Manderley, but it takes most of the book for us to find out why. Rebecca starts with our narrator (who is never named: she is referred to only by her married name, Mrs. de Winter, and often noted as the second Mrs. de Winter) meeting a handsome older man on holiday and getting pulled into a whirlwind romance. She and Maximilian marry in haste, as the saying goes, and she returns with him to his family estate in Cornwall. For an isolated, orphaned young woman who had been working for an odious employer, it feels like a dream come true.

Manderley, though, is more haunted house than fairy tale. The estate faces the sea in rainy, cloudy Cornwall, and the sea is what took the life of the first Mrs. de Winter, Rebecca; she drowned in a sailing accident. Rebecca has only been gone for a year, and her loyal servants still walk the halls of Manderley. Housekeeper Mrs. Danvers was once Rebecca’s maid, and she guards her memory and possessions with the zeal of a religious fanatic. Mrs. Danvers’ devotion is intense to the point of madness. Does she think of the lost Rebecca as a sister, a daughter, a lover? It’s not clear, but it is obvious that Mrs. de Winter is hardly a flickering candle compared to the roaring fire that Rebecca had been.

Rebecca was assertive where the second Mrs. de Winter is meek. She was older, stronger, a loyal wife, a perfect hostess. How, the second Mrs. de Winter wonders miserably, can she possibly compare? Maxim is increasingly cold, Mrs. Danvers overtly hostile. But she’s not alone: Manderley’s agent and Maxim’s sister are on her side, and as the novel continues, the second Mrs. de Winter learns to build on her own inner strength.

By the end of the novel, of course, she needs it. Rebecca’s ship, and her body, are discovered in the sea outside Manderley, and this is when the first cracks in the myth of Maxim and Rebecca’s perfect marriage appear: you see, Maxim identified Rebecca’s body when she was first declared dead. With the inconvenient appearance of the real body, Rebecca’s death has become a fresh mystery, and the second Mrs. de Winter has to decide where she stands and whose side she’s really on.

The moment of crisis had come, and I must face it. My old fears, my diffidence, my shyness, my hopeless sense of inferiority, must be conquered now and thrust aside. If I failed now I should fail forever.

Rebecca is a novel about the dead and their influences on the living, and it ends on a deeply bittersweet note. The second Mrs. de Winter is stronger for her experiences, but scarred, and is forever separated from Manderley and the life she had been promised. Rebecca is rich, not quite overwritten, and dark, and Mrs. de Winter is an engaging narrator, bringing us into her inner life and deepest fears. She loves Maxim, but Rebecca reminds us that love has its limits. The final chapter of Rebecca shows us a stronger Mrs. de Winter, no longer desperate to be loved, but confident in who she is and what she is capable of. But it is no triumph; her growth has come at a terrible, bruising cost. Rebecca’s ghost will always haunt the de Winters, just as she would have wanted.

Rebecca has been adapted for stage, screen and radio, most memorably in Alfred Hitchcock’s movie of the same title (Hitchcock, it’s said, disparagingly referred to the unnamed Mrs. de Winter as “Daphne”). It’s reasonably faithful¹, and has much of the appeal of the book. Delightfully, Mrs. Danvers’s overpowering obsession with Rebecca feels even more potent (and queer) onscreen. (There was also a Netflix adaptation in 2020 that was justly forgotten, but the 1964 Indian horror/thriller Kohraa, which adds more supernatural elements, seems worth checking out; at the time of writing, it’s available, though perhaps not legally, on YouTube.)

A German musical adaptation almost made it to Broadway, only to be cancelled due to allegations of financial deception. (YouTuber Wait in the Wings chronicled the musical’s disastrous attempt to move to Broadway in this engaging video, and he’s monitored the show’s return to the stage in Europe and attempts to overcome its infamy.) The whole thing is built around a tremendous setpiece representing the grand staircase at Manderley. A big, bombastic musical feels like the natural home for Rebecca, with its operatic emotions, secrets, and melodramatic finale.

The book was published with a robust first run of 20,000 copies and sold double that in less than a month; almost immediately after that, it was hit with an accusation of plagiarism, due to its striking similarity to the Brazilian novel A Sucessora.²  I haven’t read A Sucessora, but if the New York Times article that ran down the similarities is correct, the differences are worth noting. Rebecca’s conclusion is darker and more complicated, and the move to Cornwall gives a sense of place that helps raise the stakes in the novel’s second half³. du Maurier’s device of the masked ball may have been a ploy to keep the masks from A Sucessora while staying true to its English setting, but centering a crucial scene around an invention of Rebecca’s — instead of an ordinary part of the holidays — keeps the first Mrs. de Winter and her iron will front and center. If du Maurier stole the structure of A Sucessora, it was a skilful and artistically gifted theft.

The second Mrs. de Winter dreams of Manderley, a place she has been forever exiled from, but generations of readers have chosen to revisit its moody halls: the book has never gone out of print. 

1. The Hays code interferes with the climax of this one, which is something of a pity. They did keep a few of the more scandalous plot points, at least. ↩︎
2. A Sucessora itself was adapted into a telenovela in 1978, running for 125 episodes ↩︎
3. Which is not to say that A Sucessora lacks a sense of place, as I haven’t read it, just that du Maurier’s novel is rooted very differently. ↩︎