“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”.

I feel like it is almost cliche to begin my post with Daphne Du Maurier’s opening lines to REBECCA, one of the most famous opening lines in English literature. Here, Du Maurier immediately establishes the voice, locale, and dream-like atmosphere of her story. We are sucked into another world and, like her nameless narrator, forever haunted by the imposing structure of Manderley and the larger than life ghost of her husband’s dead wife.

And yet, despite her timeless ability to compel readers, Du Maurier often gets a bad rap. Until recently, she was dismissed as an escapist romance novelist. The prevailing thought for some time was that her work was “middle-brow.” Others considered it trash. Why? Let me try to put it into context. The books REBECCA most closely resemble are JANE EYRE (Charlotte Bronte) and WUTHERING HEIGHTS (Emily Bronte), both published ninety-one years before Du Maurier’s bestseller. Meanwhile, James Joyce’s experimental FINNEGAN’S WAKE was published in 1939 (just a year after REBECCA) and Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece, MRS. DALLOWAY was published thirteen years before REBECCA. So, Du Maurier was writing traditional historical romances and gothic thrillers at a time when her best known contemporaries were more concerned with experimenting with form. She, in fact, wrote — what we might now call — commercial women’s fiction.

In recent years, critics have revised their takes on Du Maurier and her status has been elevated. They have focused on the Freudian and Jungian subtexts of her books, news of her potential bi-sexuality, and the undeniably powerful psychological realism in her works. Her work is now commonly accepted as literature.

Yes, it might be true that there is a “trashy” element to REBECCA, if trashy is equivalent to page-turning and accessible (although that might not be it, exactly, either) but it seems far too easy to dismiss the novel or the author. First of all, as in REBECCA, Du Maurier’s endings are never quite happy. When one reads REBECCA, they enter a dark and queasy place full of twists and turns and never feel quite at rest even at the book’s close. (Not exactly a place you would want to escape to.) Second, I think Du Maurier touches on something profound in all of her novels and short stories: whether it is the loneliness at the heart of her book and their heroines, the complicated relationship between the narrator and Rebecca, or the way in which a house (Manderley) becomes a complex character in its own right.

-Jennifer Bassett

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 15th, 2007 at 5:31 pm and is filed under WR Classics, Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.