tag:theconversation.com,2011:/id/topics/daphne-du-maurier-39318/articlesDaphne du Maurier – The Conversation2023-04-11T01:42:33Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2000082023-04-11T01:42:33Z2023-04-11T01:42:33ZDaphne du Maurier’s The Birds predicted environmental crisis 70 years ago<p>In Daphne du Maurier’s short story, The Birds (1952), a change in bird behaviour is linked to the impact of technological developments after the second world war.</p>
<p>Birds, as the 2022 <a href="http://www.birdlife.org/papers-reports/state-of-the-worlds-birds-2022">State of the World’s Birds report</a> warns, are “barometers for planetary health”. Nearly half of global bird species are now in decline. In du Maurier’s apocalyptic tale, set in Cornwall, birds launch vicious and unprovoked attacks on humans.</p>
<p>Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation, The Birds, celebrates its 60th anniversary in 2023. Revisiting du Maurier’s story of relentless devastation shows how the writer anticipated some of today’s most pressing environmental concerns.</p>
<p>In her 1989 memoir, <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Enchanted_Cornwall.html?id=slx6AAAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y">Enchanted Cornwall</a>, du Maurier claims that she was inspired by seeing a tractor ploughing a field in Cornwall surrounded by circling “cloud of screaming gulls”. </p>
<p>This scene is transplanted into The Birds when its narrator, disabled second world war veteran and land worker Nat Hocken, observes some unusual behaviour: “As the tractor traced its path up and down the hills … the man upon it would be lost momentarily in the great cloud of wheeling, crying birds.”</p>
<p>Nat acknowledges that birds always followed the plough in autumn: “but not in great flocks like these, nor with such clamour”. The tractor – and the birds’ engagement with it – is significant, as the vehicle is synonymous with mechanisation and changes in the landscape.</p>
<p>In his book <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Something_New_Under_the_Sun_An_Environme.html?id=D4dOq9Llo_gC&redir_esc=y%22%22">Something New Under the Sun</a>, historian J.R. McNeill explains that agricultural ecology changed from the 1950s, with the creation of large fields and elimination of hedgerows in order to facilitate industrial farming. This created a situation in which animal “chances for survival and reproduction were apportioned largely according to compatibility with human action”.</p>
<p>In du Maurier’s story, the birds turn this on its head – quite literally – through their attacks. The unnamed tractor driver tells Nat: “I could scarcely see what I was doing.” As the birds attack the eyes, sight becomes a metaphor for humans failing to see the changes in nature.</p>
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<span class="caption">A young Daphne du Maurier.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Young_Daphne_du_Maurier_restored_bw.jpg">The Chichester Partnership / University of Exeter</a></span>
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<p>Nat, by contrast, eschews technology in favour of traditional methods (he fixes hedgerows and works with a hoe) and quickly realises that the farm owner’s attempt to shoot the birds is futile.</p>
<p>Like many environmental campaigners, Nat is ignored. His attentiveness to the birds’ rhythms and his traditional modes of working are perceived as strange. </p>
<p>The aptly named Farmer Trigg is found dead with his gun, as the birds mimic wartime aerial strategies to overcome modern technologies of war and agriculture. The point is underlined when an RAF fighter plane is later found in the field in which the tractor was ploughing, brought down by birds.</p>
<p>Du Maurier observed a world in which humans were becoming increasingly disassociated from their environment. </p>
<p>This is shown through her sensitivity to nature’s delicate balance and attentiveness to changing technology and society (the council houses of Nat’s neighbours cannot withstand the birds’ assaults whereas his old cottage, with its thick walls, provides more security).</p>
<p>The story unremittingly portrays how the social and economic infrastructures we take for granted <a href="http://www.dumaurier.org/menu_page.php?id=149">are fragile</a> and, ultimately, unsustainable.</p>
<h2>‘All them birds’</h2>
<p>The Birds was published a decade before conservationist Rachel Carson’s <a href="https://library.uniteddiversity.coop/More_Books_and_Reports/Silent_Spring-Rachel_Carson-1962.pdf">Silent Spring</a> (1962), a pioneering book which highlighted the adverse biological effects of pesticides in American farming.</p>
<p>Carson drew on the Romantic poet John Keats’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci, set in a wasteland where “The sedge has withered from the lake, / And no birds sing”, as one of its epigraphs, signalling the value of literature in the articulation of environmental crisis.</p>
<p>Carson’s scientific text opens with an apocalyptic vision of a:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices, there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The birds are either dying or dead, their plight – both actual and symbolic – indicative of wider environmental damage. Similarly, in The Birds, winter appears overnight and the ground becomes instantly hardened. </p>
<p>Carson <a href="http://nytimes.com/2012/09/23/magazine/how-silent-spring-ignited-the-environmental-movement.html">pioneered an understanding</a> of human biological destruction of nature through her scientific book. Du Maurier articulates the dangers through fiction.</p>
<p>In The Birds, du Maurier demonstrates how war – particularly war of the scale that she had witnessed as a civilian – is a destroyer and at the same time a mobiliser of the technologies of mechanisation and chemistry which have wreaked, and continue to wreak, havoc on the planet.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">A scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 adaptation of The Birds.</span></figcaption>
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<p>The Birds is a pessimistic story. Nat’s attempt to warn London of the impeding danger from the birds fails as the woman on the telephone exchange is “laconic, weary” and “impatient”, leaving Nat to observe: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>She doesn’t care … She hopes to go to the pictures tonight. She’ll squeeze some fellow’s hand, and point up at the sky, and say ‘Look at all them birds!’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Read today, Nat’s comment feels like an ironic observation on the Hollywood interpretations of du Maurier’s story, which obscured her original narrative. Modern readers need to “look” at du Maurier’s The Birds more closely to see that <a href="http://www.hotpress.com/film-tv/neil-jordan-letters-home-covid-19-odd-way-shown-paucity-imaginations-22813175">“something in nature has turned against us”</a>.</p>
<p>In du Maurier’s thriller of altered nature, birds become the violent emissaries of death. She terrorised contemporary readers with a vision of the future, which is now very close to the present.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/200008/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Catherine Wynne does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Rereading du Maurier’s story of relentless devastation shows how the writer anticipated some of our most pressing environmental concerns.Catherine Wynne, Associate Dean for Research and Enterprise, Faculty of Arts, Cultures and Education, University of HullLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1488212020-10-26T14:38:16Z2020-10-26T14:38:16ZRebecca: Netflix returns to Manderley with a modern remake of Daphne du Maurier’s classic thriller<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/365518/original/file-20201026-19-1tl0zr3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=53%2C0%2C6000%2C3970&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Dream fulfilled: Maxim de Winter and his second wife arrive at Manderley.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">KERRY BROWN/NETFLIX</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>From its hypnotic opening dream sequence to the irresistible fascination of its title character, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca has captivated readers since its first publication in 1938. Like all great literary classics, it is a novel with the power to speak to new audiences and to <a href="https://fivebooks.com/book/rebecca-by-daphne-du-maurier/">adapt to changing times</a>. </p>
<p>Read through the lens of the #metoo movement when the novel <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/rebecca-daphne-du-maurier-80th-anniversary-popular-still-why-manderley-a8234771.html">celebrated its 80th anniversary in 2018</a>, Du Maurier’s depiction of Maxim de Winter’s treatment not only of his first wife Rebecca but also the famously timid second Mrs de Winter took on a darker significance. </p>
<p>Netflix has returned to an even more modern Manderley in Ben Wheatley’s <a href="https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81002196">new adaptation of the novel</a>, a version which deliberately set out to sidestep Alfred Hitchcock’s much-loved 1940 film to present a <a href="https://www.digitalspy.com/movies/a34394397/rebecca-netflix-ben-wheatley-interview-lily-james/">vibrant and dynamic Rebecca</a> for the 21st century.</p>
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<p>Purists will undoubtedly be eagle-eyed in spotting the divergences from Du Maurier’s plot, in particular the new fate imagined for sinister housekeeper Mrs Danvers (played by Kristen Scott Thomas) and the uncharacteristically optimistic final line from the second Mrs de Winter (Lily James). But there is much in this new adaptation that casts intriguing new light on Du Maurier’s bestseller.</p>
<h2>Dreams and nightmares</h2>
<p>A challenge facing any <a href="https://www.willowandthatch.com/netflix-rebecca-du-maurier-adaptation/">adaptation of Rebecca</a> (and there have been two for television in addition to the Hitchcock classic) is how to recreate the perspective of the narrator, the second Mrs de Winter. It is her intense and febrile imagination which is so crucial to the atmosphere of the novel. </p>
<p>Visionary dreams bookend the novel and, as <a href="https://www.virago.co.uk/titles/daphne-du-maurier-2/rebecca/9781844088799/">Sally Beauman writes in her afterword</a> to the Virago Modern Classics edition, Mrs de Winter “daydreams incessantly”. It is in these vivid fantasies, as much as in the recollections of the devoted Mrs Danvers, that Rebecca comes to life. The Netflix adaptation opens with Mrs de Winter’s dream of a dark-haired woman in red. This figure of Rebecca reappears throughout the film, disappearing down the corridors of Manderley during the masquerade ball and embodying Mrs Danvers’ conviction that her mistress is “still here” in the house. </p>
<p>As she is about to leave Monte Carlo for Manderley, taunted by Mrs Van Hopper that both Maxim and Manderley are haunted by Rebecca, Lily James’s Mrs de Winter petulantly declares: “I don’t believe in ghosts”. But in this adaptation, Rebecca’s presence feels more tangible than spectral (although in a nod to Du Maurier’s famous short story The Birds, on more than one occasion an ominous murmuration of birds hangs in the sky).</p>
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<img alt="19th-century portrait of woman in a red dress sitting on a chaise Longue." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/365516/original/file-20201026-13-1o0epxd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/365516/original/file-20201026-13-1o0epxd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1014&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/365516/original/file-20201026-13-1o0epxd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1014&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/365516/original/file-20201026-13-1o0epxd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1014&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/365516/original/file-20201026-13-1o0epxd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1275&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/365516/original/file-20201026-13-1o0epxd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1275&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/365516/original/file-20201026-13-1o0epxd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1275&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Rebecca’s red ball gown is understood to have been inspired by this portrait of Mrs Hugh Hammersley by John Singer Sargent.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">John Singer Sargent, Met Museum of Art, New York</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span>
</figcaption>
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<p>Rebecca’s red dress in the opening dream becomes more significant when we discover that the dress from the painting of Caroline de Winter, Maxim’s ancestor, is also a deep red velvet (inspired by John Singer Sargent’s painting of Mrs Hugh Hammersley). The dream thus prefigures Mrs de Winter’s own unwitting impersonation of Rebecca, a visually effective doubling that recalls Du Maurier’s splitting of her own personality in <a href="https://fivebooks.com/book/rebecca-by-daphne-du-maurier/">her novel’s two central characters</a>. </p>
<p>Du Maurier began writing the novel in Egypt where she had accompanied her husband on a military posting, and her fear of her social inadequacy as a commanding officer’s wife bubbles up in the second Mrs de Winter. But underneath this reticence, Du Maurier’s independent, creative self fuelled the passionate and fearless Rebecca de Winter, a character who both inspires and intimidates in the novel.</p>
<p>In another added dream sequence in the new adaptation, Armie Hammer’s Maxim is sleepwalking towards the west wing of the house (a symbol of his lingering guilt over Rebecca’s death) and James’ Mrs de Winter is engulfed by ivy that crawls along the hallway, an image that brings the monstrous natural growth from the novel’s opening dream into Manderley itself. </p>
<p>When the novel’s Mrs de Winter tries to recapture her lost Manderley, she dreams that “nature had come into her own again and, little by little, in her stealthy insidious way had encroached upon the drive with long tenacious fingers”. In the new adaptation this insidious menace finds its way into the house but James’ character does not remain imprisoned by her dreams and fantasies for long; she emerges as a strong and independent woman, with more than a dash of Rebecca’s boldness.</p>
<h2>‘I can see the woman I am now’</h2>
<p>Mrs de Winter is such an effective narrator in Du Maurier’s novel that we are easily persuaded of her own poor estimation of herself. We empathise with her shyness, her anxiety, her imposter syndrome. But Du Maurier hints that she is more powerful than she at first appears and this boldness is a quality that the new adaptation embraces. In a recent interview, <a href="https://www.harpersbazaar.com/uk/fashion/fashion-news/a34202668/lily-james-november-cover-interview-rebecca/">James said</a> that she wanted to play Mrs de Winter as “less of a damsel in distress”. </p>
<p>It is Mrs de Winter who firmly takes charge once Maxim has made his confession. Rebecca “hasn’t won, we won’t let her” she asserts – and from then on control of the events seem firmly in her hands rather than Maxim’s, especially when he is remanded in custody and she races down to London to discover the truth about Rebecca’s visit to the doctors. </p>
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<img alt="Two women seen in reflection in a mirror." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/365520/original/file-20201026-17-129i37o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/365520/original/file-20201026-17-129i37o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/365520/original/file-20201026-17-129i37o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/365520/original/file-20201026-17-129i37o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/365520/original/file-20201026-17-129i37o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/365520/original/file-20201026-17-129i37o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/365520/original/file-20201026-17-129i37o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Strong women: Lily James as Mrs. de Winter, Kristin Scott Thomas as Mrs. Danvers.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">KERRY BROWN/NETFLIX</span></span>
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<p>This bolder Mrs de Winter leaves Armie Hammer’s Maxim somewhat in the shadows, despite his temper and repressed violence erupting in the confession scene. In the original novel, the narrator asserts herself by declaring: “I am Mrs de Winter now” and the new Netflix adaptation feels very much like Mrs de Winter’s film. Her final confrontation with a desperate Mrs Danvers, whose deep love for Rebecca is a palpable and poignant presence throughout, shows how important female relationships and women’s power is to this novel. </p>
<p>In exile after the events at Manderley, du Maurier’s Mrs de Winter muses that “confidence is a quality I prize, although it has come to me a little late in the day”. In this new adaptation, emerging from the shadows of her predecessor and the constraints of her husband’s control, Mrs de Winter finally has her day.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/148821/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Laura Varnam does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>It’s a very modern version which gives the female characters more agency than in previous adaptations.Laura Varnam, Lecturer in English Literature, University of OxfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1465732020-10-20T19:00:59Z2020-10-20T19:00:59ZGuide to the classics: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier — gender, gothic haunting and gaslighting<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/364188/original/file-20201019-17-7q2d2g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=11%2C5%2C3964%2C2652&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://media.netflix.com/en/only-on-netflix/81002196/assets/eyJpZCI6InBreDJodzJseXUiLCJuYW1lIjoiUmViZWNjYS0wNTIwNl9SLmpwZyJ9">KERRY BROWN/NETFLIX</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>A small group of novels are famous for their first lines: Jane Austen’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1885.Pride_and_Prejudice?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=gfHh7geqrm&rank=1">Pride and Prejudice</a> (1813), Herman Melville’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/153747.Moby_Dick_or_the_Whale?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=qCSb6QVie9&rank=1">Moby Dick</a> (1851) and Leo Tolstoy’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15823480-anna-karenina?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=ifDzIA65zG&rank=1">Anna Karenina</a> (1877). <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17899948-rebecca?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=2SJo7Fr5US&rank=1">Rebecca</a> by Daphne Du Maurier (1938), belongs to this elite collection. Its opening line perfectly encapsulates the narrative’s core theme. </p>
<p>“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again,” the book begins — though it is not Rebecca who speaks. </p>
<p>This is the strange paradox of Du Maurier’s novel: its characters are doomed to refer (and defer) endlessly to Rebecca, who “always” did things, perfectly and elegantly, a certain way, while Rebecca herself never appears.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/newly-discovered-du-maurier-poems-shed-light-on-a-talented-writer-honing-her-craft-115659">Newly discovered Du Maurier poems shed light on a talented writer honing her craft</a>
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<h2>Two ghosts</h2>
<p>It is the novel’s unnamed narrator who speaks that first line — the second Mrs de Winter, a woman perpetually in her predecessor’s shadow. She is quite simply, not Rebecca — her husband’s late first wife. </p>
<p>She is exceedingly young — shy, inexperienced, and under the thumb of a wealthy lady who has employed her as a travel companion. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/364192/original/file-20201019-19-15ey6l2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Book cover: blue and white lettering reads Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/364192/original/file-20201019-19-15ey6l2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/364192/original/file-20201019-19-15ey6l2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=941&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364192/original/file-20201019-19-15ey6l2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=941&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364192/original/file-20201019-19-15ey6l2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=941&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364192/original/file-20201019-19-15ey6l2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1183&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364192/original/file-20201019-19-15ey6l2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1183&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364192/original/file-20201019-19-15ey6l2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1183&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://d1w7fb2mkkr3kw.cloudfront.net/assets/images/book/lrg/9780/3490/9780349006574.jpg">Virago</a></span>
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<p>In Monte Carlo, our narrator meets Maxim de Winter, a tall, dark and handsome aristocrat, recently widowed. He swiftly rescues her from drudgery, proposes marriage, and takes her back to England to live in his beautiful and ancient estate, Manderley. </p>
<p>The dual spectres of Rebecca and Manderley haunt de Winter and his bride but the circularity of the narrative makes escape impossible. </p>
<p>The novel begins at the narrative’s end, retelling the events leading to the couple’s nomadic life. Retrospection taints the novel with a pervasive sense of inevitable doom and a desperate sympathy for the naïve young narrator. Now, night after night, she must dream of Manderley again — of its beauty, to be sure, but also, too, of its oppressiveness. </p>
<p>The name “<a href="https://www.behindthename.com/name/rebecca">Rebecca</a>” means to tie or to bind, a further allusion to the first Mrs de Winter’s stranglehold on her home and its inhabitants even after her death. She is imprinted on the house and on its housekeeper, the silent and sinister Mrs Danvers, whose passionate obsession with her former employer <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/1395950?seq=1">is echoed</a> in Carol Ann Duffy’s poem, Warming Her Pearls (1987). </p>
<p>Mrs Danvers’ snide comments constitute Rebecca’s continuing manipulations, even beyond the grave. </p>
<p>When Manderley hosts an annual costume ball, for instance, the second Mrs de Winter is anxious to impress her new husband and his guests. Mrs Danvers encourages her to dress as Caroline de Winter, one of her husband’s ancestors, whose imposing portrait graces the mansion’s hall.</p>
<p>But when she makes her grand entrance, her husband angrily orders her to change. Rebecca had worn an identical costume the year before. Mrs Danvers’ goal of humiliation is achieved.</p>
<figure>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">‘I’m asking you to marry me, you little fool.’ A new Netflix adaptation maintains the off-kilter power dynamic of the source text.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>A limited perspective</h2>
<p>The novel’s use of first-person narration in some ways limits us to the inexperienced worldview of the young narrator. </p>
<p>She stands in for the hordes of <a href="https://digscholarship.unco.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1023&context=honors">young women of the interwar period</a>, their families lost to the war while these young women were left to navigate the world unchaperoned and alone, without interested parties available to approve or consider their choice of husband. </p>
<p>But the reader does come to understand the narrator’s naivety, and to see what she does not see, with increasing anxiety for her safety.</p>
<p>While she cannot see beyond Maxim’s charm, or conceptualise Mrs Danvers’ obsession with Rebecca, the reader looks on helplessly as she experiences what we now recognise as “<a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-does-gaslighting-mean-107888">gaslighting</a>”. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/364190/original/file-20201019-19-19id26b.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Older woman and younger woman look in mirror, scene for black and white film." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/364190/original/file-20201019-19-19id26b.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/364190/original/file-20201019-19-19id26b.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364190/original/file-20201019-19-19id26b.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364190/original/file-20201019-19-19id26b.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364190/original/file-20201019-19-19id26b.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364190/original/file-20201019-19-19id26b.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364190/original/file-20201019-19-19id26b.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Joan Fontaine and Judith Anderson in Hitchcock’s 1940 adaptation.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032976/mediaviewer/rm3329662465?context=default">IMDB</a></span>
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</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-does-gaslighting-mean-107888">Explainer: what does 'gaslighting' mean?</a>
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</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Rebecca can be recognised as part of the genre of the “<a href="https://blogs.kent.ac.uk/melodramaresearchgroup/tag/female-gothic/">female gothic</a>”, critic Ellen Moers’ term for works that derive their terror from women’s domestic entrapment and manipulation, as in the <a href="https://interestingliterature.com/2018/05/a-summary-and-analysis-of-the-bluebeard-fairy-tale/">Bluebeard folktale</a>. </p>
<p>Female gothic narratives seek to expose the psychological manipulations and abuse of power disguised as romance. This alone explains the narrator’s continued sympathy for her “wronged” husband, even at the novel’s end. </p>
<p>This use of the female gothic also constitutes a critique of the novel’s source text: Du Maurier’s Rebecca is <a href="https://journals.openedition.org/lisa/1774?lang=en">a reimagining</a> of Charlotte Bronte’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10210.Jane_Eyre?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=sMIZYEaZnM&rank=1">Jane Eyre</a> (1847), in which Jane is disturbed by the looming presence of Mr Rochester’s first wife, the infamous “madwoman in the attic”. </p>
<p>Whereas Jane’s ultimate devotion to her husband is celebrated in that novel, Du Maurier encourages her reader to recognise her narrator’s powerlessness.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/emily-brontes-fierce-flawed-women-not-your-usual-gothic-female-characters-100744">Emily Brontë's fierce, flawed women: not your usual Gothic female characters</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Birds, horror and adaptation</h2>
<p>Du Maurier’s writing has always lent itself to cinematic adaptation, particularly as horror. Perhaps most famously, Alfred Hitchcock adapted her short story to make <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18869985-the-birds-and-other-stories?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=r1xkoBtvGP&rank=20">The Birds</a>, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056869/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">his 1963 film</a>, while <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv13841pn">Nicholas Roeg’s adaptation of her story</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2871390-don-t-look-now">Don’t Look Now</a> (1971) was <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069995/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0">screened in 1973</a>. </p>
<p>Rebecca’s psychological suspense drew Hitchcock’s attention, and he swiftly adapted it as a film, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032976/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2">released in 1940</a> starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine.</p>
<p>Hitchcock’s Rebecca won the Academy Award for Best Picture that same year. It also spawned a <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3877748">range of commercial products such as the “Rebecca Luxury Wardrobe” and the “Rebecca Makeup Kit”</a>, one of the first films to do so. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">‘Everything is kept just as Mrs de Winter liked it. Nothing has been altered since that night.’</span></figcaption>
</figure>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/psycho-turns-60-hitchcocks-famous-fright-film-broke-all-the-rules-140175">Psycho turns 60 – Hitchcock's famous fright film broke all the rules</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Strangely, however, these beauty and fashion products were all associated with Rebecca, a woman who never appears on screen.</p>
<p>Hitchcock’s adaptation diverges from Du Maurier’s novel at its conclusion and in the way in which each narrative explains Rebecca’s death. Whereas Du Maurier lays a foundation for Maxim’s capacity for violence, Hitchcock positions him, like the narrator, as a victim of Rebecca’s cruel manipulations. </p>
<p>A new <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2235695/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Netflix adaptation</a> of Rebecca stars Lily James, Armie Hammer and Kristen Scott Thomas. This follows recent adaptations of <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/89717.The_Haunting_of_Hill_House">Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel</a> <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6763664/">The Haunting of Hill House (2018)</a> and its second season, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10970552/">The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020)</a>, a reworking of <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12948.The_Turn_of_the_Screw">Henry James’ The Turn of The Screw (1898)</a>. </p>
<p>Together, these constitute a series of gothic hauntings that draw attention not only to the psychological trauma inherent in those earlier works, but the way in which that trauma and its terrors are profoundly gendered.</p>
<p>Rebecca’s capacity to haunt the second Mrs de Winter, Mrs Danvers’ maintenance of her place in Manderley, Maxim’s power over his new bride, and the narrator’s cowing acceptance of all of this, point to the gendered power structures of both the gothic and the marriage plot. </p>
<p><em>Rebecca screens on Netflix from October 21.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/146573/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jessica Gildersleeve does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A new Netflix adaptation of Rebecca stars Lily James and Armie Hammer. The novel on which it is based, first published in 1938, explores domestic entrapment.Jessica Gildersleeve, Associate Professor of English Literature, University of Southern QueenslandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1483672020-10-20T14:28:13Z2020-10-20T14:28:13ZRebecca and beyond: the creative allure of gothic Cornwall<p>Ben Wheatley’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/oct/18/rebecca-review-perfectly-watchable-romp">adaptation</a> of Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca showcases the English county of Cornwall as a <a href="https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/daphne-du-maurier-and-the-gothic-tradition">Gothic space</a> of tumultuous waters, coarse moorlands, and perilous cliffs. Du Maurier’s Cornwall was a haunted place and the author was drawing upon a long tradition of seeing the Duchy as spectral and monstrous.</p>
<p>While Rebecca was published in 1938, Cornwall’s legends, landscape, and distinctive identity lent themselves to the gothic imagination from the end of the 18th century. As far afield as the US, Cornwall was perceived as a place of hauntings, madness, and death — a foreign, liminal threat composed of precipices and thresholds which would influence subsequent representations of the county. This could be seen in Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 novel <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wieland_(novel)">Wieland</a>. An early example of American gothic, it follows a man who visits Cornwall with his family, where he loses his mind and jumps from the cliffs. </p>
<p>By the 19th century, these Gothic representations of Cornwall see a sudden <a href="https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.802440">boom</a> as the county became increasingly prevalent in the wider British imagination due to a series of rapid cultural changes. These include being one of the last counties to be connected to the <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=C7lIAAAAYAAJ">national railway</a>, the <a href="https://terencecgannon.medium.com/the-collapse-of-the-cornish-tin-mines-704cd1f409de">collapse of the mining industry</a>, <a href="https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/2114">the birth of tourism</a>, and a period of <a href="https://bernarddeacon.com/demography/the-great-emigration/">mass migration out of the county</a>. </p>
<p>All such changes spoke to more generalised Victorian anxieties of <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07075332.2013.828643">globalisation</a>, <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2591080?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents">modernity</a> and the <a href="https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-1-349-17336-5_4.pdf">industrial revolution</a>, which caused concerns about changing economies, collapsing industries, and social (and geographical) mobility. People were also becoming more aware of Cornwall due to an increase in travel narratives, travel guides, folklore collections and stories featuring the county, as part of the rise of a <a href="https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/print-culture">print culture</a>. Increased ease of access to the county through travel also increased the county’s notoriety and what people found struck them as strange. </p>
<p>The architect John D. Sedding in 1887 <a href="https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/bitstream/handle/10871/40826/JPassey%20Thesis%20CORRECTIONS%202020.pdf?sequence=1">stated that</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>On whatever side you like to take it, the historic, the pre-historic, the natural, architectural, geological, ornithological, or on the side of its folklore, Christian or heathen — the place teems with subject matter that is as curious as it is interesting. Cornwall is the nursery ground of the saints; the fabled land of Lyonesse; the home of the giants; the haunt of fairies, pixies, mermaids, demons, and spectres. To speak of its natural aspects, its wild seaboard, and frequent air of savagery, one is almost bound to use terms of fancy.</p>
</blockquote>
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<p>These features provided ample fuel for gothic authors of the time. </p>
<h2>An ancient place</h2>
<p>Bram Stoker, the author of <a href="https://theconversation.com/dracula-free-movement-of-vampires-a-fitting-horror-story-for-the-brexit-era-129124">Dracula</a>, set <a href="http://www.bramstoker.org/novels/08stars.html">The Jewel of Seven Stars</a> in Cornwall in 1903. The story features the mummy of an Egyptian queen that requires a suitably ancient, foreign land in which to be <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3781/3781-h/3781-h.htm">resurrected</a>. Explaining why Cornwall is the perfect place, the novel’s Egyptologist, Abel Trelawny, says:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In a hundred different ways [Cornwall] fulfils the conditions which I am led to believe are primary with regard to success. Here, we are, and shall be, as isolated as Queen Tera herself would have been in her rocky tomb in the Valley of the Sorcerer, and still in a rocky cavern.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Beneath Cornwall lies labyrinths of mining chambers, which could be seen as not too far removed from graves or tombs. The county is also isolated at the “Land’s End”, and associated with magic and mystery, partially through <a href="https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/tintagel-castle/history-and-legend/">Merlin and King Arthur.</a></p>
<p>In Thomas Hardy’s early novel <a href="https://www.hardysociety.org/oxo/40/a-pair-of-blue-eyes/">A Pair of Blue Eyes</a> (1873), two suitors fight for a Cornish maiden, travelling from London on the new rail network to Cornwall. While the two vie for her hand, neither is aware that she is also on board; however, she is travelling as cargo rather than as a passenger as she lies in a coffin journeying home for the last time. The incoming Londoners arguing over an already dead Cornish woman speaks to anxieties over the coming of the rail and how an influx of “outsiders” might change Cornwall as <a href="https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/bitstream/handle/10871/40826/JPassey%20Thesis%20CORRECTIONS%202020.pdf?sequence=1">expressed by the writer William Connor Sydney</a> in 1897:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Railways, and the gradual assimilation of its people more and more into ordinary English society will have the effect, it is greatly to be feared, of banishing its huge array of witches and hobgoblins, giants and dwarfs, grim spectres, and haunted corridors to the limbo of things that had been.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Crumbling mine on the coast with waves crashing below." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/364466/original/file-20201020-18-qm6yy5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/364466/original/file-20201020-18-qm6yy5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364466/original/file-20201020-18-qm6yy5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364466/original/file-20201020-18-qm6yy5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364466/original/file-20201020-18-qm6yy5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364466/original/file-20201020-18-qm6yy5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364466/original/file-20201020-18-qm6yy5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Botallack Mine, Cornwall.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/botallack-mine-cornwall-west-devon-mining-1795306897">Kathleenjean/Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Arthur Conan Doyle even sent Holmes and Watson to Cornwall for a retreat in The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot (1910) only for them, unsurprisingly, to encounter “<a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2349/2349-h/2349-h.htm">the Cornish horror – [the] strangest case I have handled</a>”.</p>
<h2>Ghosts and gold</h2>
<p>Mines and subterranean spaces, in particular, inspired several gothic tales. On such tale is Joseph F. Pearce’s <a href="http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?130326">The Man Who Coined His Blood Into Gold</a> (1893) where a poverty-stricken miner is told by an underground goblin that he can transform each drop of his blood into gold coin with magic. The miner is later found, dead amongst his glittering horde. The tale appeals to 19th-century anxieties surrounding the collapse of the mining industry and the ravages of industrial capitalism. </p>
<p>Cornwall’s landscape is unique for both its world-famous mine networks and rugged coastlines, notorious for shipwrecks. Margery Williams, most famous for the children’s story <a href="https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/williams/rabbit/rabbit.html">The Velveteen Rabbit (1922)</a> set <a href="https://www.proquest.com/docview/6518834/4302075EC05E4CF2PQ/2?accountid=9730">The Last Mitchell</a> (1905) in Cornwall, where a “living” ghost, having perished in a wreck, haunts his ancestral home, only to finally vanish once his body is returned to his home. </p>
<p>Edgar Allan Poe, the poster child of the gothic, even ventured as far as Cornwall, “one of the wildest and least frequented portions of fair England,” in his short story <a href="https://poestories.com/read/ligeia">Ligeia (1838)</a>, where a man is visited there by the spectre of his lost sweetheart.</p>
<p>Cornwall’s dislocation from the mainland, its reputation as both “<a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-cornwall-44400199">English and not-English’</a>”, its tempestuous and radical history, and its wealth of folklore and legends, all lend themselves to a Gothic literary tradition that stretches over 222 years. With Wheatley’s incarnation of the mysterious county, it’s certain that this place of ghosts and magic still captures our imaginations today.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/148367/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Joan Passey works for the University of Bristol and her PhD was funded by the AHRC South, West, and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership.</span></em></p>Wild coastlines, rich folklore and a sense that it’s a place unto itself, at once England and not, has made Cornwall the ideal setting for Gothic tales.Joan Passey, Teaching Associate in Victorian literature and culture, University of BristolLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1156592019-04-23T12:42:42Z2019-04-23T12:42:42ZNewly discovered Du Maurier poems shed light on a talented writer honing her craft<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/270109/original/file-20190419-28106-nkdeg4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C937%2C626&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">For decades, Du Maurier poems were hidden behind this picture.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Image courtesy of Deep South Media</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Daphne du Maurier remains one of the 20th century’s most popular and enigmatic writers, her life captivating readers as much as her works, as the <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/f901fb1e-f098-11e7-bb7d-c3edfe974e9f">most recent biography</a>, Manderley Forever by Tatiana de Rosnay, has shown. Her literary reputation is also finally on the rise and, although her most popular novel Rebecca has often overshadowed her wide-ranging achievements as a writer, the celebration of its <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/sarah-perry-daphne-du-mauriers-rebecca-still-sexy-transgressive/">80th anniversary</a> last year reinforced Du Maurier’s place in the canon of English Literature as a serious and influential author. </p>
<p>This will be aided by the recent discovery of unknown poems, written early in her writing career, hidden behind a stunning photograph of the young Du Maurier in a bathing costume on the rocks, poised to take flight into the sea that was such an inspiration to her work. </p>
<p>The poems were discovered by auctioneer Roddy Lloyd of Rowley’s auction house, Ely, as he prepared the archive of Du Maurier materials belonging to the late Maureen Baker-Munton for <a href="https://www.rowleyfineart.com/the-du-maurier-collection">auction on April 27</a>. Baker-Munton was PA to Daphne’s husband, Lt Gen Sir Frederick “Boy” Browning and she became a close and important friend to the Du Maurier Browning family, as expert Ann Willmore explains on the <a href="http://www.dumaurier.org/menu_page.php?id=147">Du Maurier website</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/270445/original/file-20190423-175521-tx2shc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/270445/original/file-20190423-175521-tx2shc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=793&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270445/original/file-20190423-175521-tx2shc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=793&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270445/original/file-20190423-175521-tx2shc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=793&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270445/original/file-20190423-175521-tx2shc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=997&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270445/original/file-20190423-175521-tx2shc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=997&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270445/original/file-20190423-175521-tx2shc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=997&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Du Maurier with her husband Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning in 1956.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Image courtesy of Deep South Media</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Du Maurier is still primarily known as a novelist – as well as the bestseller <a href="https://theconversation.com/du-mauriers-rebecca-at-80-why-we-will-always-return-to-manderley-92519">Rebecca</a> she is also rightly revered for the great Cornish novels, Jamaica Inn (1936), Frenchman’s Creek (1941) and My Cousin Rachel (1951). But, as I argue in the book I am writing on Du Maurier, she was a far more versatile, wide-ranging, and experimental writer than is currently recognised. Du Maurier wrote plays, short stories and biographies throughout her career but she was also a poet, as her son Kits Browning explained to me when we spoke over the telephone recently.</p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/du-mauriers-rebecca-at-80-why-we-will-always-return-to-manderley-92519">Du Maurier's Rebecca at 80: why we will always return to Manderley</a>
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<h2>Honing her craft</h2>
<p>The newly discovered poems were written when Du Maurier was honing her craft as a writer in the late 1920s. At that stage she was primarily writing short stories but, as Browning told me: “My mother wrote poetry throughout her life and career.” Indeed Du Maurier often used poetry as a way of exploring an experience or emotion or testing out a character before then expanding on her ideas in a short story or novel. One of the newly discovered poems focuses on loneliness: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>When I was ten, I thought the greatest bliss,<br>
would be to rest all day upon hot sand under a burning sun…<br>
time has slipped by, and finally I’ve known,<br>
The lure of beaches under exotic skies,<br>
and find my dreams to be misguided lies,<br>
For God! How dull it is to rest alone.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Du Maurier’s work is preoccupied by the difference between fantasy and reality - and the dangers of dreaming - and her work repeatedly returns to the tension between the desire for independence and the need for companionship and human contact.</p>
<h2>Gender and sexuality</h2>
<p>Another poem: Song of the Happy Prostitute, portrays a woman who is frustrated with the way her profession is represented.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Why do they picture me as tired and old…<br>
selling myself with sorrow,<br>
just to gain a few dull pence to shield me from the rain. </p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/270440/original/file-20190423-175548-1u8d3kl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/270440/original/file-20190423-175548-1u8d3kl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/270440/original/file-20190423-175548-1u8d3kl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=178&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270440/original/file-20190423-175548-1u8d3kl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=178&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270440/original/file-20190423-175548-1u8d3kl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=178&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270440/original/file-20190423-175548-1u8d3kl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=224&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270440/original/file-20190423-175548-1u8d3kl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=224&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270440/original/file-20190423-175548-1u8d3kl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=224&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Song of the Happy Prostitute.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Image courtesy of Deep South Media</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>What on first sight might seem an unusual, even controversial, topic for the young writer in fact reflects the dominant themes of her early work, as Ann Willmore, of <a href="http://www.bookendsoffowey.com">Bookends of Fowey</a>, explained to me recently. Willmore discovered the unpublished Du Maurier short story <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/8466387/The-Doll-Short-Stories-by-Daphne-du-Maurier.html">The Doll</a> in which a young woman, suggestively named Rebecca, protects her personal independence by keeping a sex doll. “The Happy Prostitute poem fits in with Daphne’s interests in gender and sexuality, especially in her early work, and she did seem to want to shock her readers”, Willmore told me.</p>
<p>The poem also, in my view, relates to two <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doll-Stories-Virago-Modern-Classics/dp/1844087352">early short stories</a> from the same period of Du Maurier’s life in which she created the character of a prostitute called Mazie who boldly claimed that her work enabled her to be independent. “I’m free, I don’t owe anything to no one, I belong to myself”, Mazie declares in the short story Piccadilly. Growing up in the 1920s, when the freedom and autonomy of women was increasingly a topic for public debate, Du Maurier’s choice of subject matter reflects the concerns of her day. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/270442/original/file-20190423-175524-dw5xnr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/270442/original/file-20190423-175524-dw5xnr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=466&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270442/original/file-20190423-175524-dw5xnr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=466&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270442/original/file-20190423-175524-dw5xnr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=466&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270442/original/file-20190423-175524-dw5xnr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=585&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270442/original/file-20190423-175524-dw5xnr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=585&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270442/original/file-20190423-175524-dw5xnr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=585&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Du Maurier and her children at Menabilly, the house near Fowey in Cornwall in which she and her family lived for many years. The house was the inspiration for the novel Rebecca.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Image courtesy of Deep South Media</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>Du Maurier was a very privileged young woman, growing up in the grandeur of Cannon Hall in Hampstead – but her background was theatrical and Bohemian, as the daughter of celebrated <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sir-Gerald-du-Maurier">actor-manager Sir Gerald du Maurier</a> and stage actress <a href="https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp63552/muriel-beaumont-lady-du-maurier">Muriel Beaumont</a>. And, as her son Kits Browning stressed, she was an avid reader and gained much imaginative experience of the world from the books she devoured as a teenager.</p>
<p>As to why the poems were hidden behind the photograph – either by Du Maurier herself or someone else – we are unlikely ever to find out. Browning <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/04/16/daphne-du-mauriers-song-happy-prostitute-found-hidden-photo/">told the Daily Telegraph</a> that perhaps she did not want her parents to read them. Perhaps the Happy Prostitute found fuller expression in the Mazie short stories.</p>
<p>These newly discovered poems shed important light on Du Maurier’s early work and writing practice. Still often dogged by the incorrect label of “romantic novelist”, these poems highlight the important themes of independence, gender, and sexuality that were to fascinate Du Maurier throughout her career, in both prose and poetry. They show her boldness, spirit, and strength, just like the photograph behind which they were concealed for all these years.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/115659/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Laura Varnam does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Hidden behind a photograph of the author about to dive into the sea, the new poems give is a picture of a young writer beginning to test out her ideas.Laura Varnam, Lecturer in English Literature, University of OxfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/925192018-02-28T09:14:12Z2018-02-28T09:14:12ZDu Maurier’s Rebecca at 80: why we will always return to Manderley<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/208080/original/file-20180227-36693-ddowu0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Still from Alfred Hitchcock's 1940 film: Rebecca.</span></span></figcaption></figure><blockquote>
<p>Her boat had been found with its queer prophetic name, Je Reviens, but I was free of her forever.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The name of Rebecca de Winter’s boat – Je Reviens (“I will return”) is a chilling promise that lies at the heart of Daphne du Maurier’s bestselling novel – and, despite the narrator’s bold claim, neither du Maurier herself nor the reading public has ever been free of Rebecca. Celebrating its 80th anniversary year with a <a href="https://www.thebookseller.com/news/virago-celebrates-80-years-rebecca-embroidered-special-edition-689371">new edition published by Virago</a>, Rebecca is a novel that has haunted and enchanted generations of readers, who find themselves drawn to return to Manderley again and again. </p>
<p>Recently voted the <a href="https://www.virago.co.uk/rebecca-voted-nations-favourite-book/">nation’s favourite book</a> of the past 225 years and repeatedly adapted for stage and screen – most famously by Alfred Hitchcock in 1940 – why does Rebecca retain its power to captivate and challenge readers, 80 years on?</p>
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<p>Rebecca’s famous opening line: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again”, sets the scene for a novel in which dreams become nightmares, obsessions take root in the mind – and a lost house of secrets feels as real as any of its inhabitants, living or dead. Nothing is at it seems in this novel in which du Maurier, the consummate plotter, is always one step ahead, pulling the strings and surprising us time after time. </p>
<p>Famous for its rich evocation of the secretive mansion Manderley and its first mistress, the effervescent and treacherous Rebecca, the novel beguiles and deceives by turns as we are compelled to delve beneath the surface glamour that skilfully veils what du Maurier’s biographer <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/f901fb1e-f098-11e7-bb7d-c3edfe974e9f">Tatiana de Rosnay</a> calls its “muted violence and suppressed sexuality”.</p>
<p>“Rebecca, always Rebecca. I should never be rid of Rebecca”, laments the second Mrs de Winter, the shy, gauche creature who is repeatedly overshadowed by her glorious and vibrant predecessor. But then she muses: “Perhaps I haunted her as she haunted me”, betraying that spark of nerve that hovers at the edge of her narration. The young, impressionable girl who cowers before the housekeeper, Mrs Danvers, and shrinks in the face of her responsibilities as mistress of Manderley, is in fact the controlling voice of the story. </p>
<p>She might begin by telling us that “there would be no resurrection … For Manderley was ours no longer. Manderley was no more”. But it is by the power of her feverish and intense imagination that the house rises up before us and we risk losing ourselves down its serpentine drive, overcome by the monstrous blood-red rhododendrons, but drawn on by an uncontrollable desire to know what is hidden in du Maurier’s “house of secrets”. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/208062/original/file-20180227-36686-1bc34lr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/208062/original/file-20180227-36686-1bc34lr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=433&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208062/original/file-20180227-36686-1bc34lr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=433&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208062/original/file-20180227-36686-1bc34lr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=433&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208062/original/file-20180227-36686-1bc34lr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=544&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208062/original/file-20180227-36686-1bc34lr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=544&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208062/original/file-20180227-36686-1bc34lr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=544&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Menabily in Fowey, Cornwall: the house that inspired Rebecca.</span>
</figcaption>
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<p>The narrator’s passion for Manderley was inspired by du Maurier’s own longing for the Cornish house, Menabilly, that she had discovered abandoned “like the sleeping beauty of the fairy tale”, waiting to be awakened by an intrepid trespasser such as herself. She began writing the novel in the sticky heat of Alexandria, Egypt, where she had accompanied her husband, Frederick Browning, on a military posting, leaving her beloved Cornwall behind but remaining “possessed” by the house – “even as a mistress holds her lover”. </p>
<p>Five years after Rebecca was published, du Maurier realised her dream of living at Menabilly, after convincing the owners to lease it to her, but the entailed house would never be hers and indeed she was heartbroken to have to move out in 1969. Like Manderley itself, Menabilly represented both love and loss, a house which possessed its tenant but to which she could never, ultimately, return.</p>
<p>Du Maurier <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10248724/Daphne-du-Maurier-always-said-her-novel-Rebecca-was-a-study-in-jealousy.html">described Rebecca</a> as a “study in jealousy” – and that jealousy snakes its way into the heart, not just of Mrs de Winter, but of Mrs Danvers and Maxim de Winter as well. </p>
<h2>Maxim the Menace</h2>
<p>A favourite codeword in du Maurier’s secret language among friends and family was the term “menace”, used for an attractive individual. But “menaces” like Rebecca de Winter often attract and repel in equal measure – and they need to be controlled. Just after the narrator has agreed to Maxim’s most unromantic of proposals in Monte Carlo: “I’m asking you to marry me, you little fool” – she comes upon a book inscribed with Rebecca’s distinctive handwriting. Emboldened by the thought of her marriage, she not only neatly excises the offending page and tears it into pieces, she sets it on fire and watches, with satisfaction, as the curling R crumbles to dust. Such flashes of power are easily missed in the novel but when Mrs de Winter returns to Manderley, Rebecca’s presence is not so easily extinguished.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/new-adaptation-of-daphne-du-mauriers-my-cousin-rachel-will-leave-you-wondering-long-after-credits-roll-78546">New adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's My Cousin Rachel will leave you wondering long after credits roll</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
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<p>Much of Rebecca’s “menace” derives from the housekeeper Mrs Danvers’ obsession with her former mistress, whose room and possessions she devotedly preserves, stroking Rebecca’s furs and delicate nightgowns, and conjuring up an irresistible image of a seductive and rebellious woman whose presence in the house is inescapable. “Do you think the dead come back and watch the living?”, Mrs Danvers asks. “Sometimes I wonder if she comes back here to Manderley and watches you and Mr de Winter together.” </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/208076/original/file-20180227-36686-1kwwyaf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/208076/original/file-20180227-36686-1kwwyaf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208076/original/file-20180227-36686-1kwwyaf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208076/original/file-20180227-36686-1kwwyaf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208076/original/file-20180227-36686-1kwwyaf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208076/original/file-20180227-36686-1kwwyaf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208076/original/file-20180227-36686-1kwwyaf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">A still from the 1940 Hitchcock film: Rebecca.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">20th Century Fox</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But it is Maxim himself, patriarch of the aptly named Manderley, who is the most dangerous character in this novel, not the supposedly vampiric and deviant Rebecca. Even the sepulchral Mrs Danvers, who tempts Mrs de Winter into oblivion at an open window, has to take second place to Maxim. In the context of the #MeToo movement, his treatment of his first wife – who had the audacity not merely to betray him but to laugh at him – triggers a stomach-churning recognition of misogyny that modern readers are chilled to find that the second Mrs de Winter cheerfully ignores. Maxim de Winter is far more menacing than the ghost of his first wife.</p>
<p>Rebecca is a novel that has haunted du Maurier’s literary reputation, for both good and ill. Wrongly promoted by her publisher Victor Gollancz as an “exquisite love story”, du Maurier’s critical standing <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10765991/Daphne-du-Maurier-literary-genius-hated-by-the-critics.html">has been hampered</a> by her misrepresentation as a “romantic” novelist and Rebecca’s popularity has often been an excuse for snobbery and dismissal by the critics. </p>
<p>But when we return to the novel, 80 years on, and step into the vivid and dangerous dreamworld of Manderley, “secretive and silent as it had always been”, du Maurier’s creative power cannot be in doubt. We will never be free from Rebecca – nor would we want to be.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/92519/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Laura Varnam does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Once dismissed as a mere ‘love story’, Daphne du Maurier’s masterpiece has transfixed generations of readers.Laura Varnam, Lecturer in English Literature, University of OxfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/785462017-06-05T11:22:47Z2017-06-05T11:22:47ZNew adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel will leave you wondering long after credits roll<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/172229/original/file-20170605-31028-1tzngnv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Rachel, Daphne du Maurier’s enigmatic, modern heroine, played by Rachel Weisz.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Fox Searchlight Pictures</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>“She has done for me at last, Rachel my torment.” The last words of Ambrose Ashley, cousin and much-loved guardian of protagonist Philip, are at the heart of the compelling mystery of Daphne du Maurier’s 1951 bestseller, My Cousin Rachel. Having travelled to Italy to combat ill health, Ambrose falls in love and marries the bewitching widow Rachel. But before he can return to Cornwall with his bride, Ambrose is dead and Philip is left to wonder whether his cousin’s letters are the ravings of a man afflicted by a brain tumour or the desperate plea of a husband whose wife has poisoned him. </p>
<p>The new adaptation, released in cinemas on June 9, starring Rachel Weisz in the title role and Sam Claflin as Philip, opens by asking the audience: “Did she? Didn’t she? Who’s to blame?” And these questions remain as a persistent but delicious torment to the viewer long after the film has ended.</p>
<p>According to publicity material I was given when I attended a press screening of the film, when Weisz first read the script she immediately asked <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/films/callingtheshots/roger_michell.shtml">director Roger Michell</a>, who also adapted the novel for the screen, whether or not Rachel was innocent. Michell replied that he didn’t know and he didn’t want to know – and this is the central ambiguity that drives the plot of My Cousin Rachel and makes Rachel’s character endlessly fascinating and seductive.</p>
<p>Daphne du Maurier herself could not have answered this question. The novel is written in the first person from the perspective of Philip Ashley, who is consumed by hatred for the woman who caused his cousin’s demise, until she arrives in Cornwall – when he slowly but surely becomes fascinated and fatally obsessed with the inscrutable Rachel. In a <a href="https://www.harpercollins.co.uk/9780007347094/daphne-du-maurier-and-her-sisters">letter of 1951</a>, du Maurier admitted that while writing the novel she turned herself “so completely into Philip that I was beguiled, and she could have poisoned the entire world, I would not have minded”.</p>
<p>Weisz’s portrayal of her namesake perfectly captures the ambiguity of the character. Beautiful, exotic, and mesmerising, Rachel turns Philip’s world upside down. When it comes to women, Philip is inexperienced and immature – and not only is Rachel not the wicked witch he has been expecting, she is a woman whose moods, passions, and motives cannot be easily pinned down. </p>
<h2>Intense passions</h2>
<p>The film is deft in its replication of Philip’s perspective but it also gives Rachel a powerful voice and presence of her own. This is striking in the scene when Philip lays eyes upon Rachel for the first time. Lingering on Philip’s face as he enters Rachel’s room, the unbearable tension is broken by shock at her exquisite beauty. But just as quickly we are reminded that Rachel is meeting her husband’s heir for the first time. As Weisz clatters her teacup and saucer, gasping “Ambrose”, we realise that she has come face-to-face with a man who resembles her husband as he would have been, years before she knew him.</p>
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<p>Philip’s naivety is accompanied by intense passions in the novel and Claflin’s performance adroitly combines a charming boyishness with a far more dangerous anger. The threat and menace in du Maurier’s novel is not merely to be found in the <em>tisanas</em> (herbal infusions) that Rachel brews up – but in the misogyny that drives the Ashley men’s views of Rachel. </p>
<p>Michell recognises that du Maurier is asking important questions about “women’s freedom in a man’s world” and comments that he wanted “Rachel to feel in part like a woman from 2017 who parachuted into that world … the woman who fell from Earth”. Michell pens lines for Rachel in which she asserts her desire for independence, powerfully demanding of Philip: “Can you not let me be a woman in my own right?”, “Why can I not make a life of my own?” As a bold and independent woman herself, du Maurier would have been delighted to see this fundamental theme of her work made explicit in the adaptation.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/172256/original/file-20170605-17899-1ojnk13.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/172256/original/file-20170605-17899-1ojnk13.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/172256/original/file-20170605-17899-1ojnk13.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/172256/original/file-20170605-17899-1ojnk13.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/172256/original/file-20170605-17899-1ojnk13.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/172256/original/file-20170605-17899-1ojnk13.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/172256/original/file-20170605-17899-1ojnk13.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Developing intimacy: Philip and Rachel.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Fox Searchlight Pictures</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>More disturbing, however, is the film’s depiction of the sexual relations between Philip and Rachel. The novel, true to its own essential ambiguity, leaves this to the reader’s imagination. In one scene, when Philip kisses Rachel in the woods, Philip remarks that he “kissed the rest of her as I had wanted to do for long hours past, and once again she was without defence”. The film seizes this hint and portrays the sex scene among the bluebells as uncomfortably close to rape. </p>
<p>Cousin Rachel is, indeed, without defence in both film and novel. Arriving in a foreign country to the house that could have been her own, she encounters a man who looks like her deceased husband and begins to act like him too. In a powerful scene at the end of the film, confronted by an enraged Philip, Rachel brandishes a poker and weeps that history is repeating itself. But Rachel herself may have had a hand in that repetition as she brews her sinister-looking <em>tisanas</em> and Philip appears to succumb to the same brain fever as Ambrose.</p>
<p>“Some women”, declares Philip’s godfather Nick Kendall (played by Game of Thrones’ star Iain Glenn) “impel disaster. Whatever they touch somehow turns to tragedy.” The tragedy that unfolds is brought to the screen with the same compelling drama, irresistible mystery and seductive charm of du Maurier’s novel. “Did she? Didn’t she?” It’s up to the audience to decide and it is testament to du Maurier’s powerful story telling that they will be debating this very question long after the credits roll.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/78546/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Laura Varnam does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The revered novel’s enigmatic, modern heroine captivates and beguiles in a new blockbuster film adaptation.Laura Varnam, Lecturer in English Literature, University of OxfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.