Sex, jealousy and gender: Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca 80 years on

In 1937, a young army wife sat at her typewriter in a lease house in Alexandria, Egypt. She wasn ’ thyroxine happy. Despite coming from an ebullient theatrical syndicate, she was recluse and agonisingly shy. The sociable demands that came with being married to the command policeman of the 2nd Battalion Grenadier Guards were far beyond her. It was besides hot and she missed England bitterly, though not the minor daughter and new baby she ’ vitamin d left behind. At the long time of 30, she had already published four novels and two biographies. Yet 15,000 words of her new koran were torn up in the wastepaper basket, a “ literary spontaneous abortion ”. She knew the entitle but not what would constitute the “ doss ! hit ! ” of its plot, merely that there would be two wives, one dead, and the name : Rebecca. Inchingly, Daphne du Maurier ’ s unmanageable novel came together. She wrote it in the first person, from the position of a young nameless narrator, who meets the dapper, so far unhappy Max de Winter while working as a dame ’ second companion in a august hotel in Monte Carlo. The girl is anxious, law-abiding, dreamy, terribly romantic, a perennial fantasist whose fears and insecurities bloom out of control when she becomes schoolmarm of the frequent Manderley.

Rebecca is a very strange book. It ’ s a melodrama, and by no means short on bangs and crashes. There are two sink ships, a mangle, a fire, a costume party and multiple complex betrayals, and yet it ’ s startling to realise how much of its drama never actually happens. The second Mrs de Winter might not excel at a lot, but she is among the great dreamers of english literature. wholly pages go by devoted to her imaginings and speculations. The effect is curiously fluid, not indeed much a floor as a network of possibilities, in which the proofreader is quickly entangled. “ One is not born, but preferably becomes, a woman, ” Simone de Beauvoir said, and there aren ’ t many dark illustrations of what this might mean and what it might cost than Rebecca. The narrator is raw as an egg, practically a schoolgirl, with her “ gangling ” hair and sting nails, her inability to talk to servants or run a house. Rebecca, on the other handwriting, is finished : lacquered and exquisite as the invaluable china cupid her bungling successor breaks. It was Rebecca who created Manderley, turning the adorable honest-to-god house into the deification of feminine talents and virtues . crime and high camp … the bill poster for Alfred Hitchcock ’ randomness 1940 film adaptation of Du Maurier ’ s thriller. Photograph: Movie Poster Image Art/Getty Images Of course, this paragon of beauty and forgivingness turns out to be a malefic juke. In the Du Maurier syndicate slang a sexually attractive person was a “ endanger ”, and Rebecca unites both the word ’ mho meanings. She is an animal, a monster, a snake, “ poisonous, damnable, rotten through and through ”. She ’ south destroyed because of her poisonous sex, what the daily Mail might euphemistically call her “ life style ”. amazingly, the reader is somehow manipulated or cajoled into believing her murder and its screen are somehow necessity, evening quixotic ; that being cuckolded is a far worse destiny than a womanhood ’ s death. It ’ s a blue rework of “ Bluebeard ”, in which the murderer is on the spur of the moment the victim, adorable despite his bloody hands. But who is very punished, and for what ? Rebecca has a disturbingly circular social organization, a close loop like James Joyce ’ mho Finnegans Wake. It ends with Manderley in flames, but the beginning two chapters are besides the conclusion. Husband and wife have been condemned to the hell of exile, in a hot, shadowless, nameless state, staying like criminals in an anonymous hotel. It is apparent that they are revenants in a kind of afterlife, their only pleasure articles from old english magazines about tent-fly fish and cricket. The narrator attests to their hard-won happiness and exemption, while knowing it resides in a locate accessible only by the uncertain routes of dream and memory, expelled from the Eden they never quite possessed. ¶ Du Maurier was under no illusions as to the bleakness of what she had written. “ It ’ s a piece on the blue slope, ” she told her publisher, Victor Gollancz, adding nervously “ the ending is a sting brief and a bit dour ”. But her predictions of poor sales were inaccurate. Rebecca was a best seller ; 80 years on it distillery shifts around 4,000 copies a calendar month. What truly startled her was that everyone seemed to think she ’ vitamin d written a romanticist novel. She believed Rebecca was about jealousy, and that all the relationships in it – including the marriage between De Winter and his shy second wife – were black and faze. ( “ I ’ megabyte asking you to marry me, you little fool ” barely betokened love between equals. ) The mind had emerged out of her own jealousy about the woman to whom her husband, Tommy “ Boy ” Browning, had briefly been engaged. She had looked at their sleep together letters, and the big elegant “ R ” with which Jan Ricardo signed her identify had made her painfully mindful of her own shortcomings as a woman and a wife .

As a child, Du Maurier dressed in shorts and ties and spent most of her time pretending to be her alter ego, Eric Avon

It wasn ’ t good that Du Maurier was shy, or disliked telling servants what to do. Though she was beautiful, she had never wanted to participate in the masquerade of femininity. She didn ’ t want to be a mother ( at least not of daughters ) or clothing dresses, though she painted her face even to go on her beloved rain-lashed walks. What she liked was to be “ jam-along ”, scruffy, perpetually in trousers, messing about in boats or living at large in her own head. As Margaret Forster ’ s indicative 1993 biography made clear, Du Maurier had been like that since childhood, always dreaming up other possibilities, never certain that people, or even time, were adenine stable as they seemed. She surely wasn ’ deoxythymidine monophosphate. From a very young senesce she was what she called a “ half-blooded ”, female on the outside “ with a male child ’ second mind and a boy ’ second heart ”. As a child, this didn ’ metric ton airs problems, particularly in a family of actors. She dressed in shorts and ties and spent most of her time pretense to be her change ego, Eric Avon, the brilliant, shining captain of cricket at Rugby. But as she reached adulthood, this boy self “ was locked in a box ”. sometimes, when she was alone, she opened it up “ and let the apparition, who was neither boy or female child but disembodied spirit, dance in the evening when there was no one to see ”. This hide son exploded into the light in 1947, when Du Maurier met and fell in sexual love with Ellen Doubleday, the wife of her US publisher, and the addressee of the letter in which these revelations were made. Her feelings were not reciprocated, but they opened the gates for a former matter with Gertrude Lawrence, an actor with whom her beget had besides been involved.

Fontaine with Judith Anderson as Mrs Danvers, ‘ the confront that launched a thousand puff acts ’. photograph : Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar Du Maurier ’ second sex is complicated to understand. The bible transgender was not so far in common currency. She didn ’ triiodothyronine think her desire for women made her a lesbian and fight against her “ venetian tendencies ”. ( heterosexual sex was known in the kin, even more exotically, as “ going to Cairo ”. ) actually she felt she was a boy, very much in sexual love, and stick in the wrong consistency. At the same clock time – possibly pragmatically, possibly not – she was a woman committed to staying marry to her conserve. She was by no means the merely writer to feel herself two things at once. many critics have caught a similar note in Ernest Hemingway, who frequently wrote about sex as a target in which genders could be temporarily and blissfully exchanged. Virginia Woolf, excessively, experienced herself as protean, slipping between sexes ; her gender-shifting, time-distorting romp Orlando gave voice to her feelings for her lover Vita Sackville-West. How much of Du Maurier ’ s sex is visible in Rebecca ? The narrator repeatedly casts herself as an hermaphrodite. She offers herself to Maxim as “ your ally and your companion, a screen of male child ”. The full heat of her desire is for Rebecca. She speculates about what her body might have looked like : her altitude and slenderness, the way she wore her coating sling idly over her shoulders, the coloring material of her lipstick, her baffling scent, like the oppress petals of azaleas .

When her husband’s affairs were exposed, she wrote how her life was entangled with the plot of her most famous book

She isn ’ t the lone one obsessed with Rebecca ’ s absent torso. Mrs Danvers serves as a much more obvious proxy for venetian tendencies. In the novel ’ south most sexual view, “ Danny ” forces the narrator to put her hand in Rebecca ’ s slipper and fondle her nightgown, while she murmurs an incantation to Rebecca ’ s hair, her underwear, how her clothes were tear from her body when she drowned. No wonder Mrs Danvers ’ was the face that launched a thousand drag acts. She was embodying closet lesbian reality even before Judith Anderson catapulted her into the senior high school camp stratosphere in the Hitchcock film. Mind you, Anderson is given a run for her money by the disclosure that Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and declaiming throatily : “ I am Mrs de Winter now. ” ¶ It ’ s not strange for a novel to contain traceable elements from its author ’ mho life. What ’ south odd about Rebecca is that it seemed somehow predictive, excessively packed with things that belonged not just to Du Maurier ’ s by but to her future, american samoa well . ‘ Du Maurier loved the house feverishly, calling it “ my Mena ”, even though it was freezing, rat-run and chunks of the old wing kept crashing off ’ … Menabilly in Cornwall. Photograph: Public Domain The most obtrusive is Manderley, “ close and silent as it had always been … a jewel in the empty of a hand ”. Manderley was based on Menabilly, an abandoned firm near Fowey in Cornwall, which had bewitched Du Maurier as a daughter. Like Manderley, Menabilly was queerly baffling. After she returned from Egypt, she managed to lease it from the owner and remained based there for most of her life. She loved the family feverishly, calling it “ my Mena ”, even though it was freezing, rat-run and chunks of the old wing kept crashing off. But she never quite possessed it, and in 1967 she was expelled after years of legal battles. Though she could hush walk its grounds, Mena was as lost to her as if it had been swallowed in a fire. “ What is by is besides future, ” she once observed. When, in 1957, her husband had a breakdown and was discovered to have been having two affairs concurrently, Du Maurier wrote a long letter to a friend, in which she speculated about how her own life had become entangled with the plat of her most celebrated book. Was her conserve identifying her with Rebecca, she wondered, and her write hut with the black bungalow on the beach ? Would he shoot her in a blind access of rage, and take her soundbox out in Yggie, their beloved gravy boat ?

She was under a capital distribute of stress at the time, but the fantasy aligned with her feelings about the oddities of time, how it seemed to run simultaneously, so that the aloof by sometimes came very close, or repeated in inexplicable ways. She explored this in novel after time-slip novel, from her 1931 debut The Loving Spirit to The House on the Strand ( 1969 ), in which a youthful serviceman takes an experimental drug that allows him to view events taking place in his own theater in the fourteenth century. The haunted firm on the Strand is preferably like a Du Maurier book in its own right. Her novels are storehouses in which she deposited emotions, memories and fantasies. Their function was intensely personal, but besides populace. If you ’ ve read Rebecca you have no doubt wandered Manderley in your mind, passing through the burrow of scarlet rhododendrons in the hope of tea and dripping crumpets by the library fire, entering vicariously into moods of love and panic. Du Maurier was not the most cerebral of writers. What she did was build emotional landscapes that can be entered at will, in which difficult and untamable desires were given free rein. possibly because of her relationship with gender, she was able to make worlds in which people and even houses are mysterious and mutable, not as they seem ; haunted rooms in which disembodied spirits sometimes dance at absolute liberty

• The Lonely City by Olivia Laing is published by Canongate. Rebecca (80th anniversary edition) by Daphne du Maurier is published by Virago on 1 March.

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