Yet, some how Du Maurier makes it work - particularly through the supporting characters.
I'm kind of curious as to why Du Maurier never gave her female protagonist a name? Was she supposed to be someone every woman could relate to and see themselves in? Was it commentary on women's role in the 1930s? The narrator is so passive, so bland, and so boring - pretty much every other character in the book is more interesting than she is. But it becomes increasingly doubtful that the shadow of his dead wife (not to mention her loyal and terrifying maidservant) will ever allow them to find a happily after. First published in the late 1930s, the protagonist is a nameless narrator who recently married a rich widower and only wants to make him happy and for him to love her. Suddenly, I couldn't stop listening to (in my experience, this rarely ever happens). It's a fascinating book, and once I got past the halfway mark Du Maurier really ratcheted up the tension in a story I'd been pretty bored with.
I would love to read a bunch of contemporary, feminist essays on Rebecca right about now. Did she succeed in her dastardly attempt to rid the glorious Manderley Estate of this young bride, this young acquired thing who could banish the memory of her beloved Rebecca forever? You shall have to listen for yourself to find out. I sat in the darkness of my driveway that night unable to leave my car listening to the voice of that housekeeper – like a mythological Siren creature, luring sailors to their deaths. I will never forget her narration of the scene where the housekeeper Mrs Danvers - so devoted and obsessed with the memory of dead Rebecca, slowly and gently encourages the new wife to climb into the high open window and throw herself to her death, for it would be the only decent thing to do. The narration by Anna Massey is so perfect that she gives it the feel of a film noir classic. This British classic is a flashback of how a young and naïve traveling companion to a rich American woman on vacation finds herself the fast bride of an older Englishman - a man with a lavish estate, a man with a sinister housekeeper, a man with a dead wife.
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