I recently watched the BBC Biopic on Daphne DuMarier, *Daphne*
(2007), which dramatizes her bisexuality; her seemingly passionless marriage; her
unrequited love for Ellen Doubleday, her publisher’s wife; and her affair with
actress Gertrude Lawrence, as well as her writing career from the plagiarism
trial over Rebecca to the writing of
her short story “The Birds.” (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0963169/)
It had been a long time since I had read Rebecca (1938), so I watched the
Hitchcock film to refresh my memory (1940).
According to Wikipedia, the film is fairly faithful to the novel with a
couple of exceptions, namely changing the death of Rebecca from a murder by her
husband to an accidental fall when he angrily confronts her and changing the
character of Mrs. Danvers to make her younger, more mysterious, and more, well,
lesbian.
My own interpretation of the film version of Mrs. Danvers
was that she was almost pathologically loyal to Rebecca and resentful of the
second Mrs. de Winter, to the point of wanting to get rid of the second wife,
almost like a child who hates her step-mother.
Mrs. Danvers is presented as unambiguously evil. She always wears black and displays a
malignant expression. If you read her as
lesbian, it could be because in those days the stereotypical lesbian was often
a vampirish predator.
I don’t remember the novel well enough to speculate on
whether this lesbian association could be found in the original text, but du
Maurier may have seen her own same-sex attraction as evil, or at least,
deviant. In any case, her diaries reveal
that she saw two sides to her own personality: the conventional wife and mother
and the hidden male lover that energized her creativity. (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/935280.Myself_When_Young)
What if Rebecca
were an expression of these two sides of her psyche? Why is the narrator of the novel (the second
Mrs. de Winter) unnamed? Why is a
crucial scene in the plot based on a costume that both Rebecca and the narrator
wear? Why does Rebecca herself have two
sides to her personality: her public image as the beautiful, elegant wife of
Maxim de Winter and her hidden side of sexual promiscuity, selfishness,
cruelty, and deception? Identity is
clearly a prominent theme.
The unnamed second Mrs. de Winter is young, inexperienced,
and naïve, compared to the sophisticated, worldly, and manipulative first wife,
Rebecca. The second wife could represent
the conventional wife and mother identity that Daphne du Maurier presented in
public, while Rebecca represents what du Maurier saw as her dark side of forbidden
desire, sexual transgression, and duplicity.
So, why is the “good wife,” so to speak, unnamed? Is that the author’s way of erasing her
conventional self? Is Rebecca’s death a
way of symbolically killing off the dark side?
Does the novel express an identity conflict? Does du Maurier unconsciously, if not
consciously, reject both sides of her personality?
A Freudian or psychoanalytic critic would have no problem
answering in the affirmative, and, I must say, I find that interpretation
persuasive.
If Mrs. Danvers’ attachment to Rebecca, even after death, is
read as lesbian, then her burning down of Manderly could perhaps represent the
destructiveness that du Maurier saw, or feared, in her hidden desires. Fire, of course, also represents the heat of
passion. Danvers’ own death in the
conflagration may express du Maurier’s fear of her own self-destructive
passion. Is that why she retreated for
the rest of her life into her conventional marriage after the death of Gertrude
Lawrence?
On the other hand, her own words attribute her creativity to
the “male lover” within. Perhaps she was
aware of the Freudian theory that repressed desire will manifest itself
indirectly, often in creative work.
Perhaps it is safer to speculate, since speculation it is, that du
Maurier was ambivalent about her same-sex desire, seeing it as potentially
destructive if acted out and a source of energy if channeled into creative
work.
I pose this interpretation tentatively and interrogatively
because psychoanalytic criticism is often viewed skeptically as a form of
practicing psychology without a license and pathologizing an author one has
never met or interviewed. Yet literature
is a form of fantasy, and fantasy is often an expression of what has been
sublimated, repressed, or denied. I will
leave it to my readers to conclude whether the parallels between du Maurier’s
own autobiography and the novel are valid and significant.
Other ways of reading the novel include the gothic fear of
irrationality and death and the age-old pattern of initiation, or coming-of-age,
in which the “innocent” second wife comes to terms with the evil in the world,
including, in her case, the knowledge that she loves, marries, and ultimately
protects a murderer. In either case, our
narrator could be nameless the better to represent a universal human
experience. Neither of these readings is
inconsistent with the other nor with the psychoanalytic interpretation.
