Tuesday, February 14, 2017

A Ghost Takes Shape (Rebecca ch. 11-18)

My love for author Daphne Du Maurier only grows.

Once this list of 100 books comes to an end I am absolutely certain I will be looking into more of her novels.  Her sense of pacing and timing is simply impeccable.  Mrs. Du Maurier's word choices and insight into the universal bits of the human condition, and the manner in which she plays on them, is nothing short of masterful.  When most women write women I find myself not caring.  Call it a condition of my gender view, but I find it to be often to over dramatically done, too foreign to my way of thinking, or too forgiving of a female character's flaws.  In Rebecca I find only a perennially relatable character who reacts in completely legitimate ways that any human might to the given situation.

This section of the novel opens with the beginning of a breakdown for our unnamed heroine.  She continues to see Rebecca everywhere, in the rooms she enters, at the table, and even well into the minds and hearts of everyone she meets.  She begins an inevitable slide into a minor form of madness believing she is losing her identity with the knowledge that everyone is comparing her and finding her short to the nearly sainted Rebecca.  She is driven by this need to know her, who she was and how she died but no one wants to speak of her but to praise her.  Finally Maxim's friend, Frank, reveals how Rebecca died, capsized at sea in a boat she often took out alone.

Frank calms the heroine and comforts her, telling her that no one is actively trying to compare her.  He reassures her that Maxim is happy, her own qualities are quite admirable, and that all of her paranoia is unfounded.  Naturally she has to ask if Rebecca was as beautiful as everyone says.  For all his faults Frank is an honest man and declares that she was, "...the most beautiful creature I ever saw in my life."

Domestic bliss, or what passes for it at Manderley, continues.  Our Mrs. de Winter continues to act bashful around the servants, even to the point of dashing into the dining room to quickly gather food and duck out so that the help wouldn't feel obliged to serve her.  It's such a strange moment but so oddly relatable to me.  To this day I have a strong aversion to an employee of any business making much of a fuss over me.  I just don't like it.  When we went on a Caribbean cruise there was a formal dinner we had to attend every night with our table having three different waiters for three different purposes.  One poured the wine, one served the meal, and the third was in charge of anything we might need done which included cutting up our meat.  If I'm at a fast casual restaurant I won't even ask for a soda refill if the machine is behind the counter because I don't want to be a bother, and there I am with three waiters for eight people.  I was mortified.  The only way I got through it was remembering the words of Mrs. Macready from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe "That's their function.  We mustn't deprive people of their function."  At a hotel with a free breakfast I get in and out as fast as possible.  If a place gets my order wrong I spend no less than five minutes trying to decide whether it's worth saying anything.  That is all to say...I feel ya sister.

The heroine goes out for a walk to a cove that Maxim had warned her away from earlier and finds a dim witted man who knew of Rebecca's death.  He also tells her that some great secret is being kept and that a dark snake like lady, clearly Mrs. Danvers, doesn't want him to speak on it.  When she returns to the house she finds a car there and a man talking to Mrs. Danvers.  Later she discovers it's a man Maxim had forbidden to ever come to the house while Rebecca was alive thought Rebecca knew the man well.  Plot thickens.

Chapter fourteen is one of the most beautiful and creepy chapters.  Our Mrs. de Winter finds herself in a corridor and dives into an unlocked room to avoid being seen by the servants and made a fuss over.  The room wasn't like many others in that wing.  It was not forgotten and covered to keep out the ravages of dust and light.  It was well kept and cleaned.  Mrs. Danvers and begins to reveal her obsessive behavior towards Rebecca, whose room it was.  This chapter makes it clear why Alfred Hitchcock stood up and took notice, this and the final moments of the eighteenth chapter.  Dang.  Our lady escapes and naturally chalks it up to normal grief rather than something more sinister.

Things seem to be on the upswing again as Beatrice returns to whisk Mrs. de Winter away from the gloom and melancholy.  Beatrice is quite the great soul, on par with Samwise Gamgee when it comes to down to earth thinking and lifting spirits.  She takes her to see her and Maxim's grandmother who has some dementia.  Our lady is quite accepted by the woman who longs to return to Manderley some day, and why has there not been a ball in some time?  The warmth, serenity, and confidence the grandmother engenders is suddenly broken as she calls for Rebecca.  You can almost palpably feel our heroine's pain as the warmth and joy, the possibility of acceptance is wrenched from her.  Beatrice apologizes profusely and our lady puts on a brave face, but the wounds are so much deeper than she'd like to admit.

After she recovers from the shock and grief she considers what everyone has told her, that there should be a ball at Manderley.  Maxim agrees, as long as he doesn't have to be a part of the planning, and plans are underway.  She agonizes over what to wear until Mrs. Danvers suggests that she would look rather fetching in a costume based on a painting.  The death faced woman insists again and again.  With no other ideas our lady agrees.  Come the day of the ball, she realizes that Mrs. Danvers is not as well meaning as she had believed.  What follows, the reaction and the confrontation, I won't ruin for you but Mrs. Danvers pulls an almost Norman Bates style performance that is simply amazing.  You can feel the creeping fear as our lady realizes just what she is up against and why.  *shiver*

Pax,

W