Beautiful in its contradictions: on reading Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier

The classic 1938 Gothic suspense that everybody loves

I am fascinated by authors who can describe ugly things with beautiful words. That’s how I became seduced by Elena Ferrante. She writes of poverty, illness, and darkness with words that are light on their feet. One could say her writing is beautiful in its contradictions

In Coco Mellors’s novel Blue Sisters, the author uses that language:

His face was beautiful in its contradictions.

In trying to formulate my thoughts on the 1938 Gothic suspense Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier, I kept returning to those words, beautiful in its contradictions.

Rebecca is told from the point of view of an unnamed narrator. What we know about her is that she’s young, inexperienced, and completely malleable. ("A dreamer, I walked enchanted, and nothing held me back.”) We know little about her physical features but, as we are in her mind, we know most everything about how she thinks. She marries a man, Maxim, and moves with him to his stately home, Manderley, where his late wife Rebecca once lived.

The book is about Rebecca, the dead wife, as much as it is about the living but far less alive narrator, for Rebecca haunts the hallways, the nearby sea, and Maxim’s staff that runs the house. On the surface, Rebecca is about the narrator adjusting to the life of becoming the mistress of the home, throwing costume balls, and handling a staff that was entirely devoted to the former mistress.

But it’s really about possession, obsession, and unburying secrets. What more does one need?

Art by Haleigh DeRocher, used with permission

The narrator says of Rebecca, “I was following a phantom in my mind, whose shadowy form had taken shape at last. Her features were blurred, her coloring indistinct, the setting of her eyes and the texture of her hair was still uncertain, still to be revealed. She had beauty that endured, and a smile that was not forgotten. Somewhere, her voice still lingered, and the memory of her words.”

The prose is stunning. Truly, I was stunned many times over. As much as I wanted to keep reading, I paused many times to reread a passage, often beautifully grotesque. Even Rebecca, who we learn from the staff was the most beautiful woman in the world, is written about with words like “phantom,” “shadow,” and “blurred.”

The narrator pays close attention to her surroundings too, not just to Rebecca. She is insecure, young, and unsure of her every step, which is why I think she is so attuned to the flowers, the weather, the way the sea looks and the rain falls.

I noticed for the first time how the hydrangeas were coming into bloom, their blue heads thrusting themselves from the green foliage behind. For all their beauty, there was something sombre about them, funereal; they were like the wreaths, stiff and artificial, that you see beneath glass cases in a foreign churchyard.

You can see what I mean: beautiful in its contradictions.

As expected, her entrance into Manderley is not without its challenges. She has to throw balls and find the right costume, one that will usurp the former mistress and dazzle her husband and the habitants of their town. She has to assert her authority over the staff. She has to get Jasper the dog to love her. And she has to come to terms with what happened to Rebecca and how it will forever affect her husband.

I suppose sooner or later in the life of everyone comes a moment of trial. We all of us have our particular devil who rides us and torments us, and we must give battle in the end.

The narrator daydreams hypotheticals, visualizing the ruin of her life at Manderley and taking the reader on a voyage to the recesses of her anxieties — and still, it’s lovely. I will go with her anywhere she wants to take me, especially if it’s to the flowers:

We were amongst the rhododendrons. There was something bewildering, even shocking, about the suddenness of their discovery. The woods had not prepared me for them. They startled me with their crimson faces, massed one upon the other in incredible profusion, showing no leaf, no twig, nothing but the slaughterous red, luscious and fantastic, unlike any rhododendron plant I had seen before.

The language is ominous throughout, even when describing the rose garden and the husband she so loves (“I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say”).

And who could forget this character introduction?

Someone advanced from the sea of faces, someone tall and gaunt, dressed in deep black, whose prominent cheek-bones and great, hollow eyes gave her a skull’s face, parchment white, set on a skeleton’s frame.

It may sound like a horror but it’s not; it has more of a nightmarish tone to it while retaining a hopefulness that only a naive, young narrator could provide.

Beautiful in its contradictions.

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What are you reading? Have you read Rebecca? I am not alone in loving this book! If you read it and want more books like Rebecca, check out

Abigail Cerquitella

’s post here.

What I’m reading: Favorite Daughter by

Morgan Dick

. This book comes out in April of 2025 (thank you Viking for the ARC) and you will WANT TO READ IT.

Love,

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