Rebecca – Bitch Flicks

Classic Literature Film Adaptations Week: Mrs. Danvers, or: ‘Rebecca’

Movie poster for Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca

This is a guest post by Amanda Civitello.

There is a trio of women at the heart of Rebecca. There’s a male love interest, to be sure – the dashing, wealthy, ostensibly noble Maxim de Winter – but at its most essential, Rebecca is a story of women: the unnamed protagonist, the second Mrs. de Winter; Rebecca de Winter, Maxim’s first wife, whose seeming omnipresence at the de Winters’ country seat, Manderley, haunts her replacement; and Mrs. Danvers, Manderley’s housekeeper, and Rebecca’s personal maid, devoted to her mistress even after death. The narrator of Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film adaptation might be the second Mrs. de Winter, but Rebecca – particularly the novel – doesn’t belong to her in the slightest. Despite a script which departs from the novel in several crucial instances and the talent of Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, the story is Mrs. Danvers’s, and the film is Judith Anderson’s.

Rebecca recounts the story of the second Mrs. de Winter (Joan Fontaine), the new bride of the wealthy widower Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier), who married him after a whirlwind courtship. Though not especially acquainted with her frequently secretive, moody husband, she nevertheless adores him and, despite her modest upbringings, resolves to do her best as lady of the manor at Manderley. She meets with resistance, of course, from a likely corner, the housekeeper Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson), as well as from a more unlikely one, Maxim’s late wife Rebecca de Winter, who drowned tragically but whose ghost seems to haunt Manderley and its inhabitants in more ways than one. The second Mrs. de Winter finds herself at odds with Mrs. Danvers, who is by turns cruel and falsely sweet, and utterly bent on removing Mrs. de Winter from Manderley, at one point attempting to coax her into suicide. The film is something of a thriller, and so of course there are questions surrounding Rebecca’s mysterious drowning – particularly about Maxim’s part in it. Fortunately for our heroine and her romantic lead, Maxim is miraculously exonerated, in a disappointing departure from the novel, and Mr. and Mrs. de Winter, it is presumed, enjoy something of a happy retirement after the closing titles, despite a final act of revenge.

Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson) and the second Mrs. de Winter (Joan Fontaine)

Rebecca is frequently described as Joan Fontaine’s film, and while she’s excellent in her role, and clearly has the most screen time, her role is not, by far, the most interesting of the film. Her character, the second Mrs. de Winter, is never allowed to grow up: in spite of everything, by the close of the film, she’s much the same frustratingly childlike shrinking violet she was at the beginning. Fontaine carries off the ingénue type very well, and it’s not her fault that her character has bursts of growth – short-lived instances in which she takes her staff in hand, or speaks her mind to her husband – but then, inevitably, regresses. She’s beautiful and even sympathetic in her persistent naïveté, at least to a point, but as a woman, the second Mrs. de Winter is ultimately disappointing. Part of the problem lies in the fact that she’s consistently portrayed as the opposite of Rebecca de Winter, who is never seen and never speaks for herself, in the film or the novel. She is the sweetness and light to Rebecca’s coldly Machiavellian, sinister calculation. The second Mrs. de Winter is innocent, concerned only for her husband, and perpetually unsure of herself, which makes her rather nice, but somewhat simpering, and sadly, not especially interesting. Rebecca de Winter is not, by anyone’s account, nice, but she’s certainly more interesting than her wide-eyed replacement, and hers is the silenced voice.

Rebecca, Hitchcock’s first Hollywood film, is beautifully shot and wonderfully acted, but it’s also caught, somewhat uncomfortably, between genres. It doesn’t quite want to be a true Gothic thriller, because it shies from the moral ambiguity that makes the novel such a rich book, but nor is it a straightforward romance, for nothing is ever straightforward with Alfred Hitchcock. Unfortunately, the major casualty of this uncertainty is the novel’s most interesting female character: the housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, a brilliant turn by Judith Anderson. In the novel, Mrs. Danvers haunts each page just as much as the ghost of Rebecca de Winter. In Hitchcock’s hands, Rebecca becomes a cross between a Gothic thriller and a mannered romance, ultimately tending towards the latter, but even this does not fully temper Mrs. Danvers’s omnipresence: she is the link between the unnamed protagonist and the unseen antagonist, not the husband they share in common. However, the novel is full of contradictions in its characterization of Mrs. Danvers which the film does not address. Through the second Mrs. de Winter’s eyes we see Mrs. Danvers as “tall and gaunt,” with “great, hollow eyes,” a “skull’s face set on a skeleton’s frame,” and possessing of “limp and heavy, deathly cold” hands. While Judith Anderson’s costuming is not, perhaps, as skeletal as du Maurier intended, she nevertheless embodies the chilly lifelessness of her character. Her Mrs. Danvers is ghostly in her carriage, but terrifyingly real in her interactions with her new mistress. Yet in the film adaptation, the other-worldliness never leaves her, and Anderson plays it masterfully, creating a character who is deeply unsettling and deliciously spooky. But du Maurier’s novel tempers this description; the Danvers of the novel is not always an evil, unbalanced ice queen. She’s desperate and half-mad with grief, still living in the past and passionate about her mistress.

Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson) in Rebecca de Winter’s bedroom

In the film, Danvers is well written, but nevertheless tends towards one-dimensional in the part the script allows her to play; in the book, Danvers’s complexity is far more difficult to ignore. A novel of Rebecca‘s length must necessarily be condensed; the kind of explicated description possible in page upon page of prose is simply untranslatable for the screen. Much of Mrs. Danvers’s complexity in the novel, therefore, is sacrificed so as to streamline the narrative. Where the film paints Danvers as more sadistic than anything else, the Mrs. Danvers of du Maurier’s novel is significantly more multifaceted. She becomes the definite antagonist in the film, the cruelly calculated, disconcertingly creepy nemesis of the wide-eyed ingénue. This is necessary: the viewer needs to believe that, not only would Danvers definitely set fire to Manderley, but that she would perish in Rebecca’s bedroom and deserve it. (On this point, the novel says very, very little, and it’s only one possibility among many that it’s Danvers who torches the great estate, and no mention is made of her fate.)

Hitchcock, however, is a director unafraid of ambiguity and a master of great subtlety, and he addresses the Rebecca-Danvers relationship most decisively in the pivotal bedroom scene, which prompts the second Mrs. de Winter into assuming more control of her household. Throughout, Judith Anderson keeps her delivery crisp and preternaturally calm, conveying Mrs. Danvers’s madness only with her eyes and movement, to great effect. The scene is as utterly disquieting on screen as it is in the novel, perhaps even more so, given the refinement of Judith Anderson’s performance. Danvers catches the second Mrs. de Winter in Rebecca’s closed-off bedroom in the west wing, and then proceeds to show her new mistress Rebecca’s personal things: her furs, still hanging pristinely in the armoire; her hairbrush, laid in exactly the same place; her nightdress, still laid out for the mistress who won’t return. It’s very easy to make it entirely Gothic in character – a bit of ghostly theatre to unsettle the new bride – but really, there’s much more at play. Again, however, the film and the novel are at odds: in the novel, there’s an undercurrent of grief for the late Rebecca that cuts through Danvers’s cruelty, such that the housekeeper is mad with grief, and motivated by love for her mistress. Death has not relinquished the hold Rebecca had on Mrs. Danvers; in fact, it’s intensified it. Judith Anderson is frighteningly convincing as she caresses Rebecca’s lace underwear, such that the scene is laced with an almost palpable degree of sexual tension and lesbian subtext. Mrs. Danvers’s passion for her mistress is undeniable, and the nature of that passion is left unspecified. The question of a lesbian subtext to the Danvers-Rebecca relationship is one to which the novel alludes as well, and it gives a layer of richness to Mrs. Danvers’s character. If there was a degree of romantic passion on Mrs. Danvers’s part, her grief becomes more sympathetic; her madness, more understandable. But in Rebecca, the scene must be viewed within the context of the film as a whole. Where, in the novel, the reader ultimately feels a degree of pity and sympathy for Mrs. Danvers, despite the assessment of the narrator, on screen, it’s simply, in the end, a briefly penetrating look into an unbalanced, hostile, malicious woman’s madness.

Mrs. Danvers showing Rebecca’s furs to the second Mrs. de Winter, part of the subtext-laden bedroom scene

These perplexing editorial choices in the novel’s adaptation for the screen make for a viewing experience which leaves audiences with a distinctly different perception of the characters and the story. The viewers are denied the absolutely disquieting story of the novel. What’s so disturbing – and so Gothic – about Rebecca isn’t Rebecca herself, and not even the image of Rebecca, the spectre of her, that the different characters construct, but the moral ambiguity surrounding the characters we’re supposed to like and dislike. If a novel – or a screenplay – is meant to be a constructed world, one that functions according to its own rules, then du Maurier’s Rebecca wreaks havoc with that framework. The reader is guided to like certain characters, to dislike others, only to find those perceptions entirely spun on their heads: by the last few pages, the reader realizes that the romantic hero she’s come to like and defend is a murderer. Changing the ending removes the ambiguity around Maxim, and turns Rebecca into a Gothic-tinged romance, and casting Mrs. Danvers as, for the most part, the cruelly sinister, unsympathetic antagonist paradoxically makes Rebecca spookier but far less disquieting, far less unsettling, than the novel.

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Amanda Civitello is a Chicago-based freelance writer and Northwestern grad with an interest in arts and literary criticism. She has recently written on Jacques Derrida and feminist philosopher Sarah Kofman for The Ellipses Project and has contributed reviews of Sleep Hollow, Downton Abbey and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to Bitch Flicks. You can find her online at amandacivitello.com.

LGBTQI Week: "A Boy in a Box": Reading Bisexuality in ‘Daphne: The Secret Life of Daphne du Maurier’

This is a guest review by Amanda Civitello.

Daphne: The Secret Life of Daphne du Maurier. Dir. Clare Beavan. BBC/Warner Borthers, 2007. Film.

N.B.: Throughout this piece, when quoting or discussing characterization, I’ve used last names to denote the real people, and first names to indicate the characters in the movie, so as to differentiate more readily between fact and fiction.

With Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier wrote of some of the most enduring characters and places in English literature. We open the book and speak the first line with the second Mrs. de Winter, our guide into the mystery and intrigue at Manderley. Much ink has been spilled about du Maurier’s masterpiece but the author herself has been slightly more neglected until quite recently, with several biographies published in the last ten years. In 2007, the BBC turned its attention to du Maurier’s life with a biopic titled Daphne, exploring a brief period in the writer’s life but providing enormous insight into her character. Directed by Clare Beavan, with a screenplay by Amy Jenkins, the film stars Geraldine Somerville, Elizabeth McGovern, and Janet McTeer. The film grapples directly with du Maurier’s sexuality in an effort to show how the major relationships in her life affected her writing process.

Before saying anything further, a word on language is necessary. Du Maurier herself refused to put a label to her sexuality, preferring to describe her passions with men and women both in her own, often poetic metaphors. (Words like “lesbian,” which du Maurier despised, had a distinctly pejorative sense in her time. For more on the evolving language we use to describe relationships between women, read Lillian Faderman’s excellent Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, which focuses on the 20th century in particular.) Where possible, I’ve tried to use du Maurier’s euphemisms but have substituted “bisexual” when using her words would have resulted in sentences too awkward to read.

The film itself is a circular one, opening with the announcement of a death, rewinding seven years, and ending with the same telegram bearing bad news. The intervening years were defined by her two most passionately intense affairs, and bookended by the Rebecca plagiarism trial and the writing of My Cousin Rachel. Daphne’s husband Tom Browning returns from the war, and their awkward reunion is a sad harbinger of a postwar rapprochement that never occurs. Shortly afterwards, Daphne leaves England for America, two youngest children in tow, in order to defend her masterpiece Rebecca against accusations of plagiarism. On the ship, she meets Ellen Doubleday, the wife of her American publisher Nelson Doubleday, and one of the great loves of her life. Daphne falls hard and fast for the beautiful Ellen, and swiftly idealizes her, eventually using her as inspiration for her first play, September Tide. Ellen addresses Daphne’s infatuation directly, telling her gently that she can’t return her affections: not only is she married, but she is decidedly straight.

Back in London, the actress Gertrude Lawrence is cast in September Tide, and ultimately, Daphne begins an affair with Gertrude, until everything falls apart. It’s difficult to offer more of a summary without wholly giving away the film, because this is mostly a film about Daphne’s relationships, and relationships, in movies and in real life, are usually built on small, ordinary nothings. Not much happens in the movie, but that’s okay: the trio of strong actresses at the heart of Daphne delivers compelling performances and they more than carry the narrative to its conclusion. It’s easy to see why Daphne falls for McGovern’s devastatingly beautiful and sophisticated Ellen, and McTeer’s sensitive turn as Gertrude Lawrence breathes life into a character that very easily could have become a caricature.

Quite apart from any aesthetic considerations (relative austerity of sets, for example), the film’s main flaw lies in the narrative decisions made by the screenwriter: instead of telling a story about a bisexual writer, the film ultimately tries to argue that du Maurier only found happiness with women, who in turn inspired her writing. In so privileging the importance of the ‘Venetian’ (lesbian) relationships in du Maurier’s life, the film creates a false image of du Maurier’s sexuality. She made it plain that she felt as if she were “two spirits”, and sought relationships with men and women. Daphne is a missed opportunity to portray a bisexual woman during a pivotal, transitional period between the relative sexual freedom of the 1920s and 1930s and the post-World War II repressive, prudish attitude toward non-heteronormative identities that persists to this day. The film would have been far more interesting had it sought to portray du Maurier’s “boy in a box” more truthfully.

Du Maurier’s long marriage is the cost of casting du Maurier as Venetian: Tom Browning’s important role in Daphne’s life is marginalized. He hovers in the background without much to do. It’s to Andrew Havill’s credit that he makes Tom interesting enough to be noticed in a film that is wholly disinclined to address his character’s existence. In his one poignant scene with Somerville, they appear to be perfect strangers: all of a sudden, a marriage and attendant domestic relationship appears out of thin air, only to recede as quickly as it came. Du Maurier and Browning, while not necessarily exceedingly happy together, nevertheless maintained their relationship amid affairs on both sides, and cared for each other. In a film with a bisexual protagonist, avoidance of her main heterosexual relationship (especially given that there were others which go unmentioned in the film) doesn’t do justice to the fullness of du Maurier’s character.

Elizabeth McGovern (L) and Geraldine Somerville in Daphne.

While her marriage to Browning was a constant in du Maurier’s life, it is evident from her letters that her relationships with women were passionate and fascinating to her. As such, Ellen Doubleday is a major focus of the film, and a significant problem with Daphne is that it sacrifices the real Ellen Doubleday at the altar of narrative to craft a more dramatic storyline. She’s the victim of editorial decisions which paint her as a flirtatious femme fatale who persists in leading Daphne on, only to let her down. After all, a movie needs a heroine and an anti-heroine, if not an outright villain – even one as beautiful and as beguiling as Elizabeth McGovern’s Ellen. But there’s a degree of responsibility toward the memory of historical characters in a drama that deals with real people and which bills itself as a docudrama or biopic that simply doesn’t exist when one is writing about wholly fictional people.

“The Rebecca of Barberrys,” wrote Daphne du Maurier to describe Ellen Doubleday, referring at once to Ellen’s beauty, magnetism and generosity, as well as the loveliness and orderliness of Barberrys, the Doubledays’ country home in Oyster Bay, New York. Why would du Maurier cast Doubleday as Rebecca? Written to Doubleday early in their friendship, while du Maurier was still dazzled by all she saw and imagined Doubleday to be, it’s unlikely that she was referring to Rebecca’s more unsavory traits. Du Maurier’s pronouncement, however, is an eerily accurate description of the portrayal of Ellen Doubleday in Daphne. In du Maurier’s novel, Rebecca is never allowed to become a character in her own right. There are competing portraits of Rebecca – as angel, as evil manipulator, as beautiful hostess and paragon of elegance – because the reader never meets Rebecca and only sees her through the eyes of others. Like Ellen in Daphne, Rebecca is only ever however the speaker wishes her to have been.

Amy Jenkins, Daphne’s screenwriter, has no choice but to turn Ellen into Rebecca. The movie creates its own problems by avoiding du Maurier’s sexuality as it does. It must be an all-or-nothing relationship for Daphne because the film hasn’t set her up as bisexual at all, but as a repressed “Venetian.” She therefore needs to be totally invested in pursuing love with Ellen precisely because her marriage is mostly an inconvenience which the movie addresses as little as possible.

Jenkins weaves extracts from the du Maurier-Doubleday correspondence into the script, with some scenes consisting entirely of exchanges from the letters. It’s to Jenkins’s credit that these quotes blend well with her original material. The source material as credited in the end titles is Margaret Forster’s excellent 1993 biography of Daphne du Maurier, for which she was allowed access to the then-sealed Ellen McCarter Doubleday collection at Princeton University. Small but significant changes to the letters’ text and the sequence of events have a profound effect on the viewer’s perception of Ellen Doubleday.

At the climax of the film, Ellen and Daphne are in Florence for a getaway following the death of Nelson Doubleday from a long, protracted, and painful illness. After a bit of a spat, Daphne kisses Ellen, leaving Ellen in floods of tears and feeling “guilty” at being unable to “change her hormones” so as to reciprocate Daphne’s affection. “Guilty! Guilty!” shouts Daphne. “I’m not another of your acolytes to be indulged, you know. Christ…do you think I have no pride?”

At the end of the film, some years after the kiss, Daphne once again attends a party at Barberrys, where she observes Ellen flirting with her new beau. “So, the lady is for burning after all,” she observes. She follows with a bitter parting shot about what would become My Cousin Rachel: “I’m writing a new novel. It’s about a widow rather sinister. You never really know whether she’s an angel or a devil. She dies in the end!” and storms off the terrace.

After catching up to her, Ellen tells her, even more unequivocally than before, that “I don’t want it. I don’t want love with you. You may go to Venice with whomever you please.”

Taken together, these scenes unfairly portray Ellen as a two-timing manipulator, a shameless flirt, patronizingly unconcerned for Daphne’s feelings, who really might be an angel or a devil, particularly when the last line which implies that Ellen doesn’t want Daphne. Indeed, given the wording of Ellen’s first, gently veiled explanation of her feelings (“I can’t love you in that way”), it suddenly seems as if Daphne were the problem all along: it’s not that Ellen doesn’t want Venetian love, but she doesn’t want love with Daphne. Daphne winds up looking desperate and Ellen, cruel.

Most of the lines quoted above were actually written by Doubleday and du Maurier. Doubleday did indeed tell du Maurier she felt guilty – about her tardy reply to a letter before the trip. Du Maurier did call out Doubleday for her comment about feeling guilty about the letter, without the tart barb about Doubleday’s ‘acolytes.’ Later on, du Maurier did complain that Doubleday “was for burning,” but in a private letter, and softened by musings that emphasized that her sarcasm was the result of wanting Doubleday to be something she could not. The bit about Rachel the sinister widow was written to du Maurier’s former teacher. Du Maurier did make it clear that Ellen was, in some respects, the inspiration for Rachel, but she did so in a letter, assuring Ellen that it would remain a secret. Finally, Doubleday did tell du Maurier she could “go to Venice with whomever you please, with my blessing,” the latter phrase – excised from the film – taking some of the sting out of Doubleday’s (understandable) frustration that she was still saying the same things, almost ten years after they met.

All this is not to say that Daphne isn’t a worthwhile film. It is: not only for the spectacular shots of the rugged Cornish landscape, but for the way it engages with Daphne’s struggle to articulate her feelings for Ellen, for the way it illustrates her thought process, her desires, and her disappointments. Bringing her letters to life isn’t a bad concept; I simply wish that the film had stayed true to those letters. There’s a compelling story there, but not, I think, the one that some wish it to be. I’d love to see a film that engages directly with the struggles of du Maurier’s “boy in a box,” but Daphne is not it.

References and further reading

Faderman, Lillian. Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.

Forster, Margaret. Daphne du Maurier: The Secret Life of the Renowned Storyteller. New York: Doubleday, 1993.

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Amanda Civitello is a freelance writer based in Chicago who has most recently written on Tamara de Lempicka’s bisexuality for Autostraddle. She holds an honors degree in art history from Northwestern University and is interested in the ways in which artists use their media to explore issues of identity. You can find her on twitter @amcivitello.