Volume 3, No. 13: 'Rebecca' as Queer Tragedy

On Reading the Past

Greetings, book people, and happy Pesach! If you’re reading this on Wednesday, I’m probably baking something almondy and delicious for my family’s seder. Almost all the snow has melted around my house, and I’ve been eating lunch on the porch in the sun. The light has been glorious. I’m not a spring hater.

I’ve finally gathered my thoughts about Rebecca. I have a lot of them, so here we go. This piece contains spoilers.

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My mother gave me a copy of Daphne Du Maurier’s 1939 classic a few years ago. Since I’ve been so into 20th century lit this year, I decided it was finally time to give it a go. It’s one of those classics that people have never stopped reading. When I posted about starting it on Instagram, so many book people responded to tell me how much they love it. I was not expecting it to become a new favorite, but I was expecting to like it.

Upon finishing this novel, my first emotion was bafflement. I did not like it. I found it boring and trite and disturbingly conventional. The narrator, the new Mrs. de Winter, is a woman so devoid of personality that she doesn’t even have her own name—her identity is entirely subsumed by her husband, Maxim (what an asshole) and the titular Rebecca (utterly fascinating). Though the book drags for hundreds of pages, there’s a sense of eerie suspense that is, at times, irresistible. I was pulled along, expecting some kind of payoff. But despite the eventual reveals, there’s no movement in this book. It’s about a woman who has opinions and does what she wants and is punished for it (Rebecca) and a woman who falls in love with a creepy murderer for no apparent reason (the new Mrs. de Winter).

I’ve been mulling over this for weeks now, and I still do not understand the enduring love everyone seems to have for this book. But I do think there’s an interesting queer reading of Rebecca—one that does not make me love it, but does make me want to think about it. I don’t know what Du Maurier intended, but here’s what I’ve decided: Rebecca is a queer tragedy.

A quick plot refresher: the new Mrs. de Winter, who is young and naive, meets and marries Maxim, who is very rich. He takes her back to his mansion, Manderley, where she’s haunted by the ever-present specter of his late wife, Rebecca, and the very real pressence of the stern housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers.

I’m convinced that every woman in this book is queer. Rebecca’s queerness is the most obvious. She has affairs (she sleeps with at least one man who isn’t her husband, and probably more) and throws lavish, raucous parties. She has this whole furnished boathouse where she goes to escape (to have fun, to be herself, to have sex, to be free). At first the narrator (the new Mrs. de Winter) assumes that Maxim is still in love with Rebecca, and mourns that she will never live up to her perfect memory. But eventually we learn that no, Maxim hates Rebecca, Rebecca was a monster, Rebecca presented this beatific face to the world but was unpredictable and nasty to him in private. Everyone loved her, we learn, because she was so good at hiding her true self. Maxim was the only one who knew how truly mean and vicious she was. It’s classic queer villainization: queer people are good at lying because we’re forced to lie to stay safe. Queer people are duplicitous and not to be trusted. Lying is second nature to queer people. Isn’t it special that Maxim is letting his pretty new wife into his confidence. Isn’t it nice that now she knows the truth about wretched, traitorous, lying Rebecca, who threw beautiful parties and made everyone laugh, but didn’t cater to her husband’s every whim.

Rebecca is villainized for being a woman who does what she wants, who has opinions, who refuses to adhere to the rigid gender expectations of the British aristocracy. At first the narrator wants to be like Rebecca, because she thinks it’s the only thing that will make Maxim love her. But as soon as she understands that Rebecca was actually a loose woman—dangerous, unhinged, not to be trusted—she becomes desperate to turn herself into the perfect wife: meek, quiet, demure. Everything Rebecca wasn’t.

The new Mrs. de Winter does not have her own opinions. Everything she does is in service to making herself attractive to Maxim. Her initial worship of Rebecca is filtered through her desire to please Maxim, as is her later hatred of Rebecca. When Maxim eventually reveals to her that he—wait for it—murdered Rebecca, she doesn’t blame him. She’s not afraid, and she’s not upset that, oops, she married a misogynist murderer. She only wants to make sure that Maxim doesn’t get caught. She spends the first two thirds of the book obsessing over Rebecca, and the last third obsessing over Maxim’s safety.

Rebecca doesn’t get her own voice. Is there any evidence in the book that she slept with women? There’s her relationship with the housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers (we’ll get to that), but, honestly, does it matter? Rebecca is a stand-in for all queer monsters. She’s queer temptress, queer seductress, queer cautionary tale. A warning for all the wives to come—don’t stray, don’t speak, don’t get angry, don’t seek out your own pleasure, don’t keep some small part of yourself safe from your asshole husband, oh no, don’t do any of that, because if you do, you’ll end up like Rebecca. Murdered and dumped unceremoniously into the sea.

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If Rebecca is queer temptress, then the new Mrs. de Winter, the unnamed narrator, is queer ghost. She’s an empty shell. She seems to exist only as symbol. A woman-shaped template to be filled in by men. She is naive, yes, but she also weaponizes her naïveté (a classic tactic of whiteness). She cannot see Maxim. She decides to love him—because he’s handsome and rich and pays attention to her when they meet?—and once she’s made that decision, she doesn’t question him. He’s terrible to her. He brings her back to his creepy mansion and then ignores her. Yet she remains steadfastly attached to him. And then he says: “By the way, that woman you’re obsessed with, my first wife, yeah, I murdered her, please comfort me!” And she says: “Oh Maxim, oh no, how dreadful for you, what a monster she must have been, of course I’ll make sure no one ever finds out!”

Perhaps Du Maurier was trying to say something about misogyny, but none of it struck me as insightful or interesting. I know it was published in 1939, but don’t come at me with that nonsense. Passing was published in 1929, and Giovanni’s Room in 1956, and both of those novels have something to say about misogyny and sexism beyond: look, it exists. That’s how a straight, surface level read of Rebecca strikes me: look at how easily a man can destroy a woman’s life. Look at how easily he gets away with it.

Mrs. de Winter only becomes interesting once you accept that she’s queer. She sees Rebecca through Maxim’s eyes, and she doesn’t trust her own opinions—but the novel’s central relationship is still the relationship between her and Rebecca. She thinks about Rebecca constantly. Every strong emotion she feels is for Rebecca. It’s very intense, and very lesbian. She yearns for Rebecca—to be her, to know her—but she doesn’t know how to articulate her yearning. She feels something in her body, but she can’t name it, so she explains it to herself by filtering it through her love for Maxim. Maxim vanishes for huge chunks of the book, off on his important male errands. The narrator spends hours in Rebecca’s room, looking at Rebecca’s things, trying to understand Rebecca’s thoughts. She lurks in Rebecca’s secret boathouse refuge. She cannot get Rebecca out of her head. It’s easy to read this obsession as repressed or unwanted queer desire. It’s easy to understand her steadfast dedication to Maxim—and her refusal sympathize and align herself with Rebecca—as a rejection of her own queerness. The things that draw her to Rebecca are the things she does not want to see in herself.

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Finally, there’s Mrs. Danvers, the most interesting character in the whole novel, though she’s treated like a cookie-cutter villain. Mrs. Danvers, like the new Mrs. de Winter, is obsessed with Rebecca. Unlike Maxim, who lets everyone believe he’s a grieving widower, Mrs. Danvers actually is grieving—or, at least, her grief is much more believable. She hates the new Mrs. de Winter, and so she makes her life miserable. She doesn’t make herself palatable, either. She runs the house the way she wants to run in—and if the new Mrs. de Winter wants to do things differently, well, she’s going to have to fight Mrs. Danvers (she’s far too timid to do any such thing). Mrs. Danvers spends the entire book setting the narrator up for ridicule and failure. She does so gleefully. Her understanding of her place at the center of Rebecca’s life is absolute. She does not doubt herself. She is also exceptionally competent and does not seem worried about losing her job (and we haven’t even gotten into the power dynamics between Mrs. Danvers and Rebecca, her employer). The only time Mrs. Danvers ever cracks is during Maxim’s trial, when she learns that Rebecca did, in fact, keep secrets from her—and then she loses her shit.

There’s something creepy about the way Du Maurier writes Mrs. Danvers. Everyone in the house is afraid of her. No one is willing to cross her. Her devotion to Rebecca is feverish and all-consuming—once again, it only truly makes sense in the context of queer desire. Whatever went on between Mrs. Danvers and Rebecca—a passionate affair, a desperately unrequited love, a known but never acknowledged attraction—it wasn’t tame. It fuels everything that Mrs. Danvers does—and she does a lot. Her actions drive the plot. Mrs. Danvers is the only women in the novel with any real agency.

Mrs. Danvers is clearly intended to be the villain, as evidenced by her hatred of the narrator—poor, beautiful, innocent Mrs. de Winter. But unlike Rebecca, queer temptress, Mrs. Danvers is coded as female bitch—cold, unloving and unlovable, selfish, conniving. If Mrs. de Winter represents feminine purity (on the surface, anyway) then Mrs. Danvers represents wily feminine sorcery. This villainy reaches its glorious climax in the last few pages of the novel. She burns the fucking house down. She goes out in a fiery blaze of lesbian rage.

Photo by Dave Hoefler on Unsplash

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If the novel is about three queer women, then its meaning—and its ending—shifts. It’s no longer “Oh look, sexism sucks!” and it’s certainly not a gothic romance. Rebecca is murdered by her husband. The narrator, presumably, remains with Maxim (though we never learn what happens to her after Manderley burns down), but she loses all the status and wealth and prestige she thought she wanted. It’s yet another lesbian tragedy in which the queer women end up dead, or ruined, or, in the case of the new Mrs. de Winter, unchanged. Nobody lives happily ever after. Nobody gets free.

Mrs. Danvers is the only character who complicates this notion of Rebecca as queer tragedy. After Maxim’s trial, he and the narrator arrive home—they’ve been driving all night, because, despite being let off (rich, white, connected), Maxim has a bad feeling. They drive up the winding road to Manderley and it’s on fire. The house is burning, and Mrs Danvers has vanished into the night. It is impossible not to love her for this dramatic act of—grief, vengeance, spite? You listen to me now, she seems to be saying, you small people, you’ll see me now. Where does she go from there? Does she get away? Does she finally let go of her obsessive love for Rebecca? Does she make a new life for herself on the continent, with a woman who can keep up with her? Is she caught and thrown in jail? Maybe she does get free. But if she does, it costs her.

I don’t know what to do with any of this. I don’t know if it matters. I’ve written all of these words, and I’ve enjoyed writing them. My experience of Rebecca has felt like an intellectual experiment in queer subtext made visible. I read it one way and it was dribble. I read it another way and it was hard and true and full of rage. But even though I would do battle for any of these queer women—for their right to autonomy and pleasure, their right to take up space, their right to be charge of their own lives—I still find myself exhausted by it all. As a gothic romance, Rebecca is a text that upholds and glorifies heteropatriarchy and all its violences. As a subversive feminist classic, it doesn’t have anything to say. As a queer tragedy—well, as a queer tragedy, maybe it’s still just another way to say: Look, women have suffered. Queer women have suffered. Here they are, suffering.

In many ways, this novel feels like a relic, a thing to study, and not a living work of art. It doesn’t feel like Alexis, another work of 20th century queer lit I read this year, and a book I want to keep untangling and grappling with for the rest of my life. Rebecca does not feel like a book with the power to change me. Maybe its value, then, is in the power I have to change it. Maybe one way to read the past is to mark it as our own. Maybe Rebecca as queer tragedy is a kind of playful rewrite—and maybe the rewrite is the gift.