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Top: Manderley in ruins (chaos reigns)
Bottom: Maxim de Winter (uxoricide and floraphile)
I.
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley ... [a], whereas, as a matter of fact, I had simply rewatched Hitchcock's Academy Award winning adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca on TV [b].
Anyway, it was enough to make me want to return to the original novel and offer not so much a commentary or critical review, but a series of reflections on those inhuman and sometimes monstrous aspects that particularly interest ...
II.
"The pyramids will not last a moment, compared with the daisy", says D. H. Lawrence [c]. And neither will Manderley - despite the second Mrs de Winter's claim that time "could not wreck the perfect symmetry" [2] of its grey stone walls.
In chapter one of Rebecca, we are given a memorable description of the way that nature reaffirms itself and vegetation triumphs over the iron and concrete world of man when given the opportunity to do so. Trees, "along with monster shrubs and plants" [1], had "thrust themselves out of the quiet earth" [1].
The well-ordered paths and drive way were now "choked with grass and moss" [2] and once highly cultivated plants prized for their floral splendour had, with no human hand to tend them or impede their growth, gone wild; "rearing to monster height without a bloom, black and ugly as the nameless parasites that grew beside them" [2].
The rhododendrons, for example, "stood fifty feet high, twisted and entwined with bracken, and they had entered into an alien marriage with a host of nameless shrubs, poor, bastard things that clung about their roots as though conscious of their spurious origin" [2-3] [d].
Nettles were everywhere: "They choked the terrace, they sprawled about the paths, they leant, vulgar and lanky, against the very windows of the house" [3].
Chaos reigns, as Von Trier's shamanic fox would say [e].
III.
There are, of course, worse things than chaotic nature; the fat-fingered vulgarity of Mrs Van Hopper, for example; the cold, superior smile of Mrs Danvers; and the "despondency and introspection" [26] that so bedevil poor Maxim de Winter following the death of his wife.
Nobody likes a snob. Nobody likes a bitter and obsessive woman. And nobody likes a man "hemmed in by shadows" [26] and weighed down by guilt and fear.
Indeed, one almost wonders why the unnamed young heroine of Rebecca falls for de Winter, especially as she senses almost immediately that perhaps "he was not normal, not altogether sane" [31]; that he was one of those men who had trances and obeyed the strange laws and "tangled orders of their own subconscious minds" [31].
Still, at least de Winter is something of a floraphile. He may never have loved Rebecca, but he loves the spring flowers at Manderley; the daffodils "stirring in the evening breeze, golden heads upon lean stalks" [32] and the many-coloured crocuses - golden, pink, and mauve - that so quickly droop and fade.
But most of all he loves the bluebells that "with their colour made a challenge to the sky" [33]. But these he would never have in the house:
"Thrust into vases they became dank and listless, and to see them at their best you must walk in the woods in the morning, about twelve o'clock, when the sun was overhead. They had a smoky, rather bitter smell, as though a wild sap ran in their stalks, pungent and juicy. People who plucked bluebells from the woods were vandals; he had forbidden it at Manderley." [33]
But if he hated to see wild flowers stuck in vases or stuffed into jam-jars on windowsills, he didn't mind having specially cultivated blooms for the house; roses, for example, which he said looked better picked than growing:
"A bowl of roses in a drawing-room had a depth of colour and scent they had not possessed in the open. There was something rather blowzy about roses in full bloom, smething shallow and raucous, like a woman with untidy hair. In the house they became mysterious and subtle. He had roses in the house at Manderley for eight months in the year." [33]
His sister, who, like mine, "was a hard, rather practical person" [33], used to complain about the smell of so many flowers. But Maxim didn't care: "It was the only form of intoxication that appealed to him." [33]
One can forgive a man many crimes - maybe even murder - if he gives himself so completely to the heady world of flowers.
Notes
[a] This is the famous opening line of Daphne du Maurier's, bestselling 1938 gothic novel Rebecca, which tells the story of an unnamed young woman who (somewhat impetuously) marries a wealthy widower (Maxim de Winter) whom she meets on a trip to Monte Carlo.
All seems to be going swimmingly until they return to his estate in Cornwall and she realises that both Maxim and his household at Manderley are haunted by the memory and ghostly presence of his late wife (Rebecca). It's a fantastic novel which has been adapted numerous times for stage and screen.
Here, I am reading the Virago Press edition of 2015 and all page numbers given in the text refer to this edition.
[b] Rebecca (1940), directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starred Laurence Olivier as Maxim de Winter
and Joan Fontaine as the anonymous young woman who becomes his second
wife.
It was Hitchcock's first American project and was a critical and commercial success, nominated for eleven Oscars - more than any other film that year - it picked up two, including Best Picture. Despite certain changes made to keep the censors happy, it was a fairly faithful adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's novel and she was happy with the result. To watch a 1940 trailer for the movie on YouTube, click here.
[c] D. H. Lawrence, Sketches of Etruscan Places, in Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, ed. Simonetta de Filippis (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 36.
[d] The narrator - i.e., the second Mrs de Winter, could of course be describing herself her.
[e] I'm referring here of course to the famous talking fox in Lars von Trier's 2009 film Antichrist - about which I have written here.
