Deconstructing Maxim de Winter - by Philippa Linton

The sea gives up its secrets in 'Rebecca' ... my own photo of the Cornish coast.

Ben Wheatley’s new adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca is being released on Netflix on 21 October. The definitive adaptation remains Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film, starring Laurence Olivier as Maxim de Winter and a luminous Joan Fontaine as his second wife. The new version stars Armie Hammer as Max, Lily James as the second Mrs de Winter and – in a great piece of casting – Kristin Scott Thomas as Mrs Danvers. The trailer promises a sumptuous, romantic, gorgeously Gothic take. We will be expected, as usual, to take sides with the winsome de Winters against the malice of Mrs Danvers, and I’m sure I will.

Such is the power of du Maurier’s novel, set in her beloved Cornwall: it’s beautifully written, wonderfully constructed and highly atmospheric. It has one of the most famous opening lines in literary history: ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again’. Manderley, the great ancestral home of the de Winters, is one of the most famous houses in literary history. It has echoes of Thornfield Hall in Jane Eyre, and indeed every other haunted country manor estate in English literature. The ghost in Rebecca is not a literal one but the memory of the beautiful, brilliant Rebecca, Max’s first wife, haunts all the characters. The shy, inexperienced second wife feels she can’t possibly live up to Rebecca’s shining reputation. The pathological Mrs Danvers clings onto the memory of her first mistress in a profoundly unhealthy way. But if Mrs Danvers is one of the villains of the story, Maxim de Winter is its anti-hero.

Max is similar to Edward Rochester: both men are rich, powerful, worldly-wise and both harbour dark secrets about their first wives. They fit the Byronic trope of the dark, handsome, brooding hero. The women who love them are inexperienced in the ways of the world, and the clear moral virtue of Jane Eyre’s character contrasts with the more ambiguous character of her Edward. In another contrast, the second Mrs de Winter – we never learn her name – is prepared to stand by her new husband in covering up a serious crime. (Hitchcock, in his 1940 film, changed the plot because it was deemed too morally murky for audiences of the time.)

I don’t like or admire Max de Winter, but I understand why his second wife loves him the way she does. When the story opens, she is a 21 year old penniless orphan forced to take a thankless job as companion to a rich, spoiled widow in Monte Carlo. Enter Max: twice her age, handsome, charismatic, amazingly wealthy. He offers her a way out of her dreary existence by marrying her and taking her back to Manderley on the Cornish coast. What girl in her position wouldn’t grab such an opportunity? What shy, inexperienced virgin wouldn’t fall in love with a man like this?

Yet underneath that traditional trope of Byronic brooding, Max is not particularly nice or good: he is privileged, entitled, emotionally repressed and often downright sexist – for the first half of the novel he treats his second wife abysmally. When I read the book for the first time, I identified with her sensitivity, chronic lack of self-esteem and shyness. The story is told in the first person from her point of view. She is not, in my opinion, an entirely reliable narrator. I don’t think du Maurier intends her to be. (Du Maurier passes no judgment on her characters, simply letting them tell their own stories.)

This much loved novel resonates because it taps into a deep-seated insecurity that many of us harbour, that we’re not good enough, that we can’t measure up. The story is also provocative because it ultimately sets its heroine and ‘hero’ in a troubling moral light. It is ironic that Mrs Danvers, as scary and unhinged as she is, is on the right side of the law (apart from her final act of sabotage).

Great literature presents the moral and emotional complexities of what it is to be human. Obviously as Christian writers we want to seek out a redemptive angle. I think we would argue that was essential, not only to our worldview but to how we approach writing. The redemptive angle in Rebecca is not straightforward. I might argue that in a sense Max and his second wife deserve their fate. But it’s a truly great novel.