Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

One of the honors English classes at my high school (not mine) read Rebecca when we were in 10th grade. I remember being surprised to see a friend carrying the book around with her. It looked like a romance novel, with the red silk and swoopy writing, but it clearly wasn't if it had been assigned reading in an honors English class. As I heard classmates talking about the book, I was intrigued enough that for years, whenever I would see the book on the bookstore shelf, I would pull it off and read the back and think, I should read this sometime. A few months ago, I found a used copy for less than a dollar, and decided that this was my chance.

Rebecca started off a little slowly, but was still interesting enough that it didn't lose me. The main character is not Rebecca, but the young and unsure narrator (never named) who, after a surprising whirlwind courtship in Monte Carlo with the wealthy Maxim DeWinter, becomes his second wife and returns with him to the family estate, Manderley. She finds Manderley haunted by memories of the beautiful, gregarious, and much-loved Rebecca, Mr. DeWinter's first wife who drowned a year earlier. The life and death of Rebecca takes on mysterious and ominous undertones as the novel progresses, heightened by the strange and foreboding presence of the housekeeper Mrs. Danvers, and ultimately culminating in a suspenseful climax worthy of Alfred Hitchcock, who directed the 1940 film adaptation.

I really liked Rebecca. I liked that the suspense of the novel did not rely on a sudden, dramatic, big reveal. There was a reveal, but the reveal itself didn't feel like a storytelling gimmick - the story had been building to it all along, and the story did not end there. I also liked that the story was told entirely from the point of view of the narrator. She entered the marriage young and naive, but much of her naivete was at the hands of the people around her. No one, neither her husband nor her husband's family nor the servants of the house, was completely forthcoming, and she was left to guess at the reasons behind people's behavior - behavior that often seemed strange and contradictory without the background knowledge that others possessed. She constantly told herself stories, about what she imagined people saying or doing (or what they had said and done in the past), stories that sounded reasonable in light of what she knew with the very little information she had, stories which left her insecure and which threatened her relationship with her husband.

In a way, I could relate to the narrator's personal storytelling, though my own life and its missing background information is (I assume) not nearly as dramatic. We all live inside our own heads, but we have to interact with other people and guess at what they are thinking and feeling and doing, and I have learned that quite often what I imagine is far from the truth. It doesn't stop me from imagining, and acting on what I imagine, because sometimes that's all I can do. But what Rebecca seemed to suggest was that sometimes we cannot even guess at what is going on behind the scenes.

And all her guessing, and the truth that she is finally told, make for an awfully good story.