Rebecca is a book about a young woman who is too frightened to ask her husband a question or even have a first name. She spends the entire novel very nearly having tea, then thinking better of it.
Only the first Mrs. de Winter deserved to have tea.
Perhaps I Will Not Go Mad Until Then
“There was something sane and comforting about the ticking
of the clock. It reminded me of the present, and that tea
would soon be ready for me on the lawn.”
Terrible Things Have Happened Under That Chestnut Tree
“How dark and sombre they were in the white skull’s face of hers, how malevolent, how full of hatred. Then she opened the door into the corridor. ‘Robert is back now,’ she said. “He came back a quarter of an hour ago. He has orders to take your tea out under the chestnut tree.’”
How I Wish I Could Forget The Things That Happened Under That Chestnut Tree
“Did she ever think about Manderley? Did she remember sitting at the dining-room table, where I sat? Did she too have tea under the chestnut tree?”
Only Bitches Get Tea. You Are A Nonentity. You Get Nothing
“‘Is it water-cress day?’ said Maxim’s grandmother, raising her head from the pillows, and looking towards the door. ‘You did not tell me that. Why does not Norah bring in the tea?’”
Oh How Everything Causes Me Pain, Not Like Rebecca, She Was So Full Of Life
“The tea was scalding, much too hot to drink. The nurse
drank hers in tiny sips.”
I? I Do Not Deserve To Drink Tea And Swallow Crumpets In The Presence of Maxim, A Cold And Remote God
“Soon tea was brought to us, a stately little performance enacted by Frith and the young footman, in which I played no part until they had gone, and while Maxim glanced through his great pile of letters I played with two dripping crumpets, crumbled cake with my hands, and swallowed my scalding tea.”
Indeed Who Ever Could Bear It
“I felt the afternoon had been too much for her. She wanted to be alone again, and did not want to face another belated tea at Manderley.”
I Resented The Tree But I Loathed The Drawing Room
“They stayed for tea of course, and instead of a lazy nibbling of cucumber sandwiches under the chestnut tree, we had the paraphernalia of a stiff tea in the drawing-room, which I always loathed.”
How Tea Reminds Me Of Entropy And Also Eeeuuuuughh
“His own cup of tea grew cold, left on a side table behind some flowers, and I, steaming behind my kettle, and Frank, gallantly juggling with scones and angel cake, were left to minister to the common wants of the herd.”
I Don’t Deserve Cake
“No,” I said. “No, you might bring me some tea, Robert,
in the library. Nothing like cakes or scones. Just tea and
bread-and-butter.”
And For A Moment I Almost Knew Joy. The Moment Passed
“I went back into the drawing-room and had another cup of tea which I thoroughly enjoyed now that the burden of entertaining had been taken from me.”
That’s More Like It, The Tea Is Cold, Like My Hopes, No More Of This Joy Business
“As I sipped my cold tea I thought with a tired bitter feeling of despair that I would be content to live in one corner of Manderley and Maxim in the other as long as the outside world should never know.”
No One Wants Tea Because They Are Dead
“What do you think it meant to me to hear Frith and Robert and the rest of the servants talking about you as ‘Mrs. de Winter?’ ‘Mrs. de Winter has gone out for a walk.’ ‘Mrs. de Winter wants the car this afternoon at three o’clock.’ ‘Mrs. de Winter won’t be in to tea till five o’clock.’ And all the while my Mrs. de Winter, my lady with her smile and her lovely face and brave ways, the real Mrs. de Winter, lying dead and cold and forgotten in the church crypt.”
Food Is For Women In Successful Marriages, And I Am A Child And A Failure
“I remembered I had only had cold tea at half-past eleven, and no breakfast.”
just gonna leave this here http://45.media.tumblr.com/5dbcff3427b8e336a700e2…
Wait… Frith-rah, the lapine sun-god, cameos in Rebecca? Are there other Watership Down crossovers I need to know about?
Just that the heroine spends most of the book tharn.
WELL PLAYED
I salute this comment.
Hazel has a crisis of faith in Wise Blood.
Man, I have GOT to read this book.
me, too.
It makes for an excellent audiobook- there are so many dismal emotions and shattered hopes for the narrator to convey!
Anna Massey’s version! It’s SO GOOD!
I hope “ministering to the common wants of the herd” features prominently in the mission statement of Manderley LLC.
I read this book and 1984 entirely too close together, so I always am waiting for the point in Rebecca when she hears the “Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me, there lie they and here lie we, under the spreading chestnut tree” song. Then I get confused about why it isn’t there, then I remember that is a totally different book. Then I try to figure out if there is some sort of connection between the two of them (there totally isn’t. just random chestnut trees.)
Tea, like coffee, is for closers.
It’s not a gothic novel unless the heroine is being denied food.
It’s hard to find time to eat between wandering the moors and being overshadowed by your love interest’s mysterious first wife.
Or denying herself food. If they actually want you to eat or drink it’s probably poisoned.
I could not stand how the second Mrs. DeWinter never ate breakfast. She kept describing the feasts laid out every day, and how she would retire to the drawing room with a piece of dry toast. Then she wondered if the servants threw it all away. Why? Why not dig in to those rashers of bacon and kippers and urns overflowing with hothouse fruit? If your life is stifling and ominous, at least enjoy a delicious breakfast prepared by your servants.
Or say to the servants, “Look, Maxim and I are not breakfast people.” But of course that sentence would have destroyed the premise of the whole book…
YES. This drives me up a tree. It sounds like the platonic ideal of breakfast, how are you not eating any of it? I am SUCH a breakfast person and this makes me viscerally angry every time I read it. Ugh! Goddammit, tuck in, woman!
I always got the sense it was part of not belonging, and class coded too: paid companions may have ranked above some household servants, but she wouldn’t have been allowed to eat profligately at her previous job, and doing it now would be taking on the reality of being Mrs. de Winter, much less in the wake of Rebecca. She continually doesn’t know how to act with servants according to the then-expectations and the hiding with toast is part of that.
I just have a lot of feelings
But We Have Always Lived In The Castle though
Find Rebecca’s favorite tea service and break that shit.
Baseball bat therapy.
Now I’m remembering the whole upsetting incident with the broken knickknack and I’m mad for her all over again.
Maxim completely humiliates her in front of Mrs Danvers! He says she’s just like a naughty serving girl and laughs at her like it is a joke between him and Mrs. D. Then he wonders why she can’t be contemptuous and haughty with the servants like he is. Ass.
Total dick move? By Maxim? SURELY YOU JEST.
And then blame innocent Robert for breaking it!
A Aaaaaa that scene makes me so upset.
I’ve always felt that it was just a matter of time before the narrator began deeply empathizing with Rebecca. You deserve better than his sulky ass, lady.
I just reread it and the narrator IS Rebecca in a way. In the last chapter she dreams she becomes Rebecca and strangles Maxim with her hair. I was jumping up and down in my library seat when I read that. Strangle that insufferable ass!
There’s a part after the narrator and Maxim visit the doctor who reveals that Rebecca is a non-child bearing cancerous licentious/lesbo when they stop at a cafe for dinner. Everyone else is eating really delicious smelling French food but they eat cold cuts. Ham, I think. Because they aren’t into animal appetites like Rebecca.
I just reread Rebecca after many years and it is so great! This must be the only book in which a naive woman in her early 20s is just not sexy enough. No, sexy is being 36 in black satin and pearls and laughing at men. Yes, please.
Rebecca as Miss Fisher?
Wait, was Rebecca a lesbian? I just finished Rebecca last week and I’m still not clear on what made her so evil, and I guess that would explain the lack of explanation.
It’s totally unclear what crazy unwomanly shenanigans Rebecca reveals to Maxim on their honeymoon that cause him to hate her so much. Whatever they are, they are way out of the ordinary. I don’t think just having premarital sex with other men would cause that reaction. And it is pretty clear that Mrs. Danvers loves her in a non-platonic way. And she doesn’t like men very much, though she plays with them. I’m not sure that DduM herself knew what made Rebecca evil. The novel reads like a fever dream.
It probably was simply the premarital sex. After all, he then married the most innocent girl he could find. The bisexualism was just bonus evil. Didn’t she also have an affair of some kind with some close male relative, a cousin I think?
Her cousin Jack, who is a skeeze in a book REPLETE with skeezes.
Yeah the whole thing is that she just really despises men – this of course does not make her a lesbian but there are allusions to her loose sexual ‘morals’ as it were and I agree with you that only premarital sex would cause that kind of scandal. She had affairs all over the place – and later in the novel Maxim talks about how careless she became with her lovers.
She’s also nasty as hell to Ben, the mentally disabled guy, and threatens to send him to an asylum if he tells anyone about her affairs in the boathouse. And whatever she does to Frank, it leaves a hell of an emotional scar, too (speaking of characters who come off as queer-coded…).
Yes, the narrator builds up Rebecca as a Great Evil in her mind to a ridiculous degree and Maxim is also a dick, but literally the only person who genuinely likes Rebecca is Mrs. Danvers, who is the kind of woman who deliberately tries to manipulate someone into suicide because she thinks she’s not good enough to “fill the shoes” of the only person SHE gives a shit about. Even given the unreliability of the narrator, I think it’s pretty clear that Rebecca was a nasty, selfish person who cared for no one but Rebecca.
Of course, the narrator is a spineless, amoral person who is happy to cover up murder as soon as she realizes Maxim loves her. Very, very few of the characters in the novel come out looking like remotely pleasant people (in my opinion, Ben, Frank, and maybe Bea are the only ones). That’s one of the things that makes it interesting, I think.
My grandma bought me six classic books on tape when I was about 11. I listened to them on rotation every night as I fell asleep for years. And I can still hear the exact voice in my head when I read these quotes…
(And at the time, I think I fell for the “Rebecca tricked him into it” line too.)
Secretly hoping that the narrator spends her post-Manderley life, like, waterboarding Maxim with tea.
I somehow conflated “waterboarding” and “tea” and got “water-skiing,” which, yes, totally, go do something FUN, girl.
I just found this book under my nightstand and I’m about five pages in, and so far it’s a meditation on post-Manderley tea (sad, with bread and butter) and Manderley tea (beautiful, with scrumptious cakes that went uneaten). And so my main take-away so far has been, “How do you sit around doing nothing except having delicious tea cakes shoved in your face and not go into a diabetic coma within the first three days?”
If you take your tea cakes with a healthy serving of paranoia and self-loathing you don’t gain weight. It’s a scientific fact.
Damnit! I knew I was doing something wrong.
Great, now I have the self-loathing part down….
Don’t forget all those brisk walks out on the freezing estate, trying to keep the frisky dog to heel. That burns up plenty calories.
Reading this, I realized that I have no memory of what exactly happened in this book and should re-read it immediately. I just remember thoroughly enjoying it at the age of thirteen.
Yes, reread it. You’ll appreciate it on a whole different level. I totally identified with the narrator and hated Rebecca when I read it as a teen. Now I hate Maxim and I think Rebecca rocks.
I’m only Team Narrator and Dog.
When i reread it i found myself empathising with Rebecca – the woman would have been queen and the book would be a completely different story if it was written now
Does everyone who thinks Rebecca was awesome just…overlook the bullying of Ben? Threatening to send people to asylums (especially in that era!) is vicious and petty. I mean, she’s awesomely vicious and petty rather than self-loathingly petty like the narrator, but I’m honestly baffled by all the people who read the book and come out of it thinking Rebecca was anything other than vicious and self-centered. But this is a view I see a LOT, and people espousing it never seem to acknowledge all the characters Rebecca hurt besides Maxim (who yes, is kind of a dick, although I’m not sure that means he deserves the mindfuck Rebecca put him through).
Yaay! I was hoping for this post, and lo! it appeared! Thank you, Mallory!
This is perfect.
I’ve taught Rebecca many times, and a fun thing I noticed the last couple times around is that when Maxim recounts killing Rebecca he says “I’d forgotten that when you shot a person there was so much blood.” Exactly how many people has Maxim shot? Good lord, man.
Was he in The War? Could that explain it?
I think it works, timeline-wise. Maxim is 42ish, and the book seems to take place in a time contemporary with its publication, so he would have been born somewhere in the 1890s.
I prefer to think this is du Maurier’s way of informing the reader that Maxim is a serial killer, though.
Oh, I See.
I first read Rebecca in my young teens, re-read it regularly, and know it practically by heart, and yet I had not spotted all the self-loathing, self-denying, very-nearly-tea-drinking. Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, now Rebecca: all I want out of life is that this Mallory-curated tour of literary heroines and their intensely messed-up relationships with food should never end.