On Literary Censorship: Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca
Banned books have always been a passion of mine. I love researching them and the reasons for their fate. Some of them, like Alice in Wonderland and Winnie the Pooh, have been banned for reasons we interpret now as ridiculous. Others, like any number of books aimed at helping children confront and understand the changes of their body in puberty, seem entirely counterproductive. While there may be a select few out there strewn in caution tape for good reason — one of which I hope to cover in this year’s series — I have never believed in the banning and destruction of books for any reason. Any attempt at censoring or monitoring books people consume only serves to light the fire of desire to read them all the more. I discussed this phenomenon a few times in last year’s banned books series — in particular with Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark when it comes to children and Lady Chatterley’s Lover for adult audiences, but also within the fictional dystopian future of Fahrenheit 451.
It is worth noting that, much as people will read things deemed forbidden to them in an act of defiance, my idea for this series originated as an act of defiant appreciation not necessarily for “Classic” literature, but for older works in general I and/or others may have overlooked or not revisited in a while that I have found to hold a continuing relevance or to have had such a ridiculous history of banning and censorship it became worth discussing. There is no age on a work of art in any media after which it becomes unworthy of attention, and books in particular are so often thrown through the cycle of analysis and dismissal that they are always worth revisiting from fresh perspectives.
With this in mind, I begin with Daphne du Maurier’s breathtaking 1938 Gothic romance, Rebecca. Despite finding it across four different banned and challenged lists in various spots of the Internet, I couldn’t find any mention of outright banning or censorship for the novel, although there is no shortage of discussion on its more historically ban-able subtexts. I kept it in the list, however, because of the oddity of what did get censored, and why: Hitchcock’s enormously popular, and predominantly faithful thanks to producer David O Selznick, 1940 film adaptation.
One of the most fascinating reasons to include Rebecca on this list is, aside from its parallel lives as a wildly popular novel and an equally successful film adaptation that suffered major censorship edits because of the Hays Code, it is a novel about the pursuit of forbidden knowledge and the obsession that comes along with it. Our unnamed narrator is every one of us searching out banned books and forbidden histories. She becomes so consumed with the need to know she begins to construct her own truth in its place, casting furtive glances around her new home and chipping away at people in the meanwhile until they finally divulge the answers she seeks. Would she have been as obsessed had the answers come to her when she originally asked, instead of constantly being told no? Just as banning books does nothing more than make them more enticing, being denied the truth of her husband’s history, given only crumbs of the scandal of it all, seems to ignite a fire with potential to consume everything around our narrator, even the peace of the life she attempts to build.
The novel seems to have something of a dual reputation, in part seemingly due to either intentional marketing error or popular assumption. On the one hand, it is viewed by many as more of a light reading romance novel. On the other, it is a haunting tale of Gothic romantic suspense shrouded in an air of mystery that holds us through to the very last page. It should come as no surprise that fiction written by women has historically — and in part continues to be — considered “women’s” or “feminine” literature and thus not necessarily worthy of serious consideration. Today the label has developed several different eye-roll worthy offshoots, such as “beach reads” and “chick lit”, which most of us have been conditioned to dismiss as more fluff pieces than worthy of deeper looking into.
Rebecca’s double reputation seems to have benefitted more than harmed it, however, and even invited rereading that shifted people’s first impressions of it as little more than standard romance fare into the masterwork of Gothic suspense and tension it is. It continues to be one of the most popular works of British literature, and sells thousands of copies a month to this day. So what is it doing here, in a series on books with sordid or shadowy reputations? Well, you see, despite somehow escaping — as far as my research will tell me — literary banning, there is no denying it contains seeds and in some cases full-grown vines of themes for which any number of other literary works have been banned: queer subtext, a woman with abnormal (read potentially non-heteronormative, non-vanilla) sexual appetites and the freedom, sort of, to explore them, hints of a cousin-based incestuous relationship, and murder. Oddly — though perhaps not surprisingly given the time it was made and the overbearing presence of the Hays Code — almost all of these were washed away in the censorship of the film. The only thing to make it through was, shockingly, the queer subtext.
No matter which way you slice it, Rebecca is at least in part a book on queer obsession. Rebecca herself, though cast in a rather villainous light, is the central figure upon which everyone else’s mind focuses. She is also the only one to have had full sexual autonomy to explore her desires, no matter how shocking they may be to our unnamed, presumably more chaste and innocent narrator. Because of the nature of Rebecca’s relationship with her husband Max, it was easier to allow her the freedom to do whatever she wanted so long as she kept up the front of a happy marriage in public. She could go off to London for stretches at a time, keep lovers in her boathouse cabin, and even managed to sneak them into her vast mansion while her husband was away.
For much of the novel we are under the impression, thanks to the ideas of our narrator, that Rebecca was beautiful and perfect in every way, the untouchable ideal the narrator has no hope of measuring up to. To the new Mrs. de Winter, Rebecca was loved by everyone around her, bringing life and light to her otherwise dull and drab surroundings. We learn, of course, this is far from the truth for most people — except her lover, John Favell, and most devoted servant, Mrs. Danvers, both of whom harbor an obsession for their versions of her in much the same way as our narrator does.
The narrator, though unnamed, identifies herself and is identified by others as the polar opposite of Rebecca, for better or worse. She is also undeniably obsessed with her. The further into the novel we get, the more time and mental space is given to Rebecca and the life she must have led in her impeccable home of Manderley. For a while every closing thought is of Rebecca, every chapter ends with her. Eventually she eats up the middle, and toward the end, entire chapters. She haunts the narrator as she haunts Max and any of her other lovers, as an untouchable force with complete power over one’s happiness, even from beyond the grave.
The narrator isn’t the only one with a queer obsession for Rebecca, however. Indeed, while all she seems to want outwardly is to consume and overpower Rebecca’s identity as perfect wife and head-of-home, the most outright obsessed with Rebecca turns out to be Manderley’s commanding maid, Mrs. Danvers. In both novel and film adaptations her one point of rage against the new Mrs. de Winter is the death and replacement of Rebecca, whom Mrs. Danvers idolized and loved beyond all others. Indeed, she goes so far as to keep the rooms on an entire side of the house and her clothes in such condition that it’s almost as if Rebecca hadn’t died at all, only stepped away for a moment, soon to return and spill the secrets of her scandalous outings to Mrs. Danvers. One has to wonder, in the sequence where she explains the truth of Rebecca’s personality and affairs to our narrator, if she was among the horde of jealous people who fell madly for her as soon as met her.
Rebecca is never outwardly described as bisexual, yet the draw of her consumes everyone in the house for one reason or another, regardless of gender. She is the specter that haunts every dark corner of the house, and every dark corner of the minds of Manderley’s inhabitants. Max never loved her; instead he feared and hated her power, choosing to marry her so she could control his beloved homestead and make it into something socially noteworthy. He, meanwhile, was her romantic front that allowed her true freedom. Eventually, of course, Rebecca’s romantic proclivities led to her demise, but she held sway and power over everyone to the bitter end.
I never quite understood the distinction between film adaptations and their source novels when it comes to what gets peoples’ hackles up. Reading about a passionately free-spirited woman with sexual agency laughing in the face of her husband’s false idea of power and her eventual downfall is one thing, but watching it play out before our eyes on a screen is another matter altogether. Just as Universal Frankenstein extracted the Creature from public imagination and brought him to life onscreen in one static and horrendous form, shifting him from a sympathetic figure to more of a monster in the classic audience’s eyes, bringing the specter of Rebecca’s power and influence to the screen seems to have drawn clearly the more scandalous aspects of her life and personality, resulting in further attempts to restrain and censor her truth and freedom.
