#daphne du maurier
the narrator of Rebecca realizes some guests have arrived early and the one person she knows well (her husband) isn’t here and her immediate first thought is to climb out the window and hide in the garden before anyone spots her so they just assume she isn’t home so she doesn’t have to deal with meeting new people without her husband there to be a social buffer
and they say classic literature isn’t relatable
Rebecca (1940)
“Luxury has never appealed to me. I like simple things, books, being alone, or with somebody who understands.”—Daphne du Maurier (b. 13 May 1907)
“Punctuated by clues that repeatedly point to Rebecca’s, Danvers’s and Fontaine’s queer desires, the novel and film weave nonheterosexual lures into their narrative fabrics. Rebecca’s sapphic menace is constructed on the coattails of homophobic stereotyping: Rebecca is monstrous, diseased, nonreproductive, destructive, unnatural, masculine, and a man hater. She is also strikingly beautiful, powerful, and alluring enough to sustain the attentions of her housekeeper and her successor and to jeopardize the success of the film’s primary heterosexual union. That the queer’s most influential and engaging attributes belong to a character who is physically absent from the film underscore both the potency of her threat and the limitations of patriarchal structures of representation—structures in which queerness is relegated to discourses of invisibility and silence.”
—Rhona J. Berenstein, from “‘I’m not the sort of person men marry’: Monsters, Queers and Hitchcock’s Rebecca”
Rebecca: Living with Ghosts and Bottling Up Memories
Last night I read Rebecca again and was struck by the similarities in the relationship between its three central characters and Michael and me.
I read Daphne du Maurier’s haunting 1938 classic first in my early twenties and was transfixed by this twisting tale of gauzy enchantment and creeping fear. Always a sucker for a gothic romance, I was mesmerized from the first paragraph.
I must’ve…