Reading Rebecca Pt. 7

Bookshelves of Doom

Chapters 19-21

If you thought the last few chapters were exciting, they pale in comparison to these. Chapter 19 is a major turning point for the book. Everything changes. Everything. Once I read these, there was absolutely NO way I could pace myself. I had to finish the book all at once.

Excitement on the Cove--Chapter 19--A Time for the Truth.

Big changes are on the way. With the ever-scary confrontation with Mrs. Danvers out of the way, our narrator is increasing her territory. She's actually acting like mistress of the estate instead of her shy, awkward, anxiety-ridden self. She's learned to be assertive with the staff. Leila noted that Frith's attitude towards our narrator has changed. I think it's not Frith's change, it's our narrator's. I think she's had an attitude change. She's now sending out different vibes. People are treating her differently because she's acting differently. She is commanding respect now. If she's not afraid of Mrs. Danvers, why would she tremble at Frith? The saying is that dogs smell fear...I'd suggest something similar here. I think the servants treated her such because they could "smell" her fear, her weakness, her uncertainty, her distress. The person who just a week or so before had to sneak out of the house in order to eat cookies without the servants or staff knowing is now the boss. Also, and this is total speculation on my part, but maybe just maybe the servants respect her for coming back down to the party last night. Maybe they thought that Maxim was an a** and cheered when he couldn't cow her into spending the night in her room sobbing.

The shipwreck. The cove. The divers.

I don't know if I'd be drawn to the scene of a ship-wreck, to wash from the shores a boat--a ship--in distress. True, the people--the sailors--are safe enough. And I don't think they'll be a loss of lives, but it will be destructive in other ways. Some more unexpected than others. For example, divers are being sent down to explore. Clue number one that a big secret is about to surface. Clue number two is our narrator's conversation with Ben. Both are such obvious clues, that it would be hard to miss where it's going.

Captain Searle's revelation: the divers have found Rebecca's boat--and found a body within its cabin.

Confession time for Maxim...

but first this little gem from our narrator:

I don't want you to bear this alone...I want to share it with you. I've grown up, Maxim, in twenty-four hours. I'll never be a child again.

And this time I think it's true. I think she actually is different now than she was before.

There never was an accident. Rebecca was not drowned at all. I killed her. I shot Rebecca in the cottage in the cove. I carried her body to the cabin, and took the boat out that night and sunk it there, where they found it today. It's Rebecca who's lying dead there on the cabin floor. Will you look into my eyes and tell me that you love me now?"

See? Big, big, big changes. I like Maxim the wronged husband turned murderer better than the slightly mad, always defensive, aloof, supposedly grief-stricken one.

Chapter 20

It was very quiet in the library. The only sound was that of Jasper licking his foot.

What an odd way to break the tension in the scene. Focus on the dog.

I knelt there by Maxim's side, my body against his body, my hands upon his shoulders, and I was aware of no feeling at all, no pain and no fear, there was no horror in my heart. . . What he has told me and all that has happened will tumble into place like pieces of a jig-saw puzzle. They will fit themselves into a pattern. At the moment I am nothing, I have no heart, and no mind, and no senses. I am just a wooden thing in Maxim's arms. Then he began to kiss me. He had not kissed me like this before. I put my hands behind his head and shut my eyes.
"I love you so much," he whispered. "So much."
This is what I have wanted him to say every day and every night, I thought, and now he is saying it at last. This is what I imagined in Monte Carlo, in Italy, here in Manderley. He is saying it now. . .He went on kissing me, hungry, desperate, murmuring my name.

Odd time for a love scene. A little late some might say. I don't know if this is a test on Maxim's part, or a manipulation. Or if this is his light bulb moment. If he just now realized how much she does mean to him. Now that he might lose her, is he seeing her for the first time? Or has this been another secret, another burden to him. Has he been tormented with the idea that if she really knew him for who he was--what he had done--that she'd reject him so he had to prepare himself, guard himself from loving her so that when she rejected him he could blow her off saying, "Well, she didn't mean that much to me really, I didn't even tell her that I loved her. She never awakened much passion in me. She was just a companion, a chum."

But apparently the kissing stops and he realizes that she's just the kissee.

"You don't love me," he said. "that's why you did not feel anything. I know. I understand. It's come too late for you, hasn't it?"
"No," I said.
"This ought to have happened four months ago," he said. "I should have known. Women are not like men."
"I wan you to kiss me again," I said, "please Maxim."
"No," he said, "it's no use now."
"We can't lose each other now," I said. "We've got to be together always, with no secrets, no shadows. Please, darling, please."

I'm not quite sure how Maxim's done this. How he's gone from confessing his crime to confessing his love and suddenly worked it so that now she's the one begging him, she's the one needing him, clinging to him, but he's done it.

A few pages later,

I took his hands away from his face and looked into his eyes. "I love you," I whispered, "I love you. Will you believe me now?" He kissed my face and my hands. He held my hands very tightly like a child who would gain confidence.

They share a bit more. Then she tells him that the reason she never talked so personally, so intimately with him before was that she thought he must still be in love with Rebecca, still grieving Rebecca.

You thought I loved Rebecca?" he said. "You thought I killed her, loving her? I hated her, I tell you, our marriage was a farce from the very first. She was vicious, damnable, rotten through and through. We never loved each other, never had one moment of happiness together. Rebecca was incapable of love, of tenderness, of decency. She was not even normal."

Rebecca has secrets--all of them tied up with her sexuality--her sexual partners, her sexual preferences perhaps??? or her sexual orientation???--her wanton ways.

"I found her out at once," he was saying, "five days after we were married. You remember that time I drove you in the car, to the hills above Monte Carlo? I wanted to stand there again, to remember. She sat there, laughing, her black hair blowing in the wind, she told me about herself, told me things that I shall never repeat to a living soul. I knew then what I had done, what I had married. Beauty, brains, and breeding. Oh, my God."

Maxim's next little gem, "It doesn't make for sanity, does it, living with the devil?"

There on their honeymoon, they agree that it is a marriage in name only. That he will not be sharing her bed or her heart. They agree to put on a show.

She knew I would sacrifice pride, honour, personal feeling, every damned quality on earth, rather than stand before our little world after a week of marriage and have them know the things about her that she had told me then. She knew I would never stand in divorce court and give her away, having fingers pointing at us, mud flung at us in the newspapers, all the people who belong down here whispering when my name was mentioned...

I did not say anything. I held his hands against my heart. I did not care about his shame. None of those other things that he had told me mattered to me at all. I clung to one thing only, and repeated it to myself, over and over again. Maxim did not love Rebecca. He had never loved her, never, never. They had never known one moment's happiness together.

Whatever wild sex romps she had occurred in London according to Maxim.

What she did in London did not touch me--because it did not hurt Manderley. And she was careful those first years, there was never a murmur about her, never a whisper. Then little by little she began to grow careless. . .She began to ask her friends down here. She would have one or two of them and mix them up at a weekend party so that at first I was not quite sure, not quite certain. She would have picnics down at her cottage in the cove. I came back once, having been away shooting in Scotland, and found her there, with half-a-dozen of them, people I had never seen before.

Her affair with her supposed cousin Favell also comes to light. I say "supposed" because he acts much more like a pimp than he does a family relation. But regardless of how related these cousins are (first, second, once removed, whatever) it is still weird.

Maxim then tells in all the details about their last conversation, their confrontation, the murder.

Chapter 21

My favorite thing about this chapter is the narrator's assertiveness with the staff or the servants. She's learned to boss people around. It took her a while. But she's starting to get good at it. I love her conversation with Mrs. Danvers. Her rejection of the cold leftovers. Her assertiveness about doing things her way. She's not taking any crap from Danvers anymore!

Maxim notices his new grown-up wife as well. A woman who has lost her "innocence" or "naivete" when she found out the truth about him and his first marriage.