The themes of Rebecca—identity, doubling, the intimate linkage between love and murder—recur again and again in du Maurier’s work. That the circumstances of her own life were the source of many of those themes is, I think, unquestionable. That she often chose to explore those themes within the confines of a story about love and marriage is perhaps not accidental either; there had always been duality in her life—her bisexuality ensured that; after her marriage, that sense of a dual identity deepened, and was to feed all her fiction.
Du Maurier had been born into a rich, privileged but unconventional and bohemian family. Her father, Gerald, was notorious for his affairs—and for running back to his wife after them. She and her sisters grew up surrounded by the writers, actors and artists who were their parents’ close friends. Before du Maurier was twenty-one, she had had several affairs with men and at least one with a woman. Yet she chose to marry a career soldier in one of England’s most elite regiments, a man who was a traditionalist to his fingertips, a stickler for correct dress and behavior, a man who was deeply shocked when—prior to their marriage—she suggested they should sleep together. After a long and distinguished military career, “Boy” Browning, as he was nicknamed, was to go on to become a courtier, spending much of his time in London, while his wife remained at Menabilly. There can be no question of their love and loyalty for each other: long after he died, du Maurier remained fiercely defensive of her husband. But the differences between them were marked, and their expectations of marriage perhaps very different. Eventually that caused problems: there were infidelities on both sides, and later in life, Browning began to drink heavily. Meanwhile, du Maurier had two identities: she was a Lieutenant General’s wife, and later, Lady Browning: she was also an internationally celebrated writer, and finally a Dame of the British Empire. That she found it difficult to reconcile the demands of two personae is apparent in her fiction, above all in Rebecca, but also in her often bitter, and shocking, short stories.
Throughout her life, she was torn between the need to be a wife and the necessity of being a writer—and she seems to have regarded those roles as irreconcilable. Half accepting society’s （and her husband’s） interpretation of ideal womanhood, yet rebelling against it and rejecting it, she came to regard herself as a “half-breed” who was “unnatural.” To her, both her lesbianism and her art were a form of aberrance: they both sprang, she believed, from a force inside her that she referred to as the “boy in the box.” Sometimes she fought against this incubus—and sometimes she gloried in him.
Given those beliefs, the dualism, the gender-blurring and the splitting that are so apparent in Rebecca become more understandable. Du Maurier was wrestling with her own demons here, and when she gave aspects of herself to the two women who are the pillars of her narrative she was entering into an area of deeply personal psychological struggle. She gave her own shyness and social awkwardness to Mrs. de Winter. She gave her independence, her love of the sea, her expertise as a sailor, her sexual fearlessness, and even her bisexuality （strongly hinted at in the novel, if not spelled out） to Rebecca. It is for readers to decide where their own sympathies lie—and du Maurier’s.
I would say that ultimately it is with Rebecca, with the angry voice of female dissent, that du Maurier’s instinctive sympathy lies. But it is possible to argue the opposite view—one of the factors that makes Rebecca such a rewarding novel to reread and re-examine. One thing is certain: Rebecca is a deeply subversive work, one that undermines the very genre to which critics consigned it. Far from being an “exquisite” love story, Rebecca raises questions about women’s acquiescence to male values that are as pertinent today as they were sixty-four years ago. We may have moved on from the subservience of Mrs. de Winter, but our enfranchisement is scarcely complete. A glance at the current bestseller lists will only confirm that the sly suggestion underlying Rebecca remains valid after sixty-four years: both in life and in bookstores, women continue to buy romance.
Sally Beauman
London, 2002