The MacGuffin: News and Comment (14/Jul/2012)
(c) Ken Mogg (2012)
July 14
The last part of last week's entry (now revised) was written separately from the rest, late in the evening. It didn't make a lot of sense - my apologies! But the idea expressed there, of civilisation (or its structures) threatened by subversive individuals or even a blind natural force (cf. The Birds, adapted by Hitchcock from a short story by Daphne du Maurier) can lead straight to what I want to note this time about Hitchcock's Rebecca (adapted from a Du Maurier novel). Recall that intriguing stone object we see outside the lodge when Maxim and his new bride drive through the gates of Manderley after their honeymoon (frame-capture, June 30, above). It represents, of course, what Maxim's aristocratic family, who have inhabited Manderley for generations, stands for. That is, noblesse oblige ('nobility obliges'). A triangular, shield-like shape rests on round balls, with an even larger 'ball' balanced on the apex of the triangle (the entire structure in turn mounted on a columned pedestal). The large ball is like the burden of office, the weight or obligation that aristocracy should respect and uphold, including towards those who serve under it. The small balls can be interpreted as standing for those 'lesser' individuals and their institutions while clearly there is a suggestion that the whole edifice is a 'precarious' one, dependent on both a top-down and a bottom-up 'co-operation'. Now, by one reading of Rebecca - and that the most obvious - Maxim de Winter is a tragic hero, if a distracted one. True, after his first wife's death, he had thought of never going back to Manderley, and only his whirlwind courtship and marriage to 'I' changes his mind. But he does return and he does appear to do his best to both uphold his family obligations and to make a success of his second marriage despite the shadow cast over it by the influence of the baleful Rebecca (whom everyone else except Maxim believes to have been a paragon - foreshadowing an aspect of Shadow of a Doubt, where serial murderer Uncle Charlie is revered by the unsuspecting people of Santa Rosa). True, too, the effective functioning of Manderley and all it stands for - English civilisation itself? - has now been overturned. You could draw parallels with 'Hamlet' ('the time is out of joint') and Arthurian legend (with its 'dolorous stroke' and Waste Land). The fact that Manderley is effectively dominated by Rebecca's acolyte, Mrs Danvers, is symptomatic. Everything in this patriarchal 'world' is proceeding upside-down, whatever surface appearances may suggest. Maxim himself, as I say, is distracted, and merely going through the motions of running things. Another literary work that certainly may have been in the mind of Du Maurier when she was writing her novel is the celebrated poem, 'The Second Coming' (1919), penned by W.B. Yeats after the First World War. It begins with an image drawn from falconry (which would have appealed to Du Maurier), then continues: 'The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/ The ceremony of innocence is drowned;/ The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.' There are plenty of Rebecca foreshadowings there (not least the reference to drowning), and I have shown previously how truly 'literate' in her borrowings Du Maurier could be (including borrowings from Charlotte Brontë, Arthur Machen, and E. Phillips Oppenheim). What I have called the 'most obvious' reading of Rebecca is just that - obvious - with Maxim being essentially a good man wounded and eventually brought low because of his marriage to his first wife who appears to have lacked all appreciation of the 'social contract' on which noblesse oblige (precariously) rests. ('I always knew Rebecca would win in the end', Maxim laments.) Nonetheless, there is no doubt that Daphne du Maurier could be heterodox in her thinking. As I wrote in 1999: 'Rebecca herself may be "a foe to society", but the novel captures well the sort of subversive questioning that was quite commonplace in England between the wars, at least in the circles in which Daphne du Maurier moved.' My thanks to NP who this week drew our Hitchcock group's attention to a 2001 article by Robin Wood (online at criterion.com) in which Wood notes, 'it's possible to sees Rebecca as the film's real heroine'. The article does have an element of 'special pleading' which is both its strength and its weakness; I'll say more about that next time. Frame-capture below: the Gothic interior of Manderley.
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