Rebecca 9781911239468, 9781911239437

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Acknowledgments I’ve written about Rebecca before, and I am indebted to the many friends, family, colleagues and students who have accompanied and encouraged me on my many returns. Lisa Kennedy was my interlocutor throughout the writing, and I am deeply grateful for her editorial insight, unwavering support and generosity as a writer. Bakirathi Mani and Lara Cohen provided astute and timely writinggroup feedback, and Amelie Hastie’s experience and creative counsel were invaluable at a crucial juncture. Thank you to the students in Women and Popular Culture and to Rachel Kabasakalian McKay for their insights. Lisa Cohen’s inscription on my Avon paperback of du Maurier’s novel made me smile, and Rhona J. Berenstein’s work on the film led to new ideas and a lasting friendship. My debt to Tania Modleski’s writing is evident throughout these pages, and Alex Doty’s memory animates my tribute to Mrs Danvers. Christina Lane graciously shared her research and insights; I thank her for her rigorous and inspiring scholarship. My mom introduced me to Rebecca, and I miss watching old movies with her. My deepest gratitude goes to Cynthia Schneider and Max Schneider-White for their patience, encouragement and welcome distractions as I wrote during hard times in close quarters. Researching the production of a classical Hollywood studio film promised rich opportunities for archival rummaging that were cut short in spring 2020 for pandemic mitigation. I want to thank the supremely organized archivists who accessed everything they could despite the closures: Nancy Kauffman and Lauren Lean at George Eastman House, Mary Huelsbeck at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, and Genevieve Maxwell at the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. I am especially indebted to Cristina Meisner at the Harry Ransom Center

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at the University of Texas at Austin, which houses the vast Selznick Collection, for scouring the record for digitized material. I hope I am able to visit eventually. Special thanks to Mimi Muray Levitt, who in answering a permission request for Nickolas Muray’s glamour shot of Judith Anderson shared wonderful snapshots and her father’s eloquent tribute to her Aunt Judy. I am grateful to Swarthmore College for its rare and sustaining intellectual community and for the support provided by the Eugene Lang Research Chair. Thanks to Karen Stetler and Liz Helfgott for the opportunity to contribute to the Criterion edition of Rebecca and to the great Molly Haskell for such a good time discussing the film. As a film buff, I feel almost as much awe for the books in the BFI Film Classics series as for the films they are named after, and I thank series editor Rebecca Barden for facilitating my long-held dream to contribute. Is it mere coincidence that she shares her name with the film’s animating female force? I’m especially happy to be part of the Bloomsbury relaunch, which is redefining the word classic by tampering with the canon. Sincere thanks to Sophie Contento, who secured stills from the BFI and expertly managed production during an exceedingly challenging time. To the anonymous readers, I express my deep appreciation for their support of this book.

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Prefatory Note She who writes about Rebecca – the novel, the film, the phenomenon – must reckon with an oddity enabled by its first-person point of view: the protagonist has no name, and the writer must decide how to refer to the character. The novel is so bound up with the question of (staking out) female/feminine identity that this lack is somehow appropriate. It can even go unnoticed. In the course of the story, the protagonist takes on a role that comes with its own name – Mrs de Winter – borrowed from a man. Yet she is not the (only) Mrs de Winter; the name is also borrowed from a woman. I has no fixed identity except in the ‘present instance of discourse’, as linguist Émile Benveniste describes the pronoun and its companion, you. He calls this ‘a very strange thing’.1 A vast readership, largely of women, addressed by du Maurier’s writing, became you. We became I. The strange drama of the shifter is encapsulated when the heroine declares: ‘I am Mrs de Winter now.’ In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf wrote amusingly of the experience of reading the work of a contemporary male novelist: ‘But why was I bored? Partly because of the dominance of the letter “I” and the aridity, which, like the giant beech tree, it casts within its shade. Nothing will grow there.’2 Woolf’s I, a female I, is trickier, rhizomatic, it flickers between objective description and subjective inscription. While du Maurier may not write with Woolf’s wit or feminist self-consciousness, she achieves a similar flicker effect. Inevitably, the first-person female voice is largely lost in the process of adaptation to audiovisual media. However, this book will claim that the 1940 film version of Rebecca achieves its own flicker effect. The prospect of shooting the entire film with a subjective camera initially intrigued producer David O. Selznick, and although the film does not attempt such a sustained experiment, director Alfred

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Hitchcock is a master of point of view. First-person camera is used in the dream sequence, shot-reverse shot patterns, and subjective shots of closed doors and hazy prospects. And the first-person voice is famously preserved in the opening narration, although it trails off as the film unfolds: I dreamt I went to Manderley last night. I dreamt I … It is possible to write about this character without naming her, though some give her a name for convenience – as a lark, the first treatment written under Hitchcock’s supervision called her Daphne, though the final script uses ‘I’. Correspondence, critical literature and commentary refer to her in a number of ways: as Fontaine, the second Mrs de Winter, the bride, the wife, the heroine, the narrator, the Girl. In this book, I call her I. I do this to signal the identification the viewer is encouraged to feel for this character and to echo the theme of possession that haunts the film and its reception.

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Introduction: The Most Glamorous Film Ever Made Rebecca (1940), directed by Alfred Hitchcock and adapted from Daphne du Maurier’s bestselling novel of the same name, is a classic, whether the term is used to evaluate merit or to signal popular appeal. An artistic success by a pre-eminent film auteur and Hitchcock’s only Oscar winner for Best Picture, it is also a sentimental favourite that demonstrates the centrality of the woman’s picture to any understanding of Hollywood classicism. Producer David O. Selznick’s follow-up to Gone With the Wind (1939), Rebecca addressed that film’s primed female audience, as it too sweeps the viewer into a powerful romance whose fantastical elements betray an undercurrent of anxiety about contemporary social change. Yet Rebecca’s English setting sidestepped and perhaps helped contain its predecessor’s fraught racial politics. Filming of Rebecca commenced in Hollywood just days after Britain’s entry into World War II. The production signalled an alliance with England while America remained neutral in the conflict. Rebecca’s source material, director and cast offer a fantasy of genteel Englishness to audiences on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond. But the film also pronounces the demise of this way of life: ‘We can never go back again, that much is certain.’ But we do go back, in part because, as a classic, Rebecca never goes away. The film has been rereleased, televised and repromoted repeatedly since its premiere eighty years ago, and its reputation shadows all subsequent adaptations of a novel that itself has never gone out of print. To what are viewers invited to return, and is the invitation nostalgic or revisionist? This study argues that it is both. As a gothic tale, Rebecca is about the pull of the past, both its perceived insularities and the subversive strains to be found there. As a heterosexual romance, it’s ambivalent at best. Du Maurier and

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Hitchcock each contribute their own special mix of conservatism, critique and polymorphous perversity to the proceedings, and Selznick burnishes it all with zealous good taste. The aura of a period film overhangs Rebecca’s contemporary setting, while the passions that drive its narrative look beyond the gender and sexual norms of its era. As Hitchcock concedes in his celebrated interview with François Truffaut and interpreter Helen Scott: ‘It has held up rather well over the years, I don’t know why.’3 The director’s bafflement suggests that the state of disavowal or not knowing that drives the gothic is part of the film’s enduring, and largely gender-differentiated, appeal. The story of a second wife haunted by her predecessor taps a rich genealogy from the tale of Bluebeard to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre to the contemporary mass-market romance novel. The critique of patriarchy and class stratification in the gothic tradition has been explored by, among others, feminist literary critics Susan Gilbert and Sandra Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic and Angela Carter in her story ‘The Bloody Chamber’.4 The shadows of empire have been illuminated by Gayatri Spivak in ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’.5 In keeping with the genre, du Maurier’s Rebecca takes a grim view of marriage, patriarchal succession and privilege, and while its critiques of class and colonialism are less coherent and explicit, these relations structure its family romance.6 Rebecca’s hermeneutic turns not only on the gothic trope of uncertainty about the husband’s actions and motives but also on finely drawn, ambivalent relationships between women: notably, a first-person narrator who remains unnamed and a figure of fascination represented in name only – Rebecca. The loyal housekeeper plays as important a role in triangulating the heroine’s relation to her dead predecessor as does the inscrutable husband, updating the fairy-tale witch and mapping the queer coordinates of the gothic plot for the times. Du Maurier’s configuration of these fraught themes caught the imagination of readers on both sides of the Atlantic, and the author’s name will forever be linked with her most popular novel.

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Within a year, it was adapted for stage and radio, and Selznick bought the movie rights on the eve of its US publication. Literary adaptations and films that appealed to female audiences were his speciality, and he had just signed Hitchcock to come to the US. The ingredients for popular and critical success were assembled. In 1940, the year Rebecca won the Oscar for Best Picture, Hollywood studios were making sumptuous films for worldwide audiences under the looming shadow of world war. Often referred to as Hollywood’s greatest year, 1939 saw the release of such classics as Stagecoach, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and The Wizard of Oz, as well as the premiere of Gone With the Wind (GWTW), ‘Selznick’s folly’. In 1941 Citizen Kane, with its politicized auteurism, addressed a US public under the threat of fascism. The year of Rebecca’s release marks a pivot from 1930s Hollywood Depression-era populism to the relations of ‘power and paranoia’, in Dana Polan’s words, that would inform the wartime and postwar films of the 1940s. Rebecca, variously referred to as a ‘psychological thriller’ and a ‘murder melodrama’, inaugurated an especially interesting cycle of films crosshatching the woman’s picture and film noir. Heroines doubted their husbands’ intentions, usually with good reason; the insecurity of gender relations reflected wartime shifts in labour and migration and the emergence of sexual subcultures. And hovering over du Maurier’s novel as well as the film’s production and reception was the discourse of popular Freudianism. Rebecca opens amid the ruins of Maxim de Winter’s coastal Cornwall estate, as a female narrator speaks the novel’s famous opening line: ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.’ Soon, the film carries us back to the first meeting in Monte Carlo between the shy and inexperienced heroine (Joan Fontaine), employed as a travelling companion to a vulgar American woman (Florence Bates), and the manor’s moody owner (Laurence Olivier), who appears preoccupied with his glamorous, deceased wife Rebecca, who died in a mysterious boating accident. After a brief courtship Maxim abruptly proposes to the young woman and brings this very different

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bride back to his estate. Ordinary, awkward and immature, the second Mrs de Winter is overshadowed by Rebecca’s memory and intimidated by Mrs Danvers (Judith Anderson) the housekeeper, who remains devoted to her dead mistress. When Rebecca’s boat is suddenly discovered by divers in the bay, Maxim reveals his hand in her death. Contrary to everything the heroine and the viewer have been led to believe, Maxim hated Rebecca. Provoked by his wife’s promiscuity and defiance, he confesses that he must have struck her in a daze. She fell, hit her head and died (the novel is less ambiguous: he shoots her). Panicked, Maxim put Rebecca’s body in her boat and scuttled it. After this startling revelation, I chooses to stand by her husband. After an inquest, Maxim is exonerated, and Danvers vengefully burns Manderley to the ground, dying in the blaze. The couple seems finally to be free of Rebecca. Yet Rebecca continues to haunt. The gothic plot is never satisfactorily resolved – the sense of lingering mystery is flaunted

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in Maxim’s admission that Rebecca told him things he ‘could never tell a soul’ – and the atmosphere that envelops the viewer from the film’s first sounds and images is hard to shake. Return is a central theme of both book and film: Maxim’s homecoming with his new bride, the heroine unwittingly dressing up in a costume Rebecca had worn before her, the sudden recovery of Rebecca’s body trapped in the wreckage of a boat aptly named Je reviens. It is also a feature of Rebecca’s narrative structure. With an opening narration that never resumes or concludes, the film leaves the audience in a dream state, dwelling within its unresolved temporality, space and mood. The film cannot fully reassure the viewer that the couple lives happily ever after. This Cinderella tale ends in ashes. Formally, identification with I sets up the gap between perception and reality characteristic of the paranoid mode of the genre and arguably of cinema viewing itself. The dreamer is unable to verify the status of Manderley – is it filled with light and liveliness or laid waste by fire, its ruins reclaimed by creeping nature? Analogously, the viewer sees both a grand Cornwall estate and a meticulously lit, impressively detailed miniature on a Hollywood soundstage expertly shrouded in fog effects. Advertised in a rerelease trailer as ‘the most glamorous film ever made’, Rebecca features a replica French Riviera and an imposing English manor house and boasts consistently high production values. But the title character who would serve as the guarantee of Hollywood glamour, what Laura Mulvey called ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’, is never even glimpsed.7 ‘Glamour’ in its archaic sense of ‘enchantment, casting a spell’ perhaps more accurately explains the film’s lasting appeal. Why does the heroine return in her dreams to Manderley? The revelation of the truth of Maxim’s feelings for Rebecca doesn’t straighten out the nature of her own, perhaps because her charming prince isn’t the only character around whom her daydreams swirl. Independent, modern, Rebecca grips the imagination in a manner the dead wives of previous eras’ gothics could not. The dreamer’s narration is a direct appeal to women viewers’ identification. But

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it also speaks to a central paradox of Rebecca: how can a lead character so abject be so compelling? Rebecca’s unaccomplished heroine lacks the sustained first-person narration that keeps readers of the novel in thrall to her perspective. Yet through narrative focalization, optical perspective, scoring and, for readers of the novel, the afterimages of du Maurier’s descriptive, subjective prose, we are wedded to her plight. The spectacle of her unformed self, twisting in a maelstrom of eros, jealousy, grief and ambition, is riveting. I is consumed with, doubled, and possessed by Rebecca. Dimensions of both female characters, and Maxim too, can be traced to du Maurier’s ambivalent relationship to her own femininity, and the threesome’s oedipal roundelay to her complicated family life. The novelist disclosed that Rebecca was fuelled by her jealousy of her husband’s relationship with his former fiancée. The revelations of Margaret Forster’s 1993 authorized biography Daphne du Maurier shed new light on Rebecca’s sexual politics. From a literary and theatrical family in which make-believe was de rigueur, the young du Maurier took on a male persona she called ‘Eric Avon’. Eventually, accepting her social role as an upper-class Englishwoman, and coming into the power of her conventional beauty, she put the ‘boy in a box’. But the persona re-emerged in the immersive experience of writing, in isolation from her husband and children, and in several intense relationships with women. These included a French schoolmistress who became a lifelong correspondent and, much later in life, the actress Gertrude Lawrence. Du Maurier’s consuming friendship with Ellen Doubleday, the wife of her US publisher, remained unconsummated. The writer herself compared Doubleday to Rebecca in her idealized form, a beautiful, charming hostess, ultimately unattainable.8 In both the novel and the film, the heroine is tormented by a feminine ideal so elevated it is unrepresentable. We see Rebecca as she is refracted through three characters who are obsessed with her: castrated Maxim, creepy Danvers, insecure I. The revelation of Rebecca’s ‘evil’ nature, when it comes, has all of the force but none

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of the coherence of her ‘good’ side. I is trapped in a marriage that feels loveless, even abusive; the book especially provides a withering critique of propertied white female dependency and the empty promise of companionate marriage. The scenario has feminist bite. Much of the novel’s psychic conflict around gender and sexuality survives in the screen version. One of the censors assigned to assess the film confides: ‘with Rebecca yesterday and [A Bill of Divorcement] today I’ve certainly had my fill of psychiatry, aberration, insanity and whatnot’.9 This study draws upon compelling feminist psychoanalytic readings of film’s staging of the female oedipal drama and the difficulty of enacting female desire within its terms.10 It also draws on queer theory’s attention to non-normative desire’s intertwining with questions of secrecy and disclosure in the gothic. Rebecca belongs on the lavender list for Mrs Danvers’s redoubtable presence alone – whether as the lone lesbian among Hitchcock’s ‘Murderous Gays’ in Robin Wood’s words or

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‘the face that launched a thousand drag queens’ in Olivia Laing’s.11 But the film’s treatment of the lesbian-coded loyal retainer poses a challenge to feminist and affirmative queer readings. Given the time period, Danvers’s sinister characterization is shaded with fascist connotations, and her spectacular demise at the film’s climax is a primal Hollywood scene of the internet-branded trope Kill Your Gays. (Danvers survives in the book.) Yet the scope of destruction she unleashes by burning Manderley to the ground is vast, and her revenge links gender and sexual deviance with a materialist critique. For British viewers, Manderley represents an investment in feudal class hierarchies, for Americans, a selective national inheritance that turns away from cultural diversity, and for global audiences, a disavowal of empire. In this light, the housekeeper does everyone a service, sweeping the screen clean of hegemonic projections. This book examines the production, text and reception of Rebecca, following the thread of what I call undue female influence running through multiple dimensions of the film. This influence is embodied in the fascinating figure of the author of the novel, the textual traces of the absent Rebecca, and the film’s largely female audience’s role in its afterlives. Chapter 1, ‘What’s in a Name?’, explores the complexity of authorship in Rebecca while telling the rich tale of the film’s production. The BFI Film Classics series already includes four Hitchcock books: the director’s brilliance and standing are accounted for. The present contribution follows Tania Modleski’s The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory in framing Rebecca as a text that poses a challenge to his authority. Du Maurier’s signature troubles the film, just as the absent Rebecca’s monogram ‘R’ haunts the film’s heroine. Hitchcock’s authorship is also complicated by women who were very much in the picture, most notably screenwriter Joan Harrison and uncredited collaborator Alma Reville.12 In feminist film historians’ research into production cultures, Rebecca is again exemplary. Selznick’s East Coast representative Katharine (Kay) Brown brought the property to Selznick and helped persuade Hitchcock to sign with him.

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Given the producer’s chaotic work style, which included dictating lengthy memos at all hours, Selznick’s wife Irene Mayer Selznick (possessor of ‘breeding, brains and beauty’) and executive assistant Marcella Rabwin were indispensable to the production of the film. The contributions of all of these women pose a potent challenge to auteurists who would see the film as primarily a Hitchcock text or as the site of a power struggle between controlling producer and director. Chapter 2 offers a close reading of Rebecca’s key narrative units, showing how cinematic narration guides an exploration of time, space, desire and anxiety linked to but greater than I. The opening dream sequence echoes in later returns to Manderley. The fairy-tale romance shades into the nightmare of married life. Rebecca’s traces linger in decor as well as in less tangible elements of film form. What du Maurier refers to as the novel’s ‘crash! bang!’ plot twist is ingeniously materialized on screen, but the film’s denouement breaks away from I in a manner consistent with the ambivalent messaging of 1940s Hollywood women’s pictures.13 We never see Rebecca, and we never escape Manderley. Even as Rebecca explores gender and sexuality in relation to the patriarchal unconscious, it grounds their expression in the historical specificity of the interwar years. In Britain and America, women of all backgrounds entered the workforce. They bought books and went to the movies in high numbers. Chapter 3 considers the reception of Rebecca, from contemporary marketing campaigns that relied heavily upon the popularity of du Maurier’s novel, to remakes, intertexts and tributes. Perhaps Rebecca remains evergreen because of its untimeliness; it makes us look twice at superseded sex and class relations, all the while giving us a feeling of déjà vu. The burning ‘R’ that is the film’s final image leads us to our own interpretations: ‘It’s not [only] a Hitchcock picture.’ Rebecca belongs to us all, even when it enacts our dispossession.

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1 What’s in a Name?: Rebecca’s Story I, too, worried about the title, and at the time I bought it I offered to give a little extra money if they would change the title of the book. However, … my experience has been that if a book has succeeded with a title … picture producers are foolish to worry about it. David O. Selznick14

Rebecca is unique among the films of Alfred Hitchcock: the name of the film can be decoupled from that of the director and retain its prominence in film history. In his 1962 interview with François Truffaut and interpreter Helen Scott, the director famously remarked of Rebecca: ‘Well, it’s not a Hitchcock picture.’ There are Rebecca fans who don’t care who directed the film; they read the book first. Rebecca shared a name with and was promoted as a faithful adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 bestselling novel. David O. Selznick savvily launched Hitchcock’s US career by linking the director to the title’s prestige. Rebecca’s reputation as an Oscarwinning classic doesn’t need Hitchcock’s signature. No one, however – least of all Truffaut, who saw in the film the root of Hitchcock’s predilection for ‘psychological ingredients’15 – would argue that Rebecca does not fit in the director’s oeuvre. Frank S. Nugent, reviewing the film in The New York Times at the time of it release, announces Hitchcock’s arrival as a transatlantic auteur: Hitch in Hollywood, on the basis of the Selznick ‘Rebecca’ at the Music Hall, is pretty much the Hitch of London’s ‘Lady Vanishes’ and ‘The Thirty-nine Steps’ [sic], except that his famous and widely-publicized ‘touch’ seems to have developed into a firm, enveloping grasp of Daphne du Maurier’s popular novel.16

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Rebecca’s marketing exploited the popularity of Daphne du Maurier’s novel

Hitchcock’s disavowal is often read in terms of his contentious yet productive relationship with his first US producer. The authoritative story of the film’s production by Leonard J. Leff, Hitchcock and Selznick: The Rich and Strange Collaboration of Alfred Hitchcock and David O. Selznick in Hollywood, tracks the men’s contrasting work styles, tastes and brands. Selznick was chaotic and a meddler, Hitchcock meticulous and controlled. Selznick was invested in character, taking special care with female stars; for Hitchcock, actors were part of an overall visual plan. As Leff characterizes the pair: ‘Both Hitchcock and Selznick were generous though dominating men. Both commanded authority. Both clashed.’17 Rebecca also provides a key case study in Thomas Schatz’s book The Genius of the System, named after André Bazin’s phrase for the greatness achieved by the efficiencies of studio-era Hollywood’s Fordist mode of production. Selznick International Pictures (SIP) was founded in 1936 as an independent studio to skim the cream off that system. With top talent and a production slate limited to prestige pictures, SIP relied on other studios to distribute its films to their theatre chains. Hitchcock was imported as a celebrity in the making to help realize the producer’s vision. Rebecca thus benefits

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from studio methods and resources as well as an unusual degree of authorial control: a director whose method built the way a finished film would look into the initial treatment; a producer whose nearmaniacal attention to detail assured any adaptation capitalized on viewer expectations; a novelist who all but invented the twentiethcentury gothic romance. Scrutiny of how gender informs the politics swirling around the name of the author is only fitting for a film that bears the name of an unseen character and features a nameless protagonist. As a literary figure, du Maurier is more beloved than critically praised. No modernist, she used words to create an immersive atmosphere, her novels and stories are spellbinding masterpieces of mood. While she is undoubtedly a creator of ‘women’s fiction’, she is less given to descriptions of dress and decor than of mental states of doubt and anguish, and in fact the majority of her protagonists are male. Despite a name that demands a cursive font, du Maurier’s own persona was rather butch and reclusive. In effect, she writes with a cinematic quality that she challenges her many adapters to top. In retelling the story of how the 1940 film version of Rebecca was made, it is not my aim to adjudicate who deserves credit; patently, it is one of film history’s great collaborations. The signatures of all three brand-name creators, as well as distinct traces of less exalted contributors, can be discerned in the finished film. Several of these others are women who found their vocations in the AngloAmerican culture industries in the interwar years. The gendered politics of attributing authorship and the connotations of creative brand – the way the production story is told, sold and read into the film text and its waves of reception – are high stakes, and they give Rebecca a prominent place in feminist historiography of classical Hollywood. A key point of divergence between director and producer of Rebecca was fidelity to the source text; its female author triangulates their rivalry. Hitchcock coaxed a performance from the inexperienced Fontaine that was worthy of I, the book’s distinctive filtering

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consciousness, and he orchestrated picture, sound and pace to match the gripping atmosphere of the novel. Selznick, acting as du Maurier’s mouthpiece, had the last word – compelling Hitchcock and his screenwriters to scrap an initial treatment and remain faithful to the novel’s scenes and dialogue and later ordering extensive dubbing, including a new version of Fontaine’s famous opening narration. Daphne du Maurier’s influence over the film cannot be reduced to debates over authorial intention, however. After all, du Maurier declined to write the screenplay of Rebecca herself. Rather, the film’s fidelity can be felt in how well it hews to the source text’s radical doubts about fidelity itself, an atmosphere of doubt and duplicity that resonates with female experience. Why does Maxim act as he does? Why does Danvers hate his second wife? Are they in love with Rebecca? Is I? As Tania Modleski shows in her essay ‘“Never to Be Thirty-Six Years Old”: Rebecca as Female Oedipal Drama’, the kernel of her influential book on Hitchcock and feminist theory, Rebecca is both textually and existentially a particularly telling case of the influence of the feminine in mid-twentieth-century mass culture. As Hitchcock himself explained to Truffaut: ‘It’s a novelette, really. The story is old-fashioned; there was a whole school of feminine literature at the period, and though I’m not against it, the fact is that the story is lacking in humor.’18 Hitchcock’s dismissal of du Maurier’s ‘novelette’ neglects to acknowledge the popular author by name and trivializes the value(s) of her readers. But du Maurier’s influence hovers over the production. Like Rebecca, the third party in the de Winters’s marriage, she is ultimately the source of all the drama. The du Maurier inheritance While Daphne du Maurier’s novel might belong to a ‘whole school of feminine literature’, as Hitchcock would have it, the author’s gifts and glamour were distinctly her own. Du Maurier came from a prominent literary and theatrical family that endears her to the British heritage industry. Her

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grandfather, novelist and Punch cartoonist George du Maurier, invented the character of Svengali in his 1895 bestselling novel of bohemian France, Trilby. Her parents were famous actor and impresario Gerald du Maurier, with whom she had what the Daily Press calls a ‘complex, adoring, deeply Freudian relationship’,19 and the former actress Muriel Beaumont. The middle-born of three girls, Daphne was Gerald’s favourite: he had wanted a son and she grew up Daphne du Maurier in the 1930s (Alamy) feeling like one. Their closeness may have been cause for her relatively cool relationship with her mother. (Shades of the family romance of Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness.) Daphne’s elder sister Angela also became a writer, the younger Jeanne a painter. The three called each other Piffy, Bird and Bing – the Brontë-esque configuration just lacked a rapscallion brother. Perhaps Daphne doubled as their Branwell – she later wrote a biography of him. While her sisters were lesbians whose famous liaisons and longtime companions were public, Daphne struggled with what in family lingo she called her ‘Venetian’ tendencies.20 The du Maurier family vacationed in Cornwall, which was to be the setting of many of her books and short stories and the place she chose to live and write. Today the town of Fowey has become the centre of ‘du Maurier Country’, a legacy managed by her youngest child, Christian (Kits) Browning. In 1932 she married Major Frederick Browning, known as Boy to his regiment and Tommy to his family, a declared fan of her debut novel, The Loving Spirit.

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Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Arthur Montague Browning would command British airborne forces during World War II, but behind the façade, the dashing officer was prone to anxiety and breakdowns. Du Maurier’s role as an officer’s wife was abhorrent to her; she was shy and detested entertaining. Rebecca, with its focus on a tense marriage and an alluring woman known as a successful hostess, was begun in fits and starts in summer 1937 in Alexandria, Egypt, where Browning was stationed. With young daughter Tessa and baby Flavia back in England with their nanny, Daphne planned a book about: ‘roughly, the influence of a first wife on a second … Little by little I want to build up the character of the first in the mind of the second … until wife 2 is haunted day and night.’21 For the imposing ancestral home, the author drew inspiration from Menabilly, a boarded-up Cornwall estate she admired. Once back in England in spring 1938, she finished the novel in record speed. Over decades in the course of her prolific career, du Maurier was asked so many times about the beloved novel that she must have felt about Rebecca the way Judy Garland did about rainbows. While she had discussed with her publisher Victor Gollancz the objective of writing a bestseller, du Maurier wasn’t at all sure that Rebecca, which she thought ‘psychological and rather macabre’, would be well received.22 Her editor Norman Collins reassured her, immediately recognizing that the manuscript ‘contains everything that the public could want’.23 Published in August 1938 in England and a month later in the US amid great anticipation, the novel was an instant hit. Critics recognized its power even when they treated its popular appeal with condescension. ‘The fearlessness with which Miss du Maurier works in material so strange … is magnificent’, wrote Frank Swinnerton in the Observer, in an emblematic review.24 Du Maurier was annoyed at the novel’s billing as a ‘grand romance’ but happy with the sales; perhaps the dissonant elements, what she thought ‘rather grim’ and ‘unpleasant’ about the novel and its depiction of marriage, were as appealing to readers at the time as its normative ones.25 Amid the publicity onslaught, which included

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newspaper serializations and considerable interest in the film rights, the writer did her best to avoid public appearances by busying herself with a theatrical adaptation. Produced at London’s Queen Theatre in 1940, Rebecca the play featured Brief Encounter’s Celia Johnson as the second Mrs de Winter. Inevitably, the du Maurier mystique in the UK envelops reception of the Hollywood adaptation; although enormously popular, the film must have appeared ‘rather artificial’, as its heroine says of Monte Carlo. British screen adaptations of the novel would follow. Modleski elegantly reads the influence of the dead Rebecca over Maxim, Danvers and I as a female force akin to du Maurier’s over the film. After all, the heroine is tortured by Rebecca’s literal signature (and the film’s producer fussed to get the dead woman’s handwriting just right). Selznick, known for his work with female stars and source material, was most solicitous of the author, apologizing on the eve of release for changes demanded by the Production Code Administration, which forbade Rebecca’s brooding hero from getting away with murder. Hitchcock may have been dismissive of the novel, but he too worked under female influence. Christina Lane’s important study Phantom Lady: Joan Harrison, the Woman Behind Hitchcock illuminates the script and other contributions of secretary-turned-screenwriter Harrison and Hitchcock’s wife, Alma Reville. Released in 1940, at the top of a decade that would see scores of memorable women’s pictures, Rebecca had more female input in its production than the outsize profiles of Selznick the Showman and Hitchcock the Master of Suspense would suggest. The discernment of these contributions within male authorial control and the studio production model makes the ‘making of’ Rebecca a compelling tale in itself. Team Selznick and Team Hitchcock When Selznick and Hitchcock began to discuss a collaboration, the property was to have been Titanic – a title perhaps better befitting their egos. But as du Maurier’s forthcoming novel was brought to

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their attention by the two men’s female collaborators, it began to make more sense (and promised to save more dollars) to import the British director to shepherd the British bestseller to almost certain on-screen success. With more than twenty films to his credit and a growing international reputation, Hitchcock was frustrated with the limited resources and rewards of working in the British context and began angling for a suitable US studio deal. He sought access to the quality craftsmanship, star power, promotional might and broad audiences Hollywood promised. Rumblings of war in Europe also made him eager to relocate his family. The success of his British films, including 1934’s The Man Who Knew Too Much and 1935’s 39 Steps, had secured Hitchcock’s fame in the US. The press eagerly covered the Hitchcocks’ exploratory visit to the US in August 1937. Lane cites evidence of the central place of Harrison in this passage: the ship’s manifest listed her as Joan Hitchcock. Before heading out to Los Angeles, Harrison joined Alfred, Alma and daughter Pat as they were entertained by Kay Brown, SIP’s New York representative.26 The women’s alliance would help put Rebecca first among Hitchcock’s assignments. Selznick was not alone among studio executives attracted by Hitchcock’s growing reputation as a cinema stylist who delivered box-office hits, but he was the one who agreed to the Englishman’s terms. He would earn back his investment by loaning the director out to other studios. Selznick’s stellar Hollywood career was characterized by the scope and scale of his projects, and when he struck out on his own to found Selznick International Pictures in 1935 with investor Jock Whitney, he was looking for a certain magnitude of talent. Selznick had worked at Paramount and RKO before becoming a famed unit producer at MGM, where his marriage to Irene Mayer brought him close to studio head Louis B. Mayer, her father. Used to the high production values and abundant resources of MGM, Selznick gambled on extravagant outlays bringing extravagant returns in his new venture. Selznick wanted directors

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David O. Selznick and Alfred Hitchcock (David O. Selznick Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. Courtesy of Daniel Mayer Selznick)

who could function in a hands-on producer role while he ran the studio, and Hitchcock had that experience. Selznick was busy with the most extravagant project in Hollywood history, Gone With the Wind, when he began negotiations to bring Hitchcock to the US, and it took him time to close the deal with the director. A control freak who supervised everything from costumes to script to dubbing, communicating his pronouncements in famous lengthy memos, Selznick would present a challenge to Hitchcock’s autonomy and working methods. GWTW’s production and postproduction remained a great preoccupation for Selznick during Rebecca’s acquisition, development and shooting – even as it afforded resources for the shoot and a publicity juggernaut that

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would carry Rebecca into theatres and box-office history. During this period, Selznick also undertook the US remake of Intermezzo (1939), a vehicle to bring its Swedish star Ingrid Bergman to the US. Overextended, Selznick was inspired and manic, constantly popping Benzedrine, with his wife Irene and executive assistant Marcella Rabwin helping to keep him on track. Hitchcock and Alma had honed the director’s script-to-screen method to perfection on his many English films. When Joan Harrison joined the pair in 1933, answering an ad for a secretary, she quickly became indispensable to the team. Blonde, chic and Oxford-educated, Harrison evolved skills that, biographer Lane shows, would allow her to strike out on her own as a creative producer. After making a string of films, including the film noir Phantom Lady (1944), Harrison later rejoined the Hitchcocks from 1955 to 1962 as producer of their successful television programme Hitchcock Presents. As a condition of his move to the US, Hitchcock insisted Harrison be put under contract. An inter-office memo in the agency of David’s brother Myron Selznick summarizes negotiations with the director: Important: Hitchcock says it is essential for him to have his secretary and script clerk with him. … Hitchcock says this girl has been with him for years and is invaluable to him in connection with his ‘peculiar system’ of writing, his shooting schedule, camera angles, etc.27

When Alfred and Alma returned to the US in summer 1938, and SIP finally put the director under contract, Selznick agreed to Hitchcock’s request and to his significant fee of $40,000 per film. Harrison got $125 per week. Selznick and Hitchcock would ultimately collaborate on four distinctive films, including Spellbound (1945) and The Paradine Case (1947). Notorious (1946), developed by the producer but made at RKO, did not bear Selznick’s name. Fraught as their first film together would prove to be, Rebecca was an unqualified artistic and

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Joan Harrison at Universal in 1943

commercial success, an immersive introduction to the Hollywood system for Hitchcock and his team, eased by the English cast and content. Selznick learned the worth of a producing director with autonomous artistic vision and independent methods, even if he couldn’t help getting in his way. The GWTW formula – female author, fraught love story, female fans – prevailed in the producer’s choice of Rebecca for his first outing with Hitchcock. Both parties had du Maurier’s forthcoming novel in their sights even before Hitchcock signed with SIP. As he negotiated with Selznick, Hitchcock was working with Harrison on what would be his last British picture, an adaptation of du Maurier’s successful novel Jamaica Inn (1939), with Charles Laughton and star German producer Erich Pommer. Harrison played a central role in that production and earned her first screen credit as a writer. When she read the galleys of du Maurier’s next, destined to be signature, novel in spring 1938, she encouraged Hitchcock to negotiate for the rights to Rebecca. Meanwhile, Kay Brown thought Rebecca ‘the most fascinating story I have read in ages’.28 Brown had been the one who urged

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Selznick to take on Margaret Mitchell’s lengthy novel in 1936 after reading the galleys, and she saw the potential in Rebecca. A sureto-be bestseller by a famous woman author featuring the cultural clout of the English gentry, Rebecca was a natural fit for Selznick, whose company specialized in lush literary properties like Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936) and the colossally ambitious GWTW. With SIP West Coast story editor Val Lewton (later famous for the cycle of low-budget, highly effective horror films he produced at RKO in the early 1940s), Brown encouraged Selznick to move forward with Rebecca.29 As Irene Mayer Selznick notes, ‘At any other time Rebecca would have monopolized David’s attention. I was so passionate about the book that I found myself defending its rights lest it become a neglected stepchild.’30 The producer finally read the book in late August and agreed that it would be a worthy follow-up to GWTW that could also launch Hitchcock. Harrison remained in contact with du Maurier regarding screen rights during this period, and with Brown and SIP’s London agent Jenia Ressair devised a plan to clinch the deal. Du Maurier’s agent had set a substantial price for the rights to the novel, and the women hoped Hitchcock could secure it for less. Du Maurier declined his offer of $40,000 – perhaps in part due to her dissatisfaction with the director’s adaptation of Jamaica Inn, which had been rewritten to highlight Charles Laughton’s role. But Brown was able to get the rights for SIP in September 1938 for $50,000, with a promise of fidelity to the novel. Selznick promptly sold the rights for a radio adaptation to Orson Welles, and Campbell Playhouse aired his production on 9 December 1938 with Welles as Maxim de Winter, Mildred Natwick as Danvers and Margaret Sullavan as ‘the Girl’ (a part Welles introduced over the air as the ‘Scarlett O’Hara of 1938’). The broadcast whet the appetite of a public already excited about the novel. At the end of 1938, Selznick had lined up a British blockbuster and a British creative genius, signalling US support for the country as World War II escalated in Europe.

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Adapting Rebecca Given his wife’s enthusiasm for the book, Selznick was sensitive to the appeal of Rebecca as women’s fiction. Joan Fontaine shared her interest in the novel when she first met the producer at a dinner party at the home of Charlie Chaplin and Paulette Goddard. ‘I just bought it!’ Selznick boasted in reply.31 In his famous memo to Hitchcock declaring his loyalty to the text and its readers, Selznick writes: Every little thing that the girl does in the book, her reactions of running away from the guests, and the tiny things that indicate her nervousness and her self-consciousness and her gaucherie are all so brilliant in the book that every woman who has read it has adored the girl and understood her psychology, has cringed with embarrassment for her, yet has understood exactly what was going through her mind. We have removed all the subtleties and substituted big broad strokes which in outline form betray just how ordinary the actual plot is and just how bad a picture it would make without the little feminine things which are so recognizable and which make every woman say, ‘I know just how she feels … I know just what she’s going through …’32

In contrast to Selznick’s celebrated attunement to female psychology, Hitchcock is generally seen as a misogynist puppeteer. But Richard Allen detects affinities between the director and du Maurier, noting that they shared the world of the theatre (the director had worked with Gerald du Maurier on the film Lord Camber’s Ladies in 1932) and its overlap with the queer demi-monde. Despite their class differences – Hitchcock had little patience for the Hollywood glamorization of upper-class English life with which Selznick hoped to infuse Rebecca – both showed English class structures as outmoded and mastered an identification with the ‘popular’ that earned them scepticism from establishment critics.33 Getting this adaptation right was a step towards the psychological complexity Hitchcock’s US films would develop. The director likely learned more by working on back-to-back novelettes by du Maurier than he would have making his transatlantic crossing with Titanic.

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Harrison’s role in the adaptation was decisive. Lane writes that the novel resonated deeply with the screenwriter: ‘Rebecca fed her avid interest in mystery novels and female true crime stories … She was du Maurier’s target audience.’34 As one of the only women producers in Hollywood during the classical period, Harrison specialized in film noir, with its dark themes and gendered power struggles. Rebecca’s romance was compelling but cruel, and Harrison did not shy away from the unsavoury bits. Her interest in ruthless men and compromised women was as keen as du Maurier’s, and she arguably cared more about what made her heroines tick. And Rebecca foregrounded relationships among women; one reviewer noted that the film adaptation could lay claim to being the ‘most striking picture ever made in terms of women character players’.35 While Selznick dragged his feet, and Hitchcock played to the press during his move to Hollywood, the orchestrated efforts of the female team of Brown, Ressair and Harrison moved things along. Unfortunately, most of the communication among these women is undocumented. Having gone after the project, Harrison had ideas of how to go about adapting the novel. Rebecca had all the components of a hit in plot and setting, ratcheted up by its unrelenting, subjective mood. The challenge was to bring all of these components to a film version that wouldn’t have the benefit of the narrator’s voice. Rebecca’s narration is full of daydreams and fantasies, including of possession by her predecessor: ‘I started, the colour flooding my face, for in that brief moment, sixty seconds in time perhaps, I had so identified myself with Rebecca that my own dull self did not exist.’36 How would this combination of passivity and overactive imagination be conveyed on screen? When Brown and Whitney came to London in November 1938, in the wake of the success of The Lady Vanishes, Harrison and Hitchcock pitched their plan to make the heroine ‘much less passive’ and the action less internal.37 Selznick warily agreed to team Hitchcock having a first pass at the adaptation, paying a flat $5,000 fee for a treatment. With war in Europe and the move to Hollywood on the horizon, Harrison and Hitchcock set to work with Alma

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Reville, using the director’s ‘peculiar system’ of screenwriting with the finished film in mind. Reville was Hitchcock’s closest collaborator throughout his long career. Starting in the film industry serving tea at Twickenham Film Studios in the 1910s, Reville got her first job as a cutter at sixteen. She was soon working in a number of capacities on set and in the editing room and was the first Englishwoman to work as an assistant director, a position she held on Hitchcock’s debut film as director, The Pleasure Garden (1927). The pair met at Famous Players-Lasky in Islington and married in 1926. Reville worked as story consultant, scriptwriter and all around adviser, credited or uncredited, throughout Hitchcock’s film and television career. As critic Charles Champlin put it: ‘The Hitchcock touch had four hands, and two were Alma’s.’38 Daughter Pat Hitchcock remembers her family’s extensive library. ‘Each time my father received a book or a script to consider as a potential project, he immediately gave it to my mother to read first. If she didn’t like it, it was instantly rejected.’ Though she received no credit, her mother was ‘very much part of’ Rebecca’s adaptation process.39 If the specifics of Reville’s contributions cannot always be pinned down, Hitchcock’s own interviews and those of their associates give evidence of its pervasiveness. Reville’s relationship with Harrison was collaborative, though the more outgoing Harrison often appears between the married couple in photographs. If not a literal threesome, the Hitchcocks and Harrison worked as a team. Arriving in Los Angeles in April 1939, team Hitchcock was welcomed by Hitchcock’s agent Myron Selznick, David’s powerful brother, and ensconced in the Wiltshire Palms Apartments in Westwood. Lane describes the domestic and labour arrangements: each morning, the Hitchcocks would come down from their penthouse to Harrison’s tastefully decorated ground-floor apartment to continue work on the script.40 Popular mystery writer Philip MacDonald came on board to develop the outline. Hitchcock approached film as a distinct medium and took liberties with literary

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properties. He found du Maurier’s novel static and tried to inject some humour into a story he felt lacked it. Their treatment opens on the boat train to Monte Carlo with a bout of seasickness caused by Maxim’s cigar, a motif that recurs during the couple’s courtship. For her part, Harrison made an effort to get inside the head of a female protagonist whose desires were not clear even to herself. The team built up I’s character in the Monte Carlo scenes to make the drain in confidence at Manderley more palpable and included the kinds of details and interactions – with the maids at Manderley, for example – that had flavoured Hitchcock’s British films. In a cheeky gesture, the unnamed heroine was referred to as ‘Daphne’. After months of work, they turned in a 45-page ‘storyline’ credited to MacDonald and Harrison.41 Alas, Selznick was ‘shocked and disappointed beyond words by the treatment’. The producer proceeded to dictate 3,000 words in response, outlining his very different approach to literary adaptation. Selznick stated unequivocally: ‘We bought Rebecca and we intend to make Rebecca.’42 He found many of the changes baffling, including giving the second Mrs de Winter a name: ‘I hope that it is not our intention to use the name Daphne nor any other name for the girl. Next to the fact that the title character Rebecca never appeared, one of the most talked-about things in connection with the book was that the principal character had no name.’43 He found the scenes of seasickness ‘cheap’ and reminded the adapters that identification with the protagonist was key to the property.44 Rebecca is a psychological tale, and the treatment had tampered with the effect. With his record of sumptuous literary adaptations – 1935, his last year at MGM, saw the release of his productions of David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities and Anna Karenina – Selznick insisted he knew whereof he spoke: This is not theory. I have too long and too successfully resisted attempts to movie-ize successful works not to be sure that my process of adaptation is sound. … This is why I have kept warning you to be faithful.45

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Exemplified by his near-fanatical attention to detail on Gone With the Wind, Selznick was especially sensitive to the respect due popular female authors and the predominantly female fans of their work. ‘The few million people who have read the book and who worship it would very properly attack us violently for the desecrations.’46 Selznick demanded the writers start afresh and wrote to Brown, ‘it may interest Miss du Maurier to know that I have thrown out the complete treatment on Rebecca … and that it is my intention to do the book and not some botched-up semi-original such as was done with Jamaica Inn’.47 Chastened, Hitchcock and Harrison went back to work, installed on the impressive former RKO-Pathé lot in Culver City where SIP was still shooting retakes on GWTW. Writer Michael Hogan, who relocated to the US around the same time as the Alfred Hitchcock and Joan Harrison (Peter Stackpole/The LIFE Picture Collection, Getty Images)

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Hitchcocks and Harrison, contributed to the adaptation. On 24 June a faithful 100-page version was delivered, and although Selznick’s anxiety was assuaged, as Leff recounts, he still responded with ten pages of single-spaced notes. After considering a number of dialogue writers (with Selznick wondering whether it was worth ‘a final stab at du Maurier to see whether she herself wouldn’t like to come over’), Selznick brought seasoned playwright Robert E. Sherwood on board.48 It was he who received screenplay credit along with Harrison, who remained busy with rewrites through to the very end of production in November. Hogan and MacDonald received adaptation credits; Alfred and Alma Hitchcock are uncredited.49 Ultimately, the different approaches to the novel – its characters, its tone, the attitudes towards English gentility and female motivation – are responsible for some of the text’s most generative ambiguities. The process of collaboration was informed by some of the same gendered struggles around authority and responsibility raised by the script. In a provocative commentary on the range of roles Hitchcock’s female collaborators played in the creation of his films, Modleski detects a parallel with I’s ready collusion with Maxim’s cover-up of his role in Rebecca’s death.50 Hollywood’s self-censorship body, the Production Code Administration, insisted on changes to the novel, refusing to approve a script in which a murder goes unpunished. The Code required that bad characters receive their due. Rebecca drowns, Danvers is immolated along with Manderley. But Maxim is exonerated, able to live his life with I ever after, if not happily. While the correspondence with the PCA on the script negotiations was cordial, Selznick found their restrictions ridiculous and considered issuing the film without Code approval. ‘The whole story of Rebecca is the story of a man who has murdered his wife, and it now becomes the story of a man who buried a wife who was killed accidentally!’ Selznick wrote in frustration to Whitney.51 The PCA also demanded the elimination of a scene in which Rebecca visits an abortionist, only to be informed she has terminal

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uterine cancer, news that prompts her to provoke Maxim into killing her. For the film’s visit to a doctor to make sense, Joseph I. Breen, who oversaw the PCA, had to allow the unsavoury idea of a suspected pregnancy through an extramarital affair with Jack Favell to remain in the script. But the affront to Maxim’s patrimony explains the rage that led to the movie’s ‘accidental’ death, and it passed the censor. The convolutions demanded by the censors’ changes point towards the transgressions the script is trying to suppress. Certainly, Maxim’s confession scene, which took up pages of exposition in the novel, presented a major conundrum to its adapters. Hitchcock wrote to Selznick early in the process: ‘Is it sufficient to put this over verbally through de Winter’s own words, or must it be done pictorially, in order to make absolutely sure that we do not lose sympathy for him?’ Maxim’s account is ‘practically a visual one. Flashback? … Ugh!’.52 Selznick had assured du Maurier that his ‘feelings about showing the dead wife coincide entirely with her own’.53 The pervasive presence of Rebecca, the most distinctive achievement of the novel, poses a problem for a visual medium. Hitchcock’s solution, which demanded multiple rewrites on Harrison’s part even as shooting was under way, was to use a present-tense camera to ‘narrate’ Rebecca’s death as Maxim details the events that transpired the night she taunted him. Choosing not to show Rebecca in flashback preserves ambiguity about Maxim’s culpability and allows her to maintain her larger-than-life status while aligning her with the power of cinema. The camera traces the action around the boathouse as if following a ghost, casting a hypnotic spell over I that extends to the viewer. When Selznick saw the rushes, he responded with uncharacteristic brevity; he found it ‘wonderful’.

Rebecca’s cast and crew Forswearing flashbacks, the production was spared the task of finding a Rebecca. But casting the rest of the film had its own complications. Ronald Colman, first choice for Maxim, declined,

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concerned about playing a murderer and wary of the film’s perception as a woman’s picture. Other Englishmen in Hollywood including David Niven and Leslie Howard were considered, and the dapper American William Powell was eager to play the role. But Laurence Olivier’s performance in Samuel Goldwyn’s Wuthering Heights, which opened in April 1939, showed he had the brooding quality necessary to play Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights (1939) the imperious husband and, Selznick admitted, ‘perhaps … 54 the more obvious edge romantically’. An afterimage of Heathcliff’s passion offsets Maxim’s detachment from his second wife; Olivier was nominated for Academy Awards for both performances. Yet he wasn’t easy to direct. He rushed his lines in a clipped fashion that producers feared would be difficult for US audiences to comprehend, and his stagey reaction shots slowed down the film’s pace. Inevitably, the publicity surrounding Rebecca’s casting focused on ‘the Girl’. Selznick had just launched Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara and imported Ingrid Bergman. This role was an opportunity for a third discovery, and the question of who would play I built upon the frenzy around the search for Scarlett that had engaged audiences so eagerly in the production of GWTW. But the heroines were very different. While Scarlett was lovely, vain and headstrong, we are told that the heroine of Rebecca lacks ‘breeding, brains and beauty’. Nevertheless, Leigh herself went after the role, and with her thenlover Olivier advocating for her, Selznick was obliged to consider her

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seriously. Objections had been raised to casting an Englishwoman as GWTW’s southern belle; Leigh was the right nationality for the du Maurier adaptation, but all wrong for the second Mrs de Winter. Even the director who had coached what would be Leigh’s Oscarwinning role in GWTW, George Cukor, ‘guffawed’ at her screen test.55 Uncast, Leigh could be said to haunt the film – a ruthless, dark-haired flirt, the heroine’s predecessor in Selznick’s more spectacular feature – more Rebecca than I. Selznick recognized that the appeal of the second Mrs de Winter lay precisely in her lack of distinction – anyone attuned to the advantages of compliant white femininity could identify with her. The top female box-office attractions according to exhibitors polled in 1940 were Bette Davis and Judy Garland, whose grit and luminosity present a strong contrast to I’s meekness. But I’s susceptibility to others – men, women, dogs, servants, ghosts – translates to film as an apt surface for projection. Not unlike a film viewer, she is imprinted by everything she experiences. I is singled out for a life of glamour not only despite but because of her ordinariness. The search attracted scores of young actresses in New York, Hollywood and London, from established stars to unknowns. According to Selznick’s biographer David Thomson, the producer had become infatuated with Fontaine after meeting her at the Chaplins’, and he formed his idea of the character in conversations with her. But he did not impose the choice of the inexperienced actress on the project; Irene Mayer Selznick counts herself Fontaine’s only steadfast supporter through the casting drama. On the evidence of 140 pages of telegrams debating the possibilities, Fontaine remained in the background until a few weeks before the start of production. A list of 126 names was compiled with the heading: ‘The following have been seen and rejected’. As Selznick telegrammed Leigh, still putting her off on 9 August, with the film scheduled to begin filming at the end of the month: ‘my wind blown mind has lost its customary decisiveness’.56

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Selznick was keen on Nova Pilbeam from Hitchcock’s Young and Innocent (1937), but she wasn’t available. Loretta Young was among the finalists, but even though the producers were open to making the heroine into an American, Young’s Santa Monica accent lost her the part. Selznick also considered Olivia de Havilland, Fontaine’s older and more established sister, whom he’d cast as Melanie in GWTW. But de Havilland’s contract at Warner Bros. was strict, and she refused to put herself forward for the role with her sister under consideration.57 Screen tests directed by noted directors John Cromwell and Anthony Mann yielded a final three: established star Margaret Sullavan and newcomer Anne Baxter in addition to Fontaine. Brown gathered a group of ‘dames’ in the New York office to rank the screen tests. In a memo to Selznick, Hitchcock conveys the opinions of his most trusted consultants upon reviewing the screen tests: I showed the tests of AB, JF, and MS to Mrs Hitchcock and Miss Harrison. Mrs Hitchcock’s opinion was that Fontaine was just too coy and simpering to a degree that it was intolerable. She thought her voice was irritating and was distressed about the whole thing. Miss Harrison’s comments were roughly the same.58

Hitchcock’s valued collaborators worried about the ‘monotony which might arise through the terrific number of scenes the girl has to play’. They were also concerned that Baxter, just sixteen, couldn’t pull off the love scenes, though they found her test the most ‘touching’. The women favoured Sullavan but could not ‘imagine MS being pushed around by Mrs Danvers right up to the point of suicide!’ They had a point; the heroine must be convincingly susceptible to the older woman’s power. The role required a weaker female lead than appealed to the women who’d helped write the part. Selznick continued to perseverate, and the casting of the role wasn’t announced until 5 September, three days before shooting began. Fontaine had campaigned for the role, but, on the eve of her

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Screen tests for the role of I: Vivien Leigh

Anne Baxter

Margaret Sullavan

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marriage to British actor Brian Aherne, was unwilling to do further screen tests. She happily cut short her honeymoon, however, when the offer came through. Born in Japan to English parents (of the aeronautic de Havillands), Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland was raised in California by her mother, Lilian, who had studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and who made sure her daughters had perfect posture, manners and diction. Fontaine ceded the family name to Olivia and eventually settled on her stepfather’s surname for her acting career. With her cultivated accent, Fontaine could appeal to both British and American audiences, and, having grown up in the shadow of her sister, played young and cowed with conviction. Lovelier and less timorous than the lank-haired heroine of the book, Fontaine was styled – with Mayer Selznick’s support – to look young and fresh rather than made up, an effect that captured the aspirational and the abject in the character.59 (Fontaine’s make-up was by Monte Westmore – one of six brothers who cornered the profession across competing Hollywood studios.) At least one fan was disappointed in the casting choice: Polly, in a handwritten note, chided ‘Mr. O’ for letting such a ‘flegmatic [sic] nincompoop as J.F. ruin such a phenomenally fine production’ as Rebecca.60 The actress’s inexperience was a drag on a production otherwise cast with highly trained stage actors. Fontaine needed extensive Joan Fontaine in the same scene in the finished film

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direction, and Hitchcock committed himself to the task, though his tactics were not always kind. He made sure Fontaine knew that Olivier hadn’t wanted her for the role.61 The actor’s isolation and nervousness no doubt contributed to her convincing performance of the unconfident second wife. With her crooked smile, I looks paralyzed with fear even as she’s seeking her husband’s approval. Selznick too helped shape Fontaine’s performance, working with editor Hal C. Kern and ordering extensive dubbing (of ‘wild lines’) in postproduction. Ultimately, Fontaine’s interpretation was a success, with positive reviews and an Oscar nomination for Best Actress for the performance. Her win the next year for the similar Hitchcock gothic Suspicion was seen by many as a consolation prize for her loss to Ginger Rogers in 1940. The supporting cast included many distinguished actors from the British expatriate community in Hollywood: Colonel Julyan, who leads the investigation once Rebecca’s body has been retrieved, is played by C. Aubrey Smith. Gladys Cooper, a friend of du Maurier, portrays Maxim’s tweedy sister Beatrice (two years later she’d portray the indomitable Mrs Vale in Now, Voyager), Nigel Bruce her foolish husband, and Reginald Denny Maxim’s right hand (and Rebecca’s target) Frank Crawley. George Sanders (the future Addison de Witt in All About Eve, 1950) plays Rebecca’s feckless cousin Jack Favell. When Favell comes to Manderley to call upon Mrs Danvers (whom he calls Danny, as Rebecca did), the cross-class alliance between the two magnetic character actors colours the film’s enduring queer subtext. For the indelible Mrs Danvers, the ‘Wicked Witch of the West Wing’ who triangulates Maxim’s marriage even after her mistress’s death, actresses considered ranged from redoubtable supporting players like Flora Robson to campier choices like Elsa Lanchester and the great silent star and notorious Hollywood lesbian Alla Nazimova.62 But it is hard to imagine anyone nailing the role of Danvers more effectively than the talented Australian stage actress whom Brown recommended, Judith Anderson. The film role came

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Judith Anderson by Nickolas Muray, c. 1927 (digital positive from the original gelatin silver negative, George Eastman Museum, © Nickolas Muray Photo Archives)

between lauded Broadway turns as Gertrude in Hamlet and Lady Macbeth in the Scottish play (a role she had played opposite Olivier in London before being cast in Rebecca). Serious, with strong features she could set in a slightly cross-eyed, sinister glare, Anderson was a commanding presence, a dignified villain who earned twice as much as Fontaine as well as an Oscar nomination for her work. The Rebecca script carries enough suggestion of the character’s lesbian attachment to her dead mistress for the Production Code Administration to demand that ‘there be no suggestion whatever of a perverted relationship between Mrs Danvers and Rebecca’. Anderson’s brilliant performance in the finished film, as directed by Hitchcock, does little to quell the censors’ concerns, and the actress would be forever identified with the role.63

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For Hitchcock, story was inseparable from visual detail, and Rebecca’s scale of production allowed him to realize the characters’ world as never before. The novel’s immersive mood and atmosphere are key to its appeal, and the production team under the management of Ray Klune would take as much care in translating its romanticized vision of the moribund English landed gentry as they had in translating GWTW’s vision of chattel slavery as ‘a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields’. Extensive soundstages housed forty grand sets designed by Lyle Wheeler for the production, which went up as the GWTW sets were broken down. ‘In a sense the picture is the story of a house’, Hitchcock told Truffaut, and Manderley was an elaborate studio creation. A largescale miniature for exteriors took up an entire soundstage. (Distance shots used a miniature miniature, with grounds attached.) Twentyfive distinct interiors designed by Joseph B. Platt gave detail and character to the mansion. Set decoration by Howard Bristol made sure that Hitchcock had the ‘things’ that were so central to his visual storytelling: the sketchbook clasped to I’s chest like a schoolgirl, the china cupid she breaks and scurries to hide in a drawer, Rebecca’s monogrammed stationery and fetish hairbrush, the ship’s tackle that

Manderley. A large model was constructed for exteriors and a smaller one with grounds for the approach to the mansion

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kills her. The vastness of the sets emphasizes her awkwardness as she trips around, enabling Hitchcock to set the camera in motion as he had not been able to do in his English productions. Selznick’s top choice for DP, Gregg Toland, was assigned to Intermezzo, so Selznick enlisted Toland’s mentor, veteran director of photography George Barnes. A master of lighting, Barnes gave Rebecca its dreamlike quality with his lush black-and-white, mobile cinematography. With 145 credits over a career spanning from 1918 to his death in 1953, Barnes won his only Oscar for Rebecca. The special-effects team headed by Jack Cosgrove handled the burning and the ruins of Manderley; special-effects cinematographer Clarence Slifer and matte painter Al Simpson filled in the grandeur of the Riviera and the Cornwall countryside. The slight quality of unreality so common to Hitchcock’s use of rear projection proved fitting for this project.64

‘The most beautiful room in the house.’ Rebecca’s bedroom set (David O. Selznick Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. Courtesy of Daniel Mayer Selznick)

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From soundstage to screen With a shooting script approved by the PCA, cast and crew assembled and sets constructed, geopolitical events intruded. Britain and France declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939, and with so many British cast members concerned about their homes and families, the production remained tense throughout. Selznick worried ‘in the event that Larry Olivier, George Sanders, etc., were ordered to report … [W]e would be in a fine pickle if they walked out in the middle – not so much of a pickle as Poland, I grant you, but still a pickle’.65 When shooting began on 8 September, the mood on set was sombre. Selznick, although distracted by GWTW, found time to interfere, and inefficiencies in production were compounded by Fontaine’s need for coaching, Olivier’s line readings and Hitchcock’s methods. The director worked too slowly for Selznick. Famous for ‘cutting in the camera’ – storyboarding each shot necessitated minimal coverage – Hitchcock remained in control of the edit. The method provoked Selznick: ‘cutting your film with the camera … is highly desirable … but of no value if you are simply going to give us less cut film per day’.66 The producer’s memos commented on everything from the quality of grey in the skies over Manderley to Fontaine’s hairstyle. Selznick had assistant director Eric Stacey and continuity supervisor Lydia Schiller report on Hitchcock’s progress, which in turn infuriated the director. Harrison was rewriting scenes into November. But working at SIP was a propitious transition to Hollywood film-making for Hitchcock’s team; Harrison regarded Rebecca as the high point of her career. The film finally wrapped on 20 November 1939, after sixtythree days, too late to meet its intended February release date. When GWTW premiered in Atlanta on 15 December 1939, editor Hal C. Kern was back in Culver City, cutting Rebecca. Although the film was received positively during previews, Selznick ordered reshoots, especially of the powerful opening and closing scenes, and dubbing that took several more months. Harrison was Hitchcock’s proxy on set, as the director had begun working on Foreign

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Correspondent (1940), on loan to producer Walter Wanger. With the delays, Franz Waxman was asked to score the film before the picture was locked, and Selznick ordered extensive changes, inserting cues by other composers. Even created under these less than ideal circumstances, the score is Waxman’s most celebrated and haunting. Waxman composed dozens of cues to sustain the film’s dreamlike atmosphere. Rebecca’s eerie theme, distinguished by the use of an electronic instrument called a novachord, conjures her pervasive presence.67 Irene Mayer Selznick recounts her husband’s insecurity around Rebecca, sharing that at one point he confided that he was considering scrapping the production. He summoned her to watch a rough assembly and she assured him the footage was superb.68 But he was dangerously overextended, and their marriage faltered. Production costs came in at $1,288,000, well over the $850,000 that Selznick had aimed for and a shocking number for Hitchcock, used to frugal UK budgets. But the film easily turned a profit. As Kyle Edwards details, the film’s marketing campaign capitalized on the popularity of du Maurier’s novel and the association of the Selznick name with GWTW and a reputation of extravagance and prestige. At the Academy Awards in late February 1940, GWTW won eight Oscars, and Selznick took home the Irving B. Thalberg Award. Olivier, connected to GWTW through his affair with Leigh, also helped publicize Rebecca. Although the film wasn’t sold on Hitchcock’s name, he was an asset whose work was praised by reviewers. Following the GWTW model of downplaying coastal dominance of cultural events, Rebecca premiered at Miami’s Lincoln Theater on 21 March 1940. A gala premiere at Radio City Music Hall followed a week later, leading to a record-breaking run there. United Artists released Rebecca in the US on 12 April and in the UK in July. Critical reception was enthusiastic, with almost all reviewers tying the quality of the production and performances to Selznick’s high standards. Affirming the marketing campaign’s logic, the Los Angeles Times christened the film ‘a worthy successor

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Advertising Rebecca’s successful opening at Radio City Music Hall in Variety, 3 April 1940 (Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)

to Gone With the Wind’. Fidelity to du Maurier’s novel ‘in text and mood’ was praised, with Louella Parsons going so far as to claim that ‘it is produced almost as fiction is written’. Fontaine was widely hailed as a discovery; Olivier came across ‘so exactly as you’d imagined Miss du Maurier’s Maxim de Winter’; and Judith Anderson was ‘truly triumphant’.69 Interestingly, the two major trade papers, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, while they praised Rebecca, were less confident in its success. The former declared the film ‘too tragic and deeply psychological to hit the fancy of wide audience appeal’, the latter ‘dour’ in its ‘ultra-British atmosphere’.70 Yet Rebecca was a bona fide hit, topping the US box office with earnings of $8,600,000 at 1940 ticket prices, remaining in theatres for weeks. The film was named ‘Biggest Winner’ of 1940 by the British magazine Kinematograph Weekly; viewers tacitly approved a Hollywood idealization of a way of life threatened by war and social

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change.71 Germany invaded Western Europe in May and the Battle of Britain commenced in July. Perhaps the ‘somberness’ Variety detected resonated with the times. In a year of Hollywood releases that included The Philadelphia Story, The Grapes of Wrath, The Great Dictator, The Letter and Fantasia, Rebecca won the National Board of Review award for Best Film of 1940. It received eleven Oscar nominations: for the three principal actors, screenwriting, set design, cinematography, effects, editing, score, director and picture. The nominations crowned Hitchcock and Harrison’s successful entry to the US studio system. Harrison made history that year with a second screenwriting nomination in the Original Screenplay category for Foreign Correspondent, which she co-wrote. Neither won, and they never would. In addition to Barnes’s award for cinematography, the only other Oscar Rebecca won was the one that mattered most: Best Picture. It would be the only time the award went to a Hitchcock film. But John Ford received the award for Best Director. Selznick took home his second Oscar for Best Picture in two years. Rebecca’s story is a grand tale of Golden Age Hollywood: on Selznick’s side, it simultaneously benefits from and puts a check on legendary stories of his mercurial excess on GWTW; on Hitchcock’s, it provides the drama of the wartime crossover to Hollywood and the encounter with the US studio system’s constraints and benefits. The story of those men has been masterfully told by such biographers as David Thomson (Showman: The Life of David O. Selznick) and Patrick McGilligan (Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light) and facilitated by the subjects themselves through the vast Selznick archive at the University of Texas at Austin and Hitchcock’s constant self-invention for the public. Historians who argue against a single great-man theory emphasize the studio era’s affordances (Schatz’s The Genius of the System) and its necessarily collaborative ethos (Leff’s Hitchcock and Selznick). The title of Michael Epstein’s PBS American Masters episode, ‘Hitchcock, Selznick, and the End of Hollywood’ (1999), adds a grace note of grandiosity.

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David O. Selznick, Joan Fontaine, Alfred Hitchcock and Judith Anderson at the 1941 Academy Awards ceremony, where Rebecca won Best Picture (Peter Stackpole/The LIFE Picture Collection, Getty Images)

Certainly, auteurist readings and industrial histories tell us much about the film. Psychological themes of doubt and suspicion and formal signatures like the travelling point-of-view shot can be traced from Rebecca across Hitchcock’s oeuvre. Selznick’s documented contributions show an attention to female sensibility and a marshalling of resources around the creation of widely resonant cultural fantasies. But, as we’ve seen, the many ways women’s work determines the final product often elude such accounts. Du Maurier is really the only figure involved with the film who uncontestably deserves the name author, and the literary and heritage industries around her, as well as significant feminist scholarly work on the female gothic and popular fiction for women, push back against a Hollywoodization of the story of the adaptation. Star labour is also significant. Joan Fontaine may not be remembered as a star of the ‘independent woman’ type, as Richard Dyer, building on Molly Haskell, defines the characters played by Davis or Katharine

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Hepburn.72 But Fontaine’s persona and labour, including her decision to work in independent productions, contribute to our understanding of this 1940s type.73 The contributions of less well-known women who, like Brown, Ressair, Harrison, Reville, Rabwin and Mayer Selznick, facilitated productions within the Hollywood studio system, are being uncovered by a growing network of feminist film historians and scholars.74 Because of Hollywood’s exclusionary racial practices, all of these women were white, and several came from exceptionally privileged families. Women from modest backgrounds, like Reville, entered film-making when it was lacking in prestige and established hierarchies. She showed Hitchcock the ropes, and was largely relegated to her husband’s shadow. These women’s stories tell not of the genius of the system but the work and care of navigating institutional barriers, sometimes in league with each other, and allow us to broaden the frame of film history and critique narrow notions of authorial control. As in the male cover-up plot of Rebecca, which depends on Maxim falsely identifying an ‘unclaimed’ woman as Rebecca, there are many others who never had a chance. Feminist film studies is also an imaginative project that engages questions of gendered representation and address (and their limits) through attention to film texts and their reception. In Uninvited, I noted that ‘Rebecca figures as insistently in feminist film theory as does Rebecca in the second Mrs de Winter’s psyche’, supplementing that work with a reading of the film’s staging of ‘lesbian representability’.75 In the next chapter, I return to key contributions on the film and their favoured method of close textual analysis. The heroine’s voiceover, Maxim’s autocratic style and family name, and Rebecca’s signature and monogram are figural traces of the struggles over authorship that this chapter traces historically. In the final chapter I return to Rebecca’s contexts of reception; if grappling with female influence is a key dimension of the film’s production and its textuality, it is through the film’s fans that such influence lives on.

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2 ‘I was possessed …’: Rebecca’s Style Do you think the dead come back and watch the living? Sometimes I wonder if she doesn’t come back here … and watch you and Mr de Winter together. Mrs Danvers

Rebecca is for, and about, the watchful. Danvers believes Rebecca is watching the goings-on at her old haunt, Manderley; in this sense, the viewer is aligned with the ghost of the first Mrs de Winter. A proper gothic heroine, I is ever on the alert. Maxim’s first words to her are: ‘Who are you? What are you staring at?’ Mrs Danvers is a seer who, in crucial moments casts her gaze to the beyond; Anderson says that Hitchcock directed her eyes. Fans were on the watch for the release of Selznick’s adaptation of du Maurier’s bestseller, and the producer worried about their scrutiny of every detail. The film’s genre, and its production in Hollywood by a largely British team as World War II escalated, shaped these positions of watchfulness. As the previous chapter’s production history recounts, Rebecca marks a high point in classical Hollywood film-making, with Hitchcock’s visual storytelling commanding vast studio resources for the first time. Studio style had reached its maturation – moving camera, chiaroscuro lighting, grand and atmospheric mise en scène, integrated effects work, romantic scoring, and trained vocal and physical performance function in service of this A-list woman’s picture. Silhouetted figures, billowing curtains, crashing waves, ubiquitous flowers, musical motifs, the monogram R are textual traces of a haunting but unknown female presence – the dead woman’s of course, but also the novelist’s and her readers’. Deploying close reading as method and retrospection as mode, this chapter shows how Rebecca rewards the watchful viewer. I explore how the film engages form to meet the challenges of adapting the novel’s

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first-person narration, representing the ambivalence of class rise and/ through marriage, and making Rebecca’s seductive presence known. The confluence of Hollywood artifice and English heritage gives the film’s mise en scène such a hold on the imagination that viewers keep coming back, to untangle competing epistemologies of desire and doubt, intrigue and anxiety, to watch. 1. The dream(er) The film’s first image is a title card showing fog-shrouded trees and promising a ‘picturization’ of Daphne du Maurier’s celebrated novel. The word choice reflects Selznick’s philosophy of faithful adherence to the source text, but it is also an apt signpost for a specialeffects sequence. Black and white, the film is not so extravagant a picturization as Gone With the Wind, whose racial fantasy seems to have demanded the artifice of Technicolor. Instead the monochrome creates an aura of mystery and allows an indulgence in texture and shadow play that will define the film. Picturization, these opening moments confirm, is also an aural phenomenon, as Franz Waxman’s score introduces themes associated with Manderley, Rebecca and the heroine/love story. After the opening credits, the picture and sound fade, immediately followed by a shot of clouds passing before the moon, figuring cinema’s own mechanics of light and aperture. The voiceover begins: ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.’ The nameless, bodiless narration that opens Rebecca conjures a presence and poses an enigma: who is I, where and what is Manderley? Why return? The narrative question is not the solution to a crime, the conquering of a foe, or the winning of the hand of a desired love object. This narration isn’t really about the forward momentum of narrative at all; it is simply a quest for a better view. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me. But then, like all dreamers, I was possessed of a sudden, supernatural power and passed like a spirit through the barrier before me.

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The iron gate is a proscenium arch, and I is a spectator who will be admitted to the show in due course. As Joan Fontaine speaks Rebecca’s famous opening lines in her refined transatlantic accent, the camera rises and glides through the gate with an impressive cinematic flourish. But still we see very little; we have yet to arrive. The twists and turns of the drive must first be navigated. Mimicking the repeated harp glissando, the camerawork’s roundabout quality also reinforces the narration: The drive wound away in front of me, twisting and turning as it had always done. But as I advanced, I was aware that a change had come upon it. Nature had come into her own again and little by little had encroached upon the drive with long tenacious fingers.

This feminized force is tightening its grip. ‘On and on wound the poor thread that had once been our drive.’ The female narrative

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path is a meandering one. ‘Finally, there was Manderley. Manderley. Secretive and silent.’ Personified, with a vaguely androgynous and exotic proper name, the house stands as antagonist and object of desire, a metonymic chain that leads back to the only other proper name we know so far, Rebecca. ‘Time could not mar the perfect symmetry of those walls.’ The quest finally resolves into a shadowy image of a (notably asymmetrical) model of the mansion in silhouette. But the pervasive uncertainty immediately resumes: Moonlight can play odd tricks upon the fancy and suddenly it seemed to me that light came from the windows. And then a cloud came upon the moon and hovered in an instance like a dark hand before a face. The illusion went with it. I looked upon a desolate shell, with no whisper of the past about its staring walls.

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The voiceover, itself a ‘whisper of the past’, composes and recomposes the elements of this Ur-scene of on-set magic: light tricks, a technician’s hand, a dissolve. ‘We can never go back to Manderley again, that much is certain.’ The haunting voiceover contradicts what we’ve just seen and heard. Again, who is the ‘we’ who can never go back, the I who does it anyway? A female name as title, a female voice as guide; what connects these traces? The last lines of the voiceover transition to a punctual point in time and shift back to the singular. ‘But sometimes, in my dreams, I do go back, to the strange days of my life which began for me in the South of France.’ As the glamorous location befits, in the next segment ‘I’ will meet a dark, handsome stranger with social rank and a mysterious past, and narrative will regain its grasp on this film. The two will marry and return together to Manderley, via the winding drive. But the transition from the opening narration to the Monte Carlo courtship flashback continues the visual motifs of the floating framing sequence. Seeming to rewind the opening’s left to right path across Manderley’s façade, the shot that emerges from the dissolve is a sweeping right to left pan that climbs with the score. (Selznick insisted on this in retakes, feeling the need for a flourish.) The camera reveals cresting waves where a moment before we saw wild undergrowth; we hear them crash in echo of the score’s rhythmic repetitions. Camera movement is aligned with restless mobility, with the sea – like Nature’s tenacious fingers, a female metaphor of recursive power. I approach the memorable overture to Rebecca in the spirit of Thierry Kuntzel’s essay ‘The Film-Work, 2’, which reveals, in a close analysis of the opening sequence of The Most Dangerous Game (1932), a matrix of that film’s darkest themes as they are woven into its formal codes.76 In Rebecca we are going back even as we go forward; Kuntzel’s analogy to the dreamwork fits this explicitly oneiric scene. The voiceover is punctuated by the prohibition of the ego’s censor – ‘we can never go back’ – and sustained by the dreamwork’s capacity for contradiction – ‘but sometimes I do

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go back’ – engaging the viewer in this compulsion. As Freud explains, ‘Dreams feel themselves at liberty … to represent any element by its wishful contrary.’77 Going back to go forward is a characteristic of voiceover narration, a device film noir would develop as an art form. The unreliability of the almost-always male narrator around whom time forks in the case of film noir is often attributed to a gap in self-knowledge, a tragic flaw. The female voiceover, as feminist film theorists have argued, lacks this claim to authority.78 Indeed, the heroine’s voiceover never returns in Rebecca. The dreamer remains in a state of suspended animation, not unlike a moviegoer. The only way to address the epistemological questions posed by the first sequence and left open at the end is to watch the film again. 2. The companion The reverie that carries us back ‘to those strange days’ consumes the remainder of the film. The camera sweeps up to catch a man on the edge of a cliff in extreme long-shot silhouette, very erect in a dark suit, though his head is bent; the next shot is a three-quarter frontal closeup of Laurence Olivier’s glower; the third an overhead shot of the back of his hatted head, strongly graphic in quality; the fourth shows his legs as he moves to step forward. The striking changes in scale and angle are the film’s first strokes of Hitchcock’s signature. The viewer has access to the stranger’s face, although the other shots emphasize the mystery of his identity. The point of view from which we regard him is impossible; one would need the dreamer’s supernatural powers, or Rebecca’s (as we will learn, ‘the sea took her’), to see his face from this angle. We study the man’s expression, following the codes of romance fiction. What deep thoughts trouble the stern yet vulnerable English star that Silver Screen bills as ‘a combination of Gable, Taylor, and Powell’?79 Waves crashing against a cliff in the Mediterranean (filmed in Carmel on the Central California coast by the second unit under D. Ross Lederman’s direction) remind George Fortescue Maximilian de Winter of the past he is fleeing.

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The music becomes more alarming until it halts abruptly with a shout: ‘no, stop!’ Someone witnessing this scene from a different point of view and at a much different scale has nevertheless read this man’s intention of jumping off a cliff and calls out to stop him. The heroine is still just a voice to us, which downplays Fontaine’s star entrance but emphasizes her attunement. She could be anybody – i.e. me, or a stand-in, given that this is second-unit work. Entering her own story in long shot, she will remain a kind of stand-in. Maxim continues to look out over the cliff towards the sea. The Harrison/Hitchcock treatment had been keen to amplify the ‘meet cute’ Monte Carlo sequence in the interest of making the heroine less drippy and the whole movie more amusing. I’s trailing ‘Once Upon a Time’ voiceover takes us into a fairy tale, set on a studio-enhanced clifftop where the hero growls ogreishly at I. The mercurial Maxim is brooding and Byronic, a prince in need of saving. I is exaggeratedly girlish, a constant nymph, chosen precisely because

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she is no ‘great lady’, simply a clumsy girl of ambiguous class status, in a sweater set and tweed skirt. Du Maurier, with her suspicion of conformist femininity and interest in incest, here tunes the Cinderella fantasy to a dissonant 1930s key. In the era of the New Woman, I works as an old-fashioned lady’s companion. Mrs Van Hopper, the gossipy American matron for whom I works, is the wicked stepmother. Written with evident glee in the caricature of American vulgarity by Hitchcock and his British team, the role is played with equal gusto by lawyer-turned-actress Florence Bates, butting out her cigarette in a jar of cold cream and memorably shouting after taking her medicine, ‘Give me a chocolate, quick!’ Shocked by news of the engagement, Van Hopper wishes I luck in her new position; indeed, it was she who initially suggested I might make herself useful to Maxim. But as for I becoming mistress of Manderley: ‘To be perfectly frank with you, my dear, I can’t see you doing it.’ Adult heterosexuality, marriage, entails tyranny and threat. One can hope it is something else too, but watchfulness is warranted.

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I’s awkwardness, and Fontaine’s charm, so important to our identification with her when she returns to Manderley, is established when she knocks over a vase at the hotel restaurant. Max comes to the rescue, and courtship ensues, although the naive I doesn’t fully recognize his intentions: ‘Do you mean you want a secretary or something?’ Maxim barks back: ‘I’m asking you to marry me, you little fool.’ The romance cliché is spoken in voice off, and Fontaine’s face contorts with incredulity. ‘I’m not the sort of person men marry,’ she responds. Rhona Berenstein’s article on the queerness of Rebecca borrows this line – which comes straight from du Maurier’s page – as a title, musing about whether I ‘is the sort of person who marries men’.80 At the very least, this romance is out of phase generationally. Maxim tells I to ‘run along’, eat her breakfast ‘like a good girl’, and, rather threateningly, ‘never to be thirty-six years old’. The asymmetry leaves room for another, triangulating presence – Rebecca as the female force Maxim can’t vanquish and I can’t (yet) access. ‘She was

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the beautiful Rebecca Hildreth, you know.’ ‘They say he simply adored her’: Mrs Van Hopper’s gossip torments I during her sleep. The couple marry hastily, and when we see their honeymoon much later, in the form of home movies projected at Manderley, it is under a cloud of moodiness and strife. The consummation of their sexual relationship is relegated to another time and place, to off-screen space. 3. Manderley The pair’s return to Manderley is framed as the viewer’s return to the narrator’s return, as we piece together what compels it. Here space dominates action, set dominates character, mood dominates time. The extravagant estate is the protagonist, the terrain we tread is gothic. Rebecca makes her presence overwhelmingly felt (and heard in the score) and her emissary Mrs Danvers makes her appearance (her musical motif echoes Rebecca’s). This important narrative move begins with I’s uneasy anticipation and ends with her contemplating a leap out of a West Wing window. What happens behind those ‘staring walls’ to bring her to that place? In the film adaptation, the novel’s subjective sequences are spatialized, mobilized, scored to position the viewer at the heroine’s side. While consistent with continuity’s demand to move the characters from one act to the next, the arrival sequence takes on the oneiric force of the opening dream it retraces. The production design as well as the camera- and effects work wrap us in I’s desire and trepidation. Passing through the iron gate with the legitimacy of ownership this time, the newlyweds linger in a liminal space as a series of shots show lateral, rear and frontal views of the couple in a convertible. A wind machine blows Joan Fontaine’s hair against rear projection in a signature Hitchcock driving scene. In her astute and witty chapter ‘Someone Is Trying to Kill Me and I Think It’s My Husband’, science-fiction writer Joanna Russ lists the elements of the twentieth-century gothic as it emerged ‘in the du Maurier tradition’: the House, the Other Woman, the SuperMale.81 Most important of all: the Heroine. ‘Their connection with

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the action of the novel is always passive; they are focal points for tremendous emotion, and sometimes tremendous struggle, simply because they exist.’ As Laura Mulvey so influentially argued, cinema pairs narrative momentum with the agency of looking. The heroine’s paradoxical passive/active quality is captured through mise en scène and subjective point of view. I is the viewer’s mirror, an apprehensive, receptive surface absorbing all with which it comes in contact. Truffaut comments on the aura of magic surrounding Manderley, and Hitchcock replies: In Rebecca the mansion is so far away from anything that you don’t even know what town it’s near. Now, it is entirely possible that this abstraction, which you’ve described as American stylization, is partly accidental, and to some extent due to the fact that the picture was made in the United States. But if the scene had been more realistic, and the place of arrival geographically situated, we would have lost the sense of isolation.82

Britain of 1939 falls away in a haze of historically fudged English gentility. Hitchock’s first film in the US offers a simulacrum of home. The weather turns: it isn’t full-on dark-and-stormy-night gothic, but it is inclement enough to obstruct I’s anticipated view of the manor house. Shaded by an oversized macintosh draped over her head, her subjective look is the opposite of a penetrating or possessive gaze. The shot of her looking excludes Maxim and withholds the view of the house a beat longer for us than for the heroine. We know she’s seen Manderley when she visibly flinches and raises one eyebrow (throughout the film, the asymmetry in Fontaine’s face and posture dynamize her interstitial position). Finally, the point-of-view shot. Strangely, though, our first view of Manderley is anything but distinct given the fog and rain. Framed in the arch cleared by the windscreen wipers, it echoes the shape and scale of the front gate and matches the precedent shot of I peeping out from under the macintosh. The windscreen figures the screen before us, another mediation of the view of the house proper.

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The travelling shot forward through the windscreen lasts long enough for Selznick’s resource allocation to register with the viewer. Waxman’s score gives us the appropriate emphasis for this cinemaof-gothic-attractions moment. The Tudor-inspired Manderley that appears is a ‘strange and endless concatenation of architectural volumes, gable roofs, turrets, chimneys, solid stone walls, mullioned bays with window-walls, merlons and a dungeon’, as Steven Jacobs describes it in his book on Hitchcock’s architecture, The Wrong House.83 Although location scouts had looked at likely manor houses in England and North America, Manderley’s construction on soundstages mimics the ‘irregular and additive plan of the Victorian country house’.84 The vision of Manderley is both an illusion that plays ‘tricks on the fancy’ – matte paintings by Al Simpson extend the façade of the miniature – and a spectacle to be possessed by a curious gaze. The shot that completes the point-of-view figure, a return to I and her macintosh, is unusually protracted, emphasizing the seer as much as the sight. The car rounds a last curve, and with Maxim still excluded from the shot, I swerves as if on a carnival ride, physically moved by the house’s return stare. Whereas the dream arrival lacked a body, this body lacks a voiceover; we read the play of I’s emotions on her face, which is turned towards us more frequently than it is towards Maxim. In the approach to the gothic house, Hitchcock’s signature point-of-view shot sequence and his graphic matches of the arch shape stage the drama of the female gaze that is, according to Mary Ann Doane, the central problem of the ‘paranoid women’s films’ of which Rebecca is exemplary. ‘In this cycle, dramas of seeing become invested with horror within the context of the home, and sexual anxiety is projected onto the axis of suspense. The paradigmatic woman’s space – the home – is yoked to dread, and to a crisis of vision.’85 The crisis, in the Lacanian framework Doane draws upon, arises from the symbolic order’s exclusion of woman from the position of desiring subject and thus from possessing a gaze that

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would signify her desire. In Rebecca, I is not only a tentative subject of the gaze, she also fails in her attempts to position herself as its object. Maxim looks beyond her to the impossible, irresistible place of her predecessor. Still, the gothic heroine does almost nothing but look. Her gaze affirms Freud’s link between vision and the sense of the uncanny.86 This feeling of estranged familiarity or familiar estrangement pervades the woman’s exploration of the genre’s haunted spaces and the viewer’s identification with her gaze. Through an etymological enquiry into the German word unheimlich, ‘un-homely’, Freud traces the sensation of the uncanny to the mother’s body, the crisis of vision to, what else, the sight of the female genitalia, ‘the entrance to the former home of all humans’. In the female oedipal drama, the original, familiar desire for the mother and her body must be relinquished, estranged, in order for the girl to make herself over as the object of the father’s desire. In Rebecca, I can’t look away. But desire, curiosity and recognition are held in check by dread and anxiety. Rebecca’s advertising materials represent the association of the house with the female body through a graphic depiction of a ghostlike female figure emerging from Manderley. The couple stares in dread, looking more like siblings, or spectators, than romantic newlyweds (see p. 20). The uncanny experience of domesticity that pervades the female gothic is thus social, psychic and somatic, and the genre’s central relationship is arguably between the Heroine and the House (her domain, but her husband’s property). I confides to Maxim that as a child she once purchased a picture postcard of Manderley. The story, like Judy’s fatal mistake of wearing Carlotta’s necklace in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), is a slip, a clue to her desire. The postcard aligns I with du Maurier’s own passion for a house, Menabilly, the ruined estate in Cornwall that provided a model for Manderley. Uncannily, with the proceeds from Rebecca, the author was able to rent Menabilly, move her family there, and write in peace for the next twenty-five years. An ambivalent wife and mother, du Maurier

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evidently had feelings for Menabilly bordering on paraphilia. Simon Callow recounts in The Guardian: ‘Her daughter Flavia once watched her kiss the stone wall: “When she turned, her slightly flushed face had a look close to ecstasy.”’87 A feminist reading of the gothic cannot ignore the classed and imperial dimensions built into the formula and into the country estate setting. Initially, the gothic serves as an allegory of feudal decay. By the 1840s, Jane Eyre is haunted by Britain’s colonial history in the person of the Jamaican-born Bertha Rochester, the ‘madwoman in the attic’ who burns down Thornfield. Du Maurier’s ambivalent picture of class in 1930s Britain is reflected in the decline of the de Winters and the triumph of the orphaned heroine, an average girl. White, educated and English, this ‘averageness’ is a construction of empire and its gendering, recalling du Maurier, who wrote the novel while living in Egypt as an officer’s wife, or the de Havilland daughters, raised as proper English girls in Tokyo and Central California in the 1920s.88 Manderley, with its echo of Mandelay, also suggests a threatened colonial order (the British ruled Burma from 1919 until it was made a crown colony in 1937, when Rebecca was written). Although the novel and film are scrubbed of such context, Rebecca’s ungovernable, unrepresentable darkness is its shadow. In du Maurier’s mid-twentieth-century Cornwall heritage plot, colonial history disappears in the vague haze of the couple’s post-flashback exile, and its ‘poor thread’ leads to the warm American reception and Hollywood adaptation of a novel whose Englishness connotes ‘class’. Transposed to the US, the desire for Maxim and aristocracy is a nostalgia for an Anglo-Saxon birthright and patriarchal lineage that could help sort out the confusions of American multiethnic democracy. Manderley is the gothic shadow of GWTW’s Tara, a house in which geopolitics and family drama merge. Both Rebecca and GWTW begin with the Selznick logo, the colonial mansion serving as the front office on the Culver City lot, and immediately reveal their central domiciles, tying the topoi of fictions of white female belonging to the Hollywood bottom line.

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The house I is about to enter is as much a metonym for Rebecca and Danvers, who die there, as it is for Maxim as the de Winter scion. Patriarchal lineage is ultimately brought down by female disorder. I, however, is not herself a force of disorder. She’s mostly there to watch. In the next scene, the rain-bedraggled couple crosses the threshold and, under Danvers’s orders, is confronted by the entire staff in Manderley’s great hall. The scene directly aligns Danvers with the power, both lure and threat, that the Hollywood house will exert over the heroine and her companion, the viewer, for the better part of the film. The extreme long shot of the Manderley exterior set (with the entry built to scale) as the car pulls up is realized and matched in grandeur when the couple is brought up short by the assembly in the great hall. Hitchcockian humour leavens the scene, mocking the excesses of the gentry (and of Selznick’s art department), even while displaying them. Manderley’s staff outnumbers its residents tenfold. The hall’s grandiosity seems like the imagining of a child, an effect enhanced by the use of matte painting to extend its gothic sweep. Fontaine, tousled

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from travel, the rain and the macintosh, looks like she stumbled onto the set not yet costumed for her role. She could be a member of the public, admitted to tour the home on Tuesdays. The heroine’s tentative movement forward, Maxim at her side, is met by Mrs Danvers’s gliding into her/our field of view: ‘I have everything in readiness for you.’ The reverse shot isolates the heroine and the alternation between the two continues as I grows more and more nervous. As the housekeeper scans her appearance, I drops her gloves, as if under a spell. Danvers wears a witchlike floor-length black gown, complemented by a mole on Anderson’s chin; she ‘casts the glamour over’ I. As we will learn, she came to Manderley with Rebecca and won’t leave without her; she is not aligned with patriarchal descent. A lady’s companion, she is also I’s counterpart, her double, and a challenge to the institution of marriage. In her case, ‘Mrs’ is a title of respect used for high-ranking servants; she’s also called Danny, and she later brags of Rebecca’s death by drowning: ‘No man could defeat her, or woman either!’

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Hitchcock explains his direction of this character: Mrs Danvers was almost never seen walking and was rarely shown in motion. If she entered a room in which the heroine was, what happened is that the girl suddenly heard a sound and there was the ever-present Mrs Danvers, standing perfectly still by her side. In this way the whole situation was projected from the heroine’s point of view; she never knew when Mrs Danvers might turn up, and this, in itself, was terrifying. To have shown Mrs Danvers walking about would have been to humanize her.89

What then is Danvers, if not human? What about her stare makes I shed her accessories? Capable of materializing anywhere, Danvers shadows the absent Rebecca. The opposite of the idealized ‘angel in the house’, she anchors the dead woman’s ghostly presence in the house’s erogenous zones. But in this scene, we don’t yet know the nature and extent of Danvers’s devotion to Rebecca. She steps into Mrs Van Hopper’s place as an (anti-)maternal figure to the heroine. Rather than a paid ‘friend of the bosom’, I is now the employer, a role that puzzles her. ‘I do hope we shall be friends,’ she says to Danvers, as if she were ‘a secretary or something’, her initial understanding of Maxim’s proposal. Though I will try to learn the ways of great ladies by perusing Rebecca’s correspondence and menus and dressing up like the portrait of Lady Caroline de Winter that hangs in the gallery, Maxim tells her she behaves more like an upstairs maid. Over the next section of the film, I’s navigation of Manderley, touted in publicity as the ‘house of a hundred rooms and a hundred secrets’, will unfold under Danvers’s watchful eye. The female gothic activates the anxiety and bewilderment of married life, a domestic isolation that adds alien demands to familiar gendered socialization.90 I is afraid of the servants, uncertain about what to do with her empty days and where to turn in the empty halls. Maxim is absent and distant. The marriage doesn’t even have the ‘will he kiss me or kill me?’ frisson Fontaine’s character experiences with Cary Grant’s in

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Suspicion. More debonair William Powell than smouldering Clark Gable-Tyrone Power in this performance, Olivier adds an English enervation with its own masochistic appeal. In any event, he is never shown upstairs; I’s big bedroom scene is with Danvers. FT

My guess is that you must have had some fun with the scenario because it’s actually the story of a girl who makes one blunder after another … I couldn’t help imagining the working sessions between you and your scriptwriter: ‘Now, this is the scene of the meal. Shall we have her drop her fork or will she upset her glass? Let’s have her break the plate …’

AH

That’s quite true, it did happen that way and we had a good deal of fun with it.91

One imagines the on-set vibe striking Fontaine something like the assembled servants overwhelming her character on arrival. The actress was already insecure – the part had been so difficult to clinch. The cast, nearly all British, nearly all theatrically trained, were intimidating and cliquish, and Hitchcock built on her trepidation. Perfect for the performance, if not for the actor’s nerves. The fact is, for all of the casting frenzy, ‘I’ is not much of a character. In contrast to Selznick’s spunky heroine of the year before, who vowed, ‘I will never go hungry again,’ I skips breakfast so as not to have to navigate the overwhelming sideboard or interact with the butler. Her slips and errors are magnified by framing and mise en scène. Long shots show her disorientation in the large sets that represent Manderley’s great rooms. The doorknobs are hung at shoulder height, like dream imagery. Fontaine’s performance, coaxed by Hitchcock and cut into shape in the editing and dubbing rooms under Selznick’s oversight, is a fascinating assemblage of affected ‘natural’ gestures and natural affectations. Fontaine is in every scene until she faints out of the procedural sequence. (Despite the charming English-village sets, this part of the film is dull enough that the viewer might wish to

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make an exit as well.) Selznick worried that Hitchcock underplayed Fontaine too much: ‘I’d like to urge that you be a little more Yiddish Art Theater in these moments, a little less English Repertory Theater. Which will make the restraint of the rest of the performance much more effective, in my opinion, and will not make it seem as though Joan is simply not capable of the big moments’.92 Fontaine earned her Best Actress nomination for the way she trips, twists, scurries, shrinks, peers from under a stray flip of hair, reaches out a tentative hand, smiles in a lopsided way, and registers imagined conversations with her eyes and chin. Sensible shoes, a longish tweed skirt, a sweater set and pearls, as well as Fontaine’s elocution, complete the fantasy world of Anglo-Americana. Lit by Barnes, who would photograph Fontaine in several more films, she is at once radiant and vague enough for viewers who want to, to see themselves in the heroine. Fontaine is both more femme and more American than the novel’s narrator. Described in the novel as having ‘lank Joan of Arc

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hair’, I represents a certain indistinct pervasiveness enjoyed by white femininity, extending an invitation to identify with the abject backed by a promise of ultimately belonging. As I stumbles and cringes around the property, visiting the boathouse and estate office following traces of Rebecca, illusions of happiness with Maxim begin to be stripped from her, culminating in a quarrel as they watch the honeymoon footage. Her timidity can drive contemporary viewers crazy – in internet slang at the time of writing, she is a simp – crushing pathetically on an indifferent Maxim. For Doane the free-floating nature of the heroine’s vision – the failure to find what she is looking for, to isolate an object of desire – signifies the fraught nature of female spectatorship itself. But if subjectivity as mastery is not on display, subjective experience defines the film. The sumptuous interiors with elaborate wainscoting, window walls and hangings are photographed with striking lighting effects. Manderley’s fresh flowers, morning room fires and seaside breezes play on the senses. Maxim’s sister Beatrice’s words about Mrs Danvers cut into her consciousness and ours: ‘She simply adored Rebecca.’ At the same time, I cannot be trapped by the conventional gaze. She slips through doorways unseen. Only Mrs Danvers’s panoptic vision can locate her. The effect of identifying with a cipher is akin to playing a video game. The heroine breaks things (the China cupid ‘treasure’), picks up objects (inevitably emblazoned with Rebecca’s monogram), trips over thresholds, hangs up on callers. ‘I know just how she feels,’ as David O. Selznick put it. Eventually, Jasper the inky cocker spaniel who snubs her at first will remain by her side. I is our avatar: in her girlish garb, passing through outsized doors, she resembles Alice in Wonderland (to whom Maxim explicitly compares her, with the ribbon in her hair), as things get curiouser and curiouser. Catherine Grant’s video ‘Rites of Passage’, made in tribute to Joan Fontaine when she died in 2013 aged 96 (her sister and rival Olivia de Havilland lived until 104), compiles every shot of I crossing a threshold: jauntily skipping out of Mrs Van Hopper’s sick room with a tennis racket as a cover for her afternoon trysts with Maxim;

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entering the morning room; approaching the West Wing and parting the curtains to Rebecca’s boudoir; trespassing at the cottage for rope to tie up the errant Jasper; dodging behind a door to eavesdrop on Favell and Danny. Grant’s condensation privileges proprioception over vision. As she puts it, ‘sensuous methodologies seem to me to be eminently suited to the epistemology and hermeneutics […] of déjàviewing’.93 Passages are not movements from one state to another, from doubt to certainty, but rather adjacencies – between fear and desire, disavowal and knowledge, male and female object choices. The soundtrack of Grant’s video overlays sampling of the film’s score with a rhythmic knocking sound. Reflecting on the construction of her video in an accompanying essay, Grant ponders what might have prompted her addition of the sound effect, which isn’t found in Rebecca. She connects the gothic scenario she was activating in Rebecca – the architecture’s anatomization of female dread and desire – to a ghostly visit in the 1961 film The Haunting, when

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the two central female characters are terrorized by a supernatural knocking at the door of their shared bedroom. I linked the two films in my article ‘Female Spectator, Lesbian Specter’; The Haunting is a more explicit figuration of the homoerotic seductions of Rebecca. Grant concludes that her creative choice was an unconscious amplification of that reading, and thus a claiming of Rebecca’s key place in lesbian film history and scholarship.94 I, in turn, am inspired by Grant’s audiovisual rendering of Rebecca’s rites of passage to read the heroine’s activation of space as a site of lesbian game play in one of the most memorable scenes – passages – of Rebecca, I’s visit to the West Wing. 4. The West Wing In the Bluebeard myth, the curious bride finds a dead wives’ club behind the locked door. In contrast, Rebecca’s seemingly sinister turn yields a space of sensuous beauty. Twirling in hesitation on the landing of the main staircase, I finally gathers the nerve to turn left – towards the unused West Wing and what Danvers has described as ‘the most beautiful room in the house’. There she finds the room of her predecessor, prepared by Danvers as if for a lovers’ tryst. The only trace of Maxim is a photograph placed deliberately on the dressing table. The scene is set up by an initial transgression of the mansion’s spatial order, when I spies Danvers fastening a West Wing shutter and tiptoes around to find George Sanders’s Jack Favell conferring with Danny through an open ground-floor window. In his silky, insinuating manner, he outs the bride for listening from behind a door. The ‘perfect symmetry’ of heteropatriarchy has its queer nooks and crannies. Sanders’s plummy intonation makes Favell’s disclosure that he is ‘Rebecca’s favourite cousin’ sound like the height of aristocratic perversion. He calls Mrs de Winter Cinderella, an invitation to camp. I’s determined approach to the closed door of Rebecca’s room is thrilling, compulsive. The frontal medium long shot shows the closed door to her own quarters in the less glamorous East Wing behind

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her: it is as if she’s sneaking across to an upper-form girl’s room. The shot, lit with gossamer-grey window effects, captures her in the most delicate of webs, her hand clenched around her wedding ring. In the subjective shot that follows, I’s arm reaching for the doorknob casts a shadow that signifies her transgression. Pandora is about to open the box. In later films, Hitchcock will return again and again to such moving point-of-view sequences to signify a seeker’s dread and desire. In Notorious, Spellbound, Psycho (1960) and The Birds (1963), the seekers are also women. The door opens to a dimly lit extreme long shot of a room with almost impossibly high ceilings, divided into an ante-chamber and inner sanctum by floor-length, translucent drapery as Waxman’s score, well, waxes. A harp glissando introduces what we have come to recognize as Rebecca’s theme, as our gaze follows I’s movements about the room, displayed for a voyeuristic and a consumerist gaze. Rouben Mamoulian used a metronome to pace Garbo’s inventory of the room in the country inn where she has just spent the night with her lover in Queen Christina (1933). Here the score works similarly, as I is drawn inexorably to examine each feature of the room and its contents: to part the sheer curtains to the inner sanctum, handle the fresh flowers, open the window, and reach towards the items on the dressing table. I could be the upstairs maid trespassing, or a set dresser. I shrinks when she catches sight of the framed photo of Maxim (the prop is both an intrusive male presence and a mocking one that doesn’t quite succeed in framing the de Winters’s relationship as ‘normal’). Suddenly, a shutter bangs, I startles, and Danvers appears in silhouette through the drapery. She draws the curtains to let in the light: ‘You have always wanted to see this room, haven’t you Madam? Why did you never ask me to show it to you? I was ready to show it to you every day,’ she says, all but admitting that she maintains the room as much for I as for Rebecca. Deathly still, a dark form with a masklike face, Danvers wills I to follow her hypnotically around the suite, almost as if blocking the scene. An oft-repeated

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production story has Hitchcock doing just that, apparently acting out Danvers’s role very convincingly. It is a peculiar shrine, to say the least. ‘I keep her underwear over here,’ Danvers continues, saying nothing of why she does so. ‘They were made especially for her by the nuns in the convent of St Clare.’ Reflecting on this scene in the novel, Olivia Laing writes in The Guardian that Mrs Danvers ‘was embodying closeted lesbian realness even before Judith Anderson catapulted her into the high camp stratosphere in the Hitchcock film’.95 The Production Code Administration did not miss the lesbian implications of Danvers’s affection for her mistress in the submitted script. After repeated warnings about the ‘quite inescapable inferences of sex perversion’, PCA head Joseph I. Breen wrote specifically about goings-on in the West Wing: ‘If any possible hint of [a perverted relationship between Mrs Danvers and Rebecca] creeps into this scene, we will of course not be able to approve the picture.’

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Somehow, the scene remained: perhaps because Selznick played ball with the censors around the representation of Maxim’s culpability; perhaps because the lingering display of luxury goods offered opportunities for commodity tie-ups. Or perhaps because there was not enough ‘there’ there to censor. Although Rebecca doesn’t appear, the on-screen image of two women’s bodies in tense proximity in a grandly appointed boudoir signifies certain possibilities. Probabilities, even. As D. A. Miller shows in his virtuosic reading of Hitchcock’s Rope (1956), the censorship of queer desire in Production Code-era Hollywood produces a contagion of connotation.96 Standing before Rebecca’s well-appointed closet – to Danvers’s ‘you do want to see it, don’t you?’, I responds with a transfixed, timid nod – Danvers draws out one of Rebecca’s furs and touches the sleeve to her own cheek, then extends it to I’s in a tactile relay of queer desire. Offering I a seat at Rebecca’s dressing table, Danvers recounts the dead woman’s bedtime ritual as she mimes brushing the young

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woman’s hair. Rebecca’s aura seems to form a forcefield around I, whose demeanour is that of a meek initiate. A connotative crescendo is reached when Mrs Danvers picks up the silk case on the pillow of the canopied bed and draws out Rebecca’s sheer black nightdress. ‘Did you ever see anything so delicate?’ Danvers asks. ‘You can see my hand through it.’ She embroidered the case herself, she boasts. The sight of the cursive capital R is too much for I. The PCA called out ‘Mrs Danvers’ description of Rebecca’s physical attributes, her handling of the various garments, particularly the night gown’. The gloves dropped when Danvers and I first meet, the solemn transfer of the fur sleeve’s touch, the delicate nightgown hidden in the folds of the silk case constitute a web of tactile feminine erotic signifiers binding the heroine and the viewer through Danvers to Rebecca’s glamour. By now the quivering I has crept back to the door. Crossing to her, Danvers conjures Rebecca’s ghost: ‘Do you think the dead come back and watch the living? Sometimes I wonder if she doesn’t come back here to Manderley and watch you and

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Mr de Winter together,’ drawing close enough to kiss the younger woman. I slips out in tears, leaving Danvers to commune with the dead, her head turned towards the sound of the sea, her gaze directed through the diaphanous curtains at nothing visible. ‘I’d prefer to forget everything that happened this afternoon,’ I tells Danvers in the next scene, disavowing her own participation in the ritual. The demand to forget prods us to remember. But what, exactly, did happen? This seduction scene produces no evidence, no issue – evoking lesbianism as, in Terry Castle’s words, ‘something ghostly: an impalpability, a misting over, an evaporation’.97 The scene lacks definitive action, but is nevertheless riveting. Rebecca – novel, film, play, radio drama – is built around what Castle calls the ‘apparitional’ and Annamarie Jagose the ‘inconsequential’98 semiotics of lesbian representation in the western tradition. Rebecca is classical Hollywood cinema’s Ur-scene of lesbian haunting. The difficulty of pinning down Rebecca’s secret illustrates Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s

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argument in The Epistemology of the Closet. The western regime of knowledge and privacy around sexuality is unstable, even when the closet, like this one, is teeming with furs. A lesbian reading of Rebecca isn’t exhausted by the transgressive nature of Danvers’s obsession with Rebecca, evidence from du Maurier’s biography, I’s sexual malleability, or the acting out of trans-generational female initiations that subvert patriarchal inheritance, though it includes all these. This scene ties lesbian representability to questions of narration and spectatorship, to Danny’s supposition that Rebecca comes back to watch. ‘Everything that happened’ that afternoon leads I in the next scene to order that all of Rebecca’s extravagantly monogrammed stationery, menus and ledgers be cleared from her writing desk. ‘But those are Mrs de Winter’s things,’ Danny objects. ‘I am Mrs de Winter now!,’ I replies. The audience all but cheers at the music cue of I triumphant, and of course reactions to her rebuke of Danvers are not free of misogyny and homophobia. However, the identity I claims here is that of a dead woman, further diminished by the metonymy of matrimony. Moreover, it is not unique – anyone could be the next Mrs de Winter. Perhaps we’re back to Bluebeard after all. 5. The portrait, the window Modleski’s reading of Rebecca as female oedipal drama outlines the competing forces of Maxim and Rebecca for the orphaned heroine’s allegiance. Cinema enlists sound and image, space and the sensory in enacting this drama, and the combined aesthetic and industrial resources of Hitchcock and Selznick have made Rebecca a canonical version of the tale. As Modleski points out: Significantly, … it is after this declaration that she follows Mrs Danvers’ advice about what to wear for the costume ball … Thus, just when she believes she has succeeded in pleasing the man, in making her desire the mirror of his, it is revealed that she has not succeeded at all, but is still attached to the ‘mother,’ still acting out the desire for the mother’s approbation.99

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It is the power of the initial mother/child bond that makes the female oedipal complex so, well, complex. The mother appears in the insistence on ‘Mrs’ – Mrs Van Hopper, Mrs Danvers – the figures who are so hard on I, and in Max’s sister Beatrice, who suggests the young woman do something with her hair. Even Maxim, who cherishes I’s ‘funny lost look’, and tells her to stop biting her nails, is motherly at times. According to the romance novel formula, all the male’s imperiousness is just a cover for a singular, enveloping devotion unknown outside the maternal embrace. The nondescript heroine, nearly as invisible as the dear reader/viewer herself, is fantasmatically overvalued. So when Mrs Danvers suggests that I copy the eighteenthcentury costume depicted in the portrait of Lady Caroline de Winter that hangs in the gallery, we brace ourselves for some measure of misrecognition. Although characters come and go for half an hour of running time without passing this painting, it assumes great psychic

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significance at this point in the plot. ‘The specularization or mise en abyme of the woman image, which characterizes the representation of the female’s Oedipal drama, is often correlated to the thematic centrality of the portrait,’ Teresa de Lauretis observes, with reference to Modleski’s account of Rebecca.100 The man aspires to measure up to a linguistic signifier, the name and the ‘no’ of the symbolic father: George Fortescue Maximilian de Winter; the woman emulates a visual icon that holds the place of the mother. But when she dresses up in frills and flounces like Lady Caroline, I fails at the masquerade; she doesn’t measure up to the Woman as image. The staircase, normally a site of female display, renders her invisible. In what seems an interminable descent, I simpers and smiles, but she is unsuccessful in attracting anyone’s gaze but ours (Hitchcock must have found this scene ‘fun’). She finally calls out to ‘Mr de Winter’, and Maxim, Frank, Beatrice and her husband turn to face her. Maxim reacts with horror. Beatrice

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blurts: ‘Rebecca’, and the music plays the dead woman’s theme. Unbeknownst to I, she is an uncanny vision; Rebecca had worn the same costume to a previous ball. Appropriating the image in the ancestral portrait, the women interrupt patriarchal succession. A proper oedipal resolution has been hijacked by Danvers, the sadistic maternal figure. The botched entry to the costume ball leads I to a second encounter with Danvers in Rebecca’s room. The space is even more fantastical in this scene than in I’s earlier visit to the shrine. Sobbing, I throws herself down on the bed, struggling to her feet when she sees the negligee case with its embroidered R beneath her. Danvers opens a window, strangely adjacent to the bed, onto the foggy night. Framed in a tight two-shot that circulates as one of the promotional stills and lobby card images from Rebecca, the two women look out at the viewer through the casement. Having failed to fit the portrait’s frame, I takes her place at the window, and Danvers encourages her to jump.

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The screen as window is a primary metaphor of cinemagoing; here the window is a screen, the threshold of the fiction. In one production still, Danvers’s hypnotic staredown bodes evil for her mistress. In another version, the two look as if they have been caught in a compromising situation. Diegetically, they have been startled by a noise outside. The mist and the exterior view recall the opening sequence, when due to the moonlight’s tricks, I hovered outside a window, sensing life inside. Was it this one? The dreamlike quality of the sequence is enhanced by I’s period attire; a costume that Rebecca wore in her own performance of the role of Mrs de Winter.101 Danvers’s black garb is timeless. Recalling Gloria Holden in Universal’s Dracula’s Daughter (1936), Danvers tries to seduce I into immortality. Again, Danvers seems to will I to exchange her body for Rebecca’s, which comes back at precisely this moment, yielded up by the sea to indict Maxim. The reverse shot, the point of view outside the window, is hazy, dust dancing in the projector beam. An overhead shot of the ground below foreshadows Danvers’s point-of-view shot from directly below the blazing beams as they crash down on her: subjective shots in which women weigh the cost of death. Suddenly, the women are startled by fireworks announcing a shipwreck. It’s time for I to grow up. 6. Secrets Instead of a masquerade ball, I ends up hosting a rescue party, with Rebecca the sole and uninvited guest. The dispersal of the company, the utter absence of smart, modern women I’s own age (think of Joan Harrison, just outside the frame every day of the long shoot), highlights her childishness and keeps the narrative focused on the isolated couple as they experience intrusions from the past. Comfortable again in her tweed skirt and sweater set, I searches for Maxim on the foggy film set. She finds him resigned, dusty and dormant like the objects that surround him, in the boathouse Rebecca used for – what? We are about to find out. Stung from his angry outburst and alarmed by his withdrawal, I is quick to fall back on her

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former employment: ‘I don’t ask that you should love me. I’ll be your friend, your companion.’ (The book adds: ‘a sort of boy!’) ‘Too late,’ Maxim replies defeatedly. Speaking at cross-purposes, I confides her post-marital doubts: ‘Whenever you touched me, I knew you were comparing me with R.’ His astonished reply, the psychological ‘crash bang’: ‘You thought I loved Rebecca? I hated her!’ I is not wrong that it was Rebecca who came between them, but it was the fact that he had covered up her accidental death (let’s give the scenarists and the PCA the benefit of the doubt and follow the letter of the script) that had prevented him from committing himself fully to his second wife. Does this revelation, and her collaborationist response, make the couple more viable? The marital dynamic is irrevocably changed: ‘It’s gone now, that funny little lost look I loved: I killed it when I told you about Rebecca.’ Notably, the classic gothic heroine’s suspicion that her distant, brooding, distracted husband is responsible for the death of his first wife is not dispelled. But the revelation of his culpability

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is deemed minor compared to the revelation of Rebecca’s. For Alison Light, the scene’s ‘whitewashing is of a piece with the inability of the film to deal with female hostility towards men and marriage, the bedrock of du Maurier’s novel, and the flipside too of her delight in Rebecca’. Ultimately, the film privileges a ‘masculine point of view’, she concludes. ‘However loyal its makers thought they were being, the film is crucially unfaithful.’102 The film moves Maxim’s confession of the nature of his relationship to Rebecca from Manderley’s main house to his first wife’s hangout, where Rebecca did vaguely sinister things like entertain her London friends. Putting the scene of the (is-it-a)-crime here, the director opts for heterotopia rather than flashback – using another space rather than another time for setting the scene apart. The boathouse offers the inverse of the museum-quality preservation

Rebecca’s boathouse set (David O. Selznick Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. Courtesy of Daniel Mayer Selznick)

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of Rebecca’s suite: this space carries her memory, her absence, in its dust and cobwebs. Oddly, it doesn’t strike one as the mise en scène the tasteful Rebecca would choose for her trysts. Rough and furnished in odds and ends, it prefigures du Maurier’s writing hut in the grounds of Menabilly. Famously, as Maxim begins to explain, the camera retraces the events of the evening of her death, moving about the space in an echo of the way Danvers and I moved about Rebecca’s room. Rebecca ‘haunts’ the film’s narration: as Maxim describes her defiance of him, her mockery, her smoking, her fall, the camera tracks and swings from an ashtray to the doorway to the piece of tackle on which she cracks her head. The confrontation scene is ripe for stunt casting, but by eschewing the flashback, the film keeps the mystery of Rebecca alive. Revenance is power. Drawing on Pascal Bonitzer’s characterization of off-screen space through reference to the shark in Jaws, Modleski writes: Similarly, Rebecca herself lurks in the blind space of the film, with the result that, like the shark and unlike the second Mrs de Winter, she never becomes ‘domesticated’. Rebecca is the Ariadne in this film’s labyrinth, but since she does not relinquish the thread to any Theseus, her space, Manderley, remains unconquered by man.103

The scene begins with Maxim declaring that Rebecca has won, and the liveliness of the camera can be attributed to her energy. I listens intently to Maxim’s narration and jumps at the indication that the death was accidental. It is I who says with conviction of Rebecca: ‘She can’t speak, she can’t bear witness, she can’t harm you anymore.’ If I doesn’t have a moment of identification with Rebecca, the camerawork ensures that we do. For all that the confession scene is the payoff, Maxim’s narration of his reasons for hating/murdering Rebecca are curiously uncompelling. She slept around? She faked their happy marriage? We don’t have the whole picture: she told him ‘things he would never

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tell a soul’, even I. ‘She was not even normal!’ ‘Sex perversion’ is the PCA’s quite reasonable inference. But it isn’t a queer identity that is revealed; Rebecca is a queer threat because she can win the game of heteropatriarchy. Maxim’s revelation that he didn’t love Rebecca makes him available to I, but it also makes Rebecca available in a new way. Rather than being downgraded, she is worth even more, she was able to perform perfect femininity, a task the heroine has so far fallen far short of mastering. 7. Closure? The couple share their most adult kiss shortly after the revelation, before breaking off abruptly to stare into the fireplace. The exciting element of jealousy that triangulated their relationship is gone. With the secret out – ‘he didn’t love Rebecca!’ – the remainder of the film shifts to the here and now, devaluing the dead woman through patriarchal assurances of law, medicine and social rank. Yet the spell isn’t entirely broken. The English reality that Hitchcock captured in his British films is substituted with Hollywood artifice. The distance from quotidian country life, in which a man with the stature of Olivier’s character would be shielded from ‘nasty business’ like culpability in his wife’s death, also conceals the off-screen reality of England at war. Masculine forces are mustered to reinstate class, gender and sexual norms. Colonel Julyan and Frank Crawley come to Maxim’s defence, and Favell shows up to blackmail them and liven up the exposition. A backlit shot in the morgue shows five men gathered grimly around an off-screen (ob-scene) image of the long-drowned, female body Maxim misidentified as Rebecca. At the inquest, I faints just as Maxim shouts: ‘you might as well know the truth!’ In subsequent scenes with Favell, I is present but marginal. Maxim keeps her away from the sequence with Dr Baker (the ubiquitous Leo Carroll), who reveals Rebecca’s ultimate secret. Not that she was pregnant: she ‘was very seriously ill’. There’s pathos if also misogyny in the revelation: ‘The growth was deep-rooted. There was nothing that could be done for her.’ Max remembers how Rebecca ‘smiled in a queer sort of way’

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when she taunted him. If he was led earlier to say Rebecca won by implicating him in her death, he now recognizes her double victory in getting the quicker death she wanted. Favell, visibly shaken by the news of Rebecca’s illness, makes a call to an off-screen Danvers to tell her that the death will be ruled suicide, ending with a hammer blow of plotting: ‘Now Maxim and his new bride can live happily ever after at Manderley.’ It is here that Hitchcock makes his cameo. As the viewer knows from the film’s opening sequence, this fairy tale ends differently, with Manderley in ruins (and very little indication of the happily, since the living-ever-after is haunted by dreams that return to ‘those strange days’). Rebecca’s final sequence intercuts between Maxim and Crawley, returning from London and assurance of exoneration, and Danvers and I at Manderley. The two men pull up to a vista, noticing an untimely light in the sky – ‘That’s Manderley!’ A special-effects sequence that rhymes with the film’s beginning, the fire cheats on realism with the use of miniatures and optical effects

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Production still of Alfred Hitchcock’s cameo, with George Sanders as Jack Favell

while capturing the actual destruction of an artifact of Golden Age Hollywood. Selznick ignited the blaze on the Rebecca’s Bedroom set himself.104 The flicker of moonlight and flames (interpolating effects from the burning of Atlanta in GWTW) comes alive in the glamorous space of black-and-white cinematography, there and not there, real and illusory, past and present. Flames do not only destroy, they animate. In the book it is our watcher, our I, not Crawley, who stands with Maxim as Manderley burns on the horizon. The film stages a rescue instead. The camera tracks left to follow a light moving from window to window. Cut to the interior: Danny holds a candle aloft to illuminate the sleeping I. Jasper lifts his head, watchful. The camera pulls back as Danvers’s impassive face is illuminated by the candlelight; her eyes leave two spots like embers as the screen fades to black. While the cross-cutting sets up Danvers as a threat, Jasper doesn’t even bother to bark. We travel the winding drive a third time, and the car finally pulls up among the crowds outside Manderley in a left to right motion that pushes back against Danvers’s sinister approach from the other direction with her candle. A cut to a medium shot shows Jasper straining at his leash also heading right – to our great relief, he pulls I into the shot. The film does not end with a clinch, however: instead the couple turns to look at Manderley,

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staring into the fire once again in a haunted embrace. ‘Look, the West Wing!’ an onlooker shouts, directing our attention away from heterosexual closure to where the fire still burns. After previewing the film, Selznick demanded retakes that shifted the focus to Danvers. Five shots devoted to the destruction of Danvers and Manderley conclude the film. We look in from the exterior – at the very window from which she urged I to jump – at Danvers (a stand-in for Anderson) moving amid columns of flame from left to right, reversing her previous course. A medium long shot of Maxim and I shows the couple’s interrupted embrace, turned towards the view as its spectators. Cut to the interior of Rebecca’s bedroom and a slight track-in to Anderson as Danvers behind a curtain of flames, hands folded, still. Then a shocking point-of-view shot from below shows flaming beams crashing down. Homophobic overkill yields to the film’s memorable last shot, in which a moving camera suggests that something still stirs in Manderley. Starting from where Danvers fell, the camera floats towards the right, then makes a left turn, moving

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behind the flames to centre the letter R on Rebecca’s nightgown case. The film ends with flames licking at the silk. The End: A Selznick International Picture. Ending with Danvers in Rebecca’s bedchamber elevates lesbian passion, at the same time associating it with madness and hellfire as ruinous spectacle. For Robin Wood, Danvers’s punishment is demonstrative of Hitchcock’s homophobia (and the director’s fascination with queer villains). Yet this transfer of point of view to Danvers – and beyond – also honours the bewitching power of cinema. R is for revenge. Maxim killed Rebecca, Manderley must burn, in defiance of patriarchy. The camera’s arabesque echoes Rebecca’s handwriting and returns us to the tracking shot that first led the disembodied heroine, and us with her, to the site, to the story, at the film’s beginning. R is for revenant. Rebecca found the audiovisual language for a peculiarly personal, free-floating female narration that would cast its influence over the gendered stories Hollywood had yet to tell. For the culmination of the film, Selznick was most particular – like the first Mrs de Winter and her sauces – about securing a ‘photographic effect … of the flames rising as they devour the “R,” to give us a natural curtain of flames as a background for our end title’.105 Rather than answering the enigmas of the film’s opening with its ending, as would Citizen Kane the next year, Rebecca keeps its secrets. Kane blatantly copies Rebecca’s framing. Welles’s film opens at night outside a gated property, the camera passes beyond an iron gate in order to approach a gothic building with a single lit window. It ends with a searching camera finding a burning object inscribed with an R – for Rosebud. In Citizen Kane the investigation is objective, and it turns back on the familiar story of the male subject’s love for and loss of his mother. In the opening scene, Kane utters the word rosebud on his deathbed; the final, deliberate camera movement solves the mystery of this utterance, sweeping over his vast collections to find his childhood sled Rosebud as it is loaded into the incinerator.

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Only the spectator is able to connect the word to the object and thus to a memory of maternal plentitude: Charlie playing with his sled in the snow before he was sent away from home with his fortune. All his ambitions and possessions were attempts to fill the lack, the film implies.106 In contrast, the viewer’s access to the burning embroidered case in Rebecca, an equally privileged object, is not offered in the spirit of closure. It tells us what we already know, adding fuel to the conflagration of transgressive female sexuality, rage and obsession associated with Rebecca’s bed and the work of Danvers’s own hands.107 Rebecca is a female rather than a male oedipal tale, and its enigma is not as easily solved. Oedipus simply answered the Sphinx: ‘man’. Even if we grant Citizen Kane, a modernist masterpiece, more complexity than what Laura Mulvey calls ‘dollar book Freud’, the film owes a debt to Rebecca’s open secrets. Rebecca’s voiceover does not return, and we never hear Rebecca’s voice. The narrative remains in an unresolved past. The couple is free of Rebecca, Manderley and Mrs Danvers. But what do they have to fill the lack? Rebecca’s success ironically shut down Selznick International Pictures – as Schatz reports, the film’s profits, on top of the unprecedented earnings of GWTW, created an overwhelming tax burden for the company, which was not a vertically integrated studio in a position to reinvest the windfall.108 Selznick reorganized as David O. Selznick Productions. Soon, US involvement in World War II separated men and women and brought blacks and whites into the armed forces and onto the shop floor. In Hollywood, Rebecca’s successors, women’s pictures and film noirs, filtered the resulting historical insecurities, with Mrs Miniver (1942) offering a more heroic view of English family life and Gaslight (1944) intensifying its ‘I married a stranger’ anxiety. After working on several more Hitchcock films, Harrison decided to go off on her own to produce films like Phantom Lady at Universal. Hitchcock could be seen as revisiting, or exorcizing, Rebecca’s story of a woman’s influence from beyond the grave in two of his greatest postwar films, Vertigo and Psycho. As the concluding chapter discusses, Rebecca’s influence goes well beyond its textual boundaries.

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3 ‘Long Tenacious Fingers’: Rebecca’s Grip For if death by drowning did not extinguish the woman’s desire, can we be certain that death by fire has reduced it utterly to ashes? Tania Modleski109

One of the pleasures of writing about Rebecca is its thematization of the affective pull of the ‘classic’, which this series both memorializes and troubles. The absent Rebecca stands for classic qualities of ‘breeding, brains and beauty’ – and for their unleashing, for desire inextinguishable. As I’ve emphasized throughout this book, Rebecca, while indeed a triumph of cinematic artistry, is also a commercial women’s text that relies for its success on intertextual genre elements and viewers’ emotional investment. Classics are made by their audiences as much as by their producers. Hitchcock’s Rebecca, David O. Selznick’s Rebecca: the film cannot be separated from the popularity of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca; the historical reception horizon includes both texts. As we’ve seen, du Maurier’s prodigious imagination is a potent challenge to auteurists who would see the film as primarily a Hitchcock text or as the site of a power struggle between interfering producer and controlling director. This chapter looks at the importance of the phenomenon that the novel was and remains to the film’s positioning as a faithful adaptation, an amplification through cinematic means. The creative efforts of Rebecca’s marketing team addressed an audience of avid female consumers; in addition to pitching the book, the campaign appealed to the story’s sensuous and fantasmatic qualities through luxury commodity tie-ins. For ultimately it is the public, not the author, that is responsible for the phenomenon we can call ‘Rebecca’, which includes the original novel (itself the subject of a high-profile, unsuccessful

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plagiarism case), the successful film, and the numerous adaptations, promotions, tributes, sequels and rewrites that are still being produced.110 Screen remakes include a major 2020 Netflix release by British director Ben Wheatley, a classy BBC miniseries from 1979 (my first copy of the novel had its stars on the cover), and an equally sumptuous 1997 Masterpiece Theatre production. Among other pleasures, these adaptations give great actresses – Kristin Scott Thomas, Anna Massey and Diana Rigg, respectively – the chance to interpret the iconic role of Mrs Danvers. Anamika: The Untold Story (Anant Mahadevan, 2008) is only the most recent of several Hindi versions that are sensitive to the story’s paranormal dimensions. Rebecca’s intermedial afterlives highlight different elements: verbal and visual, British and not, heterosexual romance and queer gothic, auteurist and melodramatic. Audiences and artists return to the scenario because these warring influences are no more successfully

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integrated culturally than they are in the film itself. Like the gothic mansion, Rebecca leaves much to explore. Reading Rebecca When du Maurier’s novel was first published in 1938, its ‘psychological elements’ found fertile ground. In the interwar years, in the wake of worldwide economic hardship, gender roles and class hierarchies were under pressure. The rise of fascism in Europe, the popularization of psychoanalysis, and the ascendance of consumer culture informed the book’s whorl of power, insecurity and desire. It was also a time of women’s influence as book-buyers and tastemakers. In 1936 Margaret Mitchell published her white-supremacist epic of the Old South, her first and only book. With the extraordinary popularity of GWTW, Claudia Roth Pierpont writes: ‘The fear of a downwardly spiraling culture associated with a new mass audience had taken on, in literature, the specific taint of the superficial sex.’111 GWTW made an effort to outfit its female address in the trappings of a national epic – telling a whitewashed tale rather than the grim truth of the Old South. Although considerably toned down for the screen, the book’s racism would forever implicate white female consumers of romance. Also in 1936, du Maurier achieved her biggest success to date with her fourth novel, Jamaica Inn, a tale of Cornish smugglers inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson. The book’s popularity, as well as the novel’s grim view of male abuse of power and female entrapment, carried over to du Maurier’s next novel. But Rebecca’s contemporary setting also made transatlantic appeal to the US’s cultured English heritage, a wishful if uneasy narrative of national whiteness in juxtaposition with the fraught racial politics of GWTW. Du Maurier’s UK publisher Victor Gollancz was a skilful promoter, and Rebecca went into a third printing before the novel went on sale in August 1938. In the US, Doubleday Doran sold more than 200,000 copies by the end of the year, and the appeal has endured.112 Rebecca has never gone out of print; at the

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eightieth anniversary of the novel’s publication, it was still selling approximately 4,000 copies a month.113 Successful both as category fiction and middlebrow literature, Rebecca was declared the best novel of the twentieth century at the Bucheron World Mystery Convention, and in 2017 topped a readers’ poll by the venerable English bookseller W. H. Smith for best novel of the past 225 years.114 In the annals of women’s fiction, ‘Rebecca’ is a name for popularity itself. Given the novel’s revelation of the eponymous character’s rotten nature, one wonders whether it is the beauty or the bitch who keeps it fresh. The formula’s dark irreconcilables seem to be at the heart of its longevity. The reprint success of du Maurier’s novel is widely credited for spawning the lucrative postwar market for paperback gothic romance. In both the UK and the US, such writers as Phyllis Whitney and Victoria Holt found great success with ‘emotional stories about a woman in peril’.115 In Reading the Romance, Janice Radway notes that ‘At the peak of their popularity, from about 1969 to 1972, gothics were issued at the rate of thirty-five titles a month, over four hundred per year.’116 Acknowledging Rebecca’s influence, the English romance imprint Mills and Boon publishes a ‘Cornwall Collection’, and a du Maurier prize is offered in the field. As we have seen, Rebecca’s core elements – the manor house, a haunting female ancestor, suspicion of the husband’s character and motives – reach back to the Brontës’ reclaiming of female passion in the novel. In all of these iterations, marriage threatens female autonomy, and the home is a refraction of psychological unrest. Doubling and ambivalence, inappropriate object choice and gender confusion, authority crises and mistaken identities are all part of the terrain. But a particular novel’s take on class hierarchy, patriarchal legitimacy, heterosexual viability and female autonomy is informed by its author’s investments and changing historical context. In the film adaptation of Rebecca, Selznick pushed Hitchcock towards more fairy-tale opulence than the director had a taste for, romanticizing an aristocratic past while embracing the heroine’s ‘ordinary’

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background. But while Rebecca critiques male dominance and the moribund aristocracy, it can’t imagine a different future. In ‘Brand-Name Literature: Adaptation and Selznick International Picture’s Rebecca’, Edwards emphasizes the importance of literary adaptation to the Selznick studio brand and outlines the ‘corporate reading strategy’ driving decisions about Rebecca’s acquisition, production and marketing.117 Implicit in this argument is the power of female fans to shape mid-century Hollywood’s production and thus its global influence. As Maria LaPlace stresses in her study of Olive Higgins Prouty, Bette Davis and Now, Voyager, ‘women’s fiction not only provided a rich source of raw materials for films, but in addition an important, longstanding, and well-established context of reception’.118 Carefully tracking SIP’s construction of its ‘prestige’ brand through the exploitation of literary connections, Edwards documents but does not interpret the significance of Rebecca’s female-skewing audience for the connotations of ‘prestige’. Prestige as cultural capital is at midcentury associated with middle-class women’s taste – hence the blurring of bestsellers and literary masterpieces in Hollywood’s marketing. But properties appealing to women, like the cinema itself, also carried the ‘taint of the superficial sex’. Selznick exploited Rebecca’s name recognition by multiple tie-ins to the novel that spanned market sectors. Rebecca was serialized in daily newspapers as well as in Ladies’ Home Journal, taking care not to ‘make Rebecca look unimportant or trivial’.119 The novel topped the bestseller list at a reduced price of $1.39. While Doubleday Doran refused the proposal of a novelization of the film, it prepared a 69-cent mass-market edition. Its Garden City imprint issued a ‘motion picture edition’ with ‘a two-color wrapper band featuring the stars to fit outside the highly advertised original jacket’. Exhibitors were also supplied with a ‘mimeographed folder’ aimed at placing stories about the tie-ups in newspapers, including a feature called ‘How Well Do You Read a Book?’120 Posters and advertising campaigns almost always featured an image of the book, and the

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trailer included turning pages and highlighted original dialogue on script pages. Exhibitors were encouraged to organize events and collaborations with local booksellers, such as handing out ‘imprinted bookmarks’, setting up lending libraries in the lobby, hosting essay contests and reaching out to colleges. The connection to the book did not always entail respect for literary value, however. The Motion Picture Herald reports an exhibitor ploy to attract viewers by purchasing multiple copies of the book and ripping out pages to print bills advertising the film adaptation. With a campaign targeted at the book’s readers and fans of Selznick and GWTW, Rebecca hooked its fan base immediately upon release, and it too was female. Perusing comment cards, Edwards finds that nearly three-quarters of respondents to a survey of patrons Exhibitors’ campaign book, United Artists rerelease (courtesy Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research)

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at a San Francisco theatre during opening week were women, and around 60 per cent of those polled said that either reading or hearing about du Maurier’s novel had drawn them there.121 Du Maurier’s novel was both commodity and mise en scène of desire translated to the screen, exemplifying the intimate relationship between consumerism and female film spectatorship analysed so brilliantly by Charles Eckert in ‘The Carole Lombard in Macy’s Window’.122 The gothic engages dangerous desires, however, and Rebecca’s consumer fantasy highlights what Diana Fuss calls the ‘homospectatorial look’, directing the gaze past the heroine to the pervasive allure of the unattainable Rebecca.123 The marketing department managed some fascinating fashion collaborations despite the isolation of the film’s primary setting (the costume ball is aborted, and even in Monte Carlo Maxim and I spend their time driving around instead of at the casino) and a heroine who ‘doesn’t give a hoot what [she] wear[s]’. Kay Brown gave her personal attention to developing the Rebecca Luxury Wardrobe. Lyn Farnol’s marketing memo explains: ‘a fashion promotion in the higher price range seldom reached by film tie-ups, has been built about the theme that the unseen character, Rebecca, was the most glamorous spirit of all time’. The Rebecca Luxury Wardrobe created by Kiviette Gowns features evening wear in the colours ‘Rebecca Mauve’, ‘Manderley Brown’ and ‘Green Grape’ to be sold by Bonwit Teller and other department stores (Rebecca Mauve was also the name of Helena Rubinstein’s exclusive make-up line). The wardrobe included accessories that alluded to fetish objects in the film – lingerie by Michel-Marcus and handkerchiefs by Frances Gack – and ‘a raincoat, snoodcap and umbrella combination by Harris Raincoat Co.’ to give everyday drizzle the excitement of the Cornwall coast. Keyed to the film’s originally planned Christmastime premiere, the unveiling of the Rebecca Luxury Wardrobe was covered in Vogue’s January 1940 edition. In the two-page spread, models wearing strapped gowns with shirred waists, décolleté and separate skirt pieces are superimposed over gothic architectural features.

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Vogue feature promoting the Rebecca Luxury Wardrobe, January 1940

It is hard to tell from the artwork whether it is the images or the clothes themselves that are translucent. Though the models’ poses bear a resemblance to the ghostly figure of the Rebecca poster and advertising campaigns, Rebecca ‘the most glamorous spirit’ herself remains unrepresentable. (This is also true of the promotional lookalike contests and pageants of local Rebeccas.) Rarely has the solicitation of women’s desire for clothes evoked so teasingly the body that has shed them. Edwards points out the paradox of engaging consumer desire through the ultimately villainized Rebecca: ‘SIP’s description of Rebecca as “that little lady” in its ad campaign attributes a benign aspect to a domineering, villainous character, described in the novel as abnormal and by literary critics as a demonic “site of disease”.’124 But as feminist critics have remarked of many women’s pictures, the last five minutes of ideological course correction can’t erase the depiction of female power that came before, and commodity tie-ins by definition do not respect narrative closure. Ultimately, Edwards

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writes, ‘With Rebecca wardrobe and make-up lines, SIP used … her vague but palpable presence – to project thousands of would-be Rebeccas into commercial culture.’125 The ploy depends on recognizing I herself as a ‘would-be Rebecca’. In effect, the campaign echoes what happens on a narrative level, as I is presented with Rebecca’s wardrobe by Mrs Danvers. Women’s Wear Daily, in ‘Invisible Wardrobe of Rebecca’, was disappointed: The wonderful wardrobe of the ill-fated Rebecca is not revealed, not even when Mrs Danvers opens the famous wardrobe to show the costumes to the new mistress of Manderley. All that the housekeeper shows her is a chinchilla wrap, and a black cobweb lace nightgown with pale shoulder drapes, to indicate the luxury of this unseen wardrobe.

One can almost see the editors shaking their heads at a heroine so ‘shy, gauche and unaware of fashionable clothes’.126 Additional marketing approaches include interior decorating (a line of house paint) and a Manderley collaboration with House and Garden. Consumption is linked to women’s films, and luxury goods are required for prestige pictures. The campaign was ultimately more about promoting taste than sales. The cheapest way to recapture the Rebecca experience was simply to see the film again. The distributor, United Artists, rereleased it in 1945 with a massive national advertising campaign. Exhibitors were addressed in the campaign book: ‘One of the most distinguished motion pictures of all times returns … that is the keynote of the vigorous sales campaign’ (emphasis and ellipsis in original). ‘Give this box-office winner your best and enjoy a solid return’; it is not clear whether the pun was intended. With the Selznick–Hitchcock collaboration Spellbound also released in 1945, the director was slightly more prominent in the rerelease publicity. The press book offered a news item entitled ‘Alfred Hitchcock Made “Suspense” His Synonym’ to plant in local papers, along with items on the main and supporting players and behind-the-scenes features.

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Now that the US was in the war, the ‘command performance’ audience the distributor sought was largely female, and the film’s aura of anxiety suited the times. Rebecca gathered momentum from the success of Gaslight and literary properties like Jane Eyre (1944) and the du Maurier adaptation, Frenchman’s Creek (1944), both starring Joan Fontaine. In the Freudian 1940s and into the 50s, women’s pictures functioned almost as a feminine cultural unconscious. In casting that echoes the incestuous strains of the gothic, Fontaine’s sister Olivia de Havilland portrayed Charlotte Brontë in Deception (1947) and later starred in Hollywood’s next important du Maurier adaptation, My Cousin Rachel (1953). The story is a role-reversed gothic, in which a naive male protagonist (with whom du Maurier clearly identified) is tormented by speculations about a woman’s inscrutable actions and motives. Rebecca’s repeated theatrical releases, postwar export and frequent television airings after the sale of United Artists’ library of old films to ABC in 1965 kept it at the centre of a dense web of cultural references for decades. Romancing Rebecca The fact that both book and film have remained accessible has inspired many creative revisions alongside ‘straight’ adaptations. A suite of Rebecca sequels draws out the possibilities latent in the Ur-fantasy. In print, Mrs de Winter by Susan Hill came first (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1993). Later adapted by the BBC, the sequel was wittily panned by Natasha Walter in The Independent: ‘Rebecca’s remaining lovers will feel like Mrs Danvers – dour, uncomprehending, and dismissive of the newcomer’s ineffective attempts to please.’127 In 2001 the estateapproved Rebecca’s Tale by Sally Beauman followed. In the latter, literary fiction published by Little Brown, Ellie Julyan, the Colonel’s daughter, is inspired by Rebecca to strike out on her own. Maxim is easily dispatched in both. The Winters (2018), by Lisa Gabriele, is consciously informed by #MeToo and the Trump presidency, picking up on Rebecca’s compelling realization of the emotional paradoxes of women’s identification with male power. In part feminist rewrites,

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Joan Fontaine and Judith Anderson with Rebecca’s slippers, which, like the character, do not appear in the film (Alamy)

the novels also have a kinship with fan fiction, in which beloved settings and characters provide the basis for further imaginings. Then there is actual fan fiction. While it is difficult to research this pre-internet, the popularity of the novel and the marketing push for book groups at the time of the film’s release suggest that there is some out there. The feminist internet website preserving transformative works, An Archive of One’s Own, lists as of this writing more than fifty stories under the heading du Maurier. They include BDSM fictions, pairings of I and Danvers and I and Rebecca, and a Rope and Rebecca mash-up. One is tagged ‘active imagination’, which characterizes the I of the novel – and hence those who identify with her – perhaps better than any other epithet. While Rebecca’s queer potential was never completely hidden (as Mrs Danvers says of Rebecca’s room: ‘I was ready to show it

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to you every day!’), it can now be explored with more context and creativity. The BBC updated its period drama programming with the 2007 production Daphne, directed by Clare Beavan. Writer Amy Jenkins builds on the details of Forster’s biography of the author, dramatizing Daphne’s (Geraldine Sommerville) relationships with Gertrude Lawrence (Janet McTeer) and Ellen Doubleday (Elizabeth McGovern). With its various du Maurier productions, the BBC claims not only her books but also the author herself for national culture. Making lesbianism part of this story modernizes mid-century women’s fiction and monetizes properties in new ways within a feminist and queer-friendly programming strand. Two highly acclaimed recent films acknowledge the aesthetic and epistemological challenges of representing lesbian desire by conjuring the 1940 Rebecca intertextually. Carol (Todd Haynes, 2016), adapted by Phyllis Nagy from Patricia Highsmith’s classic romance The Price of Salt (1952), filters its heroine’s obsession with an older married woman through a compelling flashback structure.128 More lurid is Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden (2016), which screenwriter Jeong Seo-kyeong adapted from Fingersmith (2002), by English writer Sarah Waters (‘perhaps not since Daphne du Maurier has a popular woman writer so captivated the literary world,’ writes Robert McCrum of Waters). Set in 1930s Korea under Japanese rule, on an isolated estate whose two wings represent geopolitical East and West, the film is a twisty tale of female solidarity and the limits of male control.129 Both films have happy, if open, endings and represent significant collaborations between male auteur directors and female writers and source material. For the purposes of this analysis, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread (2017) offers the most striking interpretation of the male/female balance of power at stake in the Hitchcock film – its production, its plot and its cultural legacy. ‘A lot of directors have tried and failed to make Rebecca. I’m probably next in line,’ Anderson confided at the time of his film’s release.130 Set in the world of London high fashion in the 1950s, Phantom Thread is

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focalized through world-renowned couturier Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis), an imperious Englishman with a Manderley-like country estate. With supreme craft and detail, the film dramatizes how egocentric male genius and meticulous female labour produce one-of-a-kind creations that depend for their ultimate effect on women’s embodied desire. The film dares us to underestimate the ingenue, Alma (Vicky Krieps), as her role evolves from pick-up to muse to overlooked wife to captor of sorts. Reynolds’s sister Cyril (Lesley Manville) is a Danvers figure, formidable, loyal – also underestimated at cost. When Reynolds capitulates to Alma’s power (and Cyril’s decree), the film not only amplifies the central appeal of Maxim’s masochism but also reinterprets Hitchcock’s surrender to the power of du Maurier’s tale. In this reading, Hitchcock himself tried and failed to make Rebecca, and therein lies the 1940s film’s true greatness. Anderson opens his work formally to the affective excess of classical Hollywood through soundtrack, cinematography, performance and mise en scène, and thematically to the male confrontation with female power, unwinding a phantom thread from the dark heart of a classic to our times. Just as Rebecca lives on after death in objects, scents, sounds, and above all the heroine’s imagination, so too does Rebecca live on in remakes, sequels and critical constructions. We can never go back to a film’s primal scene to fix its meaning historically – Rebecca’s premiere at Miami’s Lincoln Theatre is just one of the film’s countless manifestations. Nor can we offer an objective analysis, free of the vagaries of critical opinion and theoretical allegiance. But, sometimes, we do go back, like I, drawn to the seductive artifice of the past, with a distinct sense that something else is going on under the surface. As I’ve argued in my account of the film’s production, enacted in my close analysis, and highlighted in my discussion of tie-ins, intertexts and homages, Rebecca invites a retrospective encounter, a necessarily ambivalent return. We cannot help going back, if we want to envision what’s ahead.

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Notes 1 Émile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971), p. 218. 2 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929), annotated and with an introduction by Susan Gubar (London: Harcourt, 2005), p. 99. 3 François Truffaut with the collaboration of Helen G. Scott, Hitchcock, rev. edn (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), p. 129. 4 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979); Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (New York: Penguin, 1979). 5 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’, Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1 (1985): 243–81. 6 See Alison Light’s influential reading of the novel, ‘“Returning to Manderley”: Romance Fiction, Female Sexuality and Class’, Feminist Review 16 (Summer 1984): 7–25. 7 Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18, 11. 8 Margaret Forster, Daphne du Maurier (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), p. 223. 9 Albert Deane to Joseph I. Breen, 27 March 1940, Production Code Administration file, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library. 10 Foundational to the current analysis is Tania Modleski’s ‘“Never to Be Thirty-Six Years Old”: Rebecca as Female Oedipal Drama’, Wide Angle 5,

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no. 1 (1982): 34–41. Modleski’s essay is revised as ‘Woman and the Labyrinth: Rebecca’ in Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory, 3rd edn (New York and London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 41–53. Modleski expands upon Raymond Durgnat’s assessment: ‘the heroine fulfills the archetypal female Oedipal dream of marrying the father-figure, who has rescued her from the tyranny of the domineering old woman (i.e. mother). But in doing so she has to confront the rival from the past, the woman who possessed her father first, who can reach out and possess him once again.’ Raymond Durgnat, The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock (London: Faber, 1974), p. 168. Also central is Mary Ann Doane, ‘Caught and Rebecca: The Inscription of Femininity as Absence’, in Constance Penley (ed.), Feminism and Film Theory (New York: Routledge/ London: BFI Publishing, 1981), pp. 216–28, incorporated in Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). Teresa de Lauretis expands Modleski’s reading in relation to Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), in Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). 11 Robin Wood, ‘The Murderous Gays: Hitchcock’s Homophobia’, in Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, rev. edn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 336–57; Olivia Laing, ‘Sex, Jealousy and Gender: Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca 80 Years On’, The Guardian (9 April 2008). Available online:

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(accessed 9 April 2018). See also Patricia White, ‘Female Spectator, Lesbian Specter’, in Diana Fuss (ed.), Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 142–72, revised in Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). 12 Christina Lane, Phantom Lady: Hollywood Producer Joan Harrison, the Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2020). 13 Du Maurier’s early notes for the novel indicate the plot twist came to her later: ‘a tragedy is looming very close and crash! bang! something happens … it’s not a ghost story’, quoted in Forster, Daphne du Maurier, pp. 132–3. 14 David O. Selznick to Merritt Hulburd, 30 September 1938, in Rudy Behlmer (ed.), Memo from David O. Selznick (New York: Viking, 1972), p. 254. Selznick makes explicit the Jewish connotations of the biblical name chosen for the eponymous character: ‘I know that it is pretty difficult to think of anybody walking into your office and suggesting that you call a picture Rebecca – unless it was made for the Palestine market – but it is equally difficult to think of asking for a new title and accepting a suggestion of Gone With the Wind.’ He had also tried to get Mitchell to change the name of her novel. The name Rebecca, from the root ‘to tie, to bind’, means ‘captivating beauty’.

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15 Truffaut, Hitchcock, p. 131. 16 Frank S. Nugent, ‘Splendid Film of Du Maurier’s “Rebecca” Is Shown at the Music Hall – “Broadway Melody” at Capitol’, The New York Times (29 March 1940). Available online: (accessed 15 July 2020). 17 Leonard J. Leff, Hitchcock and Selznick: The Rich and Strange Collaboration of Alfred Hitchcock and David O. Selznick in Hollywood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 266. Anyone writing on Rebecca is indebted to Leff’s exemplary scholarship. See his excellent audio commentary on the Criterion edition of Rebecca. 18 Truffaut, Hitchcock, p. 127. 19 Lois Spratley, ‘Bi-ography: The Life of a Sexually Ambivalent Writer’, Daily Press, 9 January 1994. 20 Forster, Daphne du Maurier, p. 28. See Jane Dunn’s composite biography, Daphne du Maurier and Her Sisters: The Hidden Lives of Piffy, Bird and Bing (New York: HarperCollins, 2013). 21 Forster, Daphne du Maurier, p. 132. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., p. 135. 24 Ibid., p. 139. 25 Ibid., p. 137. 26 Lane, Phantom Lady, p. 72. 27 Noll Gurney, memo to Ned Kaufman, 23 June 1938, Hitchcock folders, Myron Selznick Agency files, Harry Ransom Center, box 108 folder 48. Thank you to Christina Lane for sharing a copy of this document.

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28 Memo from Kay Brown to David O. Selznick, 24 June 1938, quoted in Leff, Hitchcock and Selznick, p. 36. 29 Lewton ran the acquisition idea by the Production Code Administration first. As he wrote to Selznick: ‘The more I think of it, the more I feel we have got ourselves a tiger. It is as good as Jane Eyre, and I think that women will be wild about it.’ Val Lewton, memo to David O. Selznick, 16 July 1938, Selznick Collection, Harry Ransom Center, box 170 folder 15. 30 Irene Mayer Selznick, A Private View (New York: Knopf, 1983), p. 223. 31 David Thomson, Showman: The Life of David O. Selznick, 1st edn (New York: Knopf, 1992), p. 273. Joan Fontaine relates the story in No Bed of Roses (New York: William Morrow, 1978), p. 99. 32 Memo to Hitchcock, 12 June 1939, in Behlmer, Memo from David O. Selznick, pp. 260–1. 33 Richard Allen, ‘Daphne du Maurier and Alfred Hitchcock’, in Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo (eds), A Companion to Literature and Film (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2007), pp. 298–325. 34 Lane, Phantom Lady, pp. 93–4. 35 LA Times, 28 April 1940. Quoted in Desley Deacon, ‘Celebrity Sexuality: Judith Anderson and Truthfulness in Biography’, Australian Historical Studies: Biography and Life-Writing 43, no. 1 (2012): 45–60, 47. 36 Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca (New York: Avon), p. 200. 37 Lane, Phantom Lady, p. 94. 38 Charles Champlin, ‘Alma Reville Hitchcock: The Unsung Partner’, Los Angeles Times, 29 July 1982.

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39 Pat Hitchcock O’Connell and Laurent Bouzereau, Alma Hitchcock: The Woman Behind the Man (New York: Berkley Books, 2003), p. 102. 40 Lane, Phantom Lady, p. 87. 41 Joan Harrison and Philip MacDonald, Rebecca treatment, 3 June 1939, Selznick Collection, Harry Ransom Center, box 492 folder 8–9. 42 Memo to Hitchcock, 12 June 1939, in Behlmer, Memo from David O. Selznick, p. 257. 43 Ibid., p. 259. 44 Ibid., p. 260. 45 Ibid., p. 258. 46 Ibid., p. 257. 47 Memo to Brown, 21 June 1939, in Behlmer, Memo from David O. Selznick, pp. 263–4. 48 Ibid., p. 265. 49 Reville and Harrison would share credit with Samson Raphaelson on Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941), starring Joan Fontaine in the role of a wife who suspects her husband of murder, a clear echo of her breakout performance in Rebecca. 50 Tania Modleski, ‘Suspicion: Collusion and Resistance in the Work of Hitchcock’s Female Collaborators’, in Leland Pogue and Thomas Leitch (eds), A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), pp. 162–80. Revisiting the question of women and Hitchcock, Modleski writes: ‘let us remember that women have always been working in Hitchcock’s house, sometimes disrupting it, sometimes setting it to rights’. Tania Modleski, ‘Remastering the Master: Hitchcock after Feminism’,

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New Literary History 47, no. 1 (2016): 135–58, 155. 51 Memo to John Hay Whitney, 6 September 1939, in Behlmer, Memo from David O. Selznick, p. 276. 52 Hitchcock to Selznick, 18 November 1938, quoted in Leff, Hitchcock and Selznick, p. 43. 53 Memo to Kay Brown, 21 June 1939, in Behlmer, Memo from David O. Selznick, p. 263. 54 Memo to Lowell V. Calvert, 15 June 1939. Ibid. 55 Behlmer, Memo from David O. Selznick, p. 273. 56 Selznick Collection, Harry Ransom Center, box 170 folder 11. 57 Memo to Daniel T. O’Shea, 1 August 1939, in Behlmer, Memo from David O. Selznick, pp. 267–8. 58 Rebecca file, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. 59 Fontaine’s subsequent roles in Suspicion (1941), The Constant Nymph (1943), Jane Eyre (1943), and the du Maurier adaptation Frenchman’s Creek (1944) clearly resonated with the persona the role of I established. She eventually went from ingenue to fine lady – playing both at age 30 in Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) – with some welcome bitch roles in Ivy (1947) and Born to Be Bad (1950). In the 1950s she struck off into independent production with second husband Collier Young and his ex-wife Ida Lupino, playing the poised and professional first wife opposite Lupino’s second in The Bigamist, directed by Lupino in 1953. In high school, before there was

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an internet, I spent a great deal of time reading Ephraim Katz’s The Film Encyclopedia. When I looked up the star of Rebecca and Letter from an Unknown Woman, I remember being pleased to find her evident doormat qualities contradicted: ‘A highly accomplished woman, she is a licensed pilot, champion balloonist, prize-winning tuna fisherman, and an expert golfer, as well as a licensed interior decorator and a Cordon Bleu cook’ (New York: HarperCollins, 2nd edn, 1994), p. 467. 60 Selznick Collection, Harry Ransom Center, box 170 folder 11. An inter-office memorandum from Harriet Flagg to Dorothy Carter accompanied the note: ‘Do you still handle this type of letter for us?’ 61 Fontaine, No Bed of Roses, p. 116. 62 Selznick wrote to Brown: ‘I think that Nazimova is one of the greatest actresses in the world and, despite her accent, I think she would be magnificent’ (DOS to Kay Brown, 25 March 1939). Incidentally, Nazimova was story editor Val Lewton’s aunt. 63 Anderson’s celebrated performance as Danvers led many to assume that Anderson herself was a lesbian. Anderson’s biographer Desley Deacon explores in her essay ‘Celebrity Sexuality’ how the identification of a performer with a queer-coded role can become a commonplace of biographical misidentification. ‘It seems clear that “the facts” of Judith Anderson’s sexuality are not as obvious as an array of recent commentators would like to think – or as amenable to the biographer’s determination to

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find the “truth”.’ Deacon quotes gossip writer Boze Hadleigh’s interview with Anderson on her role in Rebecca: ‘I feel that Mrs Danvers was spiteful and sexless. A frank sadist. She couldn’t stand poor phony little Joan Fontaine, and I don’t blame her.’ (59). See my discussion of the character actor’s ‘queer career’ in Uninvited. Dame Judith Anderson’s Tony Award-winning Medea in 1948, Technicolor supporting roles in Salome (1953), The Ten Commandments (1956), and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), and later featured parts on the soap Santa Barbara (1984–7) and in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984) as a Vulcan High Priestess, plot Anderson’s star image along the intersecting axes of high culture and high camp. See also Annamarie Jagose’s passing references to Anderson’s appeal in her fascinating reading of Rebecca in Inconsequence: Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual Sequence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). 64 George Turner, ‘Du Maurier + Hitchcock + Selznick = Rebecca’, American Cinematographer 78, no. 7 (1997): 84–8. Criterion Collection edition (2017) special feature with Craig Barron on Rebecca’s visual effects. 65 Memo to Henry Ginsberg and O’Shea, 23 August 1939, in Behlmer, Memo from David O. Selznick, p. 274. 66 Unsent memo to Hitchcock, 19 September 1939, in Behlmer, Memo from David O. Selznick, p. 277. 67 Jack Sullivan, Hitchcock’s Music (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). David Neumeyer and Nathan Platte, Franz Waxman’s Rebecca: A Film Score

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Guide (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2011). 68 Mayer Selznick, A Private View, p. 224. 69 Rebecca file, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. 70 ‘“Rebecca”: THR’s 1940 Review’, The Hollywood Reporter. Available online: (accessed 13 July 2020). 71 Antonia Lant, Blackout: Reinventing Women for Wartime British Cinema, Appendix 2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), p. 231. See also Julian Poole, ‘British Cinema Attendance in Wartime: Audience Preference at the Majestic, Macclesfield, 1939–1946’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 7, no. 1 (January 1987): 15–34. 72 Richard Dyer, Stars (London: BFI, 1979), pp. 61–8. Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974). 73 Fontaine’s sophisticated image informed Rebecca’s enduring status as a quality film. For example, Fontaine was the main attraction at the inaugural Berlin Film Festival in 1951, an Allied effort to bring capitalist cultural triumphs to East Germany, where Rebecca was the opening film. 74 On women in sound-era Hollywood studio production, see J. E. Smyth, Nobody’s Girl Friday: The Women Who Ran Hollywood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), and Lizzie Francke, Script Girls: Women Screenwriters in Hollywood (London: BFI, 1994). See also the journal Feminist Media Histories and in the

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UK the Women’s Film and Television Network, which hosts the ‘Doing Women’s Film and Television Histories’ conference. 75 White, Uninvited, p. 50. 76 Thierry Kuntzel, ‘The Film-Work, 2’, Camera Obscura: Feminism and Film 2, no. 2 (1980): 6–70. 77 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), translated and edited by James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 2010), p. 334. 78 Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). Sarah Kozloff, Invisible Storytellers: Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 79 Silver Screen, August 1939, Media History Digital Library. 80 Rhona J. Berenstein, ‘“I’m Not the Sort of Person Men Marry”: Monsters, Queers, and Hitchcock’s Rebecca’, in Corey K. Creekmur and Alexander Doty (eds), Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian and Queer Essays on Popular Culture (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 239–61. See also Rhona J. Berenstein, ‘Adaptation, Censorship, and Audiences of Questionable Type: Lesbian Sightings in Rebecca (1940) and The Uninvited (1944)’, Cinema Journal 37, no. 3 (1998): 16–37. 81 Joanna Russ, To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 95–6. 82 Truffaut, Hitchcock, pp. 131–2. 83 Steven Jacobs, The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2007), p. 181.

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84 Ibid., p. 184. 85 Doane, The Desire to Desire, p. 134. 86 Sigmund Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, in Standard Edition, Vol. 17 (London: Hogarth Press, 1919), pp. 217–52. 87 Simon Callow, ‘Daphne du Maurier and Her Sisters: The Hidden Lives of Piffy, Bird and Bing by Jane Dunn – Review’, The Guardian, Books section, 20 April 2013. Available online: (accessed 9 April 2018). 88 Rey Chow’s ‘When Whiteness Feminizes: Some Consequences of a Supplementary Logic’ uses the narrative schema of the film version of Rebecca to illustrate how the white heroine’s triumph in the woman’s text structurally depends upon racialized othering. Differences 11, no. 3 (1999/2000): 137–68. 89 Truffaut, Hitchcock, pp. 129–30. 90 See Tania Modleski’s chapter on the contemporary gothic novel in Loving with a Vengeance (New York: Methuen, 1984). 91 Truffaut, Hitchcock, p. 131. 92 Memo to Alfred Hitchcock, 11 October 1939, in Behlmer, Memo from David O. Selznick, p. 282. 93 Catherine Grant,‘Déjà-viewing: Videographic Experiments in Intertextual Film Studies’, Mediascape (Winter 2013). Available online: (accessed 29 July 2020). 94 My reading of Rebecca and The Haunting drew on Doane’s account of the ‘paranoid woman’s film’ to argue that the cycle’s infusion of the female

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gaze with dread might be read as active but thwarted non-normative queer desire rather than the impossibility of a female desiring position. Doane’s use of Freud’s ‘A Case of Paranoia Running Counter to the Psychoanalytic Theory of the Disease’ prompted me to tie the supernatural knocking on the two women’s bedroom door in The Haunting to Freud’s interpretation of the woman’s hallucination in the case history. He read her conviction that she heard the ‘click’ of a camera snapping photos during a tryst with her lover as an exteriorization of her sexual arousal – the knock of an importunate clitoris! I saw Hollywood narration under the pressure of censorship as similarly symptomatic, similarly creative. 95 Laing, ‘Sex, Jealousy and Gender’. 96 David Miller, ‘Anal Rope’, in Diana Fuss (ed.), Inside Out (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 124–46. 97 Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 28. 98 Jagose, Inconsequence, p. ix. 99 Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much, p. 49. 100 Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 151. De Lauretis’s tour de force reading connects Rebecca with the portrait of Carlotta Valdes in Vertigo (1958). 101 Kyle Edwards says that the costume was borrowed from Gone With the Wind, a tantalizing prospect. ‘BrandName Literature: Film Adaptation and

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Selznick International Pictures’ Rebecca (1940)’, Cinema Journal 45, no. 3 (2006): 32–58, 42. 102 Alison Light, ‘Hitchcock’s Rebecca: A Woman’s Film?’, in Helen Taylor (ed.), The Daphne du Maurier Companion (London: Virago, 2007), pp. 295–304, 301. 103 Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much, p. 50. 104 Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (New York: Pantheon, 1988), p. 290. 105 In Selznick’s opinion: ‘We’re a trifle slow in getting up to the nightgown case; the nightgown case in a couple of takes is sloppily placed instead of being precisely placed, as was Mrs. Danvers’s habit’ (DOS memo to Mr. Raymond A. Klune, 14 November 1939, in Behlmer, Memo from David O. Selznick, p. 284). 106 Laura Mulvey, Citizen Kane (London: BFI, 1992), p. 54. 107 If Rosebud was in fact Hearst’s nickname for Marion Davies’s clitoris, as Kenneth Anger claims in Hollywood Babylon, the two films’ endings converge in signalling the disruptive power of female sexuality. 108 Schatz, The Genius of the System, p. 293. 109 Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much, p. 52. 110 See Helen Taylor, ‘Rebecca’s Afterlife: Sequels and Other Echoes’, in Helen Taylor (ed.), The Daphne du Maurier Companion (London: Virago, 2007), pp. 75–91. 111 Claudia Roth Pierpont, ‘A Study in Scarlett’, The New Yorker (31 August 1992), pp. 87–103, 87.

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112 In 1938, Doubleday sold 205,706 copies including book club editions, Publisher’s Weekly (21 January 1939), p. 197. 113 Laing, ‘Sex, Jealousy and Gender’. 114 Anthony Award for Best Novel of the Century. Available online:

(accessed 9 April 2018). 115 Editor Patricia Myrer quoted in Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), p. 31. 116 Radway draws her statistics from a bulletin for retailers on ‘How to Identify, Display, and Sell the Gothic’. Reading the Romance, p. 32. 117 Edwards, ‘Brand-Name Literature. 118 Maria LaPlace, ‘Producing and Consuming the Woman’s Film’, in Christine Gledhill (ed.), Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (London: BFI, 1987), p. 154. 119 Lyn Farnol, quoted in Edwards, ‘Brand-Name Literature’, p. 37. 120 Lyn Farnol, ‘Revised draft of exploitation and publicity in work on Rebecca’, Selznick Collection, Harry Ransom Center, box 170 folder 5. 121 Edwards, ‘Brand-Name Literature’, p. 44; Selznick Collection, Harry Ransom Center, box 172 folder 8.

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122 Charles Eckert, ‘The Carole Lombard in Macy’s Window’, Quarterly Review of Film Studies 3, no. 1 (1978): 1–21. 123 Diana Fuss, ‘Fashion and the Homospectatorial Look’, Critical Inquiry 18, no. 4 (1992): 713–37. 124 Edwards, ‘Brand-Name Literature’, p. 38. 125 Ibid. 126 ‘Invisible Wardrobe of Rebecca – the Movie Clothes Story’, Women’s Wear Daily (29 March 1940). 127 Natasha Walter, ‘Book Review: Dreaming of Manderley Again’, The Independent (9 October 1993). 128 Patricia White, ‘Sketchy Lesbians: Carol as History and Fantasy’, Film Quarterly 69, no. 2 (2015): 8–18. 129 Patricia White, ‘A Handmaiden’s Tale’, Public Books (blog), 11 November 2016. Available online: (accessed 9 April 2018). 130 ‘Paul Thomas Anderson Opens Up About the Mysterious Phantom Thread for the First Time’, EW.com. Available online: (accessed 19 September 2020).

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BFI FILM CLASSICS

Credits Rebecca US 1940 Directed by Alfred Hitchcock Produced by David O. Selznick Screenplay Robert E. Sherwood Joan Harrison Adaptation Philip MacDonald Michael Hogan Based on the novel by Daphne du Maurier Music by Franz Waxman  Director of Photography George Barnes © 1940 Selznick International Pictures Released through United Artists Production Manager Ray Klune Executive Assistant to the Producer Marcella Rabwin Continuity Supervisor Lydia Schiller Script Clerk Adele Cannon Scenario Assistant Barbara Keon Story Editors Katherine Brown Val Lewton Special Effects by Jack Cosgrove Assistant Directors Edmond Bernoudy Eric Stacey Ridgeway Callow

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Second Unit Directors D. Ross Lederman Eric Stacey Second Unit Cinematography Lloyd Knechtel Archie Stout Camera Operators Vincent Farrar Arthur Arling Irving Rosenberg Assistant Camera Joseph F. Warren Harry Wolf Casting Test Directors John Cromwell Anthony Mann Stills Fred Parrish Matte Artist Albert Simpson (uncredited) Optical Effects Clarence W. D. Slifer Art Direction Lyle Wheeler Interiors Designed by Joseph B. Platt Interior Decoration Howard Bristol Construction Harold Fenton Supervising Film Editor Hal C. Kern Associate Film Editor James E. Newcom Gowns Irene (uncredited) Make-up Monte Westmore Ben Nye Frank Westmore Hair Stylist Hazel Rogers Sound Recorder Jack Noyes

Sound Dubbing Arthur Johns Gordon Sawyer Music Associate Lou Forbes Technical Adviser W. A. Bagley Unit Publicist Russell Birdwell CAST Laurence Olivier Maxim de Winter Joan Fontaine I George Sanders Jack Favell Judith Anderson Mrs Danvers Nigel Bruce Major Giles Lacy Reginald Denny Frank Crawley C. Aubrey Smith Colonel Julyan Gladys Cooper Beatrice Lacy Florence Bates Mrs Van Hopper Melville Cooper Coroner Leo G. Carroll Dr Baker Leonard Carey Ben Lumsden Hare Tabbs Edward Fielding Frith Philip Winter Robert Forrester Harvey Chalcroft US release 12 April 1940 UK release July 1940 Running time: 130 mins

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