Haunted houses: Manderley in Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

Manderley, the fictional estate on the Cornish coast resembling Menabilly, where Daphne du Maurier lived and wrote, is at the heart of what became an enormously successful novel published in 1938 and subsequently adapted into a Hitchcock film in 1940. Rebecca’s famous opening line: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again” sets the scene for a story in which dreams become nightmares, obsessions take root in the mind of the characters and a lost mansion full of mysteries lives through its inhabitants, living or dead. The unnamed female narrator begins by telling us that “there would be no resurrection … for Manderley was ours no longer. Manderley was no more”. But it is by the power of her intense imagination that the house rises up before us with its serpentine drive, invaded by monstrous blood-red rhododendrons. The influence of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century gothic works of isolated women and Byronic, enigmatic men is starkly apparent in Rebecca. Just like Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, it is a dark and romantic tale of second wives, detached husbands, and unnerving British estates that conceal secrets and lies. Rebecca includes sentimental, gothic and crime narratives as well as cross references to fairy tales and psychological thriller: all these genres are exploited by Daphne du Maurier and they mix together and contribute to enrich the trope of the haunted house, a powerful and imaginative construction though which du Maurier presents multiple layers of dissonant consciousness and explores the motif of sexuality and female transgression.