Rant – Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

Why it is literally not of its time

Hello everyone!

This time brining you a rant that I originally presented and subsequently wrote down for our local book club discussion. We read Rebecca at the end of 2020 and I am not yet done talking about it, as evident from previous newsletters that already featured some side-mentions of Du Maurier. I love thinking about narrative structure and framing devices, on the biggest scale of the novel as well as the smallest scale of individual passages and scenes. Rebecca provides much food for thought in this respect, and I helpfully got pointed to the workings of time and temporality through the lens of queer theory. Enjoy but be wary of spoilers 😉

Queer temporality or non-normative temporality, I would posit, surfaces in two main ways in Rebecca. First thematically, as the feature of non-normative coming of age features heavily in queer theory. The coming-of-age story we are presented with in Rebecca matches this quite closely, as the unnamed narrator follows a seemingly out of sequence timeline in which sexuality, desire, and maturity in general gets delayed. Her coming-of-age timeline appears disrupted by the act of marriage, which would fit better in the stage of adulthood as we find her only at the end of the novel, rather than where it sits now at the start of the story.

Even more interesting, I find, is the second aspect of temporality present in the literal narration, as the narrator pushes us backwards and forwards through time. Starting at the general level with the framing of the novel, but also occurring within individual scenes as we are frequently taking forward in the imagination of the narrator as to what might happen or what people might say/think/do etc., or by contemplation on how other character might speak/think/act based on previous scenes and interactions.

The most poignant quote I have come across, a piece of queer historiography theory, that in my view could fit extremely neatly onto the experience of reading Rebecca comes from Carla Freccero ("The Queer Time of Lesbian Literature: History and Temporality" in The Cambridge Companion to Lesbian Literature, p. 21.)

“What does it mean to narrate a discontinuous history? What forms might such a narration take, - or as a way to account for what often gets missed, overlooked, and left out in traditional historical accounts and that queering history might bring back in: haunting, affect, metaphor, ideology, identification, desire, ‘ordinariness’, materiality, the nonhuman.

I am thus interested in what it would mean to let go of the anchor, of what ‘really happened’, not to deny that things happen, but to take the risk of seeing what other stories there are to tell when one no longer seeks to master the past.

[…] Multiple overlapping non-synchronous, non-teleological histories; histories of things that emerged and disappeared, histories that might have been, that could still be, discarded and forgotten, or effaced histories that might be retrieved, rearticulated, brought to bear in the interest of other futures, or not”

Rebecca, to me, encapsulates this interplay between two styles of time narration by having both a teleological timeline and a discontinuous one sit side by side. Maxim’s timeline we can reconstruct as a purely teleological one: first wife > murder > cover-up > second wife > reveal > escape. The narrator gets dropped in the middle and moves back, forth, back again, and so forth, from the meta-level of the narrative to the individual thoughts and scenes. You could even posit that we have here a masculine timeline being subverted by a queer/feminine one. It is this second timeline, the subverting one, that brings about an unsettledness and that contributes to the haunting feeling the novel leaves behind.

And getting super meta, perhaps the publication of the book follows queer time, as it feels completely out of place being published in the 1930s rather than 1830s.

All in all, I find this one of the brilliant elements of the book, what makes it so, so interesting, and why I could talk about for a lot longer than we did in our book club meeting (even though that was already three solid hours of discussion).

Thank you for your attention and goodbye!