Episode 72: Rebecca and Manderley

Sarah Harrison: Welcome to Tea Tonic & Toxin, a book club and podcast for anyone who wants to explore the best mysteries and thrillers ever written. I’m your host, Sarah Harrison.

Carolyn Daughters: And I’m your host Carolyn Daughters. Pour yourself a cup of tea, a gin and tonic …

Sarah Harrison: … but not a toxin …

Carolyn Daughters: And join us on a journey through 19th and 20th century mysteries and thrillers, every one of them a game changer.

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Sarah Harrison  01:35
I have the pleasure of introducing our listener of the episode. I almost said listener of the month, but we do a couple per month. I am really excited. I already sent her award sticker packet. Dorothy Young, we want to give a shout out to this episode. Dorothy’s so awesome. She’s one of our most recent Patreon members from Newberry, South Carolina. Thank you so much. Dorothy!

Carolyn Daughters  02:07
Sarah, tell us about these Patreons.

Sarah Harrison  02:09
We’ve recently expanded our Patreon program. It’s exciting. You can sponsor the podcast, and that goes directly to covering our expenses. And then recently, Carolyn and I had a retreat where we talked about all of the many ways that we want to do more for the podcast. And so we came up with one way to help expand it, is with a Patreon so you’ve probably seen me posting lately on social media a bunch of links to our Patreon page. So that’s one way where folks can now like support the podcast and get extra special content. And we’re going to record our very first extra bonus episode today on the book Rebecca. Very exciting. Thank you, Dorothy, thank you to all of our listeners, all of our Patreons. We really love you more than we could say. We talk about how much we love you off camera here.

Carolyn Daughters  03:25
Today we’re going to talk about Rebecca, which is this amazing book by Daphne du Maurier. And I’m going to read the back of the book jacket from a 1952 version. We have several copies of Rebecca here. Four versions, some showing Manderley.

Sarah Harrison  03:37
Hold up the version to the camera. It’s my favorite version we’ve looked at so far. All different. Yours has the blood red rhododendrons, which is a beautiful cover.

Carolyn Daughters  03:59
I’m going to read the back of the 1952 version here. This is Manderley, notorious, ridden by evil. Its mistress Rebecca de Winter has been dead for eight months, drowned in a sailing accident. She was glamorous and adored. But through the frightened eyes of Rebecca’s successor at Manderley, Max de Winter’s shy young second wife, we come to know Rebecca as she really was. We understand with horror the power Rebecca holds over Manderley, even in death, and watch her satanic curse paralyze Max de Winter’s love for his new wife, the second Mrs de Winter. Then suddenly, a dramatic and bold revelation shatters Rebecca’s spell. Here is a moving love story and an unforgettable gallery of characters, a romance so breathtaking, so haunting, that it stands as a giant among modern novels.

Sarah Harrison  05:09
I have the pleasure of introducing our spectacular guest, Shana Kelly. Shana began her career as a literary agent at the William Morris Agency in New York and London for 10 years. She currently works as a documentary screenwriter, book editor, writer, and publishing consultant. She also teaches at Denver-based Lighthouse Writers Workshop. In 2024, Shana won an Emmy for writing A Towering Task, The Story of the Peace Corps. It’s a historical documentary that aired on PBS in 2023. Shana is currently writing a historical documentary about The League of Women Voters, which sounds really interesting. Shana Kelly joins us to discuss Rebecca. Welcome Shana. I’m so excited. I think you are our first Emmy winner.

Shana Kelly  06:17
Thank you. What an honor to be here and to be called an Emmy winner.

Carolyn Daughters  06:24
We’re so excited. So this book, Shana, you and I have known each other for many years through Lighthouse Writers Workshop, and we’ve worked together, and I’ve done you’ve led workshops, and I’ve attended those workshops, and so I reached out, I believe, last fall, and said, we have this list of books for 2024 and if you would love to be a guest, we would love to have you as a guest. That would be amazing. And then you looked over the list, and you said, Oh, Rebecca, looks interesting. So tell us … when you said, Okay, Rebecca, yeah, let’s do that book, what drew you or draws you to Rebecca?

Shana Kelly  07:10
I think I was drawn to it. I mean, I know Daphne du Maurier. I’m familiar with a lot of her stories. I’ve seen a lot of the movies based on her books and short stories, but I had never read any of her work, and so this is one of those books that maybe I just hadn’t given it much thought. But as soon as I saw it there, I thought, what a great opportunity to finally read this book. I need the excuse or something to do it, although you’ve inspired me to read a lot of books on this podcast that I may not have otherwise picked up. So I mean, it was that familiarity with the story. There was a certain love of the movie already, and of the kind of Gothic mystery of it all. I do love the story of the second Mrs de Winter, and I love Manderley, but I have definitely a different appreciation for it now that I’ve read the entire book and I see the way she tells the story, as opposed to the way other people may have told it.

Sarah Harrison  08:09
I want to throw in there, I mentioned this is going to be our first bonus episode. We’re going to be discussing the movie and adaptations in depth in a separate episode. I know we just kind of mix up the conversations here. We’re gonna make an effort in this new experiment to not do that this time. This is highly organized structured. Sarah “highly organized” Harrison, that’s what people call me.

Carolyn Daughters  08:40
I’m gonna start calling you that now.

Sarah Harrison  08:43
No, but that’s really cool. And I was thinking, so this was your first time reading Rebecca. It was my second time, because it came up in another book club of super important books written by women. And so for me, reading it the second time was a really different experience than reading it the first time. What were your most hard-hitting impressions?

Shana Kelly  09:04
Reading through this for the first time, I was a little surprised at the structure of it, that she starts at the end of the story, and then the entire thing is this flashback. And it was interesting to me, how much you know going into the story. You know who’s alive and who’s not. Manderley is no more. You don’t know why. You don’t know that it’s burned down at that point. You know that. You know Mrs. Danvers is alive, but perhaps missing. You also get this sense of this couple, which colored the entire story for me, because they seem so miserable. So, you see them in this state of limbo. They’re in exile in this beginning part, and you don’t really know why. You just know that they’re living this very staid and boring existence where the highlight of their day is looking at the cricket scores and the sporting news from England. But they’re in some I don’t think they she says, what country? They just live a hotel life. They’re just in a hotel somewhere. And then at some point, the narrator, the second Mrs de Winter, is reading an article about pigeons, I think, to him, and it reminds her of Manderley, and so she’s enjoying it, but then she realizes that he’s getting upset. And so then it’s like that, even that article about pigeons was a little too exciting for the life they’re leading. So I just couldn’t help but think about where they were heading. It’s in the back of your brain for the entire book. And that really struck me.

Sarah Harrison  10:50
That’s interesting, because I think on my first reading, I like, read it, I read the beginning, then I forgot about it because I was into this story. And now in my second reading, I’m like, Oh my goodness. Like it just like, Finally she does have the life she wants. And I’m like, see, because now that I hadn’t watched the movie before, I didn’t know the stories when I first read the story, it was a new story, and so I was like, so involved in the story, I forgot about all the foreshadowing about Manderley, but the way it just sets it up.

Carolyn Daughters  11:24
In that beginning, the narrator, the second Mrs de Winter, is telling her story, so it’s in her voice, and she’s tries to tell us, like, Okay, every day is the same. There’s nothing, no high highs, no super low lows. We keep on, keeping on. She sells it, or attempts to sell it as preferable. This is good. Did you feel like it was good? Or did you feel like, okay, you’re working a little too hard to sell this? Like, did you feel like this was a good place that they are. She and Max de Winter. It sounds like you don’t think so.

Sarah Harrison  12:05
I didn’t. I do that’s interesting.

Shana Kelly  12:08
It’s really interesting because not having read the book before, I had a different sense of the story from the movie. So when I read this beginning, it did seem like she was protesting. It said, Well, this is a lot better than being terrified. Like, I think she says something along those lines, where you’re like, but it also could be a moment in time. And so having read the entire book, and then, of course, going back to the beginning, after I finished it, I was like, well, maybe they’re on their way from Manderley to some place that’s a little happier, but certainly this, it feels like, although they know she feels like she knows what he’s thinking and needs and wants, he’s so wrapped up in his own self that doesn’t feel like it’s reciprocated. And so that made me a little sad for her. And of course, the fact that she’s so much younger than him, but you don’t necessarily know that when you’re reading the intro to the book, or the right, whatever you would call it.

Carolyn Daughters  13:11
I feel like his needs are always elevated above the needs of the second Mrs de Winter in this book.

Sarah Harrison  13:17
Yeah, well, in her mind, for sure.

Carolyn Daughters  13:19
I think in reality also. All narrators are unreliable, right? I mean, if you’re telling your own story, it’s not the voice of God, right? Especially in this case, there’s some unreliability there. Constantly through this book, she is thinking, this person’s looking at me, and this is what’s going through their head. This person thinks this about me, and sometimes she’s probably right and sometimes she’s really wrong.

Sarah Harrison  13:51
Well, that’s one thing I love about her narration, and also hate. The way she’s framing and reframing constantly, and the way her imagination will go forward, and she’ll picture herself in this place, in this position, and what she’s doing. And so much detail. I remember once she was upset at the beginning. They were in the hotel, they were just meeting, and she said she wished she was out of there and just taking a walk and whistling and whistling. It’s specific and wonderful, and then you know something will happen, and she’ll just reframe everything that happened, and it has a new context and a new framework that she’s evaluating it in. She’s always framing and reframing. And I feel like I do that myself. I’ve always assumed everyone does it, but I’ve since learned that not everyone does it. A lot of times I’ve found people are very locked in to the perspective they come to a situation. It’s really interesting for me to learn about humanity.

Carolyn Daughters  14:58
There’s a scene where he goes from Manderley to London for a day and night, and her anxiety is ramped up. The second Mrs de Winter wonders, did he get there? Is everything okay? She can’t eat, she can’t think. You can almost hear the second hand of the clock ticking, that sort of thing. And then she finds out he’s made it all right. There’s just this wave of relief. She grabs all of this food and then secretes it out the door, because she doesn’t want anyone to think she’s eating too much food or what have you. And then goes and lays out in the sun. And everything is wonderful. And as somebody who for most of my adult life, I’ve had issues with anxiety, I understood that, but I don’t know that I’ve, at most points in my life ever had it to the degree that, okay, they’re taking a random drive. Did they arrive from point A to point B on their random drive to London. But I understood that, when you realize, okay, I have this respite, this, everything is okay, right now and then that, that sort of piece washes over you. And I thought her life is terrible, like, really bad.

Sarah Harrison  16:21
In a sense, but in a sense of her own making, it’s not like he did the wrong thing by leaving Manderley and going to London. If our spouse goes to work, we’re not going to lose it, right? Especially, I remember back before cell phones, but me and my mom would have a once a week phone call, because you paid for that, you paid long-distance charges. And so you weren’t just calling and communicating all the time, and it was hard and it was expensive, so much more back then, like her reaction is over the top.

Carolyn Daughters  17:01
I’ve met people who have that. A spouse, friend, sibling, whoever is going to work. Did they get to work? Are they okay? They’re mapping their day out in these milestones. But his lack of awareness of anything going on with her is, I think, what bothered me. I’m not saying that he was responsible by going to London. He wasn’t. But he was completely oblivious to her day-to-day life. How is this excusable?

Sarah Harrison  17:36
I have a lot of thoughts about that, but I want to hear Shana’s thoughts.

Shana Kelly  17:40
I think it’s interesting, this sense of their relationship. For sure, he is, at best, so self-centered. I think it would have been unusual for a man in his position at that time, in that country, in that culture, it seems very real to me. This feels grounded in reality to me in a way that I don’t know I expected it to be. It is melodramatic, it is Gothic, but it also feels real. And I think to me, that moment where the second Mrs de Winter completely loses it when he’s on the car ride like my sense wasn’t that she would do that every time he got in the car. It’s like that day at that moment, she was ramped up, she was triggered. She could not handle the fact that she did. She could not lay eyes on him. And he really is. I mean, this is, we’re talking about a character who has no family and who’s been brought into this, completely foreign environment compared to what she’s ever experienced. Or at least that’s the sense that you get. And there’s the staff at Manderley. They’re constantly following her. She doesn’t know where she’s going. She doesn’t he is her only touchstone, and he barely knows her, and barely can think about anything outside of his own thoughts and his own torment in those moments, we don’t know until later what he’s really probably preoccupied by.

Sarah Harrison  19:06
it’s a lot more than my spouse went to work. It’s right, his concerns, I feel like, so this was, this was a change for me, because I feel like in the first reading, I really did feel for Rebecca or not, the next Mrs de Winter. I always call her Rebecca in my head.

Carolyn Daughters  19:22
She doesn’t even have a name. At no point in the in the book does anybody ever say her name, including her husband, or if they do, she leaves that out of her recitation and her telling.

Sarah Harrison  19:35
This is Rebecca part two, the second Mrs de Winter.

Carolyn Daughters  19:39
Call her Rebecca 2.

Sarah Harrison  19:42
I just fell for her, and I think a lot of that was because the second Mrs de Winter is the narrator, and I’m seeing it through her head. And I’m like, they left her alone. But if I think about it as an adult with a spouse, I’m like, Okay, well, how was? He’s a bad communicator, but so is she? How is he supposed to? Know that she can’t manage him doing ordinary life things.

Carolyn Daughters  20:03
To be fair, he’s twice her age. He should have a little more, no skill.

Sarah Harrison  20:07
I think a little less. He’s been for 42 years, raised in an entirely different culture. He loves her innocence, but he doesn’t perceive the consequences in any way at all. And I just read this part at the end of the book that that reframed for me is when everything’s gone down. He took my face between his hands and looked at me for the first time. I saw how thin his face was, how lined and drawn, and there were great shadows beneath his eyes. She hasn’t exactly been paying attention herself. She’s been so wrapped up in her anxiety. And don’t get me wrong, he does a lot of annoying things, but she’s been so wrapped up in her own anxiety. I’m sure it’s not new that His face has been thin and drawn. Everyone’s been commenting, really, on how much better he looks than and how, what, what a good effect she’s had on him. He’s been looking rough for a long time, and she hasn’t noticed at all, because she’s wrapped up and she doesn’t know how to manage a house, particularly a house like Manderley. She feels one down. She feels powerless. They’re both bad communicators, and in their own spheres, that are just like making a wreck of things.

Shana Kelly  21:23
It’s a little bit of a perfect storm, because you have this person who is just by nature of who the second Mrs de Winter is and how she’s been raised in her class, which obviously is a huge issue in England at this time and in this book. But she’s also like when you’re talking about her reframing things and her anxiety, she really is everything that she reframes, it’s through the lens of her own insecurities. So if she’s imagining what people are thinking, she’s imagining they’re thinking terrible things about her. And like you said, sometimes they probably are, but sometimes they’re not. And so you’ve got this person who’s already got that tendency for whatever reason, and then you throw her into a completely new environment with all these people who are going to look down their noses at her for the things she doesn’t know and hasn’t experienced. And there’s all these mysteries, there’s all these things that she’s been thrown into. Whereas if Manderley were just a healthier, upper class castle of the time, maybe it would have gone a little better, but there’s just so much working against her and against Maxim.

Sarah Harrison  22:33
The first time I read it, I looked at it as a class issue, but this time I looked at it way more as a culture issue, like when you’re just brought up to think differently, it’s always shocking what someone else is thinking. He’s been brought up to command. He wears it like a mantle. The second Mrs de Winter has been brought up to be snubbed by other servants, so she has a posture of apology and trying to get through and get people to like her. And all it does in her new position is bring more like criticism and confusion from people are like, Why are you acting like this? Why are you apologizing for breaking your own thing?

Carolyn Daughters  23:20
Your own random thing, which is one of and I understand we don’t want to break people’s things. They have 8 million things, and we still don’t want to break something of someone’s, but Manderley is just chock full of tchotchkes, I mean, expensive ones, mind you, but like a museum. It’s a museum.

Sarah Harrison  23:37
Manderley is a house full of museums and but she can’t own it because she feels this one down position.

Carolyn Daughters  23:43
You can’t tell. And she breaks this. She’s like, I broke Rebecca’s cherub at Manderley. Yes, which, it wasn’t Rebecca’s thing. That’s her mindset. And it’s her thing. Hide it. But really, it’s not as if Max de Winter is saying, like, oh, that cherub meant so much to me.

Shana Kelly  24:02
It just says it’s expensive. He says, Oh no, that was one of our more valuable pieces.

Carolyn Daughters  24:07
Wasn’t it expensive?

Sarah Harrison  24:10
Maybe bought it. She only made it like the stuff that’s owned in these houses. They were the original museums. They’re so fascinating. And I always love that aspect of these stories.

Shana Kelly  24:20
Well, they even open Manderley up to the public. They say that we don’t ever see it happening.

Sarah Harrison  24:27
We have seen it in other stories. And I was telling Carolyn I was over in Scotland at the Murray family mansion, which is my maiden name, MacMurray. It is still one of the only privately owned clan castles, and the family lives there, and they open it up to the public. So you can go through part of the rooms, and then part of the rooms are like chained off. You can’t go through those because that’s where the family lives.

Carolyn Daughters  24:53
There are either hired individuals or staff servants who once a week or. Whatever you know daily, or whatever the schedule is, take people through them. And we see this in Pemberley, in Pride and Prejudice, where the house is often opened up, and then they go through all the this is the portrait gallery. Because there are major artworks and artifacts in some of these old homes like Manderley.

Sarah Harrison  25:19
Have you guys ever been to the Vanderbilt Mansion in Asheville, North Carolina? If you’re ever over there, you have to go. It is incredible. The family does not live there anymore. So the person that painted her portrait was John Singer Sargent, half that’s their family portraits. The caliber of artwork, it is incredible and beautiful. I loved going there. I would go there again anytime. I thought it would be too expensive. But then I went and I stayed all day. I was like, eight hours in that house, wow. It reminds me of that where, like, your regular stuff around your house is the stuff that’s now in museums. It’s now in the Louvre or wherever.

Carolyn Daughters  26:14
I want to hear what you both think about this narrator, the second Mrs de Winter. When we meet her, she’s a companion to Mrs. Van Hopper. She’s the snobby, wealthy sort of vulgar, American.

Sarah Harrison  26:31
She’s an American. Of course, we should say she’s been written in as an American.

Carolyn Daughters  26:38
We’ve all the three of us have read a lot, and our listeners have probably read a lot, because you guys are all amazing, but this whole companion gig, like this, is an actual job, and maybe somebody’s gonna have to let me know. Is it still a job?

Sarah Harrison  26:54
I don’t know. Can I get this job? Just fly me around the world and I just be entertaining to your conversation.

Carolyn Daughters  27:01
I couldn’t do I saw how she had to behave with Mrs. Van Hopper and just sit through meals and be excruciating.

Sarah Harrison  27:10
Van Hopper was a pretty bad companion. I don’t know, what do you think, Shana.

Shana Kelly  27:16
The second Mrs de Winter drew the short straw there, I’m afraid. I mean, I would think it’s not that far off from being a personal assistant these days of the rich and famous.

Sarah Harrison  27:26
Which can go really a lot of directions. It could be the best gig ever or the worst. I think Matthew Perry’s personal assistant is up on charges right now. That’s true.

Shana Kelly  27:37
That’s true. You can have access to vacation homes and trips and things that you would never have otherwise, but you are on call 24/7 so, yeah, I feel like there is a slightly modern version of this, but certainly then, I mean, even Maxim doesn’t assume she’s a paid companion when he first meets her. Maybe she’s a relative, a child or niece or something, sure, which I think it was pretty common then too, to bring in someone younger who’s in the family to be your companion.

Sarah Harrison  28:12
It’s a female thing, and Max seems pretty disconnected from worlds that he’s not brought up in so there’s some propriety. Yeah, men don’t have hired companions. They have personal secretaries, right? They don’t have hired companions.

Carolyn Daughters  28:27
Yes, but the men so we see Max de Winter sitting at a table, dining on his own, and this is maybe less common for women, I’m guessing.

Sarah Harrison  28:35
As a woman, you would not travel alone, no way. You have to have a companion if you want to travel. I went to Alaska in my early 20s. I needed to get out. It’s like, I’m gonna go work in Alaska. And even still, everyone was like, Are you going alone? Like, my philosophy was and is, if I wait for somebody to do something with me, I’m never gonna do it. So you just gotta do it. But that wasn’t an option back then. You had to have a companion. You had to have somebody at all times, helping to guard your personal social space.

Carolyn Daughters  29:19
So she ends up having this job with Mrs. Van Hopper. Mrs. Van Hopper is ill. She now has all this free time.

Sarah Harrison  29:29
“Ill” in quotation marks. Yes, poor Mrs. Van Hopper.

Carolyn Daughters  29:35
The second Mrs de Winter spends time with Maxim, and then basically trades one life for another. They both have potential benefits, and they both have dramatic downsides. She’s about to enter a brand new, very different life, and there’s this bridge of travel during their honeymoon, which I think covers up or shields from her, what her life was and what her life is going to be. It’s like this magical time, and then, literally, the honeymoon period. That’s right, that phrase came from, from Rebecca. We talked briefly about this being gothic novel, but Shana like she’s driving up to Manderley with Max de Winter. Like, how are you? How are you as a reader, taking this journey with her? Were you like feeling okay? This is ominous.

Shana Kelly  30:36
For sure. I mean, it’s ominous because of the way it’s written. First of all, it’s also ominous, because you understand that she doesn’t have any clue what she’s gotten into, and that even when he asked her to marry her, I mean, he she’s about to be swept away by Mrs. Van Hopper. She’s had this week with Maxim, and she’s definitely having feelings for him, but he hasn’t said a lot to her.

Sarah Harrison  31:01
And she’s never even entertained her feelings legitimate.

Shana Kelly  31:04
No, I think it’s in there, but she doesn’t think there’s a shot and she’s gonna end up with this guy. And so when he first says, Oh, she’s gonna take you away to New York, well, would you rather come back to Manderley with me, she thinks he’s offering her a job. And so there’s clearly not been a lot of, like intimacy to the point where she is expecting a wedding proposal, or a marriage proposal at that point, so that it just cracks me up, that line where she says, Oh, you want me to be your secretary. And he’s like, I’m asking you to marry me, you little fool.

Sarah Harrison  31:38
Yeah, his proposal is like, I think, from his low point.

Shana Kelly  31:43
A little bit. You get the sense that it, there is an understanding there. There’s work to be done. He needs a partner. He needs a companion.

Sarah Harrison  31:52
And he needs a distraction. That was what I got from that. Well, that’s definitely what he’s suicidal down there at Manderley.

Shana Kelly  32:02
She’s sweet and innocent and naive and presumably pretty, although she would never say that.

Carolyn Daughters  32:11
I got the sense that the second Mrs de Winter was pretty.

Sarah Harrison  32:13
I never did until watching the movie, which we’ll discuss later.

Shana Kelly  32:17
They’re not going to cast somebody who isn’t beautiful in that miracle. But at some point, somebody says she has angel eyes, like you get the sense it’s an inner beauty that he’s seen this purity in her that’s the opposite of everything he’s been experiencing. And that’s part of his she has traits.

Sarah Harrison  32:35
But what he seemed attracted to, to me, is the rebound kind of status, where he’s like so you’re the opposite of what I’m used to, right? You know? And that’s attractive to me.

Carolyn Daughters  32:47
Sarah and I debated this last night. He doesn’t let her in on what his life was before, or who Rebecca was, or what he thought about Rebecca. So she is left at her very young age and her class and her life experience, to build an image in her head of the most perfect woman in the world. And then much of the feedback she gets from people, what did you think of her? She’s most beautiful woman. She was so talented at everything she did. Everybody loved her. She was everyone’s friend. She already has this foundation, and then it’s built up, up, up. And he never dispels any of these ideas.

Sarah Harrison  33:44
You’re marrying a rebound after two weeks whose purpose is to distract you from suicide, basically. So it’s a marriage of convenience. When he says he was selfish, he was selfish. He takes her back to Manderley. That’s 100% true. He isn’t. He’s very frank throughout the whole book. He’s very pragmatic. He never leads her on. He never says he loves her till the end. But he was happy with her, and he wanted to keep her. He used marriage to keep her, but it was, in a large sense, almost like a higher at that point. He didn’t know her any better than she knew him.

Carolyn Daughters  34:21
Shana, how did you feel every single time he says to the second Mrs de Winter something like, oh you simpleton, Oh you silly child, eat your food, all this stuff. Like, I kept trying to put myself back in many, many years ago, and think like, would this potentially have been charming, or would this have been insulting even then? I don’t know. What are your thoughts?

Shana Kelly  34:44
I do think she probably has a higher tolerance for that stuff, given that it’s in the 30s and she is a child.

Sarah Harrison  34:54
She’s 21 he’s 42.

Shana Kelly  34:57
She is definitely young enough to be his child. It had this effect on me of undermining any sort of connection they had as husband and wife. I was like, what is the nature of this relationship? Has it been consummated? I assume it has over the honeymoon, but there’s not a lot of detail there. Later, some people comment on it, and we know that they’re having trouble coming together, but the “child” thing is grossing me out on some level, and it does seem completely unfair. He is infantilizing her, and then he wants her to be able to handle running this Manderley household, but then he doesn’t want her to grow up.

Sarah Harrison  35:46
That’s what he was then. That what really got me. He was attracted to her childishness in listens, that it was just the opposite of Rebecca. He was. It’s like a rebound, 101, story, what is that like when you were just consciously choosing the opposite of your last relationship? I did not enjoy that aspect of it, but also, I think it’s not an undertone, it’s really overt. That’s why he chose her. And it feels a little unfair for me to just be say, Well, you shouldn’t be that person. Well, that’s the person he is in the book. That’s the whole story.

Shana Kelly  36:31
Because this whole thing is told from the point of view of the second Mrs de Winter. You can’t escape her paranoia, her insecurities, her anxieties, her desires. She so much wants this marriage to work. And so as a reader, I also wanted it to work. I was very much wrapped up in what she wanted out of life and her goals. I just kept rooting for this marriage, for them to turn a corner. And so when moments like that happened. I was like, Oh God. And even when she stands up for herself later in the book at Manderley and says, don’t talk to me like I’m a child. I want you to treat me like other men treat their wives. And he says, Oh, you want me to knock you about then? And she’s like, Well, no, don’t joke. And he’s like, I’m not joking.

Sarah Harrison  37:23
I don’t think he was.

Shana Kelly  37:25
I don’t think he was, I’m sure there was a lot of knocking about happening in other marriages.

Carolyn Daughters  37:30
And actually even spanking their wives as if they were children.

Sarah Harrison  37:34
I think it was even like, legally protected in many instances. I think spanking was allowed up into fairly recently, even in the United States.

Shana Kelly  37:47
He’s an interesting guy, and he seems oblivious at Manderley. I don’t necessarily think of him as this villain. I just think he is blinded by his own story.

Sarah Harrison  38:04
Which is a big deal story. It’s not like, like I said. It’s not like, Oh, my spouse went to work, and now I got some anxiety to deal with. It’s like, it killed my wife, and she’s gonna get found one day, I killed my wife, who everyone loved, and it was about to come out that she was sleeping around with the whole town.

Carolyn Daughters  38:23
I think an argument can be made that he is the villain of the book.

Sarah Harrison  38:29
You want to make that argument? I don’t think so.

Carolyn Daughters  38:35
Mrs. Danvers at Manderley is the obvious candidate, and Rebecca, from the Gothic perspective, is also an obvious candidate. It could even be Rebecca with Mrs. Danvers, being the actor for the dead woman. I get that. But I have to ask, did he not know who he married? Had they known each other? He’s with wife #2 for five seconds, and then let’s get married. So maybe one learns that lesson with the second wife?

Sarah Harrison  39:08
I don’t think it was the culture, if say that in his defense. But also, like, people got married really fast. I mean, he got married extra fast. He got very married fast. And also, Rebecca was a master. She had pulled over everyone’s eyes. And I have to wonder, why did Rebecca tell the truth at all after four days. Like, why?

Carolyn Daughters  39:32
I think she reveled in other people’s discomfort and pain and shock.

Sarah Harrison  39:37
So the second Mrs de Winter is a masochist?

Carolyn Daughters  39:40
Yeah, sadist. Sociopath.

Sarah Harrison  39:44
I mean, that’s fair.

Carolyn Daughters  39:45
Take Max de Winter. It’s easy to say, Oh well, it’s the time period. Oh well, he’s a man. Oh well, he was in mourning. Mourning this idea of what his life would be, or his first wife had traumatized him, all of this. But at the end of the day, he married a woman he barely knew. Found out who she was, decided his property was worth keeping up this farce. She basically, at some point, says to him, I could have an heir, and that heir will have the name of de Winter whether it’s your child or not. And I’m assuming it won’t be and that’s how this is going to go. He murders her, meets the second woman, and has this whirlwind “romance.” There really doesn’t seem much intimacy. He marries her and brings her back to Manderley and then seems oblivious to anything going on with this 21-year-old woman. I really find a lot of fault with him.

Sarah Harrison  40:57
Interesting. I find medium fault with him.

Shana Kelly  41:04
I do find a lot of fault with him. I think I’m between medium and high medium. I can’t, as a reader, really forgive the murder. At the same time, because I’m in the book with our nameless narrator, the second Mrs de Winter, I want what she wants. I want him to get away with it. But if I take a step back from the story, and I think about it like, not only did he shoot his wife in cold blood, and we can talk about it.

Sarah Harrison  41:06
It was pretty hot blooded. It wasn’t premeditated.

Shana Kelly  41:47
He said he was going to try to scare her and her lover, her first cousin. But he brings the gun and she provokes him. At least that’s the way it’s written. She basically says all the things she thinks she needs to say to get him to shoot her. I guess we’ll talk about that later, too. Not only does he shoot her, but he thinks she’s pregnant at that point, so he’s murdering this unborn child too. And then he has to clean up the blood. He has to clean up after himself. He doesn’t just kill her. He kills her and then he hides it. He puts her on a boat and then puts holes in the boat. He  takes it to a whole other criminal level.

Carolyn Daughters  42:42
This makes that broken cherub at Manderley seem like nothing.

Shana Kelly  42:48
It really does. It really is nothing compared to that.

Carolyn Daughters  42:50
The second Mrs de Winter shoves it away and hides it. But boy, what he does here is incredible.

Sarah Harrison  42:55
The murder is the piece for me that was so hard to get around. I actually, I have so much more sympathy for Max the second reading, because I think the first reading, I so closely identified with the second Mrs de Winter, with the narrator, and was just in her head, but that’s the second reading I felt like, much more like I think the reason I identify with her more is because she’s the narrator. If Max was narrating it, I think I would really strongly identify with him if he got to have me in his head. And because neither one of them is talking, they’re just living in their head. But then the murder is hard to get around, and her reaction to it is a little baffling.

Carolyn Daughters  43:36
I don’t fully identify with the second Mrs de Winter either, so I’m not in her camp. She’s confounding to me and frustrating. We have just scratched the surface where. Basically, if we were going to go by the pages of this large book on page 14. So we have a few things we have to discuss. Let’s do it in another episode.

Sarah Harrison  44:03
Let’s do it. We hope you’ll return, listeners, to talk more about Rebecca, Manderley, and the second Mrs de Winter.

Carolyn Daughters  44:07
Shana Kelly is going to be back with us, and I would like to find out a little bit about your documentary work.

Sarah Harrison  44:14
I know we haven’t even got to dig into Shana yet, so we’re going to do that in the next episode. And then in upcoming episode, we’ll talk more about Manderley and get to finally let loose on film adaptation versions and how they compare to the book. So thanks, Shana. We hope to see you in the next episode.

Carolyn Daughters  44:31
Okay, guys, Shana might just leave the building. We don’t know. 🙂

Sarah Harrison 
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Carolyn Daughters
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Sarah Harrison
We want to thank you for joining us on our journey through the history of mystery. We absolutely adore you. Until next time, stay mysterious.