Rebecca (1940)

 

I keep her underwear on this side. They were made specially for her by the nuns in the convent of St Clare. 

A scene from Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940). The new Mrs. De Winter is toured through the off-limits, kept-as-it-was bedroom of her predecessor, the first -- and late -- Mrs De Winter, by Manderley house mistress Miss Danvers. 

Rebecca would be a horror film if not for an ever-present musical score that attempts to regulate our emotions with overflowing dollops of glee. A horror in itself, but not a horror of Hitchcock's choosing. More likely the score was applied independent of him, by the film's backers. Anything but frighten 1940 movie-goers who had enough to be frightened of, what with German bombs falling on their cities and towns.

In a long ago post I mentioned Ms. Schwartz's ENGLISH 11: NOVEL class, where we read Hardy's the Mayor of Casterbridge (1886). The other novel in that class was Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca (1938). An interesting decision to pair these two books. Hardy's novel is subtitled the Life and Death of a Man of Character, whom we follow from a drunken mistake he made at a roadside inn to his dying wish years later: that he be forgotten. In the un-subtitled Rebecca, we are given two characters to consider: the first is a "great woman" in the making (it was Simone de Beauvoir who once wrote: "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman"); the second is the unraveling of a "perfect" woman who we never meet, but over the course of the book and the film, are encouraged to despise.