Madwomen in Gothic Mansions: Rebecca and Jane Eyre

I read a comment recently that Daphne du Maurier’s classic gothic horror story Rebecca is the same story as Jane Eyre. So I had to think about that and catalog the similarities that struck me.

Name

Jane Eyre is a plain, short name, like her character appears to be physically, and it is indicative of her nature as well. The narrator of Rebecca never reveals her name. She implies that it is one often misspelt, for she comments that Maxim de Winter spelled it correctly on his note to her in Monte Carlo. Her lack of a name is significant: it symbolizes her lack of her own identity, about which more later.

Point of View

In both novels, the narrator is a woman whose story is told, but Jane is the eponymous subject of the title, while the Rebecca of the other title is the dead first wife. As I said, the unnamed narrator reveals her story, but not so much as of Rebecca.

Personal Appearance

Jane Eyre is a very short woman, small and childlike. She is between 18 and 20 years old through most of the novel, though we meet her when she is about 10 at the very beginning. Her hair is plain, her face is plain, and her figure is not described as attractive, especially when compared to Blanche Ingram. Mr. Rochester says she is “almost pretty” the morning after their engagement. Her choice in clothes is very plain and severe.

ANonymous Narrator (hereinafter Ann for my convenience) is about 21 and has a thin figure. She considers her face plain, although Maxim de Winter seems to think her attractive, as do others around her. She has a childlike, innocent quality in her expression that is lost later on. She cares little about clothes and wears any old thing until the episode of the masked ball.

Background

Both are orphans and as young adults enter humiliating positions.

Jane Eyre was orphaned when she was a baby and was reared by her maternal uncle and his wife, the Reeds. Mrs. Reed resents her and treats her severely after Mr. Reed’s death. She is sent to a school where she is mistreated, and she becomes a teacher, and then a governess.

Ann lost her mother some years back and her father only a year or two back, and she subsequently advertised to become a paid companion to Mrs. de Hopper of New York, who treats her condescendingly to the point of humiliation.

Personality

Though shy, Jane Eyre is strong-willed and resilient. Mistreated to the point of abuse, she never becomes a victim, even though Rochester could be said to be abusive before he is humbled through circumstances and they marry. Jane is firm in her strong values and stands up for herself and her own best interests against both Rochester and St. John Rivers.

Ann is shy, dreamy to the point of escaping reality, romantic, sensitive, and unaware of either her effect on others or of their attitudes toward her. She shares little of herself, nor does she ask for information even when it’s in her best interest to do so. She is unassertive, submissive, and reacts to Maxim de Winter’s abusive tendencies by adopting a strategy of anticipating what will set him off and avoiding it at all costs, a typical abuse victim’s pattern of behavior. She seems to have no desires or thoughts of her own except in reaction to Maxim de Winter. She has no sense of right and wrong except as it relates to loving Maxim de Winter and gaining his love in return.

Red

In her childhood, Jane Eyre is punished by being locked into the Red Room, where her uncle Reed died. Red is symbolic of fear and terror. In Rebecca, Ann calls attention repeatedly to the red rhododendrons, overgrown and menacing, outside the morning room where she feels forced to sit after breakfast, day after day.

The Mansion

Thornfield is the ancestral home of Edward Fairfax Rochester. It is set among the rather bleak Yorkshire moors, and it has lush gardens surrounding the house. The third floor and the attics are forbidden to visit. Or at least strongly discouraged, as that’s where the madwoman is kept secretly.

Manderley is the ancestral home of Maximilian de Winter. It is set on the Cornish coast and has mysterious woods leading down to the boathouse and its cove, but it has an appealing valley called the Happy Valley leading to an adjacent cove. The drive from the lodge to the house is three miles long and overgrown in a menacing way. The house east wing is where the couple have their rooms. The west wing is supposedly shut up and if not forbidden, then certainly discouraged by Maxim de Winter, though Mrs Danvers encourages Ann to explore and discover more about Rebecca there. (Why Maxim de Winter did not order the servants to completely clear out the west wing at the same time as he sent the orders to renovate the east wing for himself and his new bride, remains a mystery. Guilty conscience?)

Art

Jane Eyre learned to draw and paint at her school, and she is proficient. A couple of her paintings are described in detail in the novel, both wild and romantic in nature, with dark colors and stormy themes that reflect aspects of her own nature and of her life experiences. She frequently takes her things out into the grounds at Thornfield when she becomes the governess there, for she finds much inspiration. In Rebecca, on the other hand, Ann is said to have an interest in art and is given plenty of supplies that she even takes out into the grounds at Manderley, but she does not produce anything outside of the house. Inside the house, she makes a few sketches that she tears up and tries to throw away, and she is mortified by Mrs Danvers bringing them back and questioning whether they were meant to have been discarded.

The Love Interest

Both young women fall in love with the first men they meet. Neither really knows the man.

Jane Eyre falls in love against all sense, since Edward Rochester mistreats her, later telling her he was only trying to make her jealous. There is much conversation between the two, and Jane requires to be convinced of his love for her. With the first wife on the prowl at night, Jane suffers from nightmares and a feeling of being haunted. Then when Jane finds out about the first wife and Rochester’s attempt to commit bigamy, she rejects him. She further rejects his proposal that they run away and live together as if they were married. She leaves him. When she meets a more honorable man, St. John Rivers, who proposes to her, she refuses to marry him because she is still in love with Rochester. She goes to find Rochester, discovers he is now widowed, and takes the initiative in courting and proposing to him. They live very happily together.

By contrast, while Ann similarly falls in love with Maxim de Winter despite his almost running off a cliff on purpose with her in the car, she knows little more about him than that his first wife died. Their courtship consists of two weeks of day trips around Monte Carlo and dinners together, but we get no descriptions of them growing close, no idea of their discovering each other’s character or personality. From Ann’s daydreams and thoughts about him, we know they do not communicate much. The proposal is a complete surprise to her, and it seems very impersonal rather than romantic. The few descriptions we learn about their honeymoon are only that the bride feels happy and that the bridegroom looks almost young (he is 42) and seems relaxed. Their marriage after arriving at Manderley is filled with the haunting presence of Rebecca everywhere, leading to considerable tension between them, with her becoming more and more obsessed with a need to become like Rebecca, since that is what she imagines Maxim wants. When she is surprised into knocking over a china figurine and breaking it, she feels somehow that she will be punished because it was Rebecca’s, and she hides the pieces, which leads to an awkward and uncomfortable scene wherein she is forced to confess to Maxim to keep others from being punished, and that leads to her husband treating her like an errant child. When Mrs Danvers leads her into ordering the exact same ball costume that Rebecca wore to the last masked ball, she reacts to everyone’s horror at seeing her by assuming she herself is to blame and that her husband certainly blames her. Her morbid thoughts are out of all proportion to the mistake, and Maxim’s silent reaction contributes to the feeling of a gulf between them. It never occurs to her to tell him Mrs Danvers suggested the costume, but by this time their pattern of not communicating is pretty well set. When she finds out that he murdered Rebecca, she thinks only that it proves he never loved Rebecca and must instead love her after all. No moral principles here! She turns her attention to the lies they must tell and the truths they must withhold to get away with it, which is simply more of the pattern of not communicating, but this time it is them against the rest of the world. She cares for neither truth, nor principle, nor morality, nor law. She uses language to change the crime description from “murder” with the blame on Maxim, to “suicide by husband” so that the blame is on Rebecca.

The First Wife

In Jane Eyre the mansion is haunted by Bertha Rochester, the madwoman in the attic, who frequently escapes and wreaks havoc on the narrator’s psyche until Jane finds out the woman is not a ghost or demon. Bertha Mason was a West Indies beauty from a family with a history of genetic insanity. The fact of the insanity is deliberately kept from Rochester until after the wedding. After Rochester marries her, he discovers she is vulgar, perhaps an alcoholic, profligate and promiscuous, and of diminished mental capacity. He takes her to England, locks her up in the Thornfield attic, and hires a woman to guard her. But the woman, Grace Poole, is an alcoholic and Bertha frequently takes advantage of her stupor to steal the keys and escape. She sets fire to the house several times, the last time causing the entire place to burn, and she flings herself to her death from the roof, escaping her husband’s attempt to save her.

Rebecca’s presence is felt by the second wife to be everywhere, starting with the morning room where Mrs Danvers informs her she is expected to spend the time after breakfast. The room leading to it seems to the young bride to be imbued with Rebecca’s personality, and in the morning room, where every piece of furniture and decor, even the very stationery and pen in the writing desk, all were chosen by Rebecca, this sense feels very strong. Rebecca’s presence is also felt on the path through the woods to the boat cove where the boathouse is standing. The young dog wants to lead the second Mrs. de Winter on that path, which is the usual one for him, but Maxim takes them along the other fork through the Happy Valley instead. The dog persists in going to the usual cove, and his new mistress follows, despite her husband’s objections. Rebecca had converted the boathouse into a little love nest for herself and her lovers, though the young second wife does not catch on to the evidence and only knows her husband does not want her there and that it has Rebecca’s presence. But Rebecca’s presence is strongest in the west wing where Rebecca’s rooms were. When the young bride inadvertently goes there, Mrs Danvers at first seems jealous of her presence, but later she encourages the girl to look at Rebecca’s things and draw unflattering comparisons to herself. She even tries to convince her to jump out Rebecca’s window the morning after the masked ball, hypnotically telling her death would be better than a fruitless attempt to take Rebecca’s rightful place. However, that spell is broken and the young wife escapes the evil influence.
     The next thing is that Rebecca’s dead body is discovered in her sunken boat, and Maxim confesses to his wife to having shot her in the boathouse and put her into the boat, sailing it out to where he sunk it. His reason is that after their marriage, Rebecca let him know that she did not love him and intended to continue her independent lifestyle, being promiscuous, gambling, drinking, doing drugs, etc. Because Maxim has a horror of negative publicity, they agreed that Rebecca was free to live this way in London under a different name and to pretend to be the perfect wife and hostess while at Manderley. She broke the bargain by bringing one lover, her cousin Jack, to Manderley, and by attempting to seduce Maxim’s estate manager, Frank, and Maxim’s brother-in-law, Giles. While Maxim was away, she brought her evil friends to Manderley. In a showdown at the boathouse, she told Maxim she was pregnant and that she intended to force him to rear her child as his heir, though it cannot be his. Actually she had just discovered that she had incurable cancer and would die within months. She taunted Maxim to get him to shoot her, and died smiling, having won. (How she was supposed to “know” that she could make him do this, or even that he would have a gun with him, I’m not sure!)

Fire

Thornfield and Manderley are both destroyed by fire. Thornfield is set afire by Bertha Rochester, the first wife. Manderley is set afire probably by Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper/maid who was devoted to Rebecca de Winter.

Aftermath

In an epilogue, Jane Eyre Rochester reveals she has been married to Edward Rochester for ten years and they have a son. They are very happy together, and Edward is regaining the sight in one of his eyes. He is still partly a cripple, having lost part of one of his arms in the fire. He is a good husband to Jane, and everyone says that she has successfully tamed him. What she has actually done is exert her good influence on him to bring out the gentle side of his nature.

In the first three chapters of Rebecca, the narrator reveals that she and her husband have been married about ten years. They have no children. They live abroad on an island, in a very small hotel, and they try to stay anonymous. Her husband is an invalid whom she has to help to be physically comfortable, he having been injured in a fire. She says they are happy, but the evidence is against it. They still do not communicate much. She reads to him, but she has to stay away from reading him anything that reminds him of home. She likes reading about it but is content never to return. Yet, the novel opened with her nightmare of returning to Manderley.

Madness

Bertha Mason Rochester was insane. There is a lot of evidence that the second Mrs. de Winter is mentally ill as well. The amount and depth of her daydreams doesn’t seem to be normal, as they progress to the point that she has a hard time coming back to reality. She avoids interacting with people to the point that it interferes with her ability to carry out her responsibilities. She allows her imagination to carry her away into absurd terrors, such as that the rhododendrons are menacing. When she is tricked by Mrs Danvers into having the same costume created for herself as was made for Rebecca, the aftermath is that she sits on her bed in a catatonic state, and her sister-in-law and brother-in-law cannot bring her out of it; her only motivation to come out of it is to avoid allowing others to see plainly that she and her husband are not unified. When her husband goes away overnight, she feels a sense of freedom that appears to show that their relationship is unhealthy; and indeed it is, for she cannot be her own person with him around. When she finds out about the murder, instead of being shocked, she seems to drop all her childishness, reticence, diffidence, and uncertainty at once in favor of protecting Maxim from any consequences of his crime. But she cannot protect him from himself, and she reaps the dire consequences of her pattern of avoiding unpleasant reality.

Conclusion

Where Jane Eyre treats Mr Rochester’s revelation of a living first wife as a moral and legal impediment to their union, Mrs. de Winter treats the revelation of her husband’s having murdered his first wife as a catalyst to cementing their union, as a threat to that union if he is found out, and therefore it is something to be hidden. In this she acts as Mr Rochester proposed that Jane should act: run away with him and pretend to be married; the de Winters run away and pretend to be normal. Jane would not base her union on a lie; Mrs. de Winter will.

Where Edward Rochester tries his best to save his first wife’s life in the Thornfield fire, thus completing a character arc in refining himself to do a noble deed, Maxim de Winter meets his crisis by murdering his wife, trying to cover it up, and doing his best to erase the past. When her body is discovered, he confesses to his wife, and they repeat his earlier pattern of trying to cover it up and doing their best to erase the past. Thus the second Mrs. de Winter has had no effect whatever on the character of her husband. He is the very same person after marrying and living with her as he was before he met her. She remains a cypher in its earlier meaning: a zero, a naught.

Thus Rebecca is a nightmare version of Jane Eyre; it is as if the main character had lost herself, and the entire tale turns into one of madness and ultimately horror.