![]() ![]() That sense of corrosive nostalgia is where du Maurier’s Rebecca starts, and an ideal adaptation of the novel would find a way to recreate that mood on film. Manderley, the object of her fetishistic obsession, is gone now. This is a story told by a sad, dry woman living a sad, dry life. You read the rest of Rebecca to find out what happened to Manderley, and you know that anything encountered after Manderley can only be a disappointment. What’s left now is only a sense of lost luxury and decay and corruption, of a once-great house gone dark and moldering. Gothic horror lives and dies by its elisions, by what cannot be said, and there is so much unspoken here. Then she goes on to describe the small, sad life she lives now in exile, and you know something awful must have happened for her to end up here. ![]() Rebecca, the 1938 gothic novel by Daphne du Maurier, has one of those perfect opening lines: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”Īs the first chapter continues, the narrator goes on to describe walking into the country house of Manderley: how it was once perfect and now is ruined, how it used to be hers to love and luxuriate in. ![]()
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