I saw Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca for the first time when I was in middle school, long before I had anything resembling good taste. The memory of the film stuck with me enough to later put it on my “Facebook favorites” when I first signed up for the site a little less than halfway through college. I read Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre for the first time when I was a junior in high school – not because it was required, but because I was one of those literary nerds or angsty fangirls (take your pick) who devoured it for its entertainment value. At the time, I didn’t make the connection between them. But Jane’s drawing and Rochester’s mysteriousness seemed awfully familiar.
Rebecca, listed on the American Film Institute’s Top 100 best movies and consistently hovering in the Internet Movie Database’s user-voted Top 250, is most directly based on Daphne DuMaurier’s 1938 novel of the same name. The novel, in turn, was inspired by Jane Eyre.
In terms of simple plot and character similarities, the unnamed narrator – like Jane Eyre – is a much-maligned young woman who marries a brooding, rich older man with a dark past. The scene where the nameless narrator meets Maxim DeWinter for the first time while dissuading him from committing suicide echoes Jane Eyre where the title character helps Rochester get on his horse. Both female protagonists come at odds with a disturbing servant; while Grace Poole in the original Jane Eyre is only a MacGuffin, Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca is truly evil. The mysterious and somewhat spooky house is haunted by a forbidden room and the husband’s past marriage – to Bertha the madwoman in the original Jane Eyre, and to the title character in Rebecca. The first Mrs. De Winter serves as a conglomeration of Bertha, Blanche, and Celine Varens. Like Bertha, she turns up as a plot point to be a legal impediment to the main characters’ union. Both stories end with the mansion destroyed by fire.
One of the most important aspect of film adaptations, however, is to recreate the feel of the original source material. Rebecca won Best Picture at the 13th Academy Awards along with Best Black and White Cinematography for George Barnes’s work. (As an interesting aside, it was also nominated for best Black and White Art Direction, but lost to Pride and Prejudice.) Like the previous year’s Wuthering Heights, it technically had the option of using color, but it was a story best told in haunting shades of gray. And Alfred Hitchcock, the “master of suspense” whose films are known for atmospheric style, mystery, and sexual tension, was a great match to direct a story inspired by Jane Eyre. Joan Fontaine, Laurence Olivier, and Judith Anderson – in their roles as the second Mrs. DeWinter, Maxim DeWinter, and Mrs. Danvers, respectively – are very convincing, and all received Oscar nominations for their acting.
Watching this film again for the first time in years, I remembered why I loved it so much. The atmosphere of smoke and fog takes the viewer into the gothic romance. The shot of waves crashing against the rocks below the cliff has become one of the iconic scenes of classic cinema, even parodied in Mel Brooks’ High Anxiety.
Laurence Olivier plays a tired and worn-out Rochester analogue – someone who wants true beauty and happiness but is trapped in the artificiality that comes with his social class. He does have a bit of what we would call an anger management problem, and he would probably tick off several of the warning signs on the Heartless Bitches’ Red Flags List. His relationship with his timid second wife is one of those Do-Not-Try-This-At-Home screen romances that are very convincing on film but would not look as good in real life. For all this, however, he never denigrates the woman whom others see as easy target to pick on. He loves her for herself, and they have great chemistry. This love is hidden behind a gruff and somewhat uptight surface, but at the same time it is very obvious and real. He is serious and haunted by his dark past, but nowhere near as witty as the original Rochester.
For that matter, the second Mrs. DeWinter is also less witty than Jane. She marks marks an even more significant departure from her inspiration. This is not to say she isn’t an interesting character. Her consistent strengths are having “kindness and sincerity and modesty,” as described in the film. She is the plain Everywoman who finds herself in a hostile new world. Her flaw is her timidity, which she eventually overcomes toward the end as she starts to assert herself: “I am Mrs. DeWinter now!” However, unlike Jane who places morality and the order of law above her feelings and loyalty to Mr. Rochester, Mrs. DeWinter follows along in the cover-up to save Maxim from the legal repercussions of Rebecca’s demise. She does not even actively collaborate – she is literally just along for the ride in this scene.
While Jane Eyre is the story of an already confident woman struggling to be recognized as herself – the title name – Rebecca is about a nameless woman trying not to be assimilated into the title name – someone else’s identity. When she comments that Monte Carlo is artificial, her employer Edith Van Hopper (a very loose equivalent of Mrs. Reed) chides her for being “too forward.” She speaks her mind, rather than saying what others want her to say or being what others want her to be. Like Jane, she is an artist, and she sees her husband for who he really is. Maxim finds her sketching him in one scene, similar to the famous “Do you find me attractive” exchange in the original Charlotte Bronte novel.
The DeWinter mansion Manderley, like Thornfield Hall, is “haunted” by the first wife. Unlike Bertha, though, Rebecca is no secret. Mrs. Danvers is very protective of the first wife’s memory, haunting Joan Fontaine’s character to the point of tempting her to suicide in one scene. Like Blanche Ingram in the original, the late Rebecca serves as a superficially beautiful foil to the protagonist, prompting her to compare herself negatively against her rival. The visually overwhelming film captures the subtext of Jane Eyre where the title character loves Rochester while knowing his past full of glamorous women – the painful awareness that she is apparently not his “type.” Rebecca is the ideal woman contemporary to the film’s era, with “breeding, brains, and beauty,” yet “incapable of love or tenderness or decency.” Hitchcock and DeMaurier's interpretation of Jane Eyre is pitting the real woman against the ideal woman.
Film versions of Jane Eyre have tended to either over-emphasize the gothic suspense elements over characters (like the 1944 version), or focus on the romance and beauty while playing down the suspense and horror (like the 1996 version). Except for the noticeable lack of a consistently active protagonist, ironically, Rebecca captures the feel of Jane Eyre better than any direct adaptation.
Sources:
Daphne Du Maurier Society (http://www.dumaurier.org)
Internet Movie Database
Sparknotes
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