You Love to See It: Rebecca (Patreon)

 EDIT: A housekeeper, I have been informed, is always called "Mrs" whether or not she's married.

“I'd stand behind her,” Mrs. Danvers whispers, her normally glacial features alight with something between delirium and greedy adoration as she mimes the act of brushing the nameless second Mrs. de Winter’s hair, “like this, and brush away for twenty minutes at a time.” Then the manic fixation begins to drain away, the light fading from her eyes as she straightens up. “And then she would say, ‘Good night, Danny,’” she continues, her voice subdued, trailing off, “and step into her bed.” In those last eight words, actress Judith Anderson communicates an entire life of quiet little heartbreaks, a litany of thoughtless rejections obsessed over and fetishized until they became an attachment so powerful it outlived its object and dragged the august bulk of Manderley down into hell rather than relinquish it to base reality.

We can imagine this woman, Mrs. Danvers, who must have been married at one time but of whose husband no mention is made, waiting up until dawn for her mistress. We can imagine the thousand ways she nearly touched Rebecca’s pale, bare skin. A brush gliding through lustrous black hair. A lace negligee through which the other woman’s naked body must surely have been visible. A soft fur once worn by the dead woman pressed first against her cheek and then against the cheek of Maxim’s nameless second wife, a breathless, almost girlish flirtation, a child’s boast that she is loved and treasured. We can imagine the sight of Rebecca vanishing behind the hangings of her bed, and the hole in Danny’s heart that opens up around her absence. What dyke hasn’t watched her best friend turn away toward sleep or marriage or some other fleeting thing, knowing that she doesn’t carry fire for you the way you burn for her? Unable to keep from hoping that she might.

As my dear friend Julia Gfrörer pointed out to me after I showed her Rebecca for the first time, the titular lady of Manderley’s rooms are in the house’s western wing, facing the kingdom of the dead where the sun goes down each night. To see Mrs. Danvers glide through the diaphanous hangings which divide her mistress’s apartments, it’s easy to imagine her a visitor in death’s silent country. Those rooms, where the depth and nature of Danny’s obsession first becomes apparent, are both her place of power and her clearest expression of vulnerability. By the window overlooking the sea she nearly convinces the second Mrs. de Winter to leap to her death. In the gossamer softness of Rebecca’s undergarments she flaunts her intimacy with the departed woman’s body. She may as well whisper “I touched the things that touched her cunt.”

Outside of Manderley she is a small and frightened presence, overshadowed by the looming figures of men — with whom she is seldom framed in the house, and who never enter Rebecca’s rooms — and rendered faintly ridiculous by her bag and hat.

It’s during her one excursion outside of the manor that we see Danny’s certainty first crack. She comes as close as she will ever come, in words at least, to acknowledging that Rebecca cared no more for her than she did for any of her other lovers or intimates. “Love was a game to her,” she says fretfully when called upon to testify as to Rebecca’s state of mind. “It made her laugh, I tell you. She used to sit on her bed and rock with laughter at the lot of you.” The insult buckles midway through, Judith Anderson’s voice cracking in a grief-freighted admission that she knows Rebecca laughed at her, too, that she knows her mistress saw her love, her devotion, her obsession, and found them inconsequential, that what intimacy she had was the closeness of a pet, not of a person. The knowledge doesn’t save her. All her curdled and rejected love comes boiling out to give her sad delusions the seal of finality only total annihilation can bring. She becomes the rooms. The rooms become her. Burning wood piercing raw flesh. Coils of smoldering silk adrift on currents of hot air. A single initial, hand-stitched into a pillowcase, wrapped in the loving embrace of the flames.