On the threshold of dread: the menace of Manderley
Fear of crossing thresholds is central to Daphne du Maurier’s unsettling Gothic novel Rebecca, a new film version of which has just been released
‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.’ The famous opening sentence of Rebecca is pregnant with the importance and effect of the house called Manderley, the setting for Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel, a best-seller which has sold millions of copies and has never been out of print.
Rebecca has been adapted numerous times for theatrical performance, but surprisingly only once as cinema: the Academy Award-winning 1940 version directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine. As for television, there have been more than a dozen adaptations, both as TV movies and as serialisations. Now there’s the Netflix adaptation, released on October 21, 2020. But it’s readers of the novel I hope to interest here.
That opening line — whether the unnamed narrator means she had yet another dream about Manderley in a whole series, or that she had a single dream in which she returned — indicates the absolute centrality of the house as a metaphor for its previous occupant, Rebecca, whose name, of Hebrew origin, is particularly well chosen by the author. It means to tie, or to bind — the exact effect which Rebecca has on Maxim and the second Mrs de Winter…
