Daphne du Maurier’s Women Who Can’t Speak for Themselves: My Cousin Rachel and Rebecca

*Spoilers

I ventured to the theater to see Roger Michell’s “My Cousin Rachel,” which looked intriguing enough, and it was—at least enough to get me to the library for the 1951 novel. My public library has, apparently, had the book since about the time it was published. This is the old, rather yellowed copy I read. Du Maurier published this more than a decade after Rebecca, the only other of her books that I have read. Both are gothic, suspense stories centered on titular female characters who don’t speak for themselves; both raise important questions about the characters and morality of those women: Was Rebecca the beautiful, charming, and much-loved woman that some characters portray her as, a victim of her husband, OR was she a cruel, nasty, and completely self-centered manipulator of her husband and everyone else? Was Rachel a natural widow, sad upon her husband’s death, a spend-thrift, but otherwise good person, OR was she a calculating poisoner, out for the Ashley fortune by any means necessary? According to Liz Hoggard, writing in The Independent in 2006, with regard to Rebecca, although the book was billed as a romance, “du Maurier insisted she wanted to write about the balance of power of marriage, and not about love.” Rachel digs into similar power issues between men and women in relationship. Both books deal with romantic and sexual obsession; both are narrated by characters so intimately involved in the stories, who experience such emotion for the titular women that we have to question their reliability and their interpretation of events; and both raise questions about the “appropriate” way for women to behave in patriarchal male/female relationships. What sort of female behavior is rewarded, and what sort is punished?

One thing these Du Maurier novels can do for readers is raise questions in our minds about female characters who don’t get to speak for themselves. When Philip Ashley’s voice is the only one to which we are granted access, Rachel is constructed for us by him. We do get to hear what other characters say about her, but not directly. Philip reports those comments, and we can wonder how selective and objective his memory is, or more accurately, we can wonder in which ways his memory is selective and subjective; it is the nature of memory to be so. He also tells us about Ambrose’s letters, but even he questions whether the letters are accurate representations or the product of his cousin’s diseased brain.

Philip never dons a cloak of objectivity. He is frank with readers about his bias against Rachel prior to meeting her and purportedly honest about his feelings as his obsession grows. He lets us know from the beginning that he, too, cannot answer the question with which readers are left at the end: “Was Rachel innocent or guilty” (9)? But, by framing it as a question of guilt or innocence, our narrator shapes the frame through which we will view the story. Rather than ask if she was victim or perpetrator, kind or cruel, faithful or faithless, strong or weak—all aspects of her character that someone might wonder about, given what Philip does relate to us—he frames this in criminal terms, as if she is on trial. Like Tom Jenkyn, who killed his wife and was hanged outside at Four Turnings, his corpse left out as an example for the child Philip and younger Ambrose, Rachel is constructed as the potential criminal from the beginning: was she innocent or guilty of poisoning both Ambrose and Philip? Philip doesn’t know. We don’t know. But what we do know at the end—presuming Philip is describing his actions accurately—is that Philip sent Rachel to what would likely be her death and just sat beside her as she died.

He does end with a focus on hanging men at Four Turnings, just as he began: “They used to hang men at Four Turnings in the old days. Not any more, though” (288). So, we are to think about a man who twenty years before had hanged for killing a woman, while this man would not. Yet because of the framing of the story at the beginning, we are brought to that final page with the question of Rachel’s innocence or guilt foremost. We cannot know for sure. But, regardless of her innocence or guilt as a poisoner, she paid for her “crime” against Philip: not giving herself to him after the one night. He will not pay for anything with his life.

Victorian novels often ended with the “virtuous” woman “rewarded” with marriage, and the “sinful” woman—usually meaning unchaste—being punished with death. In this novel, Rachel is unchaste and punished with death. Yet du Maurier creates the novel, with its first-person narrator who is unsure of the truth and perhaps a bit free with it, so that we cannot really know if she is deserving of punishment or not. Our narrator, the man who constructs our window into the world of the novel, is more than fine with Rachel being unchaste, if only she would then have married him and agreed to sex with no one else but him for the rest of their lives. Marriage wouldn’t be a reward for past chastity, but a means of managing her future chastity. Her death isn’t a punishment for sex with a man not her husband; it is a punishment for not wanting to continue having sex with that man. Interestingly, the rewarding/punishing force here is not a supposedly impersonal fate, or a metaphor for the divine; it is the imperfect first-person narrator who knows that the forces of justice no longer “hang men at Four Turnings” for killing a woman. This is most definitely, like Rebecca, a reflection on power relations between men and women. Du Maurier gets us to wonder—with Philip—how much power Rachel really has over her husbands and Philip. Is it the ultimate power of life and death?

Yet, when it comes down to it at the end, she is just another woman killed by a jealous, suspicious, and possessive man. Like Max de Winter killed Rebecca, like Tom Jenkyn killed his wife. She is never allowed—like Rebecca—to speak her story. And that’s what makes these books gothic horror, more than romance. Du Maurier draws for us pictures of two women who cannot speak for themselves—and then meet tragic ends. Their names are central to the stories, but their voices are silent. And, she draws for us a third woman, the second Mrs. de Winter, who narrates Rebecca, but has no name. In traditional Victorian novel structure, she is the virtuous one rewarded with marriage. But, rewarded for what? Is she virtuous, or merely naïve enough to serve Max’s purposes? At what cost does her marriage come? When her husband tells her that he killed his first wife, she is only relieved that he didn’t love Rebecca. After Max wins her allegiance, their marriage without the first wife haunting them truly begins. What virtuous basis for marriage is this? Again, du Maurier offers what can seem on the surface to be a romance, but instead can be read as critique of how patriarchal men can get away with murder and demand unreasonable and immoral things in return for their love. This is powerful feminist story-telling.