Rebecca: A Mansion Movie Overview
[message type=”simple” bg_color=”#EEEEEE” color=”#333333″]The Setting as the Star of the Story
Daphne du Maurier’s best selling novel, Rebecca, was lovingly brought to the screen by producer, David O. Selznick, on the heals of heels of his huge success as the producer of Gone with the Wind. It was director Alfred Hitchcock’s first American film. It won an Academy award for Best Picture of the Year and Best Cinematography. “Manderley” functions as a star of Rebecca a well as it setting. It is a major character in the story. Hitchcock, speaking of the film years later, said it was really not his film, “the mansion was the star.” He said “In a sense it is the story of a house.” (Hitchcock/Truffaut by Francois Truffaut) Selznick also always believed that Manderley was one of the important, if not the most important, characters in the story.
The mansion’s role as a character is evidenced by its overarching position in the plot itself as well as being the film’s dominant setting. We see an image of Manderley at the very beginning of the film, we see it at the end. We see its roadways, its woods, its seaside vistas. We see it from the outside, from the inside and from room to room. We walk through its corridors and beyond its closed doors. We see it in daylight, by moonlight and at dawn. We see it though rain and basking in sunshine; we see it in flames and we see it in ruin. Even when it is not shown on the screen, it is talked about by other characters in the film as an object of curiosity, admiration and fascination. It is an architectural space that commands the narrative, both in its exterior facades and its interior floor plan and design.
[/message] [message type=”simple” bg_color=”#EEEEEE” color=”#333333″]The Mansion as a Symbolic Space
Beyond its physical appearance and its presence as the main setting of the story, Manderley is a psychological and symbolic space. A great house is more than stones and mortar. It is more than a house. It is not merely an address; it often has a name to distinguish it from other places or described in association with its prominent owner. It is designed as something exceptional, something out of the ordinary. It is created as opposed to just being built and intended to both impress and to intimidate. It is architecturally complex and made of the finest materials available; its interiors are both elaborate and intricate. It is a dominating presence whether viewed from the outside or experienced on the inside. It is bigger than life; its size overwhelms and dwarfs the visitor and the inhabitants enveloped within it. It is its own world – a luxurious man-created world, often isolated and separated from the rest of the world and populated by a specific set of inhabitants, its master or mistress and the household servants. It also represents family, heritage, tradition and history. If past generations have occupied it, it is an ancestral home, a family stronghold. It holds the story of their lives and deaths and their secrets. It is symbolic because it represents and manifests the family’s wealth, power, social standing; it is intended as a monument to the family’s importance.
[/message]The Mansion As the Personification of its Owner
The Manderley estate is the is family seat of a long line of de Winter ancestors dating back to the time of Anglo-Saxon King Ethelred the Unready who reigned from 979 – 1013 A.D. Maxim, the last of an on-going chain of patriarchal hereditary ownership, is the current master of Manderley. The great house, enlarged and evolved over the centuries, is a monument to the family’s long history. He represents the house and the house represents him.
Manderley also serves as a placeholder and stand-in for a missing character, its former mistress, Rebecca de Winter. We never see what Rebecca looks like, but her presence permeates Manderley. Despite Manderley being her husband’s family’s domain, Rebecca has somehow conquered and infused the house with her personality. Manderley is inexorably intertwined with Rebecca. She usurped it as her home. By the force of her personality, it remains in her possession. Her presence dominates the house even after death, to the extent that the house personifies her in the eyes of the other characters. What they and others connect with Manderley is her beauty and the balls she organized and hosted.
At the outset of the main action of the story we find Maxim de Winter in a self-imposed exile, longing to see his beloved Manderley again. Later we find out that he stayed married to an unfaithful Rebecca to prevent his family‘s name and home from being besmirched by gossip and scandal. We will learn that the confrontation that ended in Rebecca’s death was the result of Rebecca’s allegation of being pregnant by another man and her ultimate threat that the heir to his beloved Manderley would be Rebecca’s illegitimate child.
The Mansion as Home
Manderley is Maxim’s beloved and cherished childhood and adult home. As Manderley’s current heir, Maxim de Winter is responsible for its maintenance and preservation; he is its steward and defender. For an aristocrat family lineage and home are of over-riding importance. He has no purpose in life other than carrying on the family name and managing the estate’s tenants and what they produce on the land. Maxim de Winter’s home is his identity.
The heroine of the story is the young, non-aristocratic woman whom Maxim meets and marries after a brief holiday courtship. To our homeless orphaned heroine marriage to Maxim as the second Mrs. De Winter holds the prospect of Manderley as home, a fantasy home, a dream home, and storybook home to makeup and replace the forever lost home of her childhood.
Rebecca, Maxim’s deceased first wife, had implanted her personal servant, Mrs. Danvers, at Manderley and elevated her to be head housekeeper at Manderley. She seems to reign over the old de Winter retainers, the house’s ancestral family of servants. To Mrs. Danvers, taking are of Manderley represents a way of keeping the memory of Rebecca alive; she has turned the mansion into a shrine dedicated to her former mistress by keeping things exactly as Rebecca left them. To Danvers and the other servants who live and work there, Manderley is also their home. Nevertheless, in the end Mrs. Danvers will try to destroy it, rather than let it be enjoyed by Maxim and his second wife.
An Outsider Enters the Mansion
The Audience Enters the Story with the Outsider
The Hero’s Real Journey Begins
The outsider hero’s physical journey from a staring place somewhere in the ordinary everyday world to the rarified world inside the mansion is just a small part of the overall story. In mansion movies, the real hero’s journey is the emotional and psychological one that begins once the mansion is entered. Mansion movie stories are told from the point of view of an outsider, usually a stranger but sometimes an estranged family member or sometimes a servant who wants to cross ranks and become a member of the family. These films narrative emphasis on being the outsider’s story and the special use of the camera in their filming techniques that bring the audience into the story as involved visitors, rather than mere observers of the actions taking place on the screen.
These differences distinguish the mansion movie from a drawing room comedy or drama, where the actions and antics of a group of wealthy people are observed from an indifferent or emotional distance by the average person in the movie-going audience. Firstly, it is natural that the general movie audience can more easily identify with an outsider, than relate the privileged persons inhabiting the mansion. Secondly, it is the particular use of the camera, specifically the forward moving camera, which functions in leading the audience into the mansion’s interior and into the story, and in sharing the outsider’s experience. Moreover, classical drawing room productions in films and on television are often mostly filmed from one main direction, simulating a live theater set- up with an imaginary and invisible fourth wall, in other words the front wall on a stage that divides the characters from the audience.
In mansion movies we first approach and see the exterior of the mansion in that way when the camera pans across its front façade. But when inside the mansion -whether the scene is being shot at a remote location site or in a studio sound stage with a custom built interior set – the camera moves in all directions, turning around within the room being filmed, so that we the audience see the interior spaces from the variety of perspectives we would have had if we, like the characters, were actually in the room and looking around it. This way we see the through the fourth wall of where the action takes place, but see as well through the three other walls.
Mansion movies almost always revolve around “cross-class” or “inter-class” relationships, depicting romantic encounters, attachments or marriages between people with unequal class positions. Someone from the working or middle class falls in love with somebody from high society or as occurs in this English story, a presumed aristocrat. In his book, Class, Language, and American Film Comedy, Christopher Beach defines “class as a system by which social division are created, delineated and maintained” despite our culture’s having “less historically determined and less rigidly imposed” class boundaries. The plots of mansion movies depict the self-consciousness and discomfort felt by the person of lesser status entering the hitherto unknown and closed-off territory of the privileged elite. Being thrust from an ordinary life and background into a hierarchical and highly mannered way of life feels quite similar to a young child let out of the nursery and learning to navigate in an adult world. Being naïve or just not knowing what to say and how to behave in such an environment makes one feel small, timid and vulnerable.
To the extent we the audience identify with the heroine in watching her emotional reactions to being at Manderley, her authoritative husband and her efforts to adapt to her new marital home, we in some way are reminded of our own childhood memories of home and family in growing up. Her feeling small, naive, inept, disoriented inside the stately rooms of the mansion where everyone else knows their way around magnifies the sense of being a lost child in the grown up’s exclusive territory, of wanting to belong but feeling out of one’s league. The wanting to belong, to be accepted, to fit in is all the more magnified because our heroine, although not a child, is an orphan without a family home to which to return. She will face challenges and crises in adjusting to marriage to Maxim in general and ultimately, in facing the family secrets or other truths uncovered and revealed, her soul and spirit will be forever transformed.
As discussed above, despite its size, its elegance, its luxury and its formality, Manderley -like other mansions in movies – represents family and home. Beyond all the aspects of the mansion being a grand palatial building, mansions in mansion-centered movies embody the underlying concept of “home writ large.” By this I mean it represents both to the main characters and to us in the audience the vicissitudes of human condition of longing for home or one’s homeland and perhaps reliving the memories of the home of childhood, mourning a lost home or a fantasy home that never was.
The Literary Lineage of the Mansion Movie
Because of its English literary lineage through the novel’s author, Daphne Du Maurier, the film also serves a bridge across the Atlantic between the legendary mansions from the annals of English Gothic fiction starting in the 1864 with Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, followed at the end of the 18th century by Anne Radcliff’s Mysteries of Udolpho and other stories, which were in turn parodied in early 19th century Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. In the mid 19th century Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, a haunting novel although cast as by its author as “an autobiography,” captured its readers’ imagination in its governess heroine’s experiences at Thornfield, the Gothic manor and her melodramatic relationship with Rochester, its mysterious owner. Gothic style romance novels flourished in the Victorian period. Toward the end of the 19th century many major authors turned their writing toward the macabre and horror branch of the Gothic fiction genre. In the 20th century Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca stands out among countless lesser stories in the still popular gothic romance branch of the genre. When feature motion pictures started to adapt such classic novels, the richly described literary manor house settings became visually materialized on the screen. Although many mansion movies had been produced before the making of Rebecca, its magnificent styling and directional tension in its representation of a mansion on film as presented in Rebecca seems to have fused the iconography of “mansion-ness” for most Hollywood films made thereafter.