Welcome back, goblins and ghouls, to the fourth annual installment of SpookyJawn! Each October, our love of horror fully rises from its slumber and takes over the MovieJawn website for all things spooky! This year, we are looking at ghosts, goblins, ghouls, goths, and grotesqueries, week by week they will march over the falling leaves to leave you with chills, frights, and spooky delights! Read all of the articles here!

by Melissa Strong, Staff Writer

MJ’s Ghost Week is a great time to revisit the Alfred Hitchcock classic Rebecca (1940). The titular Rebecca is, after all, a ghost, the late first wife of the protagonist’s husband. The dead woman gets top billing. The more her successor learns about Rebecca, the more she fears she will never measure up. Rebecca’s shadow haunts her, even though the “ghost” never appears. Adapted from Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel–which was named England’s favorite book from the last 225 years in 2017, beating out To Kill a Mockingbird and Pride and Prejudice–Rebecca was the director’s first movie after his move to Hollywood. It is representative of his earlier work and a great all-around thriller. Such enduring popularity has lent itself to Hitchcock’s Rebecca, a timeless film that remains the best version of the beloved novel. Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine star as Maxim de Winter and the second Mrs. de Winter. Judith Anderson gives an unforgettable performance as Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper obsessed with Rebecca.

Rebecca also establishes Hitchcock’s coded depictions of queer people, which he returned to in films like Rope (1948), Strangers on a Train (1951), and Psycho (1960). I wrote a paper about this in college for a Hitchcock class that somehow satisfied a world literature requirement. Even in my 20s, I noticed the director’s gay coding and its relationship to his films’ suspense, violence, and surprises: “Hitchcock intentionally used the stereotypes and misinformation of his era,” Scott Badman and Connie Russel Hosier observe, to “manipulate the audience’s reaction.” Often Hitch does this by “highlighting the villainy of his villains.” These problematic portrayals reflect the homophobia of the times, which we cannot afford to forget. Moreover, Hitchcock’s gay coding shaped filmmaking. Its influence can be seen in movies like Silence of the Lambs (1991) and The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999). 

Yet, Mrs. Danvers stands alone as Hitchcock’s only lesbian character. Equally important, Hitchcock’s portrayal of her was intentional. He changed the script in ways that limited information about her, and Hitch made Mrs. Danvers much younger by casting Anderson, then in her early 40s. These changes alter the motives of her obsession with Rebecca. In the novel, the woman Rebecca calls “Danny” is old enough to be her mother, and du Maurier suggests she feels jealous. Casting Anderson in the movie makes Mrs. Danvers a peer close to Rebecca’s age. In doing so, Hitchcock removes the possibility of maternal jealousy, replacing it with the suggestion of romantic and sexual obsession.

There is no mention of a Mr. Danvers because likely he never existed. On Downton Abbey, Mrs. Hughes explains that “Mrs.” is an honorific for housekeepers of great manors. But Mrs. Danvers’s life revolves around Rebecca, not the manor. She maintains Rebecca’s bedroom as a shrine and visits to fondle the furs and sheer lingerie. Worse, Mrs. Danvers tortures the second Mrs. de Winter with her devotion to Rebecca. The housekeeper puts out handkerchiefs and stationery monogrammed with the dead woman’s initials. Every conversation she has with the protagonist is about Rebecca: how Rebecca did things, how wonderful and special she was, and how little the second Mrs. de Winter resembles her. After tricking her into upsetting Maxim, Mrs. Danvers even recommends that the protagonist consider suicide.

I was a fan of Rebecca even before taking the Hitchcock class. I saw it multiple times in my formative years, watching with my mother. Movies with female protagonists excited me, and I didn’t mind black and white. Looking back, I likely felt drawn to the young protagonist’s isolation, as she is overwhelmed and made helpless. I felt enchanted by her whirlwind courtship and abrupt marriage to Max de Winter. There is a hint of the fairy tale about the relationship, and someone even refers to the second Mrs. de Winter as Cinderella. After all, she was an orphan working as a “paid companion” when a wealthy, handsome, and powerful man at least 15 years older swept her off her feet and brought her home to his estate. Girls are conditioned to find such things exciting and romantic, when in reality they tend to be sketchy at best. Nobody taught me any different.

As a case in point, Maxim hides the truth about Rebecca from his new wife. Rather, he maintains multiple lies of omission. It’s completely self-centered, and he even admits to her that marrying her might have been selfish. He wants a fresh start with someone completely different from Rebecca, which makes sense, and he deserves it. But lying to get what you want–especially from people who love you–is not okay, bruh. Seeing the protagonist fall apart because she doesn’t know Maxim hated Rebecca makes his behavior even more unacceptable. This seems gaslighty in 2024, adding a haunting layer on a rewatch.

Manderly, the de Winter mansion, is like Downton Abbey, except the servants openly mock the lady of the house. They adored the beautiful, charming, and free-spirited Rebecca, and the second Mrs. de Winter is nothing like her. Rebecca does not make clear whether the staff know that Maxim chose her for precisely those reasons. However, Mrs. Danvers knows, and her devotion to Rebecca drives her to torment the protagonist. Maxim’s failure to intervene is troubling. Manly business matters keep him busy, and he is so egocentric he thinks he can conceal the truth from his wife despite taking her to the same home he shared with Rebecca. He even kept all the servants he and Rebecca had. And why the inaction? Why doesn’t Max throw out Rebecca’s underwear so Mrs. Danvers cannot put it in his new wife’s face? Why doesn’t he insist that his employee stop acting creepy? Or fire her?

Maxim resembles Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre, the 1847 classic by Charlotte Brontë, which Rebecca parallels. Some regard du Maurier’s novel as an adaptation of Brontë’s, though the author disagrees. She did not intend to invoke Jane Eyre, in which a young orphan finds out that the rich older man who proposed to her already has a sham marriage with a psychotic woman living in the attic. Oopsie! (Or did she  actually suffer from exploitation, not mental illness? See Jean Rhys’s 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea and the 1993 movie adaptation.) Rebecca is like a spectral retelling of Jane Eyre where the madwoman in the attic becomes the ghost of the first Mrs. de Winter.

From echoes of Jane Eyre to Hitchcock’s only gay woman, there is a lot going on in Rebecca. It keeps the movie interesting nearly 85 years after its release. If you have not seen it yet, give it a watch! Let me know what you think of Mrs. Danvers, how the protagonist compares with Jane Eyre, and how her romance with Maxim measures up in the twenty-first century.