The fact that I loved him in a sick, hurt, desperate way, like a child or a dog, did not matter. It was not the sort of love he needed. He wanted something else that I could not give him, something he had had before.

I've been wanting to read Rebecca for years for a multitude of reasons, the biggest one being that the 1940 Hitchcock adaptation is one of my favorite movies of all time.

The way I see Rebecca—the way I've always seen Rebecca—is a perfect example of a Gothic mystery. It's one of the most claustrophobic books I've ever read, a half-insane dreamscape where the titular character is long dead and yet she haunts the narrative like she still has control of Manderly, and in a way, she does.

Manderly itself becomes a character throughout the novel, sometimes feeling more real than the narrator herself. Everything leads back to Manderly, and consequently, everything leads back to Rebecca. Because even though Manderly wasn't originally Rebecca's (it's Maxim's family estate, Maxim's decision to marry her that brings her to Manderly in the first place), she has all the power of Manderly to the point that she steals our narrator's name before she even meets Maxim.

Anyway, I have thoughts about this way this book is interpreted, specifically about people hating this book because of certain actions that take place.

Spoiler

I wouldn't think this would need to be spelled out, but apparently it does: Just because the ending unfolds the way it does, doesn't mean we as the readers are supposed to happily swallow it. Rebecca has been held up as a story of a young woman's coming-of-age, her own tale of achieving agency and self-actualization. Reading the book, especially those iconic first pages, I'm more convinced than ever that this is only because people are taking our narrator's words at face value.

Our narrator, this woman who isn't even afforded the decency of a name, one of the best cases of an unreliable narrator, is swallowed up by the story, by Maxim, by Manderly, by Rebecca. And yet she maintains this internal truth that through Maxim's revelations of Rebecca's murder, she has now become a woman overnight, someone who is finally worthy enough of being with him because she is now older, more mature, more suited to carry this burden with him so he doesn't shoulder it alone.

And the whole time the narrator saying this is the same one who was begging in her internal monologue for some insight to his mind so she can understand him better, so she can feel like she isn't going crazy, some reminder that he still loves her. The recurring theme of dog comparisons (RIP the second Mrs. de Winter, you would have loved Mitski and Roman Roy) suddenly shifts from her to Maxim when he places himself in her hands and asks for comfort.

It's honestly wild to see people take this book at face value when our narrator says she feels like a true woman now or when she boasts about her own loss of her shyness because this is the same narrator who has vivid daydreams for pages on end about everyone's perception of her, of people mocking her. Or when people say they can't stand this book because it "justifies murder", like were we reading the same thing?

To me, the narrator has never once lost her delusions, only altered them in order to cope with her own life and circumstances. If you were a sheltered, nervous, timid young girl who never felt like someone worthy of belonging without a purpose and you fell in love with an older man and suddenly felt like you were being haunted by the ghost of his first wife, if you were being brushed aside and laughed at by him and convinced that he never loved you, if you grew anxious and paranoid because there's a housekeeper who was maybe in love with said first wife and she was trying to encourage you to commit suicide, wouldn't you also grab on to the first moment of real affection you were shown by your husband, regardless of how it's come about? If you truly believed you were nothing without him, wouldn't you do anything to keep him?

She doesn't receive a name because she never feels whole, despite how hard she tries to convince us. She is able to be strict with the servants not because she has finally found her footing, but because Maxim's revelation that he never loved Rebecca has absolved her of any fears that her ghost has any power in the romance of their marriage. When Maxim tells her the whole truth, she doesn't care about anything except that he promised he didn't love the wife he murdered.

These three characters—Rebecca, Maxim, and our narrator—are forever trapped in this vicious cycle of consuming each other. From the very beginning, the narrator's lost because the only way she believes she can win is by either embodying everything Rebecca was, or holding Maxim's love over her memory, something Rebecca never cared for but the narrator could never understand that because she needs to cling to Maxim in order to feel fulfilled. And Rebecca—as vile, manipulative, and selfish as she was—never needed that. Her ghost will always be hanging over them, and she will always win.