Some portions of the internet might take umbrage with the following statement, but the fact remains: Alfred Hitchcock owes two of his best works to a woman’s mind. What’s more, so does thriller cinema as a whole. Rebecca, Hitchcock’s first American film, is based on author Daphne du Maurier’s bestselling novel of the same name, while The Birds draws inspiration from one of her short stories. Another of her shorts also sparked Nicolas Roeg’s psychological masterpiece Don’t Look Now.
It’s a sound wager everyone knows Daphne du Maurier authored Rebecca, but her originating the latter pieces surprises many. If Alfred Hitchcock was the Master of cinematic Suspense, then Daphne du Maurier was the genre’s novelist queen. The British author knew how to craft a chilling gothic atmosphere like the back of her hand. Although she dabbled with romantic elements, du Maurier wasn’t a romance writer; she effortlessly wove multiple genres to phenomenal effect and layered her plots with revolutionary themes for the 1930s and 1940s. Since its invention, the unsettling combination of suspense, seduction, and the paranormal have been the gothic tale’s defining characteristics. Those sensibilities made du Maurier into a ruthlessly efficient storyteller and the ideal partner for Hitchcock’s narrative proclivities in more ways than one — ways both predictable and ceaselessly startling.
Daphne du Maurier Deserves Recognition for ‘Rebecca’s Legacy
To claim creativity flowed through Daphne du Maurier’s blood is an understatement. Daphne was the middle child of three daughters and was born into a family of actors, writers, and painters. Her first novel, The Loving Spirit, was published when she was just 24 years old. Rebecca, her fifth and most acclaimed work, hit shelves in 1938 when du Maurier was 31. Two years later Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation won the Academy Award for Best Picture. In the intervening years, Rebecca has never gone out of print.
Although Rebecca’s success is undeniable and indomitable, it isn’t purely cumulative. The book instantly sold out its initial run of 20,000 copies. However, because du Maurier was a woman in the 1930s, male critics derided her works as “women’s fiction” and “just romance.” Although sensible modern readers know there’s nothing wrong with the romance genre (and no “just” about it), presuming a woman has nothing to contribute to the literary canon except romance (which isn’t good enough for inclusion anyway!) is infuriating.
Daphne Du Maurier herself despised said belittling. In a 1977 interview, the author emphatically said “I am not a romantic novelist.” She continued, “The only romantic novel I’ve ever written […] was Frenchman’s Creek. […] Not Jamaica Inn, or Rebecca, which is a study in jealousy completely.” A separate quote from the author revealed her frustration over critics discarding her meticulously crafted work: “I am generally dismissed with a sneer as a bestseller.”
At this point, anyone who still insists du Maurier doesn’t deserve recognition equal to any classic male author is just being silly. Rebecca is a defining gothic contribution, but she varied genres like a snake sheds skin. Thrillers, historicals, the supernatural and the paranormal, environmental dystopias, and cutting-edge sci-fi all emerged from her active mind. Her recurring themes include unreliable narrators, gender dynamics, social hierarchies, murder most foul, and the ways jealousy, lust, and greed can warp into dangerously pathological conditions. Her women are spiked with jagged edges: they’re powerful, aggressive, and beyond easy summation, defying social conventions with their sexual autonomy and well-oiled cleverness. Like too many female creators before and after her, Daphne du Maurier never fit inside the reductive box men tried to crush her into.
‘Rebecca’ Is a Gothic Masterpiece
Daphne du Maurier described her seminal classic as “a sinister tale about a woman who marries a widower…psychological and rather macabre.” Indeed, Rebecca’s unnamed protagonist (a detail that peeved off Agatha Christie!) is swept off her naive feet by a man twice her age and whisked away to Manderly, the stunning but ominous family mansion. Rebecca drips with gothic precognition. Manderly’s exterior beauty masks a sprawling interior littered with emotional tripwires. This is no domestic bliss escapism, but a graveyard haunted by the oppressive spirit of the titular Rebecca, Maxim de Winter’s first wife.
Du Maurier brilliantly weaves Rebecca with a poisonous sense of unease in this psychological thriller. The second Mrs. de Winter is no force of personality like her predecessor, but a terrified child caught in an inferiority complex. The mousy, passive girl feels incapable of living up to Rebecca’s memory or fulfilling her new duties as wife and lady of the house. Her whirlwind marriage has trapped her in a place where she’s terrorized by something as small as Rebecca’s handwriting and as omniscient as Mrs. Danvers, who makes psychologically harassing Maxim’s new wife into an Olympic sport. Du Maurier breeds harrowing dread with every step and amplifies a hovering fear of inescapable disaster.
Most remarkably, unreliable narrators populate du Maurier’s story at every corner. Byronic antihero Maxim claims Rebecca was a cruel narcissist. His first wife was likely no saint, but his viewpoint villainizes her for rebelling against a proper wife’s social propriety. His solution to his woes? Murder Rebecca in a fit of rage. Maxim’s second wife, however, embodies everything expected of her station: she’s gentle, demure, and compliant, a wilting flower starving for attention and therefore accepting of his insulting, often infantilizing behavior. Rebecca’s memory isn’t the only domineering thing oppressing the second Mrs. de Winter.
Taking this into consideration, there’s no way keeping Rebecca’s protagonist unnamed wasn’t an intentional commentary on du Maurier’s part. One, it reflects how the perfect feminine ideal nearly obliterates the protagonist’s sanity. Two, her name doesn’t matter — her husband defines her existence, and despite her efforts, she still can’t measure up to society’s expectations. Rebecca performed the socialite wife role to a T, but behind closed doors, Maxim feared this powerful woman. Convention demanded one woman die; the second wife risks being crushed to dust.
Rebecca concerns itself with gendered power dynamics. Du Maurier would return to these themes often, with My Cousin Rachel and Jamaica Inn of particular note. Lust and danger are often inseparable in her oeuvre. When those chemicals meet, they crescendo into cataclysmic obsession.
How Did Daphne Du Maurier Influence Alfred Hitchcock’s Filmmaking?
Lacing romance with threat sounds a lot like Alfred Hitchcock, doesn’t it? Even before Psycho, his thrillers played with expectations by going through a sweet romance’s motions before imperiling the female lead through her supposed love interest. Although his Rebecca alters some circumstances, Hitchcock hews to the novel’s psychological thriller throughlines. Manderly’s rain-drenched, shadow-cast architecture is pure gothic trappings wrapped in a German Expressionism bow. The oppressive atmosphere is to die for, as is the emotional intensity. Discomfort permeates every frame and every dismayed expression on Joan Fontaine’s face; malignant apprehension is as thick as smoke. Even the set designs feel belligerently tyrannical. Judith Anderson’s Mrs. Danvers is a revelation while Sir Laurence Olivier effortlessly variates between the seductive aristocrat and an unknowably menacing entity.
Despite the author and director’s shared frustration with Hitchcock’s try at Jamaica Inn (the production was troubled), du Maurier loved his Rebecca. His interpretation of The Birds was another story. Hitchcock switches out the working-class lead character of du Maurier’s chillingly contained story for two urban socialites performing an unconsummated erotic tête-à-tête. The subtext of Hitchcock’s movie and du Maurier’s story mostly match, and rarely has even Hitchcock terrorized his audience more adeptly. However, du Maurier’s version brings more layers to the table. Her The Birds reflected social anxieties following World War II. An east wind (Russia) heralds nature turning against humanity. Scattered radio broadcasts and warning sirens about aerial bombardment recall the Blitz, a World War II event du Maurier lived through.
Much Like Her Characters, Daphne du Maurier Broke the Rules
Daphne du Maurier was a woman ahead of her time. She valued her financial independence. She didn’t sacrifice her interests when she became a mother (a benefit of her privilege). She valued her privacy, and she was likely bisexual and had a complicated relationship with her gender identity. Her success is a triumph for women-identifying authors, especially those who cross patriarchal-enforced genre boundaries.
Her success also raises the interminable debate about high art versus low art. If something’s a pop culture zeitgeist, then a certain group decides it can’t also be quality art. But du Maurier’s contributions to literature, and the creatives she influenced, are incalculable. She and Hitchcock’s names are eternally entwined thanks to two of his best works resting on her laurels, but a man will never determine or define her genius.