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x_losHere are some things I thought about Rebecca AGES ago, courtesy of Zaf.
In Gaskell's North and South the Moral Conflict is such a nonentity that I don't know HOW to enter into it with the heroine. The unnamed heroine of Rebecca might have a kind of similar nonentity/Mary Sue problem, or perhaps I'm not getting her from my position of modernity. The thing about Rebecca that's sad is even though Nameless is so essentially decent, there's NOTHING to like about her. I know I'd find her dull.
Zaf interestingly suggested that she didn't know whether the reader was *supposed* to like Nameless: "She's supposed to be Nothing to you." If so, that's an interesting problematization of the gothic novel heroine being the audience's object of interest/stand-in. If Nameless is still working as a blank stand in (her name is never given because it is yours?) it could take the Gothic conceit of crises of the dissolving self and make your loathing for her a kind of self-hatred, which is an attack on the integral self.
Desire in Rebecca is REALLY interesting. Nameless makes such deliberate calls to public school life? 'I adored him like I was a first year and he was my prefect and I had a crush' or 'I don't expect you to love me, I want to be your boy'. There's this entire construction of Rebecca as Woman and worthy of romantic love, and herself as adolescent and boyish and deserving of Sex: but Sex that isn't even sex just sort of the power-divided rituals of 'fagging', in the 'initiation process' sense (not the bundle of sticks/dude you're such a ___).
This dynamic is, however, so eclipsed by Rebecca-and-desire. Rebecca is CONFUSING from a feminist perspective. Is she self-directed or is she just a scoiopath? Because I have NO idea if she's not just. fucking. crazy. There's also the matter of her lesbian connection with Danny, the head of household, the housekeeper who still keeps her room /perfect/. This is stranger than all Rebecca's other desirous entanglements, especially, as Zaf put it, because of their extreme age difference/familial relationship. 'I've been here since she was a bride' give you a certain understanding of their relationship, and then 'I had the charge of her since she was a girl' remediates that understanding, then the thing between them morphs again, becoming that incredibly sexual description of Rebecca with her hair out on the pillow, in bed.
Technically the book's ancestral relationship is between Rebecca and her cousin, but they're English and a bit period, and given the eerie power of her mother/obsessive lover relationship with the housekeeper, it seems almost negligible.
Rebecca and Namelesses' husband, Max, is stranger still. He claims to have NEVER felt for Rebecca, to have always had doubt, yet he married her? It's good that its VAGUE what Rebecca gets up to, because that makes her a more sinister figure. It makes it creepier. Actually saying 'she has promiscuous sex' doesn't do much for a modern reader--it's very 'Oh. Um. Okay? And? We're supposed to be okay with shooting her about it?'
Zaf feels Max picked Nameless as his second wife because he can abuse her, citing that he shows at most apathy for her, even after he professes to love her. "He sort of treats her like a dog, and she welcomes it when he kicks." She sees a narrative of covert emotional abuse, in response to being abused by Rebecca. "He wants the opposite. Someone he can control."
I read it somewhat differently. I think he's definitely in search of a Child, but that when Max says he loves Nameless--maybe he's just too detached, too traumatized, to give that due weight.
I guess his paternal relationship with Nameless creepily parallels the maternal Danny/Rebecca thing, for me--the sexual/parent figure. All the narrator's 'I wanted to be a woman, I wanted to be his wife, his mother' sort of makes the rebecca relationship she's alluding to FEEL like abusive incest that Max has been exposed to. This, btw, is sounding really like the Shirley Jackson article last night--interesting reverberations within the Female Gothic).
Its interesting that NO ONE in the novel fucking has parents, and, as Zaf pointed out, there are no children. As Nameless's female employer points out in the very Jane Austen beginning, this wouldn't be possible if Narrator had parents. Nameless only has the aunt who got her this position. We know she's without siblings, friends or parents--I find it a little incomprehensible that you COULD be so cut off from the world. In a modern Western setting---it's almost no longer possible, and so I feel at sea trying to enter into her lack of Context. I mean we're of the facebook generation. You can't escape everyone you've ever met. You can be parted from them geographically, but you can never be entirely without people. The only *child* is the one Rebecca threatens Max with, as an heir. Max and Bea have no parents--only vaguely alluded to
I LIKE Manderley's destruction because that's the sacrifice Max DIDN'T make circa Rebecca, and should have made. As Zaf says, it's very cleansing by fire. Which I always think is an interesting phrase, because fire is SO dirty. ?ike how is this a theme in literature? There's nothing filthier than a fire-stripped building. Perhaps as Ana suggests in legal/financial terms fire is a convenient means of removing things, but when I was sifting through a burned building site in hs I kept going 'this is not cleansing--LITERATURE HAS LIED TO MEEE, augh I smell of ashessss.' And it GETS done so dramatically--it accomplishes that work.
After Danny lights the estate on fire and walks away with her bags, I almost feel she *should* be dead. I like that there's the possibility she isn't, but death would SEAL her story. She has nothing but Rebecca, and Rebecca lingers on here. When her ghost has been burned out, Danny's gotta die.
Zaf mentioned that it's interesting that the 'evil' person doesn't die, but punishes the 'good' people, who stay punished, and presumably suffers no consequences. I'd add that Danny's fucked up inside forever. Max and Narrator are exiles (living on the run off his riches in a parody of a certain type of love-story), and like it's Brax in Gallifrey, not allowed to THINK of the Thing, but they have, idk, personhood? And Danny doesn't anymore. "She's sort of had everything taken from her. If we assume that Rebecca was bad, it doesn't necessarily mean that Danny was."
Zaf then wondered if we shouldn't view Danny as the 'good' person. I mulled it over. She's the one who grieves--which is valid, the one who loved and kept loving in the face of Rebecca's apathy, and then her absence. "And having Nameless as a narrator--we must assume that she is unreliable. At least sometimes," Zaf pointed out. But ultimately I think there's no morally coming back for Danny from Jump Off This Balcony, Nameless, You Know You Wanna.
In Gaskell's North and South the Moral Conflict is such a nonentity that I don't know HOW to enter into it with the heroine. The unnamed heroine of Rebecca might have a kind of similar nonentity/Mary Sue problem, or perhaps I'm not getting her from my position of modernity. The thing about Rebecca that's sad is even though Nameless is so essentially decent, there's NOTHING to like about her. I know I'd find her dull.
Zaf interestingly suggested that she didn't know whether the reader was *supposed* to like Nameless: "She's supposed to be Nothing to you." If so, that's an interesting problematization of the gothic novel heroine being the audience's object of interest/stand-in. If Nameless is still working as a blank stand in (her name is never given because it is yours?) it could take the Gothic conceit of crises of the dissolving self and make your loathing for her a kind of self-hatred, which is an attack on the integral self.
Desire in Rebecca is REALLY interesting. Nameless makes such deliberate calls to public school life? 'I adored him like I was a first year and he was my prefect and I had a crush' or 'I don't expect you to love me, I want to be your boy'. There's this entire construction of Rebecca as Woman and worthy of romantic love, and herself as adolescent and boyish and deserving of Sex: but Sex that isn't even sex just sort of the power-divided rituals of 'fagging', in the 'initiation process' sense (not the bundle of sticks/dude you're such a ___).
This dynamic is, however, so eclipsed by Rebecca-and-desire. Rebecca is CONFUSING from a feminist perspective. Is she self-directed or is she just a scoiopath? Because I have NO idea if she's not just. fucking. crazy. There's also the matter of her lesbian connection with Danny, the head of household, the housekeeper who still keeps her room /perfect/. This is stranger than all Rebecca's other desirous entanglements, especially, as Zaf put it, because of their extreme age difference/familial relationship. 'I've been here since she was a bride' give you a certain understanding of their relationship, and then 'I had the charge of her since she was a girl' remediates that understanding, then the thing between them morphs again, becoming that incredibly sexual description of Rebecca with her hair out on the pillow, in bed.
Technically the book's ancestral relationship is between Rebecca and her cousin, but they're English and a bit period, and given the eerie power of her mother/obsessive lover relationship with the housekeeper, it seems almost negligible.
Rebecca and Namelesses' husband, Max, is stranger still. He claims to have NEVER felt for Rebecca, to have always had doubt, yet he married her? It's good that its VAGUE what Rebecca gets up to, because that makes her a more sinister figure. It makes it creepier. Actually saying 'she has promiscuous sex' doesn't do much for a modern reader--it's very 'Oh. Um. Okay? And? We're supposed to be okay with shooting her about it?'
Zaf feels Max picked Nameless as his second wife because he can abuse her, citing that he shows at most apathy for her, even after he professes to love her. "He sort of treats her like a dog, and she welcomes it when he kicks." She sees a narrative of covert emotional abuse, in response to being abused by Rebecca. "He wants the opposite. Someone he can control."
I read it somewhat differently. I think he's definitely in search of a Child, but that when Max says he loves Nameless--maybe he's just too detached, too traumatized, to give that due weight.
I guess his paternal relationship with Nameless creepily parallels the maternal Danny/Rebecca thing, for me--the sexual/parent figure. All the narrator's 'I wanted to be a woman, I wanted to be his wife, his mother' sort of makes the rebecca relationship she's alluding to FEEL like abusive incest that Max has been exposed to. This, btw, is sounding really like the Shirley Jackson article last night--interesting reverberations within the Female Gothic).
Its interesting that NO ONE in the novel fucking has parents, and, as Zaf pointed out, there are no children. As Nameless's female employer points out in the very Jane Austen beginning, this wouldn't be possible if Narrator had parents. Nameless only has the aunt who got her this position. We know she's without siblings, friends or parents--I find it a little incomprehensible that you COULD be so cut off from the world. In a modern Western setting---it's almost no longer possible, and so I feel at sea trying to enter into her lack of Context. I mean we're of the facebook generation. You can't escape everyone you've ever met. You can be parted from them geographically, but you can never be entirely without people. The only *child* is the one Rebecca threatens Max with, as an heir. Max and Bea have no parents--only vaguely alluded to
I LIKE Manderley's destruction because that's the sacrifice Max DIDN'T make circa Rebecca, and should have made. As Zaf says, it's very cleansing by fire. Which I always think is an interesting phrase, because fire is SO dirty. ?ike how is this a theme in literature? There's nothing filthier than a fire-stripped building. Perhaps as Ana suggests in legal/financial terms fire is a convenient means of removing things, but when I was sifting through a burned building site in hs I kept going 'this is not cleansing--LITERATURE HAS LIED TO MEEE, augh I smell of ashessss.' And it GETS done so dramatically--it accomplishes that work.
After Danny lights the estate on fire and walks away with her bags, I almost feel she *should* be dead. I like that there's the possibility she isn't, but death would SEAL her story. She has nothing but Rebecca, and Rebecca lingers on here. When her ghost has been burned out, Danny's gotta die.
Zaf mentioned that it's interesting that the 'evil' person doesn't die, but punishes the 'good' people, who stay punished, and presumably suffers no consequences. I'd add that Danny's fucked up inside forever. Max and Narrator are exiles (living on the run off his riches in a parody of a certain type of love-story), and like it's Brax in Gallifrey, not allowed to THINK of the Thing, but they have, idk, personhood? And Danny doesn't anymore. "She's sort of had everything taken from her. If we assume that Rebecca was bad, it doesn't necessarily mean that Danny was."
Zaf then wondered if we shouldn't view Danny as the 'good' person. I mulled it over. She's the one who grieves--which is valid, the one who loved and kept loving in the face of Rebecca's apathy, and then her absence. "And having Nameless as a narrator--we must assume that she is unreliable. At least sometimes," Zaf pointed out. But ultimately I think there's no morally coming back for Danny from Jump Off This Balcony, Nameless, You Know You Wanna.
