vocabulary master

I heard about the book "Rebecca" a long time ago, back when I was reading "Story of O," I think, and I thought it would be something I'd like to read, but I forgot about it until I saw it -- where else? -- in a Goodwill one day. The only thing I knew about it was that it was written in the first half of the 20th century, and that it's a mystery. I'm 100 pages in, and I haven't hit any mystery yet, but there are still several hundred pages to go.

I really liked the opening of the book. It starts with the narrator dreaming of Manderley, the famous homestead she first heard of as a child and later inhabited as the companion-wife of the mansion's master. Not much is foreshadowed -- just that somehow the couple loses the home. It has a haunting presence throughout the book, even before any real mystery comes into play. The narrator tells the story from her current perspective -- noting how she's changed since she first met Maxim as a naive 21-year-old. She and her employer were staying in the same hotel as Mr. de Winter, and when the gossipy "clumsy goat" Mrs. Van Hopper falls ill, the narrator finds herself swept up by Maxim. He's lonely, and she's infatuated. He decides to marry her and bring her to Manderley. 

Much attention is paid to descriptions of the house and its surrounding flora. The location seems ideal -- gardens, the sea. But the house's servants are bitter toward the new Mrs. de Winter, because Rebecca has been dead barely a year. Apparently the first Mrs. de Winter drowned, but the narrator doesn't know the details yet.

Daphne du Maurier's writing style is elegant yet easy. Most of the notes I've jotted are simply vocabulary words from the first 30 pages, but there have been a few memorable quotes. I think I've neglected analysis so far because the book is so long and I'm eager to get through it quickly. It's not the quickest of reads, but not the most difficult, either. There's a decent amount of suspense, but I'm not sure what to expect in terms of the extent to which Rebecca's ghost will make itself known.

• Mullioned = having vertical divisions of stone or wood
• Inviolate = undisturbed
• Spurious = counterfeit
• Vanguard = leaders of a movement or army
• Ablutions = cleansing of the body
• Bracken = area overgrown with ferns or shrubs
• Impunity = exemption from punishment
• Lorgnette = a pair of eyeglasses mounted on a handle
• Bougainvillaea = ornamental tropical woody vines
• Patent = obvious
• Gaucherie = awkwardness, lacking social grace
• Constitution = temperament (archaic)
• Impelled = urged to action
• Fettered = restricted, shackled
• Ducal = pertaining to a duke

I love the narrator's initial description of Maxim: "His face was arresting, sensitive, medieval in some strange inexplicable way, and I was reminded of a portrait seen in a gallery I had forgotten where, of a certain Gentleman Unknown. Could one but rob in of his English tweeds, and put him in black, with lace at his throat and wrists, he would stare down at us in our new world from a long distant past--a past where men walked cloaked at night, and stood in the shadow of old doorways, a past of narrow stairways and dim dungeons, a past of whispers in the dark, of shimmering rapier blades, of silent, exquisite courtesy." (15)

I also love the associations the narrator makes with flowers, but this one is actually from Maxim: "A rose was one of the few flowers, he said, that looked better picked than growing. A bowl of roses in a drawing-room had a depth of colour and scent they had not possessed in the open. There was something rather blowsy about roses in full bloom, something shallow and raucous, like women with untidy hair." (31)

The narrator, Mrs. de Winter, is having a terribly awkward time at Manderley her first few days. She gets lost in the dark passages and doesn't know how to behave around the servants. She isn't sure what to do when Maxim isn't around, and she savors each moment she spends with him. She talks of wanting to bottle up memories, so that you could open them up and relive them whenever you wanted. She's trying not to digest the last words she had from Mrs. Van Hopper -- that Maxim does not love her, he just can't stand to stay in that house alone. I think Maxim does love her in his own way -- as he says, because she isn't 35 and wearing black satin. She's not the high-class social butterfly everyone expected Maxim to seek out. He needed someone different from Rebecca.