The copy of "My Cousin Rachel" I just finished reading has a Reading Group Guide at the back. I usually avoid reading these because I don't want to be influenced by corny questions meant to inspire conversation at a tea party. But I gave in, because that is a ridiculous attitude for someone who wants all the information and trusts herself to interpret appropriately. I won't answer the guide questions in essay format or any other; though, I will say that they were reasonable and have not adversely affected my understanding of the story. They touched upon the obvious themes of youth and immaturity, and the universal battle of wits between men and women. I could go there, but really what I want to do is wonder what happened.
The narrator, Philip, is, for lack of a better phrase, living in his own head throughout the novel. Usually a first-person narrator gives you a fairly broad viewpoint, the author allowing you to discover things through the narrator's interactions; but Philip is often confused, and the reader is no wiser. Ultimately the story is tragic, regardless of who was originally in the wrong. Were Philip and his cousin Ambrose both deceived by Rachel? Did she try to poison them each in turn for their family fortune? Or were Philip and Ambrose really so similar in character that they both misread her actions out of paranoia, and it's only a coincidence that they both became ill during their time with her? With no proof that she was plotting against him, and supplied with enough rationalizations to justify her spending, Philip and the reader find it believable that she is innocent. Because if she was trying to kill Philip, why would she not have succeeded? Or was she using her power to demonstrate that she, too, is capable of employing a stranglehold? Philip's anger literally caused his hands to grip her neck -- flashback to "The House on the Strand" -- but her move was drawn-out and calculated, if such a move indeed existed. It's hard for Philip and the reader to determine whether Rachel's feminine wiles are the manifestation of misappropriated good or fallible evil.
But, ultimately, no one wins. (And so without telling the full story I'll spoil the ending...) It can take only a moment to ruin the rest of your life. A split decision can have ramifications that you knew you risked, but something told you to act. Is it fate stepping in? Fate meaning nothing but a tipping point -- a Choose Your Own Adventure plotline that happens to bring the story to an outcome that makes a strange kind of sense. I keep thinking of a trial I reported on in Alabama, in which a woman turned her car around using the emergency median of an interstate, killing the lead man in a group of motorcyclists. Sometimes you ignore things that you can clearly see. "I just didn't think ... " Philip didn't know for sure that Rachel would die if she walked along the unfinished bridge, that it would certainly break beneath her weight. But yet he had been warned, and chose not to pass the warning on. The driver of the car in Alabama received a jail sentence; but in Cornwall, Philip was hanged.
I found the novel's ending everything I could have hoped for -- surprising, saddening, thought-provoking. It brought the story full circle to the opening scene where Philip remembers seeing the body of a dead man who was hanged for killing his wife. While I am not a proponent of the death penalty in reality, for the purpose of fiction I find myself feeling the sentence justified. At the same time I want to believe that Rachel was not evil, that she was simply a cultured and knowledgeable woman of the world who found herself in a Twilight Zone upon moving from fancy Italy to frumpy England, where she tried to fight off love feelings for her dead husband's doppelganger and failed, leading him on and leading him to destruction. And the satisfaction of that heartbreaking duplicity is just one example of what pulls me in every time, convincing me that Daphne du Maurier is herself a sort of supernatural vessel of the collective unconscious, reaching into the most intimate moments and fears and dramas of the mind with exquisite finesse.
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