Lily James, Dominic West, and Netflix’s Curious ‘Rebecca’ Remake
By: Shannon Ashley
Tags: Women, Culture, Film, Relationships, Books

The funny thing is that the controversy of Rebecca is far from over. We’re still waiting to see how the whole Lily James and Dominic West fiasco pans out, but for now, it looks like they may be fined by the Italian government just for riding that scooter together. Current coronavirus laws in the country restrict people from sharing scooters. It’s currently under investigation according to local councilor Stefano Marin.

Yet that’s not all.

Did you know that the writer of Rebecca has long been accused of plagiarism? Author Daphne du Maurier died in 1989, but both of her stories which Alfred Hitchcock used — Rebecca and The Birds — have been singled out as blatant copies of other writers' work.

With Rebecca, there have been three charges of plagiarism. First, critics and readers thought the plot was a poor rip-off of Jane Eyre.

Later, a woman named Edwina MacDonald sued du Maurier, claiming Rebecca was a copy of her story, Blind Windows. The New York judge dismissed the case because nobody could prove that du Maurier ever read MacDonald’s work. But there’s another writer, who first accused du Maurier of plagiarism — Carolina Nabuco. Nabuco was a Brazilian writer who wrote a book called A Sucessora, published 4 years before Rebecca. According to The New York Times Book Review, “So numerous are the parallels, that one may find them on almost each page.”

It’s also been said that “the key differences between A Sucessora and Rebecca is that the former was written in Portuguese and is set in Rio de Janeiro in the 1920s; the latter was written in English and is set in England’s West Country in the 1930s.”

Nabuco never sued du Maurier, but in her memoirs wrote that when the Hitchcock adaptation of Rebecca came to Brazil, United Artists asked Nabuco to sign a document stating that similarities between her book and the movie were a coincidence, which she refused.

Author Frank Baker also claimed du Maurier plagiarized his work and considered bringing a suit against Universal Studios when Hitchcock’s The Birds came out based on du Maurier’s short story of the same name.

Baker wrote a novel called The Birds which was published 16 years before du Maurier’s short story. However, Baker’s novel, which was published by du Maurier’s cousin Peter Davies, was unsuccessful, and only sold about 350 copies in 26 years.

Du Maurier maintained that she never plagiarized anyone and that any similarities were purely coincidental. And to a certain extent, it seems true — there are universal themes in du Maurier’s stories which seem to keep coming readers coming back for more.

But at the same time, the sheer popularity of Rebecca seems to have stunted its growth. The more I look at du Maurier’s life and her infamous story about love, pride, obsession, and jealousy, I can’t help but wonder if the real story isn’t the one we have to read between the lines.

As a child, du Maurier seemed to prefer her male alter ego she called Eric Avon. When she was about 10, she cut her hair short and wore boys’ clothing. At age 18, she fell in love with a 30-year-old headmistress. Although she married a man in 1932, she became obsessed with her husband’s ex-fiancée, who some believe inspired the character of Rebecca. Du Maurier followed her husband’s ex from afar with newspaper clippings until her shocking suicide in 1944.

Some people believe that this woman knew she was the inspiration for Rebecca, partly because she invited du Maurier’s sister to her wedding. But considering how hated the character of Rebecca was in the novel, it’s tempting to speculate that this ex-lover might have been negatively impacted by society’s view of Rebecca/herself.

It’s worth noting, however, that the reader never actually gets to meet Rebecca. While the book’s narrator isn't even called by name until she becomes Mrs. de Winter, Rebecca’s name is constantly uttered by faulty witnesses.

Yet nobody remotely trustworthy ever tells us anything about Rebecca and who she really was. That makes it easy to label her a monster or master manipulator, but that doesn’t mean it’s true. The narrator herself is an imperfect judge of character — like so many Gothic heroines she’s got her head in the clouds and jumps to absurd conclusions.

For decades, readers have been thinking that they’re supposed to hate Rebecca. The love between Maximilian and the narrator is put upon a strange pedestal as if some murders of supposedly bad wives are justified and can be instantly forgiven.

Somehow, I think there’s more to be gleaned from the text. There’s even room for an interpretation where Rebecca was a woman of agency in a time and place where women had very little power.

In fact, that’s something Lily James hinted at herself when speaking about the story:

And regarding the infamous character of Rebecca, she said:

She's not wrong.

So, on the one side, I’m pretty damn disappointed in Netflix’s Rebecca, but perhaps it’s not all for naught. Lily James, Dominic West, and Daphne du Maurier have all given us something to talk about.

Maybe, just maybe, those conversations are worth one lackluster film.