Manderley

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Manderley is a fictional property that plays a central role in Daphne du Maurier's 1938 book Rebecca and Alfred Hitchcock's 1940 film adaptation . The first sentence Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again ("Last night I dreamed I was back in Manderley") is one of the most famous introductions in English literature. Manderley subsequently became a popular house name in Great Britain and the epitome of luxury and prestige.

Location and description

Menabilly House at Fowey in Cornwall around 1920

Manderley is a large oceanfront property. The old aristocratic family seat is inhabited by Maxim de Winter and his wife, the otherwise nameless "second Mrs. de Winter". De Winter's first wife, Rebecca, has been dead for about a year. There are many domestic servants who report to the housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers. The castle-like house has two floors. It has an east and a west wing and a number of representative rooms. The morning room is particularly exquisitely furnished. Other important locations are the library, the great ballroom and the former bedroom of the de Winters, the most beautiful room in the house with a view of the sea. The house is located in the middle of a spacious property. A rose garden is laid out directly at the house. The rest of the property seems to be mostly wooded. Trees and large, bright red rhododendrons line the long, winding access path and only reveal the house at the last moment. The "happy valley", which is planted with bewitchingly scented azaleas and forest flowers, is within easy reach of a walk . You can get to the beach over a cliff. There is a decrepit boathouse and dock.

There is no geographic location for Manderley. It is believed to be in Cornwall , where you Maurier himself lived. Models for the property can be found in du Maurier's later residence, Menabilly, near Fowey in Cornwall, the interior is reminiscent of Milton Hall in Peterborough , Cambridgeshire , which she visited several times as a child during World War I. The undefined place creates an atmosphere of isolation and rapture in the novel. It doesn't even specify which town should be nearby, except for the equally fictional small town of Kerrith. In this respect too, the film ties in with the novel. Although Hitchcock visited a number of manors and manors in Europe, the United States and Canada, he finally decided to have Manderley created entirely in the studio so as not to destroy the isolated impression with realistic filming locations. The miniatures, which were made for outdoor shots, show a winding Elizabethan mansion with many gables, windows and bay windows.

Function of the house in the novel and in the film

Right at the beginning of the story, it becomes clear that Manderley is an inaccessible, forever lost place. The opening sequence depicts a dream in which the narrator visits a ruin that was once Manderley. In a retrospective , she then presents the property that she entered as a newlywed to find a home . As the narrative progresses, this proves to be an impossible endeavor, and in the end Manderley goes up in flames.

Like all classic Gothic novel buildings , Manderley is a place haunted by its secrets. The house has ostensibly been converted into a kind of museum : portraits of Maxim's ancestors adorn the walls, postcards with Manderley motifs are sold, and some rooms are open to the public once a week. However, for the main actress in the story, the second Mrs. de Winter, the atmosphere in Manderley is threatening and fraught with fear. The housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, suggests that she still regards Rebecca as the actual landlady. Manderley is Maxim's childhood home, but much of the property's furnishings and design, for which the property is widely admired, was Rebecca's work. It was hardly changed after her death. Maxim only has the former guest wing in the east wing prepared for himself and his new wife. The morning room and the representative rooms also show Rebecca's handwriting in details. The west wing is uninhabited. Rebecca's clothes are still hanging in the closets, her bed has been reupholstered and Mrs. Danvers arranges fresh flower arrangements every day. The dead woman is so present that her perfume seems to be hanging in the air. The entire property appears to have been converted into a mausoleum . Although all rooms are theoretically open to the narrator as the landlady, psychological barriers are built up that make Rebecca's room in particular a “forbidden place”. Manderley is not a place to move freely. What should be a home becomes a prison for the protagonists .

Manderley is central to du Maurier's novel. Except in the first main part, which takes place in Monte Carlo , and in the final part, which requires a trip to London , the protagonists hardly move away from their property. This central function is reinforced at Hitchcock. For him, “Rebecca” is the story of a house, and the house becomes “one of the three main characters in the film”.

reception

  • Due to the popularity of the novel and the film, the name Manderley became hugely popular for ordinary houses as well, and was even the most common house name in the UK for a while . The singer Enya , for example, renamed her Dublin castle to Manderley Castle .
  • The New York interior designer W. & J. Sloane produced an exclusive series of furniture for the film premiere in 1940, which was supposed to reproduce the atmosphere of Manderley's morning room.
  • Stephen King took up the narrator's dream in the introduction to the novel Rebecca as a motif in his novel Sara .
  • The television series With Umbrella, Charm and Melon uses the name Manderley in episode 92 (Deadly Dust) .
  • At Manderlay modified used by Lars von Trier 's name for the second part of his trilogy America (2005). The scene at the locked gate of the estate alludes to the closing sequence of the Hitchcock classic.

literature

  • Adrian Weibel, Tension at Hitchcock: on how the authorial suspense works , Königshausen & Neumann, 2008, ISBN 3826036816 , page 56.
  • Karen Nölle-Fischer: With a sharper eye: feminist literary criticism . Women's offensive, 1987.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Avril Horner, Sue Zlosnik: Daphne du Maurier: writing, identity and the gothic imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, 1998, ISBN 0312211465 , p. 99.
  2. ^ Steven Jacobs: The wrong house: the architecture of Alfred Hitchcock . 010 Publishers, 2007, ISBN 906450637X , p. 176 f.
  3. ↑ Avril Horner, Sue Zlosnik: Daphne du Maurier: writing, identity and the gothic imagination , p. 100.
  4. ^ Steven Jacobs: The wrong house: the architecture of Alfred Hitchcock, p. 178.
  5. ↑ Steven Jacobs: The wrong house: the architecture of Alfred Hitchcock , pp. 179-181.
  6. ↑ Barbara Straumann: Figurations of exile in Hitchcock and Nabokov . Edinburgh University Press 2008, ISBN 0748636463 , p. 127.
  7. ↑ Avril Horner, Sue Zlosnik: Daphne du Maurier: writing, identity and the gothic imagination , p. 99.
  8. ↑ Steven Jacobs: wrong house: the architecture of Alfred Hitchcock , pp. 179-193.
  9. ^ Steven Jacobs: The wrong house: the architecture of Alfred Hitchcock , p. 192.
  10. ^ Steven Jacobs: The wrong house: the architecture of Alfred Hitchcock , p. 176.
  11. ^ Steven Jacobs: The wrong house: the architecture of Alfred Hitchcock , p. 176.
  12. ^ Steven Jacobs: The wrong house: the architecture of Alfred Hitchcock , p. 178.