I think I've been reading too much 20th-century poetry: when I read the first line, before I read your fascinating commentary, I "heard" the line as a poem, but this way:

Last night I dreamt
I went to Manderley
again.

And, presumably, again and again and again.



a romance between a woman and a house
That seems to have been not uncommon in English literature; I'm thinking for instance of Elizabeth Bennett, who's only half joking when she says she began to fall in love with Darcy "on seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley."

At least Pemberley escaped the conflagrations that destroyed Manderley and Thornfield.

Are there any examples of men falling in love with houses or their lands? Brideshead Revisited, I suppose, but that's if I remember correctly a fairly masculine affair. Are there any books where it's the woman who's identified with the house? If not, why not: isn't the house supposed to be the province of the woman?

Excuse me wittering on like this, I'm supposed to be doing something else entirely. I'll have think more to figure out what I think.
 

Are there any examples of men falling in love with houses or their lands?

It's a feature in The Secret History - the visit to Francis's place marks the beginning of Richard's friendship with the others, it's the site of the original crime, and so on, but you'd have to pair it with Hampden College. It is, at least, a story in which Richard's emotional relationship is as much with his surroundings as with people.

That book, of course, is written by a woman, so I don't know if it count.


Are there any books where it's the woman who's identified with the house?

All I can think of off-hand - and we're ranging across the genres here - is Molly in Red Dragon. Moving to the seaside, marrying Molly and settling in her 'good, ramshackle house' are all more or less of a piece in the hero's life, and they combine to form a sort of sanctuary. Separating her from her location is part of the trauma.

That's not so much woman/house as prize as it is woman/house as refuge, which says a lot about the relative distribution of property and power in society...
 

Oh, and credit for pointing out the iambic hexameter and rhyme must go to my dad. :-)
 

That line informs the way we understand every line in the book does it not? We know, from the first line, that the narrator is no longer at Manderly and that something has happened to bar them from returning to it. It makes the reader more vigilant for clues indicating what is to come than is the narrator -- without making the narrator seem oblivious only for plot purposes.

Would you say, Kit, that that sentence alone is almost enough to place the book into the Gothic genre?

And have you ever read The Haunting of Hill House by Jackson and if so what do you think of the first line that book? To me it is the second line which is the clincher but the apparent dissonance between the 1st and 2nd lays out contending themes in the book.

Back to Rebecca -- do you think an argument can be made that the house itself functions as unrealizable dream of the achievement of true gentry status by one who was on the margins of that life -- and the way in which modern society has destroyed that apparent castle of gentle and aristocratic life. At the same time, of course, making the argument that that life always had been corrupt and rotten at its core.
 

I have indeed read The Haunting of Hill House; I shall add it to the list, because wow, Shirley Jackson was a great writer.

I think you could make the gentry argument; Rebecca certainly seems a contemporary figure, involved in fashions and modern dissipations. I'd say, though, that in the case of this particular book it's not exactly a dream of status. Aristocracy, to this narrator, means freedom from having to endure the vulgar and the abrasive - or perhaps, freedom from having to care so much about it, as witness Maxim's grand indifference to the social pressures he foists on his poor wife. But what the narrator really seems to long for is beauty and nature: she dislikes Monte Carlo being 'artificial' and is more fascinated by Manderley's azaleas and hydrangeas and beaches than she is by its wealth. She likes its interiors too, but she only relaxes out of doors.

Du Maurier apparently wrote the book in Egypt, homesick for Cornwall, and to me it definitely feels like there's a passion for the landscape of Cornwall as much as for any human relationships.

So, well, I think you could make a case - the Marxist deconstruction practically writes itself - but to me, the tone of the book feels as if the dream is very much bound up with the actual Manderley as well as whatever it might symbolise. In a way, it feels as if the narrator would prefer to live at Manderley without having to be a gentrified lady.

Basically, I think that a wish to fit into a world from which one is exiled is certainly part of it, but I think the relationship with Manderley feels more primal, more sensual and lived, than that. Just my view. :-)

As to the first sentence qualifying it as Gothic ... really, I think I'd need to read a lot of Gothic books before I could confidently answer it!
 

Oh well, if we're going to cross genres and include schools, there's Harry Potter and Hogwarts, of course.

And come to think of it, although Hogwarts is his first love, he's also very fond of the Weasleys' house, and ends up marrying its daughter and presumably recreating a similar home. No wonder he never fell in love with Hermione! Her parents are very nice people from what we see of them, not at all like the Dursleys, but I'll bet their house is a lot more like number four, Privet Drive, than like the Burrow.
 

I don't know; Harry Potter's relationships with places seem to be much more about relating to a community than to a location. If you consider, say, Richard in The Secret History, his first love is the beautiful Hampden campus, and he falls in love with his clique largely because they seem to be equally picturesque. He never quite fits in*, but he feels more at home in some places than others and prefers people who seem even more at home there than he does. Harry Potter, on the other hand, falls in love with places where he does fit in because they're full of people like him. With him, places seem basically secondary: they can be great in themselves, but it's the community they represent that's his first love.


*At least in his own mind. He's an unreliable narrator, and he evidently fits into the group a lot better than he realises because their common element isn't really money or class; it's an unhappy childhood without secure parenting. The twins are orphans; Francis has no father and an unreliable mother; Bunny's parents are very strange indeed and send him penniless to expensive schools; Henry, from the glimpses we can see, seems to be the son of a magnate who doesn't much care for him and a young trophy wife, and spends much of his childhood injured besides. Richard, whose father physically abuses both him and his mother (though he never quite puts it to himself in those terms), is as badly off as any of them, and hence equally vulnerable to the same experience, which is seduction into a small cult. (He remarks early that he would probably have ended up in a cult if he stayed in California, but doesn't realise he ended up in one after he left. Self-analysis doesn't necessarily give him self-knowledge.)
 

I dearly love "Rebecca". (It seems not to be in the public domain? I can't get an ebook version anywhere; I eventually sent it to be ripped and scanned.) It's such a delightful psychological warfare novel in so many ways, and I actually felt a little sorry for Max in the end, in spite of myself. (Just a tiny bit, though! :))
 

I’ve been loving your deconstructions, Kit, and must thank you very much for making me think a lot more about opening lines! If you’re familiar with it, I’d like to know what you think of John Fowles’s The Magus – I was put in mind of it by your discussion of Rebecca, and in my mind I tend to associate the two books because of their rich symbolism and layers – although, of course, they cannot be more different in their approach to gender.