Rebecca: A Genuine Romantic and Typical British Contemporary Novel Overlooked by Critics

Abstract

The prejudiced attitude of the English novelist Daphne du Maurier’s contemporaries towards her novel Rebecca, 1938 and their inattentive reading of the novel established the motive for this research. Critics of the time thought it had no sufficient merit for systematic study and placed it among lowbrow popular literature. It was shunned by chief critical studies, and du Maurier was condemned as an idle dreamer. Their claim rested on shaky assumption that it was a romantic novel. The aim of the researcher is to conduct a critical analysis of the novel to refute their allegations and confirm it as a worthy piece of literary creation by clarifying the depth and mysteries it contains. To achieve that aim, the pluralistic or eclectic approach, which maintains that effective criticism requires the use of all methods, is employed. The researcher has questioned the conventional methods used in the assessment of literary works underlining their inadequacy to offer a concrete conceptual definition for this purpose. Accordingly, the two claims of the research title have been addressed. The discussion of the traditional definitions of romance has proved the nonromanticism of the novel in that sense. It is still confirmed as a romantic story as seen from its author’s perspective and her perception of romance abstracted from her article on romantic love, hence the ‘genuine romantic’. The second segment, ‘typical British contemporary novel’, is predicated on the researcher’s arguement against the aforementioned accusation that Rebecca is a stale piece of fiction. This has been disproved through testing the novel against the British literature in the 1930s. The study is hoped to be a beneficial contribution in the literary and academic provinces and to profit other researchers to carry out further related studies.