One of Rebecca's most significant revisions to Jane Eyre, it seems to me, is its elimination of the earlier novel's Christian redemption plot. Aside from two or three scattered references to God, of which more in a moment, Rebecca's entire worldview remains thoroughly earth-bound. We know from the very beginning that the unnamed narrator and Maxim de Winter live a sterile (literally: the narrator remains childless) existence abroad, consigned to a succession of uninteresting hotels and conjuring up a parodic ultra-Englishness in order to ward off memories of those things "we have tried to forget and put behind us" (5). Despite her claim that she and Maxim have been refined by "suffering" (5), they have not achieved peace--merely a deliberate "boredom" (6). Repetition is one of the hallmarks of Gothic terror; the repetition that now governs their everyday lives serves as anesthesia instead of antidote. That is, the narrator embraces boredom as the opposite pole of "fear" (6), but the same Gothic operation that produced fear now produces boredom. She has not, in other words, managed to write herself out of this particular narrative trap, nor does she wish to.
One of the great turning points in Jane Eyre's self-consciousness comes when she realizes that "Mr. Rochester was not to me what he had been; for he was not what I had thought him. I would not ascribe vice to him ; I would not say he had betrayed me: but the attribute of stainless truth was gone from his idea; and from his presence I must go; that I perceived well" (ch. 26). In retrospect, Jane explicitly figures her error as idolatry, a sin for which she must atone; after all, in getting Mr. Rochester wrong, Jane gets herself wrong, and gets herself wrong with God into the bargain. Jane's total union with Rochester at the end of JE is actually triangulated through and consolidated by their new, mutual love for God, as the chastized Rochester finally learns how to submit himself to divine justice. But Du Maurier pointedly inverts Jane's great revelation, since the second Mrs. de Winter's supposed self-discovery, her ability not only to perform as chatelaine, but also to govern her husband ("[y]ou must say..." [287]), rests on her willingness to accept and endorse that Maxim murdered his wife. Even as the narrator and Maxim collaborate to erase Rebecca (unsuccessfully) on account of her adultery, they promptly found their own relationship on murder. Sin replaces sin--all the more notably for the de Winters' foaming rage at Rebecca's wayward sexuality. For the narrator, there is never any need to choose between God and Maxim; no crisis of conscience here. After all, in this case, righteousness would mean sacrificing the narrator's "happily ever after" (in a novel in which the narrator constantly projects both fantastic and paranoid tales of what will happen next, virtually all of them wrong). Under the circumstances, one cannot help noting the spectacular irony in the narrator's invocation of God near the end: "We ought to go down on our knees and thank God that it's finished" (381). Perhaps the second Mrs. de Winter is not so much a revised Jane Eyre than a failed one, a repetition in a lesser key.
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