All life takes place somewhere.
Whatever is happening or has happened, took place in some form of setting and our expectations and attitudes towards both characters and tale originate in a place/space.
A Setting provides both context and psychological frame for a narrative.
This opening below from Daphne Du Maurier’s famous thriller Rebecca sets up our expectations for a tale of suspense and mystery. The language is dreamy and disturbing, suggestive of a nightmare and unresolved experiences- we can feel the underlying anxiety of the narrative.
This anxiety is presented through a language which accumulates a sense of the sinister; ‘..long tenacious fingers.’ The animation of nature in this way gives a predatory, murderous aspect to the narrator’s starnge desire to return again and again to Manderley.
This generates expectations of a narrative which we presume will explore the story behind this unsettling place and the narrator’s strange compulsion to go back, even when asleep.
Our expectations are unsurprisingly realized as this unsettling narrative progresses and it is little wonder that film directors from Hitchcock on, have found the tale irresistible.
Note how the novel begins with a recurring dream. ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. ‘ Dreams recur when there is unfinished business and the novel explores the dark history of Manderley with its charismatic and dangerously dead lady of the house, Rebecca De winter.
Look at the images of imprisonment that recur in this recounted dream. The precariousness of reality is underlined by the use of the verb, ‘seemed.’ The unnamed narrator/dreamer feels excluded in this dream suggesting that the tale may involve feelings and experiences of inferiority/inadequacy .
The tale explores issues around power: economic, social and sexual.
Nature seems to have taken over Manderley, and this overrunning of Manderley may hint at a loss of control on the narrator’s part. Chaos has returned and nature mocks human arrogance perhaps, reclaiming Manderley, reasserting her natural power.
The repulsive commingling of the sexually suggestive ‘naked branches’ with the sacred, ‘an archway to a church’ unsettles the reader and presumably the narrator, revealing the taboo nature of the tale(drive way ) ahead.
The drive way is a metaphor for the narrator’s journey into worldly experience.
The language is nightmarish and laden with menace. Manderley seems a fallen world, where both the narrator and reader may lose their way morally and psychologically.
Probably one of the most unsettling, nightmarish lyrical openings ever written! Hear and feel the rhythm of the writing and the ‘pulse’ of its breathless promise!
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me. There was a padlock and a chain upon the gate. I called in my dream to the lodge-keeper, and had no answer, and peering closer through the rusted spokes of the gate I saw that the lodge was uninhabited. No smoke came from the chimney, and the little lattice windows gaped forlorn. Then, like all dreamers, I was possessed of a sudden with supernatural powers and passed like a spirit through the barrier before me.
The drive wound away in front of me, twisting and turning as it had always done, but as I advanced I was aware that a change had come upon it; it was narrow and unkept, not the drive that we had known. At first I was puzzled and did not understand, and it was only when I bent my head to avoid the low swinging branch of a tree that I realized what had happened. Nature had come into her own again and, little by little, in her stealthy, insidious way had encroached upon the drive with long, tenacious fingers.
The woods, always a menace even in the past, had triumphed in the end. They crowded, dark and uncontrolled, to the borders of the drive. The beeches with white, naked limbs leant close to one another, their branches intermingled in a strange embrace, making a vault above my head like the archway of a church. And there were other trees as well, trees that I did not recognize, squat oaks and tortured elms that straggled cheek by jowl with the beeches, and had thrust themselves out of the quiet earth, along with monster shrubs and plants, none of which I remembered.