It’s been a while since I watched these two (yes, sorry, watched, not read): the 1940 Hitchcock film and the 1994 BBC Middlemarch.

Middlemarch

I read the novel a few years ago (my second George Eliot – after Adam Bede about 20 years ago). The experience was wonderful. Such sadness for Dorothea’s clearly stupid attachment to Casaubon – a dried-husk borderline-bonkers clergyman obsessed with his researches into ancient Britain, but then (as so often) redemption, a vindication of her fundamentally principled approach to her life, and the nuanced alternative ways of enacting one’s principles. This all came through in the TV adaptation, if you could ignore the dated acting and direction.

Rebecca

Strangely, ‘dated acting and direction’ wasn’t a problem with the Hitchcock, despite its being older. Perhaps American films of that era have become timeless, sui generis. Interesting also that Du Maurier’s novel was published only two years before the film.

Rebecca herself is dead before the film starts. She met her end, we are told, on a small boat in a storm; and she doesn’t ever appear, even in flashback. Yes she dominates the whole piece: Maxim (her widower), his new wife, and most ominously the housekeeper Mrs Danvers, whose obsession with her dead mistress makes her stalk broodily about the mansion in an obvious ‘she’s a bad’un’ way. But it’s when Rebecca’s dead body is found in a sunken boat that the story unravels: her marriage was a faithless sham, and she died in a row with her husband, who subsequently identified another body as that of his wife, and hid Rebecca’s body by putting into a boat and scuttling it.

How they are related

Two stupid attachments: Dorothea to Casaubon, and Max to Rebecca. But does the connection go deeper? Might Rebecca’s affair with Jack parallel Casaubon’s emotionally careless obsession with his futile research project? Both Rebecca and Casaubon, by their deaths, leave their lovers bereft and seeking new solace. For Dorothea this comes in the form of the sexy young painter Ladislaw; for Maxim, as his new wife. But whereas Max brought about Rebecca’s death, Casaubon died of his own health (perhaps aided by a surfeit of book-learning). And the stories end differently: Rebecca with the great house Manderley sinking into flames; Middlemarch with new beginnings stirring in the eponymous community. Eliot shuns, unlike Hitchcock (and perhaps Du Maurier), the spectacular.