book and fragrance giveaway: Rebecca

Many authors use perfume as a novelistic shorthand for memories awakened in complete recall. A character smells something and it awakens deep memories, or takes him back in time. In Daphne du Maurier’s neo-gothic romance Rebecca, this motif takes a sinister turn. A youung girl marries a widower with an obscure, tragic past and moves to his ancestral estate . She soon discovers that the place is haunted by the presence of the memory of the previous wife, Rebecca. 

This ‘haunting’ is mostly expressed through smell and fragrance. Azaleas, overpowering, overfeminine, unnaturally-abundant blooms which choke the manor of Manderley, become a symbol of the dead wife’s overpowering femininity. Rebecca even wore a perfume which smelled of azaleas. The hapless new wife discovers traces of perfume on Rebecca’s clothes, which have turned musty with age, she experiences the oppression of the obscure yet present past in the form  a choking fog that blights the landscape at the moment of crisis in the book and functions as an anesthetic for the heroine’s pain, and breathes in the must of long-evaporated cologne on all sorts of things around the house. Du Maurier uses all of the scented moments to intensify the miasma of the haunting presence of the dead first wife of the brooding hero Maxim. I can say no more about the plot of the book, because I don’t want to spoil it for you, but I will include some moments of fragrant realization from within its pages. The word scent is used at least 22 times throughout the book, so I chose some of the most evocative.

 

First, when throwing on an old mackintosh to go on a walk, the heroin (00ps, heroine! ) pulls out a discarded handkerchief from the pocket and smells it—it belonged to Maxim’s first wife, Rebecca: “I noticed that a dull scent clung about it still. A scent I  recognized, a scent I knew. I shut my eyes and tried to remember. It was something elusive, something faint and fragrant that I could not name. I had breathed it before, touched it surely, that very afternoon. And then I knew that the vanished scent on the handkerchief was the same as the crushed white petals of the azaleas in the Happy Valley” (118).

Another item of clothing left behind by the departed Rebecca is a lovely apricot nightdress, which  is bearing the scent of azaleas as well, but it has grown musty with age (foreshadowing, anyone) “there was a dim mustiness about it where the scent had been”(166).

When imagining the considerable elegance and charm of her dead rival, the heroine jealously imagines her dancing at a ball: “when she danced [she] left a stab of perfume in the air like a white azalea” I love the idea of a stab of fragrance. Sometimes it can be lethal, monstrous, overpowering like that.

And then the famous lines about memory and fragrance. The heroine exclaims: "If only there could be an invention that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again."

I’m gonna stop there, so as not to give any of the plot twists away, but please take my word for it; if you are interested in the psychology of fragrance, you should read this thriller.

 

 

One note: I didn’t know azaleas had a smell; I guess the ones I have been around have had all the fragrance bred out of them. But I looked up azaleas in Basenotes’ directory, and sure enough, some perfumes contain the note.

That brings me to my giveaway drawing. I am going to give the winner of this drawing my copy of Rebecca and a few samples of floral fragrances that could potentially ‘stab’ the air, on  the right wearer, that is…. As I mentioned before in my previous drawing for rose scents, I really want to get some more regular followers (I am writing this blog for my own benefit, but I wouldn’t mind having some friends to converse with as well) so please, get my rss feed, become a facebook networked blog follower, add me as a blogger friend, or subscribe to my blog in any other form you please, then post a comment below letting me know you are interested in winning a copy of Rebecca and some lethal floral perfume decants as well as  following Hortus conclusus. (if you already subscribed somehow before, I know you, so you don’t need to tell me.) When I post my 115th posting (in about a week, I imagine) I will announce the winner of the draw!

one quick note: my accidental misspelling of ‘heroine’ as ‘heroin’ reminds me of my mishearing of ‘heroin’ for ‘heroine’ in one of my favorite Bowie songs,

“The Secret Life of Arabia”:

“I walk through the desert sand when the heroine/heroin dies…” Which does he mean? I imagine the ambiguity was intentional.. I mean, it’s Bowie, for God’s sake!

That was a tangent!

CREDITS:
Hitchcock movie still from pullquote.com
azalea forest from flowerpictures1.com
image of young du Maurier courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.