My! Cousin! Rachel! My gosh what a BOOK. Recommended to me by lirazel in the comments to my post on Rebecca, for which I'm very grateful! I'd never even heard of this one before.

Let me start with what's obviously the most important thing, which is that du Maurier has learned about more birds in the years since she wrote Rebecca :P Nicely done, du Maurier, keep up the good work!

Okay but actually. Brace yourself for too many words, because I have a LOT to say about this book.

So, as with Rebecca, this is a book involving an unreliable narrator, an old estate by the sea that looms large in the lives of the lead characters, unhealthy relationships, and mysterious threats. Well: it's a gothic, of course it does! Gothics might not be a genre I gravitate to, but apparently when they're well done I'm THERE because both du Mauriers I've read now have been highly worthwhile experiences. Maybe du Maurier is just magic or something.

My Cousin Rachel's narrator-protagonist is Philip, a rich young man who has been raised by his much older cousin Ambrose in a context with basically zero women around, because Ambrose is a raging misogynist. And everyone's always talking about how much Philip is like Ambrose!

Anyway Ambrose fucks off to Italy for health reasons, and while there he meets a woman (the titular Rachel), is captivated by her, marries her, sends some paranoid letters home to Philip, and then dies of what the doctors diagnose as a brain tumour.

Philip, understandably given his background, is VERY SUSPICIOUS of Rachel and hates her immediately -- until Rachel appears in person in his life, and the reality of what she's like changes his tune completely. She's small and beautiful and kind and gentle! Obviously he was wrong to suspect her of anything!

Rachel is a fascinating figure, for certain, and there's much that's mysterious about her. She doesn't say much about her past, but what little you hear, it's clear she's been through a lot of trauma, and is doing her best to live her life and move on from it but is still deeply affected by it.

Rachel has suffered through multiple abusive marriages, her childhood was not good, she had a traumatic miscarriage within the last year, and her man of business (the only stable person in her adult life) is in love with her and seems to want to manipulate her into a relationship instead of respecting the reality of who they are to each other; like, no wonder she's flighty and inconsistent and has weird emotional reactions to things sometimes! Especially since she's now spending so much time with Philip, who reminds her a LOT of her most recent abusive ex! The stuff about her relationship with Ambrose.....does not look great, and then the moment where you find that he was physically violent to her just puts everything else into even starker relief. He was a bad husband and a bad man.

And Philip is very clearly ALSO bad. It sneaks up on you a bit; I felt sorry for Philip at first, his upbringing was not one well-suited to turning him into a reasonable adult man and I wanted him to have the chance to learn and grow up and be better. He seemed to be merely terribly naive and sheltered. And his narration is obviously biased towards himself, which helps carry the reader along on his side for quite a while. But the further I got and the more I saw him living out his worse impulses, the less sorry I felt. I was entirely out of patience with him before I was halfway through, and that's before he demonstrates his capacity for violence!

Philip spends the whole book being a jealous and self-centred manbaby who just wants the people who are his to be ENTIRELY HIS AND NOBODY ELSE'S. Ambrose is HIS and he haaaaaates anyone who might change the nature of their relationship, where the two of them are all-in-all to each other. And then when Philip he meets Rachel, he starts behaving in the same kind of possessive way about her, only worse, because he has huge amounts of power over her due to his wealth and his relationship to her dead husband and the fact that he's a man and she's a woman. And she's trapped alone in a country where she knows nobody except for him and his allies. He runs roughshod over her, unwilling to listen to her when she expresses what would be best for her, always pushing her into the role he wants her to have: where she's isolated and completely under his control and he can spend all of his time commandeering her attention and obsessing over her with no interruptions.

Even when he decides to give her the inheritance that ought to have been hers, it is not out of a sense of generosity or of righting a wrong, it's entirely because he figures that if he makes the estate hers (with him stipulated as its caretaker) then she HAS to stay there with him and never leave him. It's a way of manipulating her again.

And all of that is bad enough, but then he demonstrates himself capable of physical violence against her, when he chokes her at a time when she's not doing what he wants. He doesn't seem to think anything of the fact that he does it, even, like he doesn't think he's done anything wrong! And then he uses the fact that Rachel knows he's willing to hurt her to threaten her in forthcoming scenes. Horrible horrible horrible.

And then there's the ENDING. He's so callous about sending her to her death!!!!!! Holy shit. I knew what was going to happen because I'd read spoilers before getting into the book, but it still sure does strike you to read that after all the build-up. YIKES.

All of which is to say, the central unanswered mystery of the book is framed as: did Rachel poison Ambrose to death, and attempt to do the same to Philip? And my answer is: well, if she did then so what??

Even if Rachel were a poisoner, even if Rachel were as malicious and bad intentioned and dangerous as Philip clearly believes at the end, his actions towards her would be completely unconscionable.

But........even if Rachel were a poisoner, it's clear she would have been using that poison as the only source of power available to her as a woman with no resources, to try to get out from under the control of powerful and explicitly-and-imminently-dangerous-to-her men. Is killing people the ideal way of handling your life's problems? Obviously not. And I wouldn't, like, recommend this in real life, to be clear. But she wasn't left with any other option except to suffer, and you know what, good for her for deciding that she didn't deserve that suffering.

But also, there's plenty of evidence for the other side too, where she isn't guilty of anything at all except some lapses in judgement on the level anyone might make. In which case she's a vulnerable woman who's experienced endless abuse at the hands of men, does her best to live a kind and open-hearted life regardless, and gets murdered for it.

I kind of love that du Maurier doesn't ever resolve the answer to this question, about whether Rachel poisoned anyone, because in the end the point is that it doesn't matter, that the power men have over women with the full consent of society is the worse poison for everyone involved. Apparently du Maurier has said that she doesn't know herself whether Rachel did it or not!

Speaking of men having power over women: Louise. She has been raised in such a way that everyone including her assumes that one day she will be Philip's wife, and she's young and inexperienced and seems to have basically brainwashed herself into thinking this will be a happy ending for her, because she needs it to be, if she wants to be able to face her future with any equanimity. As a result she's a little bit too in love with/possessive of/automatically taking the side of Philip, and it leads her to staunchly believe the best of him and the worst of anyone else who might be seeming to interfere (hence her eager willingness to believe ill of Rachel), but I hope that the ending OPENS HER EYES because holy shit. There is at least a hint that it has given her something to think about with respect to Philip, and I hope it sinks in!!!!!!! Louise seems mostly reasonable and just very young, and I think she could grow into someone worth knowing if she takes the right steps here, instead of doubling down on being on Philip's side. Otherwise she could very easily become the protagonist-of-Rebecca to Philip's Maxim.

But literally every woman in this book has it rough. In Philip's eyes, every other woman in his world is ugly, irritating, a waste of time and energy to spend any time with. Louise is looked down on and taken for granted. And Rachel is put up on a pedestal to his obsession. There is no good way to exist as a woman within this framework!

I also appreciate the thematic implications of the particular way Rachel dies. Philip puts so much energy into improving the estate specifically and only because of Rachel; the improvements to the building are to make a statement about Rachel's spending habits, that her supposed extravagance doesn't matter because he can be more extravagant, and the improvements to the grounds are because Rachel loves gardening and needing her input on the gardens is another way to force her to stay longer. What kills her in the end, then, is an aspect of the insidious ways in which he is using his power to to manipulate Rachel, with the garden bridge collapsing under her. And the dangerous endpoint of his obsessive actions was foreshadowed by the dog of his childhood having been killed by falling slate during the roof renovations earlier.

Du Maurier is clearly very deliberate, throughout the book, about every choice she's making, and how all of it works together to build the story she's trying to tell, from the tiniest details out. It's really incredible, and I'm quite sure I didn't catch on a conscious level nearly all of the things she was doing, the connections she was drawing, but this book as a whole is the result of an author who knows exactly what she's doing and knows how to achieve the results she wants, and I am so impressed.

(However: du Maurier's books are, you know, of an era, and Philip's horse is named after a slur, and it's jarring to constantly randomly have that intrude on the text over the whole course of the book -- because the horse KEEPS on showing up in scene after scene! The name is, I think, chosen to tie into the themes of ethnocentrism/xenophobia that the book is intentional about including (Rachel is half-Italian and half-English, and that very clearly MEANS things to Philip et al) but I also don't think that at that time the term was understood by white people to be a slur on the same level it is known to be today, so I don't think the jarring experience was quite what du Maurier was intending here. I think she intended it to be merely a subtle reminder of that theme. Well, intentions and outcomes don't always match, and here we are.)

Anyway my conclusion is that I desperately need fanfic about Rachel, but ao3 contains exactly zero works for My Cousin Rachel and this is a tragedy and I am personally betrayed by fandom.