Max de Winter: Dreamboat or Douchebag?
When I was preparing to write this column I was of the firm opinion that Maximillian de Winter was a definite douchebag. My vague memories of him, from reading the book years ago, were of a cold man who married a mouse of a girl and then began to coolly neglect her as she was bullied by those around them. In many ways he was to me the epitome of a romance alphahole – proud, rich, and full of himself. It was surprising when I went back to the text to see how differently the heroine saw him.
At the start of the story she tells us, “He is wonderfully patient and never complains, not even when he remembers.” Impressive but then after all he has been through maybe he has learned contentment. But then further down is a section that really impressed me:
“Mr. de Winter is having coffee with us, go and ask the waiter for another cup,” she said, her tone just casual enough to warn him of my footing. It meant I was a youthful thing and unimportant, and that there was no need to include me in the conversation. She always spoke in that tone when she wished to be impressive, and her method of introduction was a form of self-protection, for once I had been taken for her daughter, an acute embarrassment for us both. This abruptness showed that I could safely be ignored, and women would give me a brief nod which served as a greeting and dismissal in one, while men, with large relief, would realize they could sink back into a comfortable chair without offending courtesy.
It was a surprise, therefore, to find that this newcomer remained standing on his feet, and that it was he who made the signal to the waiter.
“I’m afraid I must contradict you,” he said to her, “you are both having coffee with me.”
Okay, I’ll admit that at this moment I swooned a bit. Clearly our heroine had been used to being dismissed before and here this handsome, rich, eligible man is the first to treat her with courtesy. I love a man with gracious manners and good will towards those considered beneath him. He went even higher in my estimation a little later in the conversation after an embarrassing moment. “I think he realized my distress, for he leaned forward in his chair and spoke to me in a gentle voice.”
This is one of endless little thoughtful acts, from driving the heroine to the places she wants to sketch to caring for her comfort. “There’s a cold wind this morning, you had better put on my coat.”
Then things seem to go south starting with the marriage proposal. “I’m asking you to marry me, you little fool” is hardly the romantic question women dream of. “It’s a pity you have to grow up” makes him sound more a pedophile than an ardent lover. The moments leading up to The Big Revelation don’t really show a lover like devotion either.
The problem, of course, is that rather than being a traditional romantic hero Max de Winter is a gothic hero. What’s the difference? Here’s one explanation:
The thrill that people find in a Gothic novel is based on fear, desire and sin—the things that lack in the average person’s life. However, all these would be nothing without a Gothic Hero to embody all of those things. The Gothic Hero delights the reader with his elusiveness and the foreboding danger that always seems to follow him. As opposed to the seemingly perfect, savior-like personality the traditional hero has, the villainous allure that the Gothic Hero possessed enchants the reader. In Rebecca, Maxim de Winter is a true Gothic Hero. Experiencing a fall from grace in which he showed villainous impulses; Maxim isolated himself from the world and eventually received retribution for his crime.
I think the above explains the attraction of the gothic heroes of such authors as Victoria Holt and Phyllis A. Whitney, some of whom would easily be called douchebags. And now it is time to ask the question to AAR Staffers: Is Max de Winter a dreamboat or a douchebag?
Anne Marble: I like that distinction. Getting a Gothic hero is like expecting Ryan Gosling, or Chris Hemsworth, or…. (OK, name your popular star)… And getting Johhny Depp. Or Neil Gaiman. Or even Eric Draven from The Crow. He’s not going to make wisecracks in the middle of a fist fight, but he might be the stronger hero in the right circumstances. Maybe he’s the hero equivalent of the “quiet strength” heroine, although of course he’ll have his inner demons to worry about. This reminds me of the Eight Hero Archetypes article that I was looking at recently.
Caz: When I read the sentence about his being a gothic hero rather than a romantic one, I practically jumped up and pumped by fist into the air, because yes, that’s it exactly. I haven’t read the book all that recently, but I’ve read it several times, and also had a bit of a binge on gothics some years back – older “classic” titles as well as digging into the big collection of Victoria Holt’s books I amassed in the 70s and 80s.
And Max is definitely a hero in that mould. The story is told exclusively from the heroine’s PoV, which immediately puts the reader at a distance from him, as we can never really get inside his head and have to view his actions through that one viewpoint. It’s something I’d forgotten, and which was brought home when re-reading and listening to audio versions of some of Holt’s books over the last couple of years. I can understand that it’s also something which can be particularly frustrating to the modern reader who is more used to getting both protagonists’ PoV in romance novels.
With Max, I think the point is that he shows to best advantage when he’s out of England. The place holds so many terrible memories for him, and it’s clear that from the moment he sets foot in his home, he starts to feel the weight of those memories start to pull him down. But when in France, he’s charming and considerate and I think it speaks volumes for the depth of his attraction towards “the girl” that he pays attention to the “little” things – protecting her from Mrs van Hopper’s wrath when he can, taking her sketching, just showing her the small considerations that she’s probably never received before – and then to go so far as to marry her, a nobody, when he could have had anyone… As the book progresses, we come to see that one of her attractions –probably the main one – is that’s she’s Rebecca’s polar opposite, but IMO that still doesn’t diminish the fact that Max married her when he didn’t have to or need to – so he must have wanted to.
Later in the book, it’s much more difficult to see Max as a romantic hero as his past comes back to haunt him. He seems to neglect his new wife the moment they set foot inside Manderley, which points to douche-baggery, it’s true, but I think it’s also probably true of men of that time and that class that they would have expected to continue to run their lives as they had before marriage – although it’s definitely selfish and and inconsiderate of him to expect his bride to know how to run a house like Manderley when the reason he married her was precisely BECAUSE she had never been brought up to do something like that. I put it down to thoughtlessness rather than being a douchebag, but again, modern sensibilities will undoubtedly err in that direction.
Ultimately, I think it’s difficult to pin Max down with either of those tags. In the early part of the book he’s a definite dreamboat, then he starts to look like a douchebag… although I really can’t bring myself to condemn him that far, and let’s face it, he’s got some pretty nasty inner demons to deal with. Can he be a dreamboat with some douche-bag tendencies?
Dabney: I feel like you have no idea who Max will be now that there is no Manderley. So, based on who he has been in the book, I think he’s no one I’d believe could love the second Mrs. DeWinter in a supportive, partnered way.
I must confess I also find Max a bit of a weakling–he couldn’t define himself beyond his evil wife and his house. I didn’t hold out much hope for a robust spouse post-fire.
Mary: Me either, Dabney.
Caroline: I’ve only seen the movie, but I thought he was a real sucker to have the wool pulled over his eyes by Mrs. Danvers like that. As soon as she duped the narrator into wearing Rebecca’s costume to the party, Max ought to have sacked her. Gothic, whatever – if you let your employee treat your wife like that, you’re a douchebag.
Lynne AAR: Yes! On the one hand, I can see strains of tortured hero in Max and the way he initially took notice of the invisible narrator and whisked her away to Manderley seemed so romantic to me. However, life at Manderley is anything but romantic. Max de Winter seems terribly rigid and underneath that inflexibility, terribly weak to have been so duped by Mrs. Danvers. And then there’s that description of Max and the narrator’s life together after the events at Manderley – they so carefully avoid anything that might remind them of bad memories that he ends up basically making the poor nameless narrator avoid anything that seems like life all together.
I love this book, but as I once blogged, I just can’t call it romance. And I do think Max is horrid.
So now it’s your turn. Max de Winter, dreamboat or douchebag?
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I noticed this morning that most of Du Maurier’s books have been up-loaded to the Overdrive catalog on my library’s e-media page. I downloaded Rebecca and Castle Dor…..I don’t remember if I ever read Rebecca or just watched the film. The funny thing is that the books are listed under romance, which I find odd.
I see I am apparently the only one who cringes when I see some of the language used for male characters, particularly douchebag. I was hoping against hope after the first of this new “”series”” blog that the fondness for this particular alliteration would wane. I much prefer what Blythe used in the first go round with the word “”jerk”” with a capital or lowercase J.
Put another way, when will there me an alliterative blog about whores vs worthies, or maybe sluts vs saints? I’ll cringe at that language too, even though I doubt it will happen, because it’s so lacking in language skills? cutsey? or just fatuous? and I mean the wording though, not necessarily the overall conversation that women are apparently enjoying.
No you aren’t alone. I see this as just another misogynistic term becoming acceptable in mainstream vernacular.
I think one important aspect being overlooked is that this is an older man-younger woman marriage. If you look at the famous ones going on right now, like Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, these marriages always have a delayed kick to them. In the first flush of romance, a big age difference does not look like much of an impediment. However, as time goes on one learns that the gap presents more obstacles than one expected. There is a huge generational difference between the two leads and absolutely everyone with whom they come into contact is of his generation and class, not hers. So there were going to be problems between these two with or without Rebecca.
I agree that after Manderly is gone, the heroine has the upper hand. Their relationship will shift even more and I would expect that she may have to revert to the earlier caregiver role in which she was employed. This time he will be the faltering older person under her care but she was have position and power which she did not have when working as such.
I didn’t realize that Jeremy Bret made a version of this. I need to find it. I prefer the Olivier one over the Charles Dance version.
In Margaret Forster’s book about du Maurier she says that “”Few critics saw in the novel what the author wanted them to see: the exploration of the relationship between a man who was powerful and a woman who was not.””
It’s interesting that you mentioned the age difference as well since age can certainly lend power – and take it away as well.
I think the class issue especially is made very clear in the book and in the Hitchcock version. In the movie Fontaine’s character is a hired chaperone to a wealthy woman and since we see the events through her eyes, we know that she is treated as a servant and lives on the periphery of Maxim’s world. That feeling is only heightened in marriage after the honeymoon, which we view in flashback.
I would add to others here that du Maurier’s _Rebecca_ is not a genre romance and therefore standard character representations we might have about romance heroes don’t really apply in this book. Maxim De Winter is a figure in a psychological suspense novel and a Gothic one at that, and though romance has its place, the romance is not always the central focus in this book. It is true that the romance does lead us into the story, and the romance concludes the story. What happens in the middle seems so much more interesting and complex though.
I would say douchebag, definitely. Perhaps I have this feeling b/c of Laurence Olivier’s performance in the movie, very distant and aloof. It could be that we follow his wife’s POV, I don’t know.
Now that I think of it, although I like Laurence Olivier as an actor, I have never seen him as a very romantic figure.
I know I read the book years ago, but I don’t remember how Max de Winter was portrayed there. Perhaps the literary character was different from the movie.
I’m a huge fan of Gothics, and I have a soft spot for many Gothic heroes. But not Max de Winter. I don’t daydream of being the second Mrs. de Winter. Enough said.
I enjoyed reading everyone’s thoughts! I don’t generally think of Rebecca as a romance, so the question hasn’t really arisen for me. I have been doing an old Harlequin Presents read lately though, and it’s kind of fascinating how often I see echoes of Rebecca in them… even if not strictly a romance, it definitely had an impact on the genre.
The old HPs also tend to be much more gothic in feel, which goes along with that heroine pov only (although they’re in third person.) The hero is enigmatic and you generally don’t know what he’s thinking until the end. (I’m fine with heroine-only POV but much prefer the somewhat more modern style of making the heroes feelings apparent, even without his pov.)
On the whole, I’d have to classify Max as pretty douchey… and for those who have only seen the movie, you haven’t seen the full Max…
I don’t view Rebecca as a romance either, so viewing Max as either/or dreamy or douchy doesn’t work for me. I’ve always viewed the book as a psychological thriller, which made it so perfect for a Hitchcock adaptation. I also agree that if you’ve only seen the movie, you haven’t viewed the full Max (the movie softens up his crime from what I can remember). I think the creepiest du Maurier male lead is Philip from My Cousin Rachel (which is tale of obsession rather than love).
I have mixed feelings on Rebecca as a romance too. Romance gothic writers have definitely used it as a blue print. I think the distant, enigmatic hero with the dark overtones that many authors use has its roots in Max de Winter. And when I did my recent re-read I was surprised at how much the very early part of the book reads like a romance. I think that is part of what makes the book so effective – it begins in this idyllic location where a Cinderella story takes place. As in Cinderella, the prince (in this case Max) serves as simply a charming means to an end. We are focused on our heroine, who is being pulled up from her life of drudgery and swept into HEA land. But rather than blue birds and wedding bells there is Manderley and the whole story starts to head south. I like that the book both ends with the reassurance that the heroine loves Max and begins with it. His feelings we are never sure of but from her end, it is a love story.
I don’t think he’s an outright douchebag (and I should include a disclaimer here that Rebecca is one of my absolute favorite books–I even wrote a regency, Lord of Secrets, in the same distant hero/mousy heroine mold, complete with overbearing Mrs. van Hopper type), but Max is far more self-involved than I’d like. Points in his favor are that he doesn’t appear to be a womanizer (the hero of Victoria Holt’s gothic Mistress of Mellyn, for example, carries on an affair with a married woman), he’s so absurdly chivalrous that he keeps his first wife’s secrets, and he presumably sees the inner worth of the heroine enough to propose marriage and place her in a position of importance in his world. But his preoccupation with his own problems frequently makes him insensitive to the heroine’s need for affection and reassurance. For example, when he returns from a trip to London, she says “”I’ve hated you being away. I’ve missed you terribly”” and he merely responds, “”Have you?””; when he discovers the heroine in Rebecca’s beachside cottage and grows angry, the heroine begs him not to be angry and says “”I love you so much,”” to which he reponds, “”Do you?”” Argh. In some ways I think du Maurier cast her hero in an even worse light by including the character of Frank Crawley, Max’s estate agent, because Frank is not only present more often, but also far more reassuring to the heroine.
In the case of the movie, I wonder if my perception of Max isn’t colored by Laurence Olivier’s performance. Apparently he wanted very much for Vivien Leigh to get the role of the second Mrs. de Winter (they were married the year the movie was made), and took out his disappointment on actress Joan Fontaine. I think most people would agree Hitchcock made the right choice in giving the role to Fontaine. In fact, Vivien Leigh is who I picture when I imagine Rebecca.
I love the image of Vivien Leigh as Rebecca.
The minute you mentioned it and I pictured Vivien Leigh, I thought “”Yes, that’s Rebecca””.
You know, I’m not usually one for prequels, but I would watch a movie prequel to Rebecca, one that showed the first de Winter marriage through Max’s eyes. I’m not sure who could play Rebecca now, but if they put someone really sympathetic in the Max de Winter role, it might be heartwrenching to watch him go from lucky, lovestruck young bridegroom to haunted spouse.
My favorite adaptation is the Jeremy Brett version, but maybe I’m biased because it was the first one I ever saw, and the one that made me want to read the book. Knowing what I do about his struggles with bipolar disorder now, he was probably a really good choice for someone as troubled as Max.
I saw the Hitchcock version recently and liked it more than I remembered the first time. (The wonderful commentary helped!) I also really liked George Sanders in that version.
Charles Dance (Tyrone from _Game of Thrones) did a nice job as Maxim too in the 1997 TV movie. I have not seen the Jeremy Brett version but it sounds good. I do like him very much as an actor.
I love Lawrence Olivier and so I am a fan of his Maxim and I do love the Hitchcock version. It’s different from the book though and stands on its own.
I said exactly the same thing about Olivier – he’s at his most mind-meltingly gorgeous in that film ;) I can’t imagine Leigh as “”the girl””, though – but the minute you mentioned her name, I immediately pictured her as Rebecca! She’d have been brilliant in that role had there been a prequel!
Also, I said Mrs Howard reminded me of Mrs van Hopper in my audio review of LoS. I’m glad to know I wasn’t imagining it!