Michelle Blanchard Ardillo

If you could be a character from a book or film, who would you be? Why?

As an avid reader my whole life, I have many “favorite books” and the list of the top ten continues to change and evolve over the decades and years of my reading life. The same 2 or 3 titles always appear near the top of the list, however, no matter what I’ve just finished reading. And the #1 spot since I first read it in 1980 has been held by Rebecca, the 1938 gothic novel by Daphne du Maurier.

In the fall of 1980, I was a first semester law student (and only semester as it turned out) at LSU in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It was a Saturday morning and I had just cleaned my studio apartment and organized my study materials for the rest of my day at my small kitchen/dining/study table. While I had been cleaning, I had turned on my teeny tiny TV (my father had won it at work in some raffle) set to one of the only three channels I could get, as background noise while I cleaned.

Cleaning my studio apartment did not take long as it was just one large all-purpose room tucked under the stairs of the larger two and three bedroom apartments above me. The management had hung a floor to ceiling curtain to separate the kitchen/living room area from the bedroom/dressing room-closet-bathroom area. It was 15 minutes from the law school, it was perfect, and I loved it.

As I went to turn off the TV which was perched on a kitchen stool to start my day of reading case law and taking notes, I was drawn in by the black and white movie that was on. An hour later I was still standing there mesmerized by it, mostly by the enormous mansion with never ending staircases and what seemed like hundreds of doors leading to who knows which rooms.

Later that day I went to the bookstore and bought my very first copy of Rebecca, and dare I say, I spent the rest of that weekend mostly reading one of du Maurier’s most famous works, completely swept away by the darkness of it, the mystery of the death of the first Mrs. de Winter, the naïveté and innocence of the second Mrs. de Winter, the tragic fire that changes everything. It wasn’t until much later that I realized the cleverness of du Maurier in making the title of the book Rebecca after the first Mrs. de Winter, and never, not once, telling the reader the first name of the second Mrs. de Winter.

Now, I really can’t blame Daphne du Maurier or Alfred Hitchcock for my not being asked back for spring semester by LSU Law School, but instead of getting a law degree, I got a lifelong obsession with both du Maurier’s novel and Hitchcock’s film.

The juxtaposition of my tiny studio apartment to the grand estate of Manderley located on the sea near Cornwall is humorous to say the least, but when I think of the British aristocracy, it is Maxim de Winter and his Manderley that I imagine. Butler, housekeeper, valet, cooks, chauffeur, maids for every floor and specific purpose, not to mention groundskeepers and the such.

The first morning the second Mrs. de Winter comes down the grand staircase for breakfast is a favorite scene of mine. She is shown to the breakfast room where an enormous buffet has been set up. The butler tries to talk her into various foods but she only wants a cup of tea. She is alone in this enormous house with only the staff to guide her first hours as her new husband has gone off to see to the demands of running his estate.

I grew up in a modest one-story family home with my parents and two younger brothers. I did have a room to myself while my brothers shared a room. We all shared the one full bath in the home, and the small half bath off my parents’ bedroom was mostly used by them. It had double pocket doors: one set opening into their bedroom and the other set opening into the kitchen. Instead of overlooking the sea at Cornwall, my childhood home was on the West Bank of the Mississippi River, and I could hear the tug boats chugging along during the night.

I had a good childhood, loved by my parents, given the best opportunities they could give me including a college education, so I have no complaints.

I wouldn’t want to actually BE the second Mrs. de Winter, BUT, how I’d like to spend a few days at Manderley, to wake up in a room that overlooked the sea, to walk the grounds with my dog, to settle into a big comfy chair in the morning room with a good book, a blazing fire, and a cup of tea, to dress up in a long gown for dinner served on fine china…well, I think I could handle a few days of that!