Rachel Ashley is Chinatown. The theme of not just this novel, but much of the author’s best work, is how women remain utterly inscrutable to men. Two men are at the center of this tale and one has passed along his misogynistic fear and hatred of women to the other. Notice that it only takes one single woman to throw the lives of two men into utter havoc. This represents a direct inversion of the ratio described in the author’s most famous novel, Rebecca, in which his two wives play havoc with the one life of Max de Winter. (Of course, Mrs. Danvers will do her part to add to that havoc by the end, but she is really just an extension of Rebecca.)
Just as Max de Winter never truly understands either Rebecca or her polar opposite whom he impulsively marries following Rebecca’s death, neither Philip or his uncle are truly capable of understanding Rachel. The irony being, of course, that she is the one woman whom both are drawn into bringing into their lives. Just as Max de Winter should never have even tried to understand the complicated Rebecca (mainly because he even has trouble with his distinctly less complicated second wife), Rachel is probably up there among the top ten percent of women that both these men should have done everything possible to avoid. These are two men who are destined for problematic domestic relationships even if they had married simple, uncomplicated, devotedly submissive women. Suffice to say that neither stands a chance with someone who describes herself as a “survivor of too many emotional shipwrecks.” Rachel comes into the lives of her distant cousins already formed and shaped with experience and that experience is as a widow married to an Italian Count of no account whose death left her shipwrecked on an island surrounded by debt.
Philip is raised by his uncle in an environment freakishly absent feminine influence. As he observes in his narration, his uncle “was shy of women, and mistrustful too, saying they made mischief in a household.” Where women are not allowed or shunned or ostracized, they are invariably misunderstood, often feared, sometimes hated and never fully trusted. Such is the case with Ambrose and Philip. This form of misogyny fueled by the absence of even an attempt to understand them is the foundation for everything which follows, including the ambiguity of the circumstances which leads Philip to pose the central question of the novel almost on page one: “Was Rachel innocent or guilty?”
It is a question which is notoriously never answered; one of the advantages of writing the novel in the first-person from Philip’s perspective. He can’t answer that question because his background and psychological nurturing has already successfully implicated Rachel’s guilt in the death of his uncle before he even meets her, but then he does meets her and is forced for the first time in his life to actually try to understand a woman rather that dismissing her as inscrutable.
What Philip discovers in being forced to actually try to understand Rachel winds up being something along the lines of what Max de Winter learns after marrying Rebecca and then learns again after marrying his second wife. In both Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel, Du Maurier seems to be giving advice not unlike that delivered in the famous closing line of a classic movie: “Forget it, guys, it’s woman town.”
