Bertha and Rebecca also make for interesting comparisons, Bertha locked away in an attic due to “madness” and Rebecca murdered for being a sexual libertine (if you take Max at his word).

Indeed, Jane has the moral fortitude to stick to her guns and leave Rochester behind when she finds out about Bertha. Mrs de Winter never for a moment feels regret upon learning that Maxim killed Rebecca, and indeed delights in it, consummating their marriage immediately after

Jane and the nameless protagonist of Rebecca also couldn’t be more different. Jane is an active agent in her own destiny; Mrs de Winter floats through life at Manderley afraid to make a single decision or to do things at all different from Rebecca. She never expresses herself in dialogue.

As I got further in the book, though, it became clear to me that the book is riffing heavily on Jane Eyre. De Winter is Rochester, a tormented older man with terrible secrets marrying a younger lower-class naïf. Unlike Rochester, De Winter has a significant Bluebeard aspect.

My initial read of it was that it felt very heavily influenced by the Turn of the Screw, in that it’s a country manor ghost story told by a woman who’s kind of losing it; while Screw suggests that the ghosts might not be real, Rebecca goes 1 step further: a house doesn’t need ghosts to be haunted

Finished Rebecca today. What a fascinating book - a shame I only pretended to read it in college (I was working on my senior thesis sorry!). It’s gloomy and dreamy and weird and I’m going to blather about it for a sec 💙📚

Much as Ori Goldberg (rightly imo) says that the carpet bombing of Gaza is not demonstrating the strength of the state of Israel but its weakness, I think October 7th demonstrates Hamas’ complete existential fear and desperation in that moment - killing civilians comes from a place of weakness

And that they perceived that the best way to do this was by inflicting as much damage on civilians as possible. Although some things are up on the air - I think it’s established they didn’t know about the music festival?

My feeling is that the goal of the operation was to permanently shatter the Israeli consensus around security and provoke the Israelis into an invasion of Gaza in an effort to scupper the Trump/Biden/Netanyahu attempt to freeze the status quo into place via normalization

This is what Du Bois argues convincingly, and he also notes that Lincoln’s biggest political skill was extreme flexibility to accept the conditions that were changing rapidly under his feet