Spoiler alert: this piece is about the endings of two novels ‘Glass Houses’ by Francesca Reece and ‘Rebecca’ by Daphne du Maurier.

As part of my PhD I’m reading, watching, looking at and visiting cultural materials and buildings, museums and houses to get different perspectives on home. It isn’t surprising that I would start to see echoes between them but I was a bit surprised that burning down the house would be an early contender.

I’ve just finished reading ‘Glass Houses’ by Francesca Reece – about Geth and Olwen – a couple of people from North Wales who were connected as children and then reconnect as adults. The book is set in and around a house – Ty Gwydr, which for Geth isn’t a place he owns but feels like it is his, and that Olwen and her husband briefly own and creates a place for them to reunite. At the end of the novel it implies that Geth sets fire to the house but we never explicitly see this. Having recently read ‘Rebecca’ by Daphne du Maurier, that links back to the end of the novel where the implication is that Manderley has been set on fire. We don’t directly see the flames but the red sky and falling ash clearly suggest that is what is happened.

In both stories the home is a place of memories but also becomes, for those who decide to burn down the house – Geth and it seems Mrs Danvers in ‘Rebecca’ – a place that reminds them of a future they can no longer have. For Geth, it seems clear that Olwen chose to stay with her husband James, rather than leave him for Geth. There’s something about not being able to be with the only person he’s ever loved in that way. For Olwen, when thinking about telling James she wants to end things, she says something about it never being about not loving him, even as she clearly has very strong feelings for Geth. So there’s a difference in terms of the space that the other has in their lives and what that relationship means for each of them in terms of the possibility of love. There is also something about what the relationship would open up or close down for each of them. For Geth, there’s a suggestion of the relationship with Olwen allowing him to live in different ways – partly that he might get to live in the house he’s come to think of as his own. But also perhaps a life that goes beyond the area he grew up in. That he knows everyone and is a kind of big fish in a small pond there, and while that’s comfortable, Olwen offers him a chance to go beyond that. For Olwen it would be more of a narrowing down – financially she would be leaving someone who is very rich for someone who definitely isn’t. But more than it’s also someone who moves through the world in a quite different way – Geth is perhaps less comfortable in some situations than James is.

The ending of the stories serves to makes the home more of a character – a place that has held and facilitated ways of being in the present, as well as a holder of memories. Something that acts upon people as well as being acted upon. In Rebecca I was surprised by how the destruction of Manderley didn’t seem to have quite freed up the de Winter’s in the way the oppressive nature of Manderley, and Mrs Danvers, had seemed to suggest it might have done. For Geth though, it’s less clear what might become of him once the house is burned down and there’s presumably an investigation. Olwen and James seem to still be together and had planned to sell the house – their second home. So while they will be somewhat affected, given their wealth and decision to leave and sell, the impact for them is likely to be much more cushioned.

For both Geth and Mrs Danvers, there’s a sense they are trying to take control of a situation that is beyond their control. That the choices they wanted have become impossible for them, in Olwen staying with James and with the death of the first Mrs de Winter. It’s hard then to imagine what they can do, how they can be, and so they kick out and bring down the house which epitomises that. It’s a narrow kind of control because it can’t get them what they want but it can at least take them further away from their lost chances and so it’s understandable that might feel like the only choice they have now.

I’ve still got lots more books to read so I’m interested as to whether there will be more stories of the house burning down to end it all. As a plot device, burning down the house has a finality to it so I can see why it would be something that authors might reach for. A way to draw a line under what has happened and show that a situation, or way of being or seeing the world is now no longer possible. It serves to heighten the emotions of those who destroyed the homes physically, while showing how others might have destroyed the meaning of the home in other ways already.