Rebecca (novel)

Chapter 1: >The book begins, famously with the nameless narrator describing her dream of returning to Manderley, a grand house near the coast in the west country, and finding it empty and neglected

Chapter 2: >The narrator and her husband, in refuge from painful events in the past, live in a small, spartan hotel somewhere in southern Europe - dreaming of England and of Manderley. The narrator remembers her first meeting with her husband, Maxim de Winter, when she was staying in a hotel in Monte Carlo, the paid companion of Mrs Van Hopper, a vulgar American.

Chapter 3: >Mrs Van Hopper inveigles Maxim, an acquaintance, into a conversation. He is clearly embarrassed by Van Hopper, and makes jokes at her expense; later he writes to the narrator, apologising for his rudeness.

Chapter 4: >While her employer is ill, Maxim insists that the narrator should have lunch with him and takes her for a drive; he is kind and attentive, though odd. Mrs Van Hopper explains that his first wife, Rebecca died in an "appalling tragedy", drowning in a bay near Manderley.

Chapter 5: >Maxim and the narrator continue to spend the mornings together; she hides her activities from V.H. She falls in love with him, but thinks him indifferent. When she asks whether he spends time with her out of charity, he gets angry - but kisses her.

Chapter 6: >V.H. plans to go to America. When the narrator tells Maxim, he responds by casually asking her to marry him. She accepts, and Maxim tells V.H. - who tells the narrator she's making a mistake she'll one day "bitterly regret".

Chapter 7: >They arrive at Manderley from London. As the narrator is introduced to the staff - especially the intimidating housekeeper, Mrs Danvers - she feels uneasy in her new role, replacing the once beautiful and elegant mistress, Rebecca

Chapter 8: >As she tries to run the house, the narrator still feels that she's overstepping her bounds by requesting any change from the normal order of things, and even begins to criticise her own handwriting, by comparing it to Rebecca, stating how it looks like an indifferent pupil with no individuality or style.

Chapter 9: >Maxim's kind, bluff sister Beatrice and her husband Giles come to visit, along with the estate manger Frank Crawley -whom the narrator desperately tries to avoid. However afterwards Beatrice and the narrator get along, and before they leave Beatrice states how different the narrator is from Rebecca.

Chapter 10: .Maxim and the narrator walk down the sea, and the dog leads her to a run-down cottage in a cove; Maxim is angry, revealing that he never goes to that "god-damned" place.

Chapter 11: >As visitors come to pay respects to her, the narrator thinks everyone's comparing her to Rebecca. Frank tries to reassure her by saying that her modesty and kindness =better to Maxim than Rebecca's glamour, however he soon admits that Rebecca was the most beautiful creature he ever laid eyes on.

Chapter 12: >The narrator breaks a china cupid & hides it out of embarrassment. Mrs D. accuses Robert, of stealing; the narrator has to tell everyone it was her, to which Maxim finds quite amusing and teases how she behaves like an "in-between-maid". The narrator tries to open up about her humilation to Maxim, but he says: "I can't understand you"

Chapter 13: >While Maxim is away in London, the narrator discovers a dissolute character called Jack Favell paying a visit to the house, and tells the narrator to keep his visit a secret from Maxim.

Chapter 14: > The narrator goes to Rebecca's bedroom and is surprised by Mrs Danvers there. She notice Danvers has kept the room exactly as it was & speaks rather too fondly of Rebecca,  stating how she feels Rebecca's presence in the house, which frightens the narrator.

Chapter 15: >Beatrice takes the narrator to visit Maxim's grandmother's home which starts out fine but soon becomes unpleasant as Gran begins asking for Rebecca. On their return, the narrator hears Maxim furious with Mrs D for allowing Favell's visit.

Chapter 16: >Maxim agrees to hold the traditional fancy dress ball at Manderley. Mrs. D advices the narrator to dress up as an ancestor of Maxim's painting. When she comes down, Maxim turns pale and angrily demands her to change. As she runs up crying she catches a glimpse of Mrs Danvers face who had watched the whole thing with a devilish grin on her face.

Chapter 17: >Beatrice explains Maxim's fury: her outfit was a replicate of Rebecca's at last year's ball, Maxim assumed that she was playing a cruel trick on him. Beatrice begs and convinces her to put on an ordinary dress and come back down. The night consists of fake smiles & hugs.

Chapter 18: >The narrator wakes to find Maxim gone; she believes that he never loved her and still loves Rebecca. She confronts Mrs Danvers in the late Rebecca's bedroom. Danvers is unrepedent and in fact encourages her to jump from the window! Suddenly a ship runs ashore.

Chapter 19: >A diver is sent down to look at the ship but to everyones surprise, finds Rebecca's boat with a body inside. Maxim reveals that it is none other than Rebecca's body -despite the fact he had already identified another body as hers. In a sudden turn of events, it turns out that Maxim had indeed killed Rebecca.

Chapter 20: >Maxim tells the narrator (at last) that he loves her and despised, hated, loathed Rebecca. She was an unfaithful devil and so he shot her when Rebecca hints she's pregnant with Favell's child

Chapter 21: >Colonel Julyan, the local magistrate, reveals that the boat has been raised, and Rebecca's body identified. There will need to be a new inquest, though Julyan appears satisfied that a simple mistake of identification has been made

Chapter 22: >The narrator and Maxim go to the local market for the coroner's inquest. Tabb the boat builder reveals that the boat has been deliberately scuttled. The coroner asks Maxim for an explanation. The narrator faints.

Chapter 23: >The coroner reaches a verdict of suicide. Jack Favell then arrives at Manderley, announcing that he knows it wasn't suicide. He reveals that he and Rebecca were lovers; and tries to blackmail Maxim. This causes Maxim to call Colonel Julyan to which Favell tells him, that Maxim killed Rebecca

Chapter 24: >Favell argues that Maxim killed Rebecca out of jealousy. Julyan asks for proof, so Favell calls Ben, the "local half-wit", who is often down at the cove as a witness; but Ben says he saw nothing. They discover that Rebecca had a doctor's appointment the day that she died.

Chapter 25: >They decide to visit the specialist, Dr Baker, now retired in Barnett. Mrs Danvers learns that Favell suspects Maxim of murder. Julyan also now seems to have his suspicions. 

Chapter 26: >Dr Baker, a women's specialist reveals that Rebecca indeed visited that day, under the name of Mrs Danvers, & found out that she was not pregnant. In fact the physician went on to say how he can find a possible suicide motive and confirms that she had a malformed uterus and was unable to have children.

Dr Baker continues saying he told her the heavy truth, and declares Rebeccca was suffering from a rare form of incurable cancer, and only had a few months to live.

Chapter 27: >Julyan promises to let it be known that Rebecca commiteed suicide, but suggests that the narrator take a short holiday abroad while the gossip dies down. Maxim phones Manderley, and discovers that Mrs Danvers has disappeared, shortly after receiving a long distance call - presumably from Favell. Worried, Maxim decides to return to Manderley.

The narrator falls asleep in the car and dreams that she sees Maxim tie a rope of hair around Rebecca's neck. When she wakes up, she sees an orange glow on the horizon but realizes that it is the wrong direction to be the sunrise. As they reach the crest of the hill estate, they see Manderley engulfed in flames.

THE NARRATOR: There's lots we don't know about her, for instance her name, which according to Maxim is "lovely and unusual". She responds saying her father was "a lovely and unusal man."

Like most gothic heroines, she is an orphan; but the story hardly brushes on details about her parents: her father died suddenly of pneumonia and her mother followed soon afterwards

Some critics suggests Du Maurier's decision to not name to the narrator, was a feminist act: The narrator has no name of her own; her father gives her one name and her husband the other. 

In the story, suggests Alison Light, she "searches to find a secure social identity (a name) as Maxim's wife"

John Sutherland writes that the narrator's "complete absence of history, past life or identity creates a striking vacuousness at the heart of the novel" -a vacuum which is filled by Rebecca

"...In life the nameless one is less alive than dead Rebecca." The narrator clearly portrays herself as a less than fully-fledged person. She calls herself "a lay-figure" -an artist's mannequin (16)...

..."A dummy" (17), "a wooden thing in Maxim's arms" (20). She is anxious and jealous of her predecessor, who seems to have had all the beauty, charm, experience & breeding she lacks.

-The polar opposite of "the raw ex-schoolgirl, red-elbowed and lanky-haired" (20). In Chapters 7 to 18, every beat of the plot concerns her inferiority, her failure to perform effectively as Maxim's wife

The philosopher and critic Slavoj Zizek suggests that in her books, Du Maurier constantly stages drama of "feminine masochism". This section of the book gives full rein to this tendency.

The narrator says she loved him "in a sick, hurt, desperate way, like a child or a dog" (18). However she undergoes a transformation in the course of the book.

Early on, she tends to be referred to as a girl or a child; Maxim suggests three times that she go to the ball as 'Alice in Wonderland' -a young, curious girl.

As mentioned above, he says pointedly that "there is a certain kind of knowledge i prefer you not to have" (16). She changes when she discovers Maxim killed Rebecca.

This change is somewhat disquieting, as she has no moral qualms following the discovery, that her husband is a murderer; "there was no horror in my heart" she says (20)

Rather, she seems delighted: the phrase "He did not love Rebecca, he did not love Rebecca" repeats itself in her head (21). She becomes, legally, an accessory after the fact.

Having exorcised the spirit of the first Mrs de Winter -"She would never haunt me again"- she reaches maturity, without any moral judgement:

"I was not young anymore.I was not shy. I was not afraid. I would fight for Maxim. I would lie and perjure and swear; I would blaspheme and pray. Rebecca had not won. Rebecca had lost." (21)

Ultimately, though, her triumph is not a happy one. Sally Beauman suggests that her reward is to be "absorbed by her husband": following him into "hellish exile"...

She "becomes again what she was when she first met him - the paid companion to a petty tyrant". Perhaps this is an exaggeration, but her fate is certainly ambiguous.

Maxim de Winter is positioned in Rebecca as the romantic hero, as the object of admiration, love and yearning -but in a very contradictory approach

On his first appearance, he is perceive to be handsome, rich and socially desirable, in the style of romantic heroes from Jane Austen to Jilly Cooper

However he is also seen as very clearly sinister. The narrator says that "his face was arresting, sensitive, medieval in some stange inexplicable way" (3).

He reminds her of a portrait of "Gentlemen Unknown", evoking "a past of narrow stairways and dim dungeons...whispers in the dark, of shimmering rapier blades of silent, exquisite courtesy". 

It has been noted that the word maxim has two meanings. One is the dictionary definition: "a short, pithy statement expressing a genral truth or rule of conduct"

("It was as though he had set himself a standard of behaviour," the narrator says of his good manners in listening to Mrs Van Hopper's inane prattle [3].)

But a Maxim is also a British machine gun of the period, associated with slaughter in the colonies and trenches.

(This strongly mirrors Beatrice comment about Maxim's temper in chapter 9: "Maxim loses his temper once or twice a year and when he does - my God - he does lose it"..."

As though Maxim is a gun, when not loaded, no harm or implication, but when loaded, can "fire up", loose control, cause harm)

The name de Winter, furthermore, hints at something sterile or cold. Maxim is in some respects a model gentlemen. "He'd give the coat off his back for any of his own people i know that" >c/guard.

"I wish there were more people like him in the country" (19). He is also capable of impeccable manners. But he is often impolite. In the lift, he looks down at the narrator and Mrs Van Hopper...

..."mocking, faintly, sardonic, a ghost of a smile on his lips" (5). From then off, Maxim intersperses episodes of kind attention towards the narrator with outbursts of anger and rudeness.

His courtship is abrupt and sometimes unpleasant. "'To hell with this' he said suddenly, as though angry, as though bored, and put his arm around my shoulder..." (5)

His marriage proposal is rude: "No, I'm asking you to marry me, you little fool" (6), followed by an insult: "You are almost as ignorant as Mrs Van Hopper, and just as unintelligent."

Maxim then suggests that he thought she loved him - while making no declaration of his own feelings, but insinuating that if she did not, it would have been "a fine blow to my conceit".

All this is perhaps standard for a romantic hero; they are often - like Mr Rochester - brusque, masterful and unattainable, as well as mentally turbulent.

(The narrator fears at the top of the cliff with him, that he is "not normal, not altogether sane" [4].) However, Maxim carries on being cold and unpleasant well into their marriage. 

There are suggestions that the marriage has, in the romantic and sexual sense "failed": "The bed beside me looked stark and cold" (17).

Note also the continued references to the possibility of the narrator being pregnant, while she is not. Again connotations are sinister:

At the ball, his eyes look beyond the narrator, "cold, expressionless, to some place of pain and torture I could not enter, to some private, inward hell I could not share" (17)

Maxim is a murderer. This was very shocking for a book of its time: so shocking that Hitchcock had to modify the story version so it seem as though his murder was man-slaughter.

Rebecca asks us to become complicit with Maxim de Winter. And by large, it suceeds: most readers want him to get away with murder.

Critic, John Sutherland suggested that Maxim's account of Rebecca's death is not to be believed. He points out that we know from the court scenes, that he's "a liar on oath: a proven perjurer".

Maxim claims that he took a loaded gun to Rebecca's cottage in order to "frighten the fellow, frighten them both" (20) - i.e. Rebecca and Favell - and that he was provoked to use it.

This is not a story that a jury would necessarily believe, particulary since we know he has an explosive temper; and why would he bring a loaded gun just to frighten someone?

Sutherland also notes "...Maxim has clearly shot people before": "I had forgotten," Maxim tells the narrator, "that when you shot a person there was so much blood" (20).

Sutherland suggests that he probably served in WWI; and notes the calm muderousness of his description: "I fired at her heart", Later he hits Favell in a rage; which the narrator finds degrading: "I wished I had not know" (24). How much else about him is she concealing?

Just as Maxim was the hero, Rebecca is clearly the villainess of the story. On the face of it, the novel's ultimate judgment on her is Maxim's:

"She was vicious, damnable, rotten through and through... Rebecca was incapable of love, of tenderness, of decency" (20).

She is compared to "the devil", and, like some force of ancient evil, she is shot and sunk to the bottom of the sea, and even then she returns to wreak havoc.

The name Rebecca, from the hebrew name apparently means a snare, while rebecca in the bible is the wife of Isaac, and was a very beautiful women.

Yet her position is just as ambiguous as Maxim's. The book to some extent celebrates her (after all, it is named after her).

If she was so awful, du Maurier's son Kit asked in an interview, "why is it that everybody else thought the sun shone out of her ****"?

There's "never a bad word about Rebecca" in the book, "except from Max". This isn't quite right: Frank, Beatrice and Ben all hint at her bad behaviour, even Mrs D hints her infidelity.

But it's true that most people are very impressed by her, from Maxim's grandmother, to the staff, & the Dr who admires the courage with which she received news of a terminal disease:

"She stood it very well. She did not flinch" (26). & Maxim, is known as a liar. Aspects of his story do seem hard to credit: would she really have "started on" Giles sexually? (20)

Giles is an amiable buffoon, and Rebecca is, according to Frank, "the most beautiful creature i ever saw in my life" (11),

Antonia Fraser wrote the events of the novel from Rebecca's point of view: Maxim is cast as a cruel monster suffering some unspecified form of perserversion & Rebecca the wronged wife.

The book does not really support this: the most obvious interpretation is that Rebecca is devious and covers up her true personality. "She was clever of course," says Max.

"Damnably clever. No one would guess meeting her that she was not the most kindest, most generous, most gifted person in the world" (20). 

But Rebecca is a somewhat unknowable character, assesed entirely through hearsay: du Maurier herself commented that she "was certainly an enigma & intended to be such" A.L:

R is "A figment of the narrator's imagination, invented from a sense of her own social & sexual limitations, a projection of the n's own desires which helps produce her feelings of inadequacy."

She becomes an embodiment of "Beauty, brains and breeding" (20), an icon of femininity, beside which the narrator is always deficient. Thereafter, she suddenly becomes the opposite.

And throughout there is enough ambiguity to sustain many different readings. Readers have often admired her. "Long after the book has been close, which character reverberates in the memory?"..

Asks Sally Beauman. "Rebecca". She has frequently been seen as feminist rebel - an attractive character because she represents freedom from sociey's gender-based expectations.

"She did what she liked, she lived as she liked," according to Mrs Danvers: she had the "courage and spirit of a boy" (18). She certaintly behaved exactly like many upper-class men of the time.

She cuts her hair short, rides horses fast, sails alone, and has affairs in London - while outwardly respecting the moral standards of the period.

(She makes a "bargain" with Max to "look after your precious Manderley", and make people "say we are the luckiest, happiest, handsomest couple in all England" [20]).

It is implied that she is sexually insatiable. The satyr, a figure of unbridled sexuality, is visible from her study window.

Later we learn that she has a number of lovers; Max compares her to an "animal" in her "degraduation" (20).

John Sutherland suggests that she has "lesbian credentials". This may be another exaggeration. But Mrs Danvers, who seems preoccupied with her clothes, says she "despised all men."(24);

While Maxim says vaguely, that she was "not even normal" (20). We learn that she's unable to fulfil the traditional female role by having children, due to a "malformation of the uterus" (26).

Her ultimate sin, suggests Beauman, is "undermining the entire patriarchal structure that is Manderley". Is that, perhaps, why she had to die?

Mrs Danvers is a classic bogeywoman, invoked and parodied by other writers. She's been called a haunted house in human form: du Maurier used her "in lieu of the hauntings of gothic melodrama"< V.H

When she first appears, on the Narrator's arrival at Manderley, she is linked immediately with death: Someone advanced from the sea of faces, someone tall an gaunt, dressed in deep black...

...whose prominent cheek-bones and great hollow eyes gave her a skull's face (mentioned many times) parchment-white, set on skeleton's frame (7). Her hand is "limp and heavy, deathly cold".

She is a kind of emissary of the dead: she stands in for Rebecca, furious that the 2nd Mrs de Winter is trying to take her place.

Initially, Mrs Danvers acts as the gatekeeper to an alien and intimidating world and seems unimpressed by her humble new mistress.

But gradually the Narrator realises that there is something beside scorn and snobbery "in those eyes of hers, something surely of positive dislike or actual malice?" (7).

Mrs Danvers persecutes her new mistress and does it in a particularly creepy way: she haunts her, "a black figure" at the head of the stairs (7);

She appears at windows and suddenly materialises behind the N in Rebecca's empty bedroom in the disused wing. As the book proceeds, her behaviour becomes more extreme and manipulative.

She is furious that the narrator has "tried to take Mrs de Winter's place" (18).

She seems to feed off the narrator's unhappiness and feelings of inferiority, which leave her "triumphant, gloating, excited in a stangely unhealthy way" (14).

She convinces the narrator to dress up as C de Winter, in a "cruel and evil" (18) attempt to worsen an already shaky marriage. When the narrator confronts her, D tries to get N to commit suicide.

Mrs Danvers is clearly fixated with her dead mistress. "She simply adored Rebecca," Beatrice tells the narrator (9). In the Rebecca's bedroom scene, Chapter 14, we see the extent of her obession.

We learn that Mrs Danvers comes to the room every day and dusts it, as if it were a shrine to the dead. There seem to be sexual undertones to her fixation: 

she praises her mistress's "beautiful figure", touches her clothes lovingly, and boasts that Rebecca wouldn't allow anyone else to brush her hair. Mrs Danvers has often been seen as a lesbian:

Hitchcock's film, which was memorably played by Judith Anderson, emphasised this angle (though Anderson's version is 20 yrs younger than du Maurier's, who looked after Rebecca from childhood).

Certainly, she sems jealous and possesive. When she learns that Rebcca concealed her illness from her, she says: "Why did she keep it from me? She told me everything" (25)

At the end of the film, she disappears shortly after Favell makes a telephone call. It is implied that she starts the fire at Manderley - her final act as Rebecca's agent.

The academic Richard Kelly suggest Rebecca has "...the trappings" of the genre: "a mysterious, haunted mansion, violence, murder, a sinister villain, sexual passion, a fire, a large landscape.."

The quintessential Gothic romance is Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Nowadays remebered chiefly as the target of Jane Austen's Gothic satire, Northangber Abbey (1817)...

...The Mysteries of Udolpho is set in 16th century Europe and tells the story of a young orphaned French noblewoman who is imprisoned in Udolpho, a castle in Italy, by her aunt's husband...

-a scheming brigand who tries to force her to marry his friend. Eventually she escapes and is reunited with her true love. The novel spawned a genre, which typically includes many features:

-A persecuted heroine, usually an orphan, -wild, remote landscapes and forests, -large, crumbling castles or mansions, -psychological terror, -a bryonic villain, -a family secret or curse.

The form is descended from fairy-tale and medieval romance, but in Radcliffe's version, the supernatural is always explained away:

Apparently ghostly events are revealed to have a rational explanation - usually an attempt by the villain to terrify and gain control over the woman an her property.

Gothic romance was usually written by woman for women; it is sometimes called "female Gothic" or "the feminine Gothic".

Tania Modleski suggests that it provided "an outlet for woman's fears about their husbands and fathers". Offering an exaggerated vision of the typical male-dominated family, it:

"spoke powerfully to the young girl struggling to mainain psychic autonomy" in a house where a remote but all-powerful father or husband "ruled over an utterly dependent wife".

During the course of the 19th century, Gothic romance was progressively domesticated, made more modern and realistic. Henry James pointed out that in the work of Mary Elizabeth Braddon-

"novels of sensation" such as Lady Audley's Secret (1862) - the lurid terrors of Radcliffe's stories were transposed to the contemporary "country house or the London lodgings".

Much of du Maurier's work was in this tradition. Jamaica Inn, like Udolpho, features a young orphaned heroine who has to live with her aunt & menacing uncle in remote location.

Rebecca, which also features an orphan, takes many Gothic features and sets them in a modern environment; its tense country house atmosphere & its twisty plot -similar to Lady Audley's Secret

It may also have been influenced by Elizabeth von Arnim's Vera (1921), in which a naive, recently orphaned young woman is swept up into a marriage with a controlling, bullying widower.

Again, the first wife has died in mysterious circumstances, and again his mansion is pervaded by the presence of his dead wife, Vera

JANE EYRE

The novelist Angela Carter claimed that Rebecca "shamelessly reduplicated" the plot of Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847); many critics have since claimed that du Maurier's novel is indebted to Brontë's.

There are many clear parallels, here listed by Patsy Stoneman:

-The young heroine is like Jane Eyre in being an orphan, humble, shy and different, and her occupation, as companion to a rich lady, is similar to that of a Victorian governess (Jane's job)

Max de Winter is like Rochester (Brontë's hero) in being rich and independent, the owner of a country house, and in having an unhappy secret which makes him moody & inward looking.

The two secrets are similar (first wives who are brilliant but immoral) and have both attempted to rid themselves of their wives by illegal means.

In both cases, the country house becomes oppressive to its owner because of its association with the mad, bad wife.In spite of being haunted and oppressed ...

...by the houses which contain evience of disastrous first marriages, both Rochester and Max de Winter try to establish new, young, wives in the same houses and under the same domestic rules.

In addition, in both cases the men's country houses burn to the ground in spectacular fires. (In an earlier draft of Rebecca, Maxim was badly injured in the fire, like Rochester.)

Happy-ish endings are achieved, but at a great price. More specifically, the important tole in both novels - is suggested by Jane's nightmare in which Thornfield Hall, has become "a dreary ruin".

Both books reimagine the Gothic trope of the family secret in a similar way:

Maria Tatar has suggested that both are variants of he folktale of Bluebeard, in which a young woman marries a rich stranger whose castle contains a forbidden room;

The young woman enters and discovers the murdered bodies of previous wives, however, Jane Eyre and Rebecca, the previous wife is a powerful and predatory figure, rather than a victim.

Jane's questions in chapter 20 could apply to both books:

What crime was this, that lived incarnate in this sequestered mansion, and could neither be expelled nor subdued by the owner? 

What mystery that broke out in fire and now in blood, at the deadest hour of night?

What creature was it, that, masked in an ordinary woman's face and shape uttered the voice, now of a mocking demon and anon of a carrion-seeking bird of prey?

There are, on the other hand, important differences between the two novels. Jane Eyre is a deeply explicitly Christian novel; Rebecca is arguably amoral by Christian standards.

Rebecca is a crime story; Jane Eyre is structured more like a parable, a pilgrim's progress. Rebecca is obsessed with social class; Jane Eyre regards class as an obstacle to overcome.

Jane Eyre is very brave and unconventional; he narrator of Rebecca is timid and wants to fit in. It is probably fairer to regard Rebecca as a rewriting of Jane Eyre, rather than reduplication...

Similarly how Jane Eyre is a rewriting of earlier Gothic novels (and Angela Carter's own story of The Bloody Chamber is a rewriting of the tale of Bluebeard).

Indeed, between them, Jane Eyre and Rebecca have formed their own mini-tradition. According to Joanna Russ, the Mills & Boon-style genre of "Modern Gothic", a cross-breed of the two is usually:

-To a large, lonely, brooding House (alwayss named) comes a Heroine who is young orphaned, unloved and lonely. She is shy and inexperienced. She is attractive, sometime even beautiful...

...but she doesn't know it. The House is set in exotic, vivid and/or exotic Country (The Heroine) forms a personal or professional connection with an older man...

a dark, magentic powerful, brooding, sardonic Super-Male, who treats her brusquely, derogates, scolds her and otherwise shows anger or contempt for her...

In the emotionally tangled and darkly mysterious "family" set up in our House are hints of the presence of The Other Woman who is at the same time her double and her opposite

-very often she is The Super-Male's present wife or first dead wife. The Other Woman is/was beautiful, wordly, glamorous, immoral, flirtatious, irresponsible and openly sexual.

The Heroine gradually becomes aware that somewhere in the tangle of oppressive family secrets going on in the House exists a Buried Ominous Secret, always connected with T.O.W & T.S.M...

John Sutherland calls her prose "excessively and lushly descriptive". Du Maurier specialises in lilting, rhythmic sentences. Many of these have been much admired.

The first line: "Last night i dreamt i went to Manderley again" - is one of the most famous 20th century English fiction, and has been praised for establishing the voice & dreamy atmosphere.

It is an iambic hexameter - a line of six beats, each consisting of two syllables, the first unstressed and the second stressed.

The last line: "And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea" - equally rhythmic, though consisting of a string of anapests: two short syllables followed by a long one.

Her sentences involve piling detail upon detail, using multiple clauses of the same kind: "there was no house, no field, no broad and friendly garden, nothing but he silence and deep woods" (7)

Or: "The fog filled the open window, damp and clammy, it stung my eyes, it clung to my nostrils" (18) Or: "I know how many grouse are killed, how many partridge, how many head of deer...

... I know where trout are rising, and where the salmon leap" (1).Yet the language of Rebecca is also relatively simple and easy to absorb; du Maurier aimed at "simplicity of style".

There are few complex or obscure words. The words that are difficult are the ones that are old-fashioned: "maroon" meaning a warning rocket (21), and trade names, i.e. Taxol: cure indigestion.

Du Maurier is a writer of limited and erratic stylistic resources. She repeats herself a great deal: "It made me want to scream. I wanted to run out of the room and scream and scream" (24)

She often repeats the same verbal formula again and again, with a few pages: "He began to laugh. He stood there laughing. I could not bear it, it made me frightened, ill" (20);

"She began to laugh. She went on laughing. I thought she would never stop" (20); "And Favell began to laugh, the laugh of a drunkard, high-pitched and foolish..." (23) 

There is also a kind of endemic exaggeration in her writing, e.g. we're told when she is driving, Beatrice "kept her foot permanently on the accelerator, and took every corner at an acute angle" 

Du Maurier's use of language is sometmes florid w/o being expressive: she deploys romantic cliché's such as "the fury was spent" (24). Her lines can be florid and garbed at the same time:

"Poor whims of fancy, tender and un-harsh" (1). And yet both the excessiveness and the repitition in her prose can be powerful...

The moment when the narrator arrives at Manderley for the first time, she finds that on either side of her there is "a wall of colour, blood-red, reaching far abover our heads":

We were amongst the rhododendrons. There was something bewildering, even shocking, about the suddennes of their discovery...

They startled me with their crimson faces, masses one upon the other in incredible profusion, showing no lead, no twig, nothing but the slaughterous red, luscious and fantastic...plant..." (7)

Her insistent, rhythmic prose, piling up detail & imagery, is excessive, but it creates a powerful atmosphere. Rebecca is a book about obsession & its obsessively reiterates its themes

It repeats various phrase and words again and again, like a refrain: the idea of "going back"; the phrase "I could imagine"; the word "Manderley"; and of course the name "Rebecca"

The atmosphere of Rebecca is to a large extent a result of how closely the details of the external world, especially the natural world, correlate with the psychological states of the characters

For instance, when the second Mrs de Winter is living at Manderley, uneasy about her husband and her marriage, she is haunted by the sound of the sea:

"A dull, persistent sound that never ceased...i began to understand why some people could not bear the clamour of the sea.

It has a mournful harping note sometimes, and the very persistence of it, that eternal roll and thunder and hiss, plays a jagged tune upon the nerves." (11)

Later, when Mrs Danvers is trying to persuae desperate narrator to throw herself out of the window, fog covers the terrace, evoking her isolation and confusion:

"The fog came thicker than before and the terrace was hidden from me. I could not see the flower tubs any more, nor the smooth paved stones. There was nothing but the white mist about me...

smelling of sea-weed dank and chill." (18)

 Later still, when Rebecca's boat has been raised and her body identified, and the de Winters are waiting anxiously for next development, the weather reflects her mood of tense expectation:

"The weather had not broken yet. It was still hot, oppressive. The air was full of thunder, and there was rain behind the whie dull sky, but it did not fall (22)

At the inquest, when Tabb the boatbuilder declares that someone had scuttled the boat, the narrator suddenly finds it "hot, much too hot" (22).

In the final act, when the worst has happened and Maxim has been accused of murder, the weather breaks and finally the rain falls.

Most novels contain significant symbols and physical details of the story that also have a larger represenative role: John Ruskin coined the phrase "the pathetic fallacy"...

To describe the widespread artistic tendency to attribute human emotion to aspects of natture. But du Maurier takes this technique so far that her method here could be called: Expressionist.

Expressionism was an artistic movement during the early 20th century, which aims to represent the world in a way that expressed subjective/violent human emotion, moods & feelings.

 Later still, when Rebecca's boat has been raised and her body identified, and the de Winters are waiting anxiously for next development, the weather reflects her mood of tense expectation:

"The weather had not broken yet. It was still hot, oppressive. The air was full of thunder, and there was rain behind the whie dull sky, but it did not fall (22)

At the inquest, when Tabb the boatbuilder declares that someone had scuttled the boat, the narrator suddenly finds it "hot, much too hot" (22).

In the final act, when the worst has happened and Maxim has been accused of murder, the weather breaks and finally the rain falls.

Most novels contain significant symbols and physical details of the story that also have a larger represenative role: John Ruskin coined the phrase "the pathetic fallacy"...

To describe the widespread artistic tendency to attribute human emotion to aspects of natture. But du Maurier takes this technique so far that her method here could be called: Expressionist.

Expressionism was an artistic movement during the early 20th century, which aims to represent the world in a way that expressed subjective/violent human emotion, moods & feelings.

So, when the narrator and Maxim have to leave Manderley for the last time, their bedroom reflects their feelings: "The dressing-table was bare without my brushes...

The beds where we had slept had a terrible emptiness about them... The wardrobe doors gaped open." (26)

Similarly, the rhododendrons discussed in the previous chapter are loaded with all sorts of ominous significance - intimations of murder("blood-red", "slanghterous") & a sexual excess ("luscious and fantastic")

After the inquest, when n fears that Maxim may be charged with murder - and possibly hanged - the hydrangeas on the drive are "sombre" and "funereal... like the wreaths, stiff & artificial..." (23)

This Expressionist tendency is, in part, why du Maurier's books film so well: they offer compelling visual correlatives for their characters' emotional states.

Rebecca is primarily seen as a "study in jealousy". From very early on in the story - as soon as she begins to fall in love with Maxim - the narrator is assailed by descriptions of Rebecca's beauty, etc.

"I never saw her," says Mrs Van Hiopper, "but i believe she was very lovely. Exquisitely turned out, and brilliant in every way" (5). Already, the narrator's thoughts are turned, somewhat obsessively>r

"I was following a phantom in my mind, whose shadowy form had taken shape at last." To a shy, inexperienced young woman...

Even the dedication in the book of poetry that Maxim lends her mirrors Rebecca's superiority."That bold, slanting hand, stabbing the white paper, the symbol of herself, so certain, so assured."

Rebecca called him Max; she is asked to call him Maxim - the name, she thinks for "grandmothers and people like myself, quiet and dull and youthful, who did not matter".

She immediately perceives herself to be in a struggle with Rebecca, one with undertones of violence: after Maxim's marriage proposal, she not only tears out the inscription from the book but burns it to pieces (6)

From the arrival in Manderley, almost every incident reflects the narrator's sense of inferiority. Where Rebecca ran the house like clockwork, she is clueless and commits many errors...

... Rebecca lived in the grand west wing but the narrator is given the less impressive east wing, second hand or "a second rate room as it were, for a second-rate person" (7).

Mrs Danvers loved Rebecca but despises the narrator -emphasising the strong contrast between the narrator and Rebecca. 

Everyone seems to compare her unfavourably to Rebecca -according to the narrator. She even goes on to imagine visitors saying: "My dear, what a dull girl... She's so different from Rebecca" (11)

Frank says that Rebecaa was "the most beautiful creature i ever saw in my life". Rebecca always charmed Maxim's grandmother, who rejects the narrator as "a child" whom she doesn't know (15).

Where Rebecca was brave, full of life, and passionate, the narrator is "a wooden thing in Maxim's arms" (20).

In chapter 18, the narrator summarises all of her fears and jealousies. Maxim doesn't love her; he loves Rebecca. The servants obey her orders. The house is decorated to her designs:...

"Rebecca was still the mistress of Manderley. Rebecca was still Mrs de Winter. I had no business here at all. I had come blundering like poor fool on ground that was preserved".

Following the climactic revelation however the main cause of the jealousy is proved to be groundless:

"You thought I loved Rebecca?" says Maxim. "You thought I killed her loving her. I hated her, i tell you. Our marriage was a farce from the very first" (20)

This makes the narrator "free of her (Rebecca) forever" (21)

Rebecca begins with a dream of ruin and loss, of "the things we have tried to forget and put behind us" (2).

And it ends with the second Mrs de Winter having a series of dreams in the car before they arrive at Manderley to find it burned down. 

One of these reprises the opening dream, of Manderley as a ruin; in the final one, she finds herself writing and seeing a "very pale, very lovely face, framed in a cloud of dark"

-Rebecca's - staring back at her from the mirror (27). Earlier, she dreams that she is walking just behind Max in the woods "and could not keep up with him" (15)

The book is also filled with endless day-dreams. The phrase "I could imagine" is a constant refrain, along with "I pictured", "I wondered", "I began to think".

There are long sequences in which the narrator imagines the ball or while at the ball & imagines people's comments afterwards.

Her imagination is constantly running away with her: she imagines Maxim dead; she imagines Maxim down at the crypt, burying Rebecca's body; she frequently imagines the spirit of Rebecca haunting the house.

Rebecca is a dream-like book, and one that life takes the quality of a dream. The narratgor remembers the ball the following day "like an old forgotten nightmare" (21):

The background was hazy, a sea of dim faces none of whom i knew, and there was the slow drone of the band harping out a waltz that never finished, that went on and on.

The same couples swung by in rotation, with the same fixed smiles, and to me, standing with Maxim at the bottom of the stairs to welcome the late-comers...

... these dancing couples seemed like marionettes twisiting and turning on a piece of strong, held by some invisible hand (17)

Du Maurier's grandfather, the novelist George du Maurier, invented in one of his early novels the concept of "dreaming true", a method whereby everything that the dreamer desires comes to him.

This fascinated du Maurier and the dream-like atmosphere of Rebecca gives a sense of unconscious desires, and particularly fears, running close to the surface of normal life.

The general tone of the dreams and daydreams is uneasy, eerie and morbid: death, loss and ruin are recurring themes as are a sense of inferiority and of being out of place.

All of these focus on none other than Rebecca: "Wherever I walked in Manderley, wherever I sat, even in my thoughts and in my dreams, I met Rebecca" (18)

The novel is phrased as a memory/flashback in Chapter 2 & In Chapter 1 the narrator dreams of Manderley which is simultaneously sinister and filled with memories of tea in the library and Jasper

The past, good and bad is irrecoverable. Chapter 2 begins with the words: "We can never go back, that much is certain. The past is still too close to us."

Throughout the book, two versions of the past jostle against each other: nostalgia for things that were loved and are now lost: and memories they desperately try to out behind them.

For instance, after experiencing a moment of great happiness in Maxim's car near Monte Carlo, the narrator wishes that there was an invention "that bottles memory, like scent... never faded or got stale" (5).

By contrast, Maxim wants to forget the past, he tells her shortly afterwards:

All memories are bitter, and I prefer to forget them. Something happened a year ago that altered my whole life, and i want to forget every phrase in my existence up to that time."

The idea of the past, and of going back to it, or bringing it back, is a regular refrain in the book. "I wanted to go back again, to recapture the moment that had gone," (5)

"I knew I should never go back" she says as she describes packing up Mrs Van Hopper's suite (6). Frank tells the narrator to forget Rebecca: "We none of us want to bring back the past. Maxim least of all" (12)

Visiting Rebecca's room is "like seeing back into Time" (14). The narrator becomes convinced that the past in the form of Rebecca's ghostly presence, "might come back into the room" (8).

She feels like a guest waiting for "the return of the hostess" (12). And indeed the hostess does return, in her rediscovered boat, which has the "queer prophetic name" Je Reviens or "I will come back" (21).

Captain Searlet finds R's boat says: It's hard on him and hard on you that we can't let the past lie quiet" (19). When discovering Maxim's secret, the Narrator declares: 

"The past can't hurt us if we're together" (23) but the past does hurt them. They are eventually made "free" of the past, but the narrator feels that they "have paid for freedom" (2)

"You will have your work cut out as mistress of Manderley," Mrs Van Hopper tells the narrator after learning that the latter is to marry Maxim...

"To be perfectly frank, my dear, I simply can't see you doing it... You haven't the experience... you don't know that milieu" (6)

In the narrator's case, the feeling inferiority are related to class. After Maxim's proposal she tells him that she's not the "sort of person" he ought to marry: "I don't belong to your sort of world for one thing" (6).

Indeed she interprets his initial proposal as a job offer: "Do you want me to be a secretary or something?" And Maxim tactlessly jokes that "instead of being companion to Mrs Van Hopper you become mine, and your duties will be almost exactly same".

Earlier, she has fantasised about living in a "lodge" on he grounds, visited occasionally by Maxim, the lord.

After the marriage, the narrator finds herself struggling with the duties expected of a woman of her social standing: ordering the servants around, chatting witht he local dignitaries; managing the "monstrous silver-tea pot and kettle"

While the narrator feels "badly bred" (20), Rebecca had "breeding" as well as charm and beauty (16 & 20). Likewise, when Maxim has been cleared and the narrator is sure of his love, her confidence expresses itself in class terms:

"It was going to be very difficult in the future. I was not going to be nervous and shy with the servants any more. With Mrs Danvers gone i should learn bit by bit the control of the house. I would go and itnerview the cook in the kitchen. They would like me, respect me." (20)

Class permeates many aspects of the story. There is no doubt that much of Maxim's mystique emanates from hus lands and status. Some of the horror he feels towards his 1st wife is to do with the threat she poses to his social standing.

He can tolerate her affair with Jack Favell, but fears she "might get hold of one of the workmen on the estate, someone from Kerrith, anyone... And the bomb would have to fall. The gossip the publicity i feared" (20)

The final straw is the news that she is apparently about ti give birth to an illegimate child, who would inherit his name and position. Even the narrator's description of the overgrown plants on the drive to Manderley in the opening dream are tinged with class awareness:

The tall rhododendrons (Max) had "entered into alien marriage with a host of nameless shrubs (the narrator), poor, ******* things that clung about their roots as though conscious of their spurious origin" (1).

Alison Light suggests that Rebecca represents a nostalgic disappointment for the decline of the aristocracy:

The decline of the aristocracy. It's a longering farewell to the world of Monte Carlo and of paid companions, to splendid breakfasts and devoted servants, the ease and arrogance of life in a stately home like Manderley.

This is partially true. It was written at a time when the great stately homes of Britain were dying out, and much space is devoted to the joys of gracious living:

Before leaving it forever, the narrator lovingly contemplates "the peace of Manderley", its lawns and elegant rooms, tended by gardeners, maids, and butler (20).*= the word peace used while rebecca was written in 1937 and 1938, when war was increasingly likely.

On the other hand Rebecca has its heroine a penniless middle-class woman and as its anti-heroine an arrogant, high-handed upper-class one.

When Jack Favell complains to the magistrate Colonel Julyan that the investigation is a stitch-up, we know that he is at least partly right:

"You're going to back de Winter. You won't let him down because you've dined with him, and he's dined with you.

He's a big name down here. He's the owner of Manderley. You poor bloody little snob" (24)

The novel's attitude towards class is ambiguously positioned between admiration and criticism.

In Rebecca the house is a fully-fledged character rather than a mere symbol: at various points it is said to be "alive", and it looms over much of the story (16).

Alfred Hitchcock said that of the four main presences in the book - Maxim, hsi two wives and the house - the house was the dominant one. 

It looms, of course, from the very first line - before we even identify any of the characters - to the final paragraph, and provided both the setting for the action and the focus for many of novel's themes.

Manderley appears in the first chapter at the centre of a disturbing dream, where it has variety of different qualities: initially enigmatic, impassive and beautiful ("secretive and silent" with "perfect symmetry");

Briefly redolent of domestic happiness; then a symbol of painful irrecoverable loss (a "desolate shell"). It also conceals a painful secret ("... our fear and suffering lay buried in the ruins.")

According to Freud, the house in dreams is often a symbol of "the human person as a whole", with cellars and attics representing repressed desires and guilty secrets. 

In Gothic stories a house often stands for a family and its fates. Manderley is an "overdetermined" symbol, suggesting multiple wishes and fears in one imahe. 

At larger, Manderley stands for a wide variety of notions. Early on in the story, it means aristocratic splendor: Mrs Van Hopper introduces Maxim as "the man who owns Manderley" (2)...

Later adding that this "lovely home" has been "in his family's possession since the conquest" (3). It grandness casts a powerful spell on those around him. 

When Maxims asks why Mrs Van Hopper considers himof importance, the narrator replies: "Because of Manderley" (4). 

The narrator has a deep feeling for the house, rooted partly in childhood when she bought a postcard of it. Yet she notes that Maxim seems both proud and wary on the subject.

"Maybe there was something about Manderley that made it a place apart; it would not bear discussions" (4). When the narrator finally visits, it is initially menacing.

The drive "twisted and turned like a serpent", passing through "dark and silent woods" then "shocking" rhododendrons and between "blood-red walls".

It is of course beautiful and enviable, living up to its reputation: 

"A thing of grace exquisite and faultless, lovelier even than i had ever dreames..." (7). But it proves - as the omens have suggested - to be a very ambiguous possesion.

From the narrator;s point of view, Manderley embodies the presence of Rebecca, the threatening and superior other woman. 

As we have seen everything about the house and its running reminds the narrator of her predecessor. Indeed Rebecca seems to haunt it; it is suggested at various points that:

"she was in the house still" that "Rebecca was still the mistress of Manderley" (18). Only after the discovery that Maxim hated Rebecca, does the narrator assert ownership:

"Standing there, looking down upon it from the banks, I realized, perhaps for the first time, with a funny feeling of bewilerment and pride that it was my home, I belonged there, and Manderley belonged to me. (19)

Even then, her ownership is only temporary: Rebecca is expelled but she seems to take the house with her,

It is of course beautiful and enviable, living up to its reputation: 

"A thing of grace exquisite and faultless, lovelier even than i had ever dreames..." (7). But it proves - as the omens have suggested - to be a very ambiguous possesion.

From the narrator;s point of view, Manderley embodies the presence of Rebecca, the threatening and superior other woman. 

As we have seen everything about the house and its running reminds the narrator of her predecessor. Indeed Rebecca seems to haunt it; it is suggested at various points that:

"she was in the house still" that "Rebecca was still the mistress of Manderley" (18). Only after the discovery that Maxim hated Rebecca, does the narrator assert ownership:

"Standing there, looking down upon it from the banks, I realized, perhaps for the first time, with a funny feeling of bewilerment and pride that it was my home, I belonged there, and Manderley belonged to me. (19)

Even then, her ownership is only temporary: Rebecca is expelled but she seems to take the house with her.

By contrast, feminist critics have pointed out that Manderley also embodies the patriarchal system: hierarchial, claustrophobic and oppresive for the woman who live in it. 

The word "man" features prominently in the name itself (and Maxim is "the man who owns Manderley"); it is the scene of the narrator's awkward and painful attempts to mould herself into a correct and pleasing feminine role.

Also Maxim seems to be compelled towards various forms of correctness by the house. He keeps up a sham marriage with the unfaithful Rebecca which disgusts him, but does it for the house:

"I put Manderley first before everything else... I accepted everything, because of Manderley" (20). And the final straw which compels him to kill Rebecca is her illegitimate chold which will inherit his house and lands:

"It would grow up here in Manderley, bearing your name... It would give you the biggest thrill of your life, wouldn't it, Max, to watch my son grow bigger day by day and to know that when you died, all this would be his?" (20)

The sea plays an important role in the novel; and it is often linked to Rebcca. She is frequently mentioned in connection with the sea or water, from the first mention of her having drowned in the bay,

When the narrator arrives at the house, she and Maxim are given the less grand rooms in the east wing, facing the rose garden - which is domesticated and confined. 

By contrast, what Mrs Danvers calls "Mrs de Winter's bedroom" - the "big room" looks "down the sea" (7). It is revealed that Rebecca loved sailing and set up the cottage in the bay as a retreat away from Maxim and Manderley.

Like her, the sea is wild and untamed. Water is also traditionally associated with powerful and disturbing forms of feminity: witches were said never to sink or drown.

The narrator's unease about her new life focuesses specifically on the sea. The "dull, persistent sound" of waves plays a jagged tuen upon the nerves" (11). 

It becomes, like Rebecca, a kind of taboo subject. She begins "to dread any mention of the sea, for the sea might lead to boats, to accident, to drowning..." 

She twice says that she is glad to be facing inland: "I preferred the rose garden, after all to the sound of the sea" (9).

When she ventures into Rebecca's bedroom, or is otherwise particularly aware of her lingering presence, the sea is always mentioned "I could hear the sound of the sea very plainly"(14).

"The sound of the sea came through the open window, the soft hissing sound of the ebb-tide leaving the shingle" (17) Mrs Danvers appears and tells the story of Rebecca's "death" saying:

"You know now... why Mr de Winter does not use thse rooms any more. Listen to the dea" (14). As the tension mounts, the narrator's agitation is again explicitly linked to the sea in various ways, both literal and symbolic.

A sea mist appears, causing the accident that will lead to Rebecca's discovery and heralding her return. It also becomes an image of the hidden and repressed past which inevitably resurface:

"I knew now the reason for my sense of foreboding. It was not the stranded ship that was sinister, nor the crying gulls, nor the thin black funnel pointing to the shore.

It was the stillness of the black water, and the unknown things that lay beneath. It was diver going down to those cool quiet depths and stumbling upon Rebecca's boat, and Rebecca's dead companion". (19)

In the aftermath, the narrator finds herself repeating the words "Time and Tide wait for no name" in her head (20). 

In the wake of Rebecca's reappearance, it rains after Rebecca's body has been sunk in the bay. A final invocation of the sea comes in the novel's last sentence, even its last word:

"And the ashes blew towarss us with the salt wind from the sea" (27).

Another word for a ghost is a revenant - a person who returns from the dead. This is a usage explicityly pointed to by the "queer prophetic name" of Rebecca's boat, Je Reveins (21).

Rebecca is full of invocations of ghost and hauntings and the idea of coming or going back. In the 1st chapter, the narrator imagines that a "nervous poacher" trespassing on the ruins Manderley might hear a ghostly figure of "a woman in an evening dress".

Even in Monte Carlo, the narrator says "I was following a phantom in my mind" (5). On discovering the dedication from Rebecca to Max in the book of poems, the narrator describes her as "dead", but her writing as "alive" (6).

At Manderley, Rebecca manifests herself in the narrator's mind as a supernatural presence - very much as in a ghost story.

Sitting in the 1st Mrs de Winter's chair: "Unconsciously I shivered as though someone had opened the door behind me and let a draught into the room" (7).

Seated at her desk, the narrator thinks: "At any moment she might come back into the room and she would see me there..." (8).

Rebecca's cottage down at the shore makes her "a little fearful": she thinks that there might be something "horrible" there (10). She describes herself as waiting for "the return of the hostess"(11)

All this builds up to the scene in the deserted wing of house - again, a classic ghost story trope - where Rebecca's presence assers itself in all sorts of ways: in her clothes, her scent, creating a "growing sense of horror" in the narrator (14).

Turning around - again, as in a ghost story - she sees Mrs Danvers, who reveals that "I feel her everywhere. You do too, don't you?" She asks the narrator: "Do you think the dead can come back and haunt the living?"

This is is exactly what Rebecca does. "Her body has come back" says the narrator after the boat is found (21). The idea of coming back features in various other context.

After visiting the cottage in the bay, the narator berates herself for opening up "a road into the past again" - while Maxim declared "Oh God, what a fool I was to come back" (11). 

Thanks to Mrs Danver's machinations, the narrator herself acts out the return of the first Mrs de Winter, by wearing her fancy dress outfit: Maxim's face is "ashen white" as if he had seen a ghost.

Freud said that we are unable to comprehend death, that "no human being really grasps it" (apart from Jesus). Thoughts of death, are reworked into projections of hope or fear...

where guilt and violent death are illustrated into nighmtmarish visions of the dead returning or fantasies of contact with the dead.

The story of Rebecca acts out the return of these repressed events: of Maxim's secrets, and of the narrator' fears.

Du Maurier's work is full of "splitting, doubling and mirroring devices". In Rebecca, the narrator and the 1st Mrs de Winter are positioned in binary opposition.

They almost seem to be mirror images of each other: where Rebecca is supremely confident, runs and ride horses, the narrator is the opposite.

They both share one identity - Mrs de Winter - which serves to underline their differences. When the narrator and Beatrice visit Maxim's grandmother, the old lady is befuddled distressed.

"Bee, who is this child?" she asks. "Why did you not bring Rebecca? Where is dear Rebecca?" (15). Equally, Ben tells her that she is "not like the other one" (13).

Such is the narrator's sense of inadequacy that when someone calls to ask for Mrs de Winter, she replies: "I'm afraid you have made a mistake... Mrs de Winter has been dead for a year" (8).

In chapter 14, Mrs D comes close to convincing the narrator to commit suicide, and says "Rebecca is the real Mrs de Winter, not you".

Later the narrator declares that Mrs Danvers was right Rebecca is "still Mrs de Winter, i have no business here".

There are several additional doubling figures in the novel: for instance, the east wing and the west wing, the sea and the rose garden.

There are even two paths in the woods, one leading to Happy Valley, which is soothing and full of beautiful flowers, and on to a pleasant cove;

The other leading through a dark unpleasant wood with a tree that looks like "the white bleached limb of a skeleton", & leads to "the other beach"; The site of Rebecca's cottage and murder (10)

Furthermore, Maxim's grandmother has "a strong uncanny resemblance to her grandson" (15). Conversely, there are also various instances where the narrator seems to merge her own identity with Rebecca's.

Thinking herself into her predecessor's position at dineer, she finds that "I had so identified myself with Rebecca that my own dull self did not exist (16). Maxim is disturbed; he says that she looks "like a common criminal".

Then, before the fancy dress hall, she delights in her transformation into Caroline de Winter: "I don't think i have ever felt so excited before, so happy and so proud" (16).

At this point she does not realise that she has also transformed herself into Rebecca, but seems to enjoy her transformationl.

Looking in the mirror she "did not recognise the face that stared at me in the glass. The eye were larger surely, the mouth narrower, the skin white and clear?" Others form the same impression.

"Identical," says Maxim. "The same picture, the same dress. You stood there on the stairs, and for a ghastly moment I thought..." (17).

Later on, when she is more confident of Maxim's love and thus her identity, the narrator tells Mrs Danvers: "I am Mrs de Winter now, you know" (21).But there is an uneasy sense that Rebecca may have possessed her, or inflitrated her personality.

The narrator dreams, while en route to Manderley after Maxim has been cleared, that her writing starts to resemble Rebecca's. She goes tot he mirror:

"A face stared back at me that was not my own. It was very pale, very lovely, framed in a cloud of dark hair. The eyes narrowed and smiled. The lips parted. The face in the glass stared back at me and laughed. (27)

The figure of the double is doing complex work in the novel:

...pointing up oppositions and jealousies, registering the narrator's ongoing crisis of identity, and leading an uncanny atmosphere to the whole story.

Du Maurier said of The Scapegoat that it was her own story, and that of her husband - who were both mentally unbalanced at the time.

"We are both doubles. So it is with everyone. Every one of us has his or her dark side. Which is to overcome the other? 

This is the purpose of the book. And it ends, as you know, with the problem unsolved..."

Rebecca is rich in symbols, and there are many others that feature in the novel. For instance, Rebecca is often linked to the colour red: 

"blood-red" rhododendrons (7); red roses; the sky "shot with crimson, like a splash of blood" at the end of the book (27); & lastly the blood that seeps into the cottage floor when Maxum shoots her.

Another recurring symbol is that of the forbidden book. When talking to Maxim in Monaco about a dressmaker's attempt to bribe her, the narrator is "aware of that sick, unhealthy feeling i had experienced as a child when turning the pages of a forbidden book" (4).

Later on, when Mrs Danvers is trying to encourage her to visit Rebecca's room, the image recurs. The housekeeper's insistence reminds her "of a visit to a friend's house, as a child...

The daughter of the house, older than me, took my arm & whispered in my ear, "I know where there is a book, locked in a cupboard, in my mother's bedroom. Shall we fo and look at it?" (9).

Later still, after the narrator has disturbed Maxim by imagining herself in Rebecca's place, her husband complains that her face has changed. 

When asked to explain, he asks whether, when she was young, she was "ever forbidden to read certain books, and did your father put these books under lock and key?" (16)

When she replies he says: "A husband is not so very different from a father after all. There is a certain type of knowledge I prefer you not have."

This forbidden knowledge could symbolise the cottage that Maxim does not want the N to visit or go near, where he killed Rebecca.

It's an odd metaphor, due to the meaning which is not entirely apparent. But it seems to have a sexual connotation: a forbidden book which a Victorian father might hide; something to do with "knowledge". The narrator is very innocent at the beginning of the story:

when Frank says that the narrator, if not as beautiful as Rebecca, has other qualities whch a husband might value more - kindness, sincerity & "modesty", she doesn't know quite what to think.

She had imagined that modesty was "something to do with minding meeting people in a passage on the way to the bathroom" (11). Of course it becomes clear what he means, when she learns more about Rebecca.

The idea of secret knowledge being locked uo could be seen as a reference to the Bluebeard myth: the disturbing truths that the young wife discovers about her husband:

the locked room, like Rebecca's, where evidence of the previous wives fates is concealed.

When reading the book of poems signed by Rebecca, the narrator feels "rather like someone peering through the keyhole of locked door" (4);

while the "sensual and horrible" (4) Favell tells Maxim to "make the most of your night behind the locked door" (25) on the night before the trip to London.

There are certainty other half-submerged sexual images in the book. As Maxim drives up to Manderley for the first time, there are frequent suggestive words and phrases:

"penetrate", "throbbing", "penetrating even deeper" (7). The narrator drops and breaks a figure of Cupid, the god of ****** love.

Visible from the window at Rebecca's desk is a satyr playing his pipes (18). In classical mythology, the satyr, half-goat, is a figure of sexual excess. 

When they read the press coverage about the discovery of Rebecca's boat, the narrator remarks that Maxim, with his "young bride" is made to sound "vile... a sort of satyr" (22): again, a bit like Bluebeard.

It is often said that Rebecca feels like a myth or a fairy-tale. As mentioned, it has been compared to the stories of Cinderella and Bluebeard. 

S.Beauman calls it "part Grimm's fairytale, part Freudian family romance": she among other critics, remarks on the story's strong Oepidal undertones.

In Freud, the Oedipus complex describes the child's desire (whether conscious/unconscious) to have sexual relations with the parent of the opposite sex. and displace or kill the parent of the same sex.

The term refers to the mythical king of Thebes, who unwittingly killed his father and married his mother. (In women, it is sometimes called the Electra complex - a phrase coined by Carl Jung)

Richard Kelly suggests that du Maurier fused the methods of psychological realism with an Oepidal version of the Cinderella story:

The nameless heroine has been saved from a life of drudgery by marrying a handsome, wealthy aristocrat, but unlike the Prince, Maxim is old enough to be the narrator's father.

The narrator must battle with The Other Woman - the dead Rebecca and her witch-like surrogate, Mrs Danvers - to win the love of her husband and father-figure. 

The fantasy of this novel is fulfilled when Maxim confesses to the narrator that he never loved Rebecca; indeed he hated her, a confession that allows the narrator to emerge triumphantly from the Oedipal triangle.

There is a great deal of evidence that supports Maxim's father-figure role towards the narrator. For instance he frequently refers to the narrator as a daughter or a child:

"I suppose you are young enough to be my daughter, and I don't know how to deal with you" He tells her during their courtship (5). He calls her "my sweet child" (11);

she compains that he treats her "as a child" (16); his grandmother asks, "Who is this child?" (15). Maxim tells the N that "A husband is not so very different from a father after all" (16)

Mrs Danvers complains that she is "young enough to be his daughter" - yet she is trying "to take Mrs de Winter's place" (18). The resolution of the story comes when she does successfully take Rebecca's place in Maxim's affections.

After learning that he never loved Rebecca, and he killed her, we are told it was "as though i had entered a new phrase of my life and nothing would quite be the same" (19)...

"I've grown up, Maxim, in 24 hours" she tells him "I'll never be a child again." Where before their marriage had been loveless and sterile, it now seems to be passionately sexual:

"He had not kissed me like this before". And FINALLY he says "I love you (20). Later, they "kiss one another feverishly, desperately, like guilty lovers who have not kissed before" (25).

The narrator describes her success, furthermore, as a kind of murder: "I too had killed Rebecca, I too had sunk the boat there in the bay" (20).

It is worth remarking too, that Oedipal relationships are a running theme in du Maurier;s books. Father-daughter incest features in her early novel The Progress of Julius (1933), and in the short story 'The Borderline Case'.

Her novel My Cousin Rachel (1951), perhaps the best of her post-war career, is another Oedipal tale: it is a kind of mirror image of Rebecca, in which a young man becomes obsessed with his adopted father's wife.

These stories may echoes of du Maurier;s own life: she felt her mother Muriel was cold and distant, and she was very close to her father, the actor-manager George du Maurier, who was violently and innappropriately jealous of the young men in her life.

In the influential critical study The Madwoman in the Attic, critics pointed out that the patriarchal norms of 19th century Britain tended to cast women as either the "angel" or the "monster".

They argued that running through the 19th century women's novels and poetry, were out-of-control female characters, "maddened doubles" who "functioned as asocial surrogates" for their more "docile" female characters.

The most famous example gave Gilbert and Gubar's book its title: Bertha Rochester, to confined, subordinate role of women and the forbidden anger of Charlotte Brontë's well-beghaved heroine, Jane Eyre.

In Rebecca Du Maurier recycled Brontë's doubling device, which contrasts the bad first wife; and she created something even more warped subversive out of the pairing.

On the face of it, the novel submits entirely to the dominant patriarchal norms of its time. The story is about the taming of a powerful woman, as "monster" who asserts her sexual freedom and defies the traditional male-dominated order.

Rebecca, as we have seen, behaves likle a roguish man of the era; she is unfaithful and an open threat to a man like Maxim.

The book punished her: she is killed and expunged from Manderley - and all evidence of her murder is erased.

A.Light suggests, romance fiction can be seen as a "coercive (forceful) and stereotyping" form: invites the reader "to identify with a passive heroine who only finds true happiness in submitting to a masterful male".

She argues also that Rebecca provides a "classic model of romance fiction while at the same time exposing some of its terms".

However Rebecca is clearly a cinderella story that becomes Bluebeard story - where the marriage, instead of being a happily-ever-after sort of place, turns out to be a crime scene.

The hero is a murderer and the heroine becomes his accomplice; its female villain is in some ways the most attractive and memorable character.

S.Beauman: "thanks to the cunning of du Maurier's narrative structure, readers were able to condemn Rebecca (a promiscuous woman) but secretly respond to the rebellion she embodies.

D.M's fiction = the balance of power in marriage. Her early books show "unreliable and ruthless male desire" (H.T); the sacrifice of women by men is a recurring theme throughout her career.

Rebecca uses the Gothic novel - a traditionally feminine form, and a way of exploring female fear of powerful fathers and violent husbands - to examine the position of women.

The N, dependent on strangers for her keep, is passed from father to husband w/o even being given a name. Manderley - a bastion (stronghold) of patriarchy is confining and paralysing.

Harking back again to the Bluebeard theme, the narrator describes herself when she arrives there as a sacrificial victim, remembering:

"a sea of faces, open-mouthed and curious, gazing at me as though they were the watching crowd about the block, and I the victim with my hands behind my back" (7)

Her husband as we have seen, is an overbearing and sinister figure, linked in various ways with violence.

The narrator finds herself constantly held up to a spirit-crushing ideal of feminine behaviour, personified in the form of her ghostly predecessor, Rebecca.

In the end, her position is resolved; yet it is an uneasy and pyrrhic victory (too great a cost). In this area, Rebecca is a deeply ambivalent (mixed/uncertain) novel. She satisfies and undermines the conventional expectations for readers.