Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
(1938)

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again" is potentially the most famous opening sentence to a novel in history. In an era of modernist experimentation in literature, Du Muarier chieved literary renowned as the author of traditional romances and gothic thrillers. Rebecca is the symbolically nameless narrator's retrospective account of living at Manderley with her new husband Maxim de Winter. The absence of a name symolises the narrator's uncertain identity which she struggles to maintain during her time at Manderley. The fact that she can only be referred to as "Mrs de Winter" effectively puts her in competition with the ghost of Maxim's seemingly perfect first wife, Rebecca, the original Mrs de Winter.

The Oedipus/Electra complex is inextricably linked with Rebecca's narrative. Maxim is undoubtedly a father figure to the heroine due to the large age difference between them and the fact that she frequently describes him as treating her like a child. Initially the heroine must overcome a weak maternal influence (Mrs Van Hopper) in order to marry the father figure. After the couple arrives at Manderley the second strong maternal influence is much harder to overcome - the powerful and ostensibly perfect Rebecca. It is impossible to "kill" (even in the metaphorical sense) something that only exists in the memory of others. It is impossible to forge your own identity when "Another one had poured the coffee from that same silver coffee pot, had placed that cup to her lips, had bent down to the dog, even as I was doing."

Themes and Relevant Quotes

Class/Etiquette	Youth	Isolation	Appearance vs Reality	Love
"It was my lack of poise of course that made such a bad impression on people like Mrs Danvers." "Convention was too strong for me" "I had already risen in importance through my lunch with [Maxim]" "I guessed at once that [Mrs Danvers] considered me ill-bred." "they had cost money, I need not be ashamed of them." "She belonged to another breed of men and women, another race than I. They had guts, the women of her race." "I thought how much easier it would be if we cast aside convention"	"I wish I were a woman of 36, dressed in black satin with a string of pearls!" "I did not want to be a child. I wanted to be his wife, his mother. I wanted to be old." "Well then a husband is not so very different from a father after all. There is a certain type of knowledge I prefer you not to have." "He held my hands very tightly like a child who would gain confidence." "I was not young any more. I was not shy. I was not afraid. I would fight for Maxim." "It's gone forever, that funny, young, lost look that I loved."	" I did not want to see any of them again. They only came to Manderley because they were curious and prying" "I wondered why it was that places are so much lovelier when one is alone" "What does it matter? Make anything up. Nobody will mind, they don't any of them know me" "We none of us want you. He doesn't want you, he never did."	"'What a long drive this is,' I said; 'it always reminds me of the path in the forest in a Grimm's fairy tale, where the prince gets lost, you know..." "sometimes I felt Rebecca was as real to me as she was to Mrs Danvers." "'Je Reviens' - 'I come back.' Yes I suppose it was quite a good name for a boat. Only it had not been right for that particular boat which would never come back again." "Do you think the dead come back and watch the living?" "for in that brief moment... I had so identified myself with Rebecca that my own dull self did not exist" "[In costume] My own dull personality was submerged at last" "Eating and drinking, trying to be normal, trying to be sane," "our marriage was a farce from the first"	"I know we are together, we march in unison, no clash of thought or of opinion makes a barrier between us." "I'm glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love." "You haven't flattered yourself into thinking he's in love with you?" "I would be content to live in one corner or Manderley and Maxim in the other so long as the outside world should never know."

Critical Responses

• "Rebecca, like Jane Eyre, taps into that favourite piece of feminine mythology that the love of a good woman will reform a man," - psychologist Dorothy Rowe
• "For feminists, Rebecca is a book about the fear of powerful women, and especially of women who assert their sexual freedom. Rebecca is killed because she defies the patriarchal order." - The Independent: Literary Greats: Rebecca - Love, Paranoia, Obsession (Liz Hoggard)
• "Once Mrs. de Winter knows Rebecca both inside and out, she is absolutely certain of her own identity. Throughout most of the book, the second Mrs. de Winter is not named, which seems to underscore the dominance and seeming triumph of Rebecca. However, since Rebecca ultimately fails to destroy her rival, this interpretation is not complete. A better conclusion is that the second Mrs. de Winter’s first name is irrelevant to the person she becomes. She is raw material that develops throughout the novel according to her relationships with different women, especially Rebecca, into the mature Mrs. de Winter. Just as a child is not named until he or she is fully formed, so the second Mrs. de Winter does not assume that name until the events of the novel have ended and she has come out in a different shape." - Women Writers: Mentored by her Nemesis: The Second Mrs de Winter (Jennifer Taylor)
• "Rebecca marks an outpost in the late 1930s, a transitional moment historically and fictionally, when the demands of middle-class femininity could be discussed and even dismantled with a public and popular form like romance. It demarcates a feminine subjectivity which is hopelessly split within bourgeois gendered relations. The girl's autobiography of gendered experience dramatises the contradictoxy pressures which middle-class sexual ideologies were to place upon women, pressures which were in some measure to be responsible for their politicisation some tlurly years later." - British Feminist Thought (Terry Lovell)