Rebecca

“He sat motionless, looking without his hat and with his white scarf round his neck, more than ever like someone medieval who lived within a frame.”

The brooding Maxim de Winter is described as a Gothic hero, burdened with dark secrets that make him seem like a figure from the past. He does not belong to the bright landscape of Monte Carlo when he is tortured with memories of his terrible first marriage.

“This at last was the core of Manderley, the Manderley I would know and learn to love.”

When her husband first takes her on a walk to the Happy Valley, the narrator experiences the enchantment of Manderley, away from house still dominated by the presence of the Maxim’s first wife, where the second wife feels like an interloper. Descriptions of nature are used to indicate the charm of Manderley.

“There was another door at the end of the room, and I went to it, and opened it, a little fearful now, a little afraid, for I had the odd, uneasy feeling that I might come upon something unawares, that I had no wish to see.”

When the narrator explores Rebecca’s deserted beach cottage, she senses that there may be something terrible there that she may not want to see, something that may harm her. Unbeknownst to the narrator, the cottage was the scene of Maxim’s murder of Rebecca as well as the location of Rebecca’s vile, adulterous behavior. Foreshadowing hints to the later, ominous revelations.

“Theirs was a brief beauty.”

The red rhododendrons are symbolized as a representation of Rebecca. When the narrator begins to have a success at Manderley, with her qualities appreciated by Maxim’s agent, the rhododendrons are described as starting to look a little faded. The brief beauty of the plant represents the limited reign of the beautiful Rebecca, whose “hour would soon be over” (133).

“Just like a between-maid, as I said, and not the mistress of a house.”

Maxim is irritated by his second wife’s fearfulness of the servants. Born with an assured place as master of Manderley, he does not fully empathize with the narrator’s difficult transition from her humbler upbringing to her new role as mistress. When the narrator accidentally breaks a china cupid, she hides the fragments in a drawer, instead of demanding that they be mended. Maxim describes her as a between-maid frightened of being fired instead of the owner of Manderley, emphasizing his class and age differences from the narrator.

“‘Je Reviens’—‘I come back.’”

When the narrator discovers the name of Rebecca’s boat written on a buoy, she reflects that the name was not fitting for the boat, which would never return because of its loss at sea. The name is prophetic because the boat eventually is brought to the surface and Rebecca comes back as a body found in the boat’s cabin. The boat’s name indicates Rebecca’s powerful personality with her desire to always win.

“She gave you the feeling of a snake.”

When Ben, the son of a Manderley tenant with a mental delay, refers to Rebecca in negative terms, the narrator does not understand what he is talking about. This conversation on the beach by Rebecca’s deserted cottage is one of the first hints to the narrator that the personality and character of Maxim’s first wife are not what she has imagined.

“‘He has not used these rooms since the night she was drowned,’ she said.”

When the housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, shows Rebecca’s rooms in the west wing of Manderley, she tells the narrator that Maxim has not used the rooms since Rebecca’s death. Mrs. Danvers assumes that Maxim’s great grief over the loss of his first wife prevented him from returning to these rooms. Mrs. Danvers conveys this interpretation to the narrator as part of her psychological campaign to convince the narrator that she is an inferior replacement for Rebecca. The real reason for Maxim’s avoidance of these rooms is quite different from Mrs. Danvers’s portrayal.

“I feel her everywhere.”

Mrs. Danvers attempts to scare the young narrator with her suggestion that the presence of the dead Rebecca is everywhere at Manderley, malevolently watching her. The insecure, imaginative narrator is susceptible to Mrs. Danvers’s resentful influence.

“My own dull personality was submerged at last.”

The self-critical, young narrator assumes that her husband preferred his sophisticated, vivacious first wife to her. At one point during dinner, she so compares herself with Rebecca that her “own dull self did not exist” (200). She longs to please her husband by impressing him with her dazzling costume for the Manderley fancy dress ball, highlighting the insufficiency the narrator feels amid the memory of Rebecca. Unknowingly, the narrator begins to feel as if she is changing into Rebecca when she looks in the mirror.

“The face of an exulting devil.”

Mrs. Danvers played a mean trick by suggesting that the narrator wear the identical costume worn by Rebecca at the previous fancy dress ball. When the narrator excitedly appears in the costume, Maxim greets her with shocked anger. In tears, the narrator turns to see Mrs. Danvers’s triumphant, evil smile. Descriptive words such as those in the passage above are often used to connect Mrs. Danvers with death and malice.

“A current of air blew in my face though, somebody must have left a window open in one of the passages.”

After the narrator’s humiliating defeat by Mrs. Danvers, she reluctantly rejoins the fancy dress ball in an ordinary evening dress. When the narrator is about to descend the stairs, she hears a board creak in the gallery behind her but finds nobody there when she turns around. Then she feels a draft of cold air and notices an open window in the darkened west wing. These descriptions convey the haunting presence of Rebecca, leaving it to interpretation as to whether these moments are orchestrated by the malicious Mrs. Danvers, the narrator’s overactive imagination, or the ghost of Rebecca.

“We were like two performers in a play, but we were divided, we were not acting with one another.”

Maxim’s anger at the narrator over her choice to dress in the identical costume worn by his deceased first wife at the previous Manderley fancy dress ball divides the married couple. Maxim’s unrevealed, painful memories of his first wife create a barrier in his second marriage.

“Perhaps it’s a good thing, it’s made me realise something I ought to have known before, that I ought to have suspected when I married Maxim.”

The narrator believes that her marriage has failed because Maxim is still in love with his first wife. She does not understand Frank Crawley’s strange reaction to her wording about suspecting something. Frank obviously thinks, at first, that she is referring to the fact that Maxim murdered his first wife. The narrator does not yet know this information.

“It was as though a blight had fallen upon Manderley, taking the sky away and the light of the day.”

Weather descriptions are often used to reflect the characters’ states of mind. The actual phenomenon of fog rolling in is described, but the wording also implies that the costume reminder of the evil Rebecca is a blight upon Manderley.

“It’s you that’s the shadow and the ghost.”

Mrs. Danvers desperately wants Rebecca to be alive and the narrator to be dead and urges the narrator to die by suicide. Mrs. Danvers’s attempt to psychologically reverse their positions by suggesting to the narrator that she is the ghost that is forgotten and not wanted at Manderley, affirms the narrator’s innermost fears. Mrs. Danvers serves as the narrator’s inner voice and guides her in her decisions, often encouraging the narrator’s feelings of inferiority.

“How could I hold you like this, my darling, my little love, with the fear always in my heart that this would happen?”

Maxim has dreaded the discovery of Rebecca’s body ever since he murdered her. He felt unable to fully be affectionate to his second wife with the shadow of his first wife coming between them. When Rebecca’s body is finally found, Maxim’s confession releases him, and he shows his love to the narrator.

“It doesn’t make for sanity, does it, living with the devil.”

When Maxim recounts the events that led to the murder of his first wife, he explains to the narrator that living with Rebecca’s evil and deceit took a toll on his sanity. Descriptions connected with hell, damnation, and the devil are used to describe the real Rebecca.

“Now that I knew her to have been evil and vicious and rotten I did not hate her any more.”

Initially, the narrator’s statement that she does not hate Rebecca anymore after discovering her character was evil seems to be contradictory. However, the wording indicates that the real threat posed to the narrator by Rebecca was the image of an ideal woman who was impossible to equal. What the narrator feared was Maxim’s presumed preference for Rebecca.

“She had crumbled away when they had found her on the cabin floor.”

When Rebecca’s physical body is found in her boat, the narrator perceives Rebecca to be only dust. Rebecca’s power over the narrator had been psychological. When the narrator discovers that Maxim never loved Rebecca, the first wife no longer seems real to her.

“‘You’ve grown up a bit since I saw you last, haven’t you?’ he said.”

After hearing Maxim’s shocking confession of his murder of Rebecca, the narrator becomes older and wiser within 24 hours. Even the drunken Jack Favell notices the change in the narrator when he arrives at Manderley to try to blackmail Maxim.

“There was only one thing ever worried her, and that was the idea of getting old, of illness, of dying in her bed.”

In asserting that Rebecca was never afraid of anything, Mrs. Danvers inadvertently reveals the one possible motive for Rebecca’s suicide: the fear of slowly dying of an illness in her bed. Later, Dr. Baker’s revelation that Rebecca was terminally ill with cancer leads to the conclusion that she died by suicide. In reality, Rebecca goaded Maxim into shooting her to achieve this goal.

“I held out my arms to him and he came to me like a child.”

After Maxim’s confession of murder to his second wife, Maxim is described in child-like terms, indicating his role reversal with the narrator. Previously, the youthful narrator was treated like an amusing child by the older Maxim; now he is dependent on the narrator for reassurance and love.