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Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca: The Shadow and the

Substance

Teresa Petersen

To cite this article: Teresa Petersen (2009) Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca: The Shadow and
the Substance, Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association,
2009:112, 53-66, DOI: 10.1179/000127909804775650

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 DAPHNE DU MAURIER’S REBECCA:
THE SHADOW AND THE SUBSTANCE

TERESA PETERSEN
Macquarie University

Do you think the dead come back and watch the living? 1

Daphne du Maurier has been widely celebrated as a writer of popular

romance. This paper will focus on her most famous novel Rebecca in
which she uses the Gothic genre as a vehicle to explore the
forbidden. In her representation of a search for identity for the
nameless narrator and Rebecca, she uses doubles and mirror-imaging,
and the subtext that emerges is a narrative of incest and lesbian
desire.
I should like to dwell—pertinently—for a moment on what was
one of du Maurier’s own favourite novels, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of
Dorian Gray, to draw a parallel between Wilde and du Maurier. In his
introduction to that novel, a novel du Maurier thought was “quite
marvelous,” 2 Peter Ackroyd comments that it “presented in oblique
form an image of the double life which Wilde himself was leading.” 3
In the novel, Lord Henry asks Basil Hallwood why he refused to
exhibit Dorian Gray’s portrait and Hallwood says:

every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the

artist, not of—sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the
occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather
the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The
reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I
have shown in it the secret of my own soul. (9)

Hallwood attests to the fusion of life and art in his portrait—a fusion
perhaps revealing of du Maurier and of her novel. In Rebecca, if one
54 PETERSEN

were to follow the Wildean analogue, the nameless narrator and

Rebecca could be seen as a composite of du Maurier herself. Her
search for identity would thus be seen as played out through the
father/daughter relationship that borders on the incestuous between
the narrator and her father/husband, Maxim de Winter, and the dual
performance of the narrator and the Rebecca/Danvers relationship
with its lesbian undertones. Ackroyd points out that Wilde led a
clandestine life and Dorian Gray is “striated with images of duality and
the double life,” and thus “it is not surprising that Dorian Gray should
be composed in two distinct tones—one being that of sentimental
tragedy, the other of outrageous epigram” (xiii). Du Maurier herself
led a clandestine life, and what could be called, with reference to
Rebecca, the Wildean paradigm, serves after its fashion as a
springboard for my reading of the novel, which, like Wilde’s portrait,
is also composed in two distinct tones: the popular Gothic romance
genre and du Maurier’s subversion of that genre.
There is a temptingly autobiographical resonance to du Maurier’s
novel. Martyn Shallcross, who was a close friend of du Maurier, notes
that Rebecca is not in the “usual mould” of romantic fiction—for it is
also a study of du Maurier’s “own personality and repressed
sexuality” and can “almost be regarded as an autobiography in
disguise—not only her private thoughts but also her personal
experiences went into the story.” 4 In her biography of du Maurier,
Margaret Forster records that du Maurier’s feelings of “inferiority”
with servants and of being “intimidated” by them went “straight into
the character of the second Mrs de Winter,” and when du Maurier
thought back to the writing of Rebecca it “made her dwell on the story
of her own life.” 5 Forster asserts that du Maurier “often felt vicious
and full of rage” but hid her feelings; she never allowed them to
“emerge except in her work” (396), and it was only through the
escapism of writing that she truly lived (416). Du Maurier herself
asserted in her autobiographical Myself When Young that “if writing
goes there would be no longer any reason for living” (163). It could
well be argued that writing gave her the freedom to explore and come
to terms with the self she presented to the world and the self that
emerges in her writing in her search for identity. Before moving from
what I have called the autobiographical resonance of the novel, I
want to state that my own discussion will not present an
(auto)biographical reading of du Maurier’s text, but, rather, drawing
on the methodologies of Freud’s Oedipal schema and offering a close
textual reading of Rebecca, it will explore Rebecca as a Gothic
representation of a quest for identity. It will trace out psychological
patterns that have been hitherto un-remarked, which (though I do
Rebecca: Shadow and Substance 55

not wish to emphasise the point unduly) seem closely connected with
the experiences and circumstances of du Maurier herself. The
provocative and rebellious thrust of anti-realism in her narrative both
questions and subverts established notions of order, control and
restrictive ideology, in particular the Oedipal, by reproducing and yet
challenging the patriarchal world in which she lived.
Du Maurier was born on the 12 May 1907, and a year later “The
Punishment of Incest Act” was passed in England. 6 Incest was finally
brought into the public domain yet it remained a subject that was
concealed rather than admitted. It was considered so horrific,
especially between father and daughter, that it was rendered socially
invisible and relegated to the realm of fantasy. In his famous lecture
“The Aetiology of Hysteria,” published in 1896, Freud acknowledged
the damage father/daughter rape caused the girl victim. 7 However, in
order to please his male audience, who did not share his empathy
with the disastrous effects of girl rape, he rejected his general causal
theory linking “sexual shock” with hysteria and within a year
abandoned it; instead he labeled “sexual shock” as “fantasy.” 8 It is
important to note that, in The Rebecca Notebook, du Maurier upholds
both the Oedipal and the anti-Oedipal; she acknowledges the
importance of marriage, “the law of the family unit, the binding
together of a man and a woman to produce children” yet sees this as
a flawed system: “the fact that marriages so often fail is our
misfortune. Incest being denied us, we must make do with second
best.” 9 It is arguable that incest underpins most of du Maurier’s
writing. Her male protagonists seem, interestingly, to reflect her
father in different ways, which range from the fun-loving Jake and his
surrogate son, Dick, in I’ll Never Be Young Again, Julius and his
incestuous relationship with his daughter Gabriel in The Progress of
Julius, Joss Merlyn and his niece, Mary, in Jamaica Inn, Ambrose and
his nephew Philip in My Cousin Rachel, and years later, Nick, who has
a sexual relationship with his daughter, Jinnie, in the short story “A
Border-Line Case.” There is a characteristically du Maurier
presentation of sexuality that is emphasized in her novel Rebecca in its
intensity as well as its being so pervasive throughout du Maurier’s
fiction.
In her introduction to The Rebecca Notebook, Alison Light notes that
du Maurier upholds the law of the family unit and shows
“ambivalence” about women’s emancipation. However, she makes
no reference to du Maurier’s assertion that an incestuous relationship
is preferable to a marital one, but instead insists that du Maurier
would have hated the “revelations” Forster makes in her biography,
in particular, that du Maurier’s marriage was “turbulent,” her husband
56 PETERSEN

“unfaithful,” and that she “fell in love with women as well as men”
(viii). Forster records that du Maurier was “condemned” to
“subterfuge” because of her “Venetian tendencies” and her attitude
“sprang” from her father’s “detestation” of homosexuality, which is
why Daphne could never have admitted to them. She says because du
Maurier tried to control her “No 2” persona, the “boy-in-the- box,”
she felt “tortured” for most of her life and this becomes evident in
her work. She claims that Daphne was “two distinct people,” and
that writing gave her release from thoughts and ideas that disturbed
her, and that her “whole life’s work was an attempt to defy reality and
create for herself a world far more exciting and true than the one in
which she lived” (419). In any event, at this point I wish not to
speculate biographically about du Maurier herself but to explore the
text of Rebecca for its understanding of incest and lesbian desire
through du Maurier’s engagement of doubles and mirror-imaging.
Rebecca begins with a dream sequence in which the narrator is
possessed with supernatural powers and passes “like a spirit through
the barrier before [her],” returning to Manderley to reunite with
Rebecca. The landscape surrounding the house is dominated by
nature and imaged as a witch who “in her stealthy, insidious way had
encroached upon the drive with long, tenacious fingers.” The woods
are “crowded, dark and uncontrolled” (5), and the hydrangeas are of
“monster height” and “black and ugly as the nameless parasites that
grew beside them.” Violence and eroticism combine with a natural
world that is described as deviant and unnatural and is a metaphor of
unnatural human sexuality:

The rhododendrons stood fifty feet high, twisted and

entwined with bracken, and they had entered into alien
marriage with a host of nameless shrubs … A lilac had mated
with a copper beech, and to bind them yet more closely to one
another the malevolent ivy, always an enemy to grace, had
thrown her tendrils about the pair and made them prisoners.
(6)

The landscape also represents a scene of death and destruction: the

nettles “choked” the terrace and lay with “crumpled heads and listless
stems,” the scene reminiscent of the description of nature in du
Maurier’s short horror story, “The Birds.” For a brief period in her
dream the narrator sees Manderley come to life: “light came from the
windows, the curtains blew softly in the night air,” then nature takes
over, a “cloud, hitherto unseen came upon the moon, and hovered an
instant like a dark hand before a face. The illusion went with it, and
Rebecca: Shadow and Substance 57

the lights in the windows were extinguished.” The house becomes a

“desolate shell, soulless at last, unhaunted, with no whisper of the
past about its staring walls.” Without the ghostly shadows of Rebecca
and Mrs Danvers, the footsteps of Jasper (the dog), and Maxim’s
presence, the house becomes a “sepulcher” (7). Michelle A Massé’s
comments usefully highlight du Maurier’s narrative technique:

Using condensation, displacement and various representational

modes as tools, we carefully rework our desires into the stuff
of dreams, in which we can safely experience what we do not
want to acknowledge in waking life. 10

One of the stock elements of Gothic fiction is the introduction of

a mystery early in the narrative. Du Maurier does not give her
protagonist a name. When questioned why, she said she “could not
think of one,” and it became a “challenge in technique” and the
“easier because [she] was writing in the first person.” 11 I agree with
Richard Kelly’s observation that by “making the naïve, nameless
second Mrs. De Winter the narrator, du Maurier is able to develop
and sustain the mystery plot while she explores the central question
of identity.” 12 After the dream sequence, the narrative moves on to
the narrator and her husband Maxim who are living in exile in
Europe. Part of du Maurier’s narrative strategy is to create mystery by
witholding information. It is not made clear at this point of the
narrative why they are living in exile. What is clear is they lead boring
mechanical lives, as the narrator herself acknowledges: “I know we
are together, we march in unison, no clash of thought or of opinion
makes a barrier between us,” “We live very much by routine,” “Oh
the Test matches that have saved us from ennui” (9/10). The
narrator is ensconced in a relationship that is a living death because
the vibrant and passionate presence of Rebecca has been
extinguished. Her only escape from the basic social necessity of
marriage and the domestic horror of confinement is through her
imagination, where she returns to Manderley in order to live her real
life—which is to unite with Rebecca whenever she likes: “for if I
wish I can give rein to my imagination, and pick foxgloves and pale
campions from a wet, streaking hedge” (11). There is of course a
sexual resonance to that natural imagery.
The retrospective narrative moves from the dream sequence to the
present with the introduction of Mrs Van Hopper, the narrator’s
marriage to Maxim, and concludes with the image of Manderley on
fire:
58 PETERSEN

The road to Manderley lay ahead. There was no moon. The

sky … was inky black. But the sky on the horizon was not
dark at all. It was shot with crimson, like a splash of blood.
And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the
sea.

In Rebecca the colour red connotes both sexual and physical violence:
the night sky above Manderley is “crimson, like a splash of blood”;
the drive that leads to Manderley is flanked by rhododendrons that
are “blood-red” with “crimson faces” and “slaughterous red” (70).
Although the novel does not make it clear who set fire to Manderley,
the suggestion is it is Danvers; the destruction signifies the end of
Maxim’s rule.
Rebecca’s presence pervades Manderey to the extent that she
seems alive: the morning room bears her stamp—it is a “woman’s
room, graceful, fragile” (89), and it is also a masculine room,
“business-like and purposeful,” the writing desk “no pretty toy where
a woman would scribble little notes” (90). Manderley is described in
feminine terms, “a thing of grace and beauty … lovelier even than I
had ever dreamed” (70), and merges with Rebecca who is “the most
beautiful creature [Frank] ever saw in [his] life” (142). Her presence
haunts Manderley: “Her footsteps sounded in the corridors, her scent
lingered on the stairs … Rebecca was still mistress of Manderley.
Rebecca was still Mrs de Winter” (243). She is feminine and beautiful
and strong and vibrant; the epitome of the sexual woman, a prototype
of women in Gothic romance who are damned; either killed by their
male partners or imprisoned because they are deemed mad. Bertha
Mason in Jane Eyre provides a typical example, and critics of Rebecca
have at different times noted the intertextual links. 13 One of the
stock devices of the Gothic novel is the haunted house, and its
gendered and ideological construction as woman’s place is used by du
Maurier to signify the containment of women within traditional
power structures, whereas the standard motifs of violence and
eroticism in the novel combine to create the uncanny that typifies the
genre.
Amidst such Gothic presentation of the uncanny in the novel lies
more than a hint of incest that can be inferred, for a start, in the
narrator’s relationship with de Winter. She refers to herself as a “little
scrubby schoolboy with a passion for a sixth-form prefect” and
“young enough to win happiness in the wearing of his clothes,
playing the schoolboy again who carries his hero’s sweater and ties it
about his throat choking with pride” (39). The father-daughter
relationship is clear—Maxim, who is twice the narrator’s age, tells her
Rebecca: Shadow and Substance 59

that a husband “is not so very different from a father after all.” He
treats her like a child: “now eat up your peaches and don’t ask me any
more questions, or I shall put you in the corner” (211), and even
suggests that she go to the Manderley Ball dressed as Alice in
Wonderland. His anxiety concerning her adult female sexuality makes
it necessary for him to keep her infantilised, and this is evidenced
early in the narrative when he tells her that he is attracted to her
because she does not dress in black satin, with a string of pearls, and
she is not thirty-six (41). The father/daughter relationship is further
emphasized when Maxim tells the narrator she is “young enough” to
be his daughter and he does not know how to “deal” with her (45),
and Danvers herself says she is a “young ignorant girl, young enough
to be his daughter” (255). Thus it can easily be argued in the context
of father and daughter, that Maxim and the narrator’s relationship
borders on the incestuous. Her insecurity and fear of failure in her
role as the second Mrs de Winter is because she is shy and
inexperienced—an insecure school-girl, indecisive and awkward, the
embodiment of the passive, yielding, pleasing woman and de Winter’s
“poor lamb” (67) and “good dog” (125), which is why she identifies
with the strong and confident Rebecca, a threat to established
notions of order and control.
Hand in glove, so to speak, with the novel’s evocations of incest is
its evocation of lesbian sexuality. Mrs Danvers’ presence in the novel
is uncanny—she is an “other” who blurs the boundaries between life
and death, a ghostly shadowy figure who keeps the memory of the
dead Rebecca alive. Danvers epitomises the lesbian subtext in the
erotic scene in Rebecca’s bedroom when she shows the narrator
Rebecca’s bed and accuses her of touching Rebecca’s nightdress:

“You’ve been touching it, haven’t you? This was the

nightdress she was wearing for the last time, before she died.
Would you like to touch it again?” She took the nightdress
from the case and held it before me. “Feel it, hold it … how
soft and light it is, isn’t it? I haven’t washed it since she wore it
for the last time.” (176)

Kelly observes that Danvers’ “obsession” with Rebecca’s clothes, her

“ritual” brushing of her hair, her “confidence in her sexual games,”
and Maxim’s statement that Rebecca was “not even normal,”
suggests that Danvers “may have enjoyed a lesbian relationship with
her” (60). In her text, The Apparitional Lesbian, Terry Castle writes
about the “ghosting” of the lesbian in the realms of literature and
popular fantasy. She says that western writing is “from one angle a
60 PETERSEN

kind of derealization machine: insert the lesbian and watch her

disappear,” and she argues that lesbians appear in fiction as “spectral
metaphors” that are crucial to the “business of derealization.” Thus it
is not surprising that in real life lesbians have engaged in a “sort of
self-ghosting” by hiding or camouflaging their sexual desires, even
withdrawing from society to escape hostility. 14
Gothic fiction is a literary form that is, to quote Jerrold E. Hoggle,
“pliable and malleable because it stems from an uneasy conflation of
genres and styles,” 15 and offers the perfect vehicle for du Maurier to
question and experiment with deviant sexuality, incest and lesbian
desire:

The Gothic clearly exists, in part, to raise the possibility that all
“abnormalities” we would divorce from ourselves are a part of
ourselves, deeply and pervasively (hence frighteningly), even
while it provides quasi-antiquated methods to help us place
such “deviations” at a definite, though haunting, distance from
us. (Hoggle, 12)

Shallcross also notes that the relationship between Danvers and the
dead Rebecca has lesbian undertones and this was “something
recognized by both Joan Fontaine and by Joanna David”—the latter
played the second Mrs de Winter in the 1979 BBC television
adaptation of the novel (78).
Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, on the other hand, dismiss the
importance of the lesbian presence in the text because it “folds the
novel back into biography” and “[carries] the danger of collapsing the
instability of Rebecca as sign into biographical speculation
concerning du Maurier’s ‘real’ sexual identity.” As an alternative, they
suggest that a more fruitful approach is to “contemplate the values
negotiated over Rebecca’s (dead) body.” They view lesbian desire in
the text as not necessarily indicating the “true” sexual identity of
Rebecca, “nor that of the narrator nor that of the author”; instead,
Rebecca functions as a sign for “multiple possibilities” inherent in
female sexual identity. Horner and Zlosnik view the Rebecca, Maxim
and narrator triangle in interpretative terms, that it manifests a
multiplicity of desires: “those of the family romance; the
father/daughter romance; incestuous desire; lesbian desire; bisexual
desire; heterosexual desire.” 16 This broad interpretation allows
Horner and Zlosnik to slide conveniently past and evade the direct
significance of the triangle. I suggest it is through the Rebecca,
Maxim and narrator triangle that du Maurier explores incest and
lesbian desire in the narrator and Rebecca’s search for identity. That,
Rebecca: Shadow and Substance 61

I suggest, is just what it looks like: her primary concern. Freud’s

summation of the omnipotence of thought processes in the field of
art supports my point:

Only in one field has the omnipotence of thought been

retained in our own civilization, namely in art. In art alone it
still happens that man, consumed by his wishes, produces
something similar to the gratification of these wishes and this
playing, thanks to artistic illusion, calls forth affects as if it
were something real. 17

Through that unfolding strategy, du Maurier turns the romance

plot on its head. Since Freud theorised the unconscious,
psychoanalysis has promoted the awareness of the conscious and
unconscious aspects of the split subject, as postulated by Lacan. The
recognition of the “I” as separate from the “you” constitutes the
recognition of the “self” as opposed to the “other.” This is founded
on the disruption of the dyadic unity with the mother, and the
process thereafter is a different one for the formation of male and
female subjectivity. In popular Gothic texts the female-subject’s pain
due to the separation from the mother leads to the desire for a
continuing self-in-relation that is represented in the romance plot and
this desire is fulfilled by the hero’s nurturing love that replaces the
lost mother love (Susanne Becker, 158). Du Maurier confronts and
questions the romance plot of popular Gothic fiction by turning the
narrative into one of domestic horror by inserting an anti-hero—
Maxim. Instead of providing “nurturing love” for Rebecca he
murders her and then constructs a fictitious accident to hide his
crime. He does not show nurturing love for the second Mrs de
Winter either—his proposal of marriage is very “matter of fact” and
there is nothing romantic about it at all: “He had not said anything
yet—about being in love […] No, he had not said anything about
being in love. Just that we would be married. Short and definite, very
original” (61). The narrator reflects the values of the dominant
ideology whereas Rebecca challenges those values. She is the “other”
and, as Joanna Russ points out, in Gothic romance the “other”
woman is very often the male’s first wife or dead first wife and “is (or
was) beautiful, worldly, glamorous, immoral, flirtatious, irresponsible,
and openly sexual” (23), a description that epitomizes Rebecca.
Rebecca’s search for identity—her being elaborately associated with
the uncanny, the covert, the taboo—takes popular romance through
the darkly Gothic and into the domain of modern understandings of
the sexual. Russ also notes that in the typical Gothic romance, in
62 PETERSEN

addition to the heroine’s other troubles she gradually becomes aware

of a “Buried Ominous Secret” (Russ’s emphasis), that is connected with
the other woman and when the secret is unravelled it turns out to be
an immoral and usually criminal activity that centres around money
and/or the other woman’s “ghastly (usually sexual) behaviour” (33).
Towards the end of the narrative the narrator becomes aware of
Maxim’s “Buried Ominous Secret” when he confesses he has
murdered Rebecca. Instead of reporting him to the authorities she
becomes complicit in his crime by giving him her loyalty and support,
thus shifting the balance of power in the relationship: she is no
longer the victim but instead the protector and nurturer—du Maurier
deconstructs the popular Gothic romance plot.
Becker comments that Manderley is haunted by one of the “most
terrifying and fatal female figures of literary history—Rebecca” (76).
She notes that du Maurier’s first draft of the novel ends with a car
accident and an epilogue that portrays the narrator and Maxim
leading a static life “full of the pervasive horror of their routine,” and
this “rather unsettling ending” is replaced in the final published
version by the narrator’s recognition that Mandeley is burning and
that the “horrors and crimes that happened there will disappear with
it, like the nightmare that the opening suggests” (78). Kelly
comments that it is “not simply marriage” that brings the narrator
happiness but the

symbolic death of Mrs Danvers, the destruction of Manderley,

and the exorcism of Rebecca, thereby crowning her with her
true and unique title of Mrs. de Winter […] and assuring her
that she is the solitary recipient of Maxim’s love and
devotion.” (57)

I disagree with both Becker and Kelly’s reading of the novel as a

“happy ending” because the destruction of Manderley and the
continuation of the relationship between Maxim and the narrator in
exile signify another nightmare—a deathlike existence.
In “The ‘Uncanny’,” Freud discusses the phenomenon of the
“double” that is accentuated by mental processes that leap from one
character to another so that one possesses the knowledge, feelings
and even the experience in common with the other character or:

the subject identifies himself with someone else, so that he is

in doubt as to which his self is, or substitutes the extraneous
self for his own. In other words, there is doubling, dividing
and interchanging of the self. 18
Rebecca: Shadow and Substance 63

A close reading of the novel makes the phenomenon of the double

apparent in the narrator’s relationship with Rebecca. In the book of
poems that Maxim gives her, Rebecca’s name stands out “black and
strong, the tall and sloping R dwarfing the other letters” (37).
Towards the end of the novel the narrator dreams that she finds
herself back in the morning room at Manderley writing invitations
with a “thick black pen” and notices her handwriting has changed—
“it was long and slanting with curious pointed strokes” similar to
Rebecca’s handwriting. A similar occurrence takes place in Robert
Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. When Mr Utterson’s head
clerk, Mr Guest, compares the handwriting of Jekyll and Hyde he
finds that there is a “rather singular resemblance: the two hands are
in many points identical: only differently sloped.” 19 Like other
monsters of literary fiction—Wilde’s Dorian Gray and his monstrous
reflection hidden away in the old school room, Dr Jekyll and his
monstrous other self, Mr Hyde, Rebecca is anti-Oedipal—the
monstrous double of the narrator. She is monstrous because
everything she signifies is a diabolic threat to the Oedipal construct:
established traditional male values and ideology. Becker comments
on those narratives that construct a figure for the “monstrous-
feminine” that enhances the horror of the story and such a figure is
“particularly suggestive”:

First, it is here encountered by a female subject—a subject that

is […] split, in process, and in different ways challenging to
patriarchal ideology. Second, the `monsters’ of the feminine
gothic are among the most powerful female figures of literary
history, representing forces which are among the most
challenging to the structures both of the house of fiction and
of the symbolic order. (56)

Danvers asserts that Rebecca is the real Mrs de Winter whereas the
narrator is the “shadow and the ghost” (my emphasis, 257), thus
invoking the uncanny by bringing Rebecca back to life and dismissing
the narrator into the realm of the dead. On the penultimate page of
the novel, the uncanny “doubling, dividing and interchanging” of the
narrator’s self with Rebecca takes place when she sees a face staring
back at her in the looking-glass that was not her own: “It was pale,
very lovely, framed in a cloud of dark hair.” The narrative trajectory
inexorably blends both identities—the narrator who finally merges
with Rebecca—she no longer lives in her shadow:
64 PETERSEN

And I saw then that she was sitting on a chair before the
dressing-table in her bedroom and Maxim was brushing her
hair […] he wound it slowly into a thick rope. It twisted like a
snake and he took hold of it with both hands and smiled at
Rebecca and put it round his neck. (396)

The image that is evoked is a noose around Maxim’s neck that

prefigures the end of his dominance, whereas the narrator’s
identification with Rebecca heralds the double life she will live
henceforth—her death like existence with Maxim and release through
her imagination to return to Manderley and Rebecca whenever she
wants. It is evident that the narrator, who is the weaker character,
lacks substance: she is the shadow of the strong and passionate
Rebecca with whom she merges—the shadow and substance blend in
union. In this amalgamation of two identities each depends upon the
hidden presence of the other: the realist story of the narrator
imprisoned in her marriage to de Winter interplays with the anti-
realist Gothic genre.
Much to du Maurier’s disappointment, The Times review of Rebecca
was fairly dismissive. It stated that “the material is of the humblest”
and “nothing in this is beyond the novelette.” The review noted the
“atmosphere of terror,” but saw it as a deterrent because it made it
“easy to overlook … the weaknesses” and rated it “romance in the
grand tradition.” 20 Other critics have dismissed the novel as
melodrama and stressed its popular appeal (Forster, 138). Overtly,
the narrative does resemble what could be called a Mills & Boon
romance plot or, to suggest something not dissimilar if not by any
means the same, a Cinderella story: a penniless young woman saved
by marriage to a rich handsome man who elevates her to a high social
position in society. However, as has been pointed out earlier, to read
the novel as a conventional Gothic romance plot is to under-read it,
because such a reading ignores the pervasive presence of dark forces
that are at work on a subliminal level. As has been argued above, the
Gothic genre is used as a vehicle for du Maurier to release the
threatening forces of the id—Rebecca. She and the narrator reflect
two sides of the same character: Rebecca is passionate, vibrant and
free of the Oedipal yoke, a threat to the patriarchal system of
representation, whereas the passive and subservient narrator is a
narcissistic echo of the male ego. To have argued that much is to
have suggested that the novel has been misapprehended by much of
the commentary on it, yet one could perhaps go further. It is
arguable, at least, that through the use of the mirror image of
Rebecca and the narrator, du Maurier plays out her fantasies to
Rebecca: Shadow and Substance 65

escape from the yolk that bound her to her father and the anger that
plagued her and come to terms with her ambivalent feelings towards
men and her attraction to women.

NOTES

1 Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca (London: Arrow Books, 1992), 181.

2 Daphne du Maurier, Myself When Young. The Shaping of a Writer (New
York: Doubleday, 1977), 65.
3 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, introduction by Peter
Ackroyd (London: Penguin Books, 1985), viii.
4 Martyn Shallcross, The Private World of Daphne du Maurier (London:
Robson Books, 1998), 76, 78.
5 Margaret Forster, Daphne du Maurier: The Secret Life of the Renowned
Storyteller (New York: Doubleday, 1993), 134; 391.
6 “‘The Punishment of Incest Act 1908’: A Case Study of Law
Creation” in Criminal Law Review, 1979, 708–718, 709.
7 Sigmund Freud, “The Aetiology of Hysteria” in The Standard Edition
Of The Complete Psychological Works Of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans.
James Strachey, vol. iii, 1893–1899 (London: Hogarth Press, 1975),
215.
8 Elizabeth Ward, Father-Daughter Rape (London: Women’s Press,
1984), 105.
9 Daphne du Maurier, “This I Believe” in The Rebecca Notebook and
Other Memories, preface by Alison Light (London: Virago Press, 2004),
115.
10 Michelle A Massé, “Psychoanalysis and the Gothic” in A Companion
to the Gothic, ed. David Punter (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000),
229.
11 Du Maurier, The Rebecca Notebook, 3.
12 Richard Kelly, Daphne du Maurier (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987),
54.
13 See Joanna Russ, “Somebody’s Trying To Kill Me And I Think It’s
My Husband: The Modern Gothic” in The Female Gothic, 3. Susanne
Becker, Gothic Forms of Feminine Fiction (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1999), 86.
14 Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality And Modern
Culture (New York: Colombia University Press, 1993), 6–7.
15 Jarrold E. Hogle, introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Gothic
Fiction, ed. Jarrold E. Hogle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004), 2.
16 Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, Daphne du Maurier: Writing, Identity and
the Gothic Imagination (London: Macmillan, 1998), 124–25).
17 Sigmund Freud, Totem And Taboo, trans. A. A. Brill (New York:
Dover Publications, 1998), 77.
66 PETERSEN

18 “The Uncanny,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological

Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, vol. 17 (1917–1919)
(London: The Hogarth Press, 1955; rpt. 1964), 234.
19 Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: and Other Stories
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1987), 55.
20 Cited in Forster, Daphne du Maurier, 138.