An Analysis of Rebecca from Rebecca: Sexy, Promiscuous, and Decidedly Evil
The enduring Legacy of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.
Oona Milliken
Reading Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel Rebecca feels like stepping into a damp, dilapidated shack in the woods—it’s dark, chilly and you have a creeping sensation at the nape of your neck telling you that the whole structure is about to fall apart at any moment. The story follows a young, unnamed woman who marries the wealthy older Maxim de Winter, an English gentleman with a large countryside estate named Manderly. Their marriage is overshadowed by the haunting memory of Rebecca, de Winter’s first wife, whom our protagonist (who, missing a first name, slowly becomes known as the new Mrs. de Winter) suspects her husband is still in love with. She spends much of her time wishing she was more like Rebecca, whose “beauty endured” and whose “smile was not forgotten,” (Du Maurier 44). However, the twist of the novel reveals that Maxim de Winter hated Rebecca due to her infidelities and murders her when he discovered that she was expecting someone else’s child.
Rebecca is aptly named: the villainous dead wife is the most interesting character in Manderly, the one readers remember long after the book is closed. Du Maurier treads a careful line of condemning Rebecca’s infidelities and lies whilst including a wistful longing to be like her. Rebecca runs around freely, has multiple lovers, and lives deliciously, yet her transgressions were supposed to be fundamentally wrong — even loathsome or repulsive. It is this dichotomy that makes Rebecca so alluring. In Rebecca, Daphnie du Maurier performs a nimble magic trick for her readers: she paints Rebecca as a sinister and promiscuous woman that deserves to be murdered by her righteous husband while simultaneously allowing her readers to want to emulate Rebecca for the very lewdness they are supposed to despise her for.
At the time of the book's publication, prevailing notions of feminine purity were not only prevalent in popular culture but also baked into the structure of life that Rebecca lived. Religious ideals, family inheritance structures through fathers and sons, as well as notions such as the “fallen women” all indicated that women like Rebecca deserved to die (Nochlin). While modern-day society doesn’t condone cheating, most audiences don’t feel it’s worthy of being shot, stuffed in a boat, and sunk to the bottom of the ocean (which is how Maxim got rid of Rebecca). In contrast, her cheating was so abhorrent to the twentieth-century audience that Maxim de Winter could “never repeat [it] to a single living soul,” (Du Maurier 276). Our unnamed narrator excuses her husband's actions and promptly blames Rebecca for her own death as she comforts her man, “‘Rebecca is dead,’ I said… ‘She can’t speak, she can’t bear witness. She can’t harm you anymore,’” (Du Maurier 286). In that sentence, our narrator rigs the scales of justice with a little balancing act that equates cheating to murder. To the reader, it is clear that temptress Rebecca had it coming. Her death was just the natural conclusion of her actions.
Apart from pure disgust, another justification outlined for Maxim’s actions is the fact Rebecca was going to birth a bastard child. Through Maxim’s retelling, we hear Rebecca taunting him with an illegitimate male heir that no one could prove was not his own, “It would grow up here in Manderly, bearing your name. There would be nothing you could do. And when you died Manderly would be his,” (Du Maurier 283). In a time before paternity testing, when the phrase “You are NOT the father!” had yet to be coined, and the transfer of power through a patriarchal line was crucial to the structure of society, this crime would have been unfathomable. Despite this, Rebecca laughs at Maxim as she tells him the news of her child and remarks, “God, how funny…how supremely, wonderfully funny. I’ll be the perfect mother, Max… And none of them will ever guess, none of them will ever know,” (Du Maurier 284). In that sense, the crux of the horror in Rebecca, in part, lies in the cheating wife’s refusal to comply with the traditional patriarchal structure that guided the de Winter’s milieu and social strata.
Part of the aversion to Rebecca might lie in the notion of the “fallen woman,” a Victorian term that described a woman that had lost her innocence through sexual activity outside of the sanctity of marriage, whether that be extra-marital or pre-marital (Nochlin). Though usually applied to women and girls who had sex before marriage, it could also be used to refer to sex workers and women with extensive sexual experience. Though the language surrounding Rebecca’s infidelities is quite coded, it is clear that she was having sex with people other than her husband, as Maxim alludes to Rebecca disappearing for weeks on end to party in London and having male overnight visitors. In fact, it is hinted that she had orgies, as Maxim tells his new wife, “I came back once…and found her there, with half a dozen of them people,” (Du Maurier 279). Despite her actions, Rebecca still expertly played the role of the faithful wife. Part of the consternation with Rebecca’s character lies in the disconnect between her appearance and her actions. Though Rebecca is the opposite of the virginal woman of what a Victorian or early twentieth-century feminine figure should be, she puts on an act sweet enough to rot your teeth. This is clear as Maxim tells his new wife an anecdote of how Rebecca sat at the dinner table with her husband’s family, “looking like an angel,” after making advances at her brother-in-law, (Du Maurier 280).
We can see why readers would have been led to feel disgusted by Rebecca and not find fault with her former husband’s decision to murder her. However, du Maurier still allows Rebecca’s character to ooze with allure, sex, and thrill. She’s the provocative anti-hero, an evil “It Girl,” a pre-war Amy Dunne (Dædalus). Certainly, Rebecca’s charm is nothing compared to our narrator, who calls herself “quiet and dull and youthful, [a person] who did not matter,” (Du Maurier 44). In contrast, Maxim describes Rebecca as clever, with an otherworldly sense of charisma, “No one would guess meeting her that she was not the kindest, most generous, most gifted person in the world,” (Du Maurier 275). Here, du Maurier creates a difficult dilemma for the reader: would one rather be the meek, rather boring narrator with a faithful sense of loyalty or the sexy, fun devil woman? Undoubtedly, her laissez-faire attitude is appealing: when confronted by Maxim about her orgy that may or may not have happened, Rebecca shrugs her shoulders and replies, “What the hell’s it got to do with you?” (Du Maurier 279) Instead of shrinking herself, as the unnamed narrator does, Rebecca laughs at the idea of what a woman should be and does the opposite. To a woman reading the novel in 1938, Rebecca would have symbolized a refusal to play by the rules binding her gender at the time, no matter the cost to her marriage or her husband. At a time when women were taught to be pure, selfless, and virginal, this woman was seductive, selfish, and, according to the contemporary audience, downright villainous. This is why du Maurier’s construction of Rebecca is so ingenious because it fosters a complicated and wicked feeling in the reader. On the one hand, the reader does not want to be as sinful as Rebecca, but on the other, cannot help but admire her bold self-indulgence.
Even dead, Rebecca arguably wins. Though Maxim kills her, Rebecca’s memory continues to haunt him and his new wife throughout their marriage. Maxim eventually becomes a suspect in her killing which further taints their relationship, and though it is never fully explained, our unnamed narrator hints that the couple flees the country after news of the murder escapes. In a fiery last scene, Rebecca’s former housekeeper burns de Winter’s Manderly estate down in an act of revenge. As Maxim says, “Rebecca knew she would win in the end. I saw her smile when she died,” (Du Maurier 270). Even to modern readers, Rebecca’s behavior is sadistic — it seems that she enjoys inflicting pain on her husband through her actions and relishes in seeing him squirm when she tells him of her coming child. As mentioned previously, Rebecca is similar to Amy Dunn, Gillian Flynn’s main antagonist character in Gone Girl. Rebecca is not a good wife or a good woman according to early twentieth-century standards, but she is also not a kind or virtuous person in any time period. To the reader, her malevolent tendencies only add to the excitement of her character. Though we cannot know du Maurier’s intentions in creating her character, we can respect her craft for creating beautifully nefarious women. Rebecca is undoubtedly an enigma — hated and revered, admired and detested, lingering in readers' minds since 1938.
Oona Milliken is a 23-year-old aspiring journalist and writer based in Brooklyn. She loves books of all shapes, sizes, and intellectual rigor ranging from YA trash to the classic literary canon, and thanks the New York MTA system every day for giving her the perfect time to read them.
WORKS CITED
Dædalus. “Gone Girl: Amy Dunne, Psychopath or Anti-Hero?” DÆDALUS ROMA, 20 May 2021, https://www.daedalusmagazine.it/gone-girl-amy-dunne-psychopath-or-anti-hero/.
Du Maurier, Daphne. Rebecca. Harper Collins, 2006.
Flynn, Gillian. Gone Girl. Ballantine Books, 2022.
Nochlin, Linda. “Lost and Found: Once More the Fallen Woman.” Feminism and Art History, 2018, pp. 220–245., https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429500534-13.
