Hitchcock famously said that Daphne Du Maurier’s novel was an unimportant text, “a novelette, really”[1]. I will attempt to show that far from being “a novelette”, Rebecca is actually a masterpiece. It is well-known for its unforgettable characters that function like projections of archaic terrors and for its inspired rewriting of Blue Beard and of major 19^th century novels such as Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Pride and Prejudice. But other elements have been less studied: its polysemy, reflected in the diversity of its interpretations, its meticulous composition, inspired by tragedy, and its metafictional dimension. 

Like all great works of art, Rebecca is a highly successful palimpsest, that actually goes beyond its various hypotexts, the main ones being Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Charles Perrault’s La Barbe bleue. In Jane Eyre, there is an actual reference to Bluebeard, with “a long passage looking like a corridor in some Bluebeard’s castle”[2]. The “moral” at the end of Bluebeard’s tale explains that “women give in to curiosity”, and that it “always proves very costly”, leaving no doubt as to the justification of this long chain of murdered wives. But why was the first woman in this bloody chain murdered? What was the pretext? Literally, the text before the text? This void is filled in Rebecca, in which the story of the murder of the first wife is told at last, in a very thorough rewriting of Bluebeard’s tale. “I felt rather like someone peering through the keyhole of a locked door”^[3], says the narrator in the beginning of the novel, foreshadowing her discovery of the bloody corpse –  through Maxim’s confession. But, as Maria Tatar notes in Secrets beyond the Door, The Story of Bluebeard and his wives, “unlike Bluebeard’s wife, she finds that the marriage bond is cemented through the revelation of her husband’s homicidal act”^[4].

Two instances of intertextual traces are worth noting: MANDERLEY is a word coined from two names: Pemberley, Mr Darcy’s estate in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and Menabilly, Daphne Du Maurier’s beloved House of Secrets, thus combining fictional heritage and biographical reference. It is also worth mentioning the direct reference to Francis Thompson’s poem “Hound of Heaven”, that is a model of reversal, playing on the fact that one would normally expect “Hound of Hell”.

The elements given to define tragedy in Aristotle’s Poetics – “through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions[5]” – correspond well to Rebecca’s plot, designed to induce pity for the narrator in her initial nightmarish situation with Mrs Van Hopper, and then fear for her, who is always within the shadow of Rebecca… and the final catharsis with Maxim’s confession. Daphne Du Maurier notes in The Rebecca Notebook: “Something horrible would have to happen, I did not know what… […] The couple would be living abroad, after some tragedy”^[6]. She also notes, about Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, that it has “the essence of Greek tragedy”. Daphne Du Maurier used to describe Rebecca as a “study in jealousy and obsession”, which is of course reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Othello. A surprising reference to another Shakespearian play, a comedy, this time, occurs at the very beginning of the novel, in the 2^nd paragraph, with the phrase “of a sudden”, now obsolete, that is actually a quote from The Taming of the Shrew, act I, scene I, with Tranio saying: “I pray, sir, tell me, is it possible that love should of a sudden take such hold?” This reference is a very subtle hint that Rebecca had to be ‘tamed’ and a definite warning to the second wife.

Rebecca has an almost circular structure: from the famous opening line “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again” to almost the end of the story, but not quite, for there is an ellipsis of a few years… Still, we can note the dramatic irony of a diegetic structure that gives it all from the beginning:, the whole narration actually is a long analepsis from the incipit (analepse in Gérard Genette’s terminology), and, as underlined by Didier Coste, the analepsis is actually contained in the word “again”[7].

[1] In an interview, quoted in Rebecca d’Alfred Hitchcock, Jean-Loup Bourget, Paris, Editions Vendémiaire, 2017, p. 48.

[2] Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 91.

[3] R, p. 35.

[4] Maria Tatar, Secrets beyond the Door, The Story of Bluebeard and his wives, Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2007, p. 79.

[5] Aristotle’s Poetics, I.6, 1449 b25-29.

[6] Daphne Du Maurier, The Rebecca Notebook, p. 5.

[7] Didier Coste, “Analepse.” DITL (Dictionnaire International Des Termes Littéraires), 2004.