This novel is also a direct appeal to our subconscious and to archaic forces within our minds, staging the three levels of the self in Freudian psychoanalysis: Max de Winter as The Super Ego, the narrator as the Ego, and Rebecca as the Id, or even as the Shadow, the repressed parts of ourselves in Jungian analysis. The character of Rebecca is also reminiscent of Lilith, Adam’s first wife in Midrachic literature. Lilith rebelled against Adam’s domination and said to him in the Alphabet of Ben Sira (c. 800s to 900s): “I will not lie below, for the two of us are equal, since we are both from the earth.”^[1]

The narrator is never given a name. She is devoid of any true identity; she is a non-entity, a signifier with no substantial signified. From the first page, the “I” is represented by a metonymic thread: “The drive was a ribbon now, a thread of its former self”, she clearly identifies with this “poor thread”: “the poor thread that once had been our drive” and the metonymy is made explicit a few pages later: “the course of my existence hung like a thread^[2]. The reader has only access to the narrator’s inner monologue. A failed artist, she does not write, does not draw, does not speak much, she is mostly lost in silent day-dreaming. She keeps imagining what might happen and what others might be saying or thinking: but this envisioning activity does not lead to creation. The unreliable narrator symbolizes the powers of fiction itself to disguise the truth while pretending to reveal it. This book is a novel about the creative process, more specifically about the impedimenta to the writing process. Its metafictional dimension is also revealed by Rebecca. Rebecca, the absent presence, whose posthumous voice has not been quite silenced by murder, her silent voice reaching the reader through other characters, is a metafictional figure, performing the role of the implied author, who, according to Chatman’s definition, “can tell us nothing. He, or better, it, has no voice, no direct means of communicating. It instructs us silently, through the design of the whole, with all the voices”^[3].

Aware of being a woman child (“I knew all the doubt and anxiety of the child who has been told, ‘these things are not discussed, they are forbidden”), the narrator is afflicted with an unresolved Electra complex, the Jungian equivalent for girls of the Œdipus complex. This theme of the Electra complex, as proposed by Carl Jung in his Theory of Psychoanalysis, is further developed in Daphne Du Maurier’s short story “a border-line case”: the heroine, who hates her mother, falls in love with an older man, only to discover that he is her biological father. In Rebecca, the narrator needs to overcome three extremely negative maternal figures, Mrs Van Hopper, Mrs Danvers and, of course, Rebecca, whose murder she totally condones, her loyalty being all for her husband-father.

The hesitations and iterations of this deceptively simple narration can also be read as an enunciative strategy exposing subjectivity in its far-reaching complexity. The narrator is like a blank page on which Maxim can write his own story. It is through her account of Maxim’s account that we learn the details of Rebecca’s murder. This multilayered narrative technique exposes – and conceals at the same time – a rhetoric of manipulation in which the murder is totally justified – an act in self-defense: he was a victim, Rebecca the devil, her death a just punishment. The narrator’s first response to Maxim’s confession is dissociation: “It was very quiet in the library. The only sound was that of Jasper licking his foot. Then I heard the watch on Maxim’s wrist ticking close to my ear. The little normal sounds of every day”[4]. The passage illustrates in a very detailed way the process of dissociation, which is further analyzed later on by the narrator herself: “I had listened to his story, and part of me went with him like a shadow in his tracks. I too had killed Rebecca, I too had sunk the boat there in the bay. But the rest of me sat there on the carpet, unmoved and detached”[5]. Her self has been split into two selves, as a defense mechanism. She is accomplice to murder and amoral in her quest for recognition through total identification with the murderer. In denial, she cannot recognize her husband’s confession for the trauma that it is and is oblivious to her own feelings: “I was aware of no feeling at all, no pain and no fear, there was no horror in my heart”[6]. As Freud explains, “the content of a repressed image or idea can make its way into consciousness, on condition that it is negated”.^[7] The use of this strategy – revealing an inner truth though negation – is a constant device in this novel: “We have no secrets now from one another” and “there was nothing wrong after all”^[8] being two obvious examples.

Repetitions are used in times of intensified tension as a narrative device, giving a hypnotic quality to the text, with inner monologue and fragments of dialogue sounding almost like mantra: “I clung to one thing only, and repeated it to myself, over and over again. Maxim did not love Rebecca. He had never loved her, never, never.[9]” And her thought finds an echo in Maxim’s remark a few pages later: “I’m glad I killed Rebecca, I shall never have any remorse for that, never, never, never”[10]. Being a murderer and having no remorse would normally be understood as the exact definition of a psychopath. Sally Beauman notes: “Maxim de Winter kills not one wife, but two. He murders the first with a gun, and the second by slower, more insidious methods”[11]; and she adds: “Following him into that hellish exile glimpsed in the opening chapters, she becomes again what she was when she first met him – the paid companion to a petty tyrant”[12]. Their relationship is described in very unconvincing terms, that dissipate any romantic illusion: « I suppose it is his dependence upon me that has made me bold at last » or « boredom is a pleasing antidote to fear ». The narrator setting fire to the page bearing Rebecca”s signature – “the letter R was the last to go, it twisted in the flame^[13]” – acquires new signification with Manderley on fire at the end. Manderley is afterwards described as a place that should never be mentioned – accessible only through dream and memory. It is not clear from the narrator’s confused discourse whether they have escaped from Hell or have been expelled from Eden…

Rebecca is a masterpiece – polysemic, full of ambivalence, enigmatic and brilliant. Through her lack of personality and clumsy use of negation, the narrator characterizes something beyond negation, abnegation: abnegation of a personal voice and of a sense of identity. Like Albert Camus’s L’Etranger, she represents human existence in its temptation of annihilation; she is like a blank page on which readers can project their repressed desires and lesser impulses. As Roland Barthes notes, “writing is destruction of voice, of origin”^[14]. Daphne Du Maurier expresses something very similar in the last stanza of a poem entitled “The Writer”:

Not for me the shadow of a smile,

Nor the life that has gone,

Nor the love that has fled,

But the thread of the spider who spins on the wall,

Who is lost, who is dead, who is nothing at all[15].

This sustained metaphor, in which the thread of the spider stands for the text of the writer, might throw some light on the motif of the thread in the incipit (“the drive a thread of its former self”, “the poor thread that once had been our drive”, echoed in “the course of my existence hung like a thread”); this metonymic chain is associated to the narrator, and through synecdoche, to the novel itself – that is, the line-thread that is left of the writer-spider when lost, when dead, when nothing at all…

[1] Hebrew text from Alphabet of Ben Sira, “Toldot Ben Sira,” Nusach 2 retrieved from hebrewbooks.org/ on October 14, 2013.

[2] R, p. 5, p. 6  & p. 14.

[3] Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative structure in Fiction and Film, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1978, p. 148.

[4] R, p. 264.

[5] R, p. 282.

[6] R, p. 265.

[7] Essay entitled “Negation”, Sigmund Freud Standard Ed. 19, 235-239 (1925).

[8] R, p. 9 & p. 31.

[9] R, p. 271.

[10] R, p. 297.

[11] Sally Beauman, p. 57.

[12] Sally Beauman, p. 58.

[13] R, p. 59.

[14] Roland Barthes, Le neutre, Paris, Seuil, 2002, p. 61 : “l’écriture est destruction de toute voix, de toute origine. L’écriture, c’est ce neutre, ce composite, cet oblique où fuit notre sujet, le noir-et-blanc où vient se perdre toute identité, à commencer par celle-là même du corps qui écrit”.

[15] Daphne Du Maurier, The Rebecca Notebook, p. 177.