Woman of the Month: Rebecca de Winter

Rebecca de Winter from Rebecca

This is the first time I’ve added an entry without an image of the woman in question, because the whole point of Daphne du Maurier’s famous novel is that we never get a glimpse of Rebecca, just as we never find out the name of the story’s narrator, the second Mrs de Winter.

Rebecca is a posthumous character, yet despite being really, most sincerely dead by the time the story starts, she is the novel’s villain, her presence still looming large over Manderley and all its inhabitants. Heck, it’s right there in the title. She’s the subject of the book, and our actual protagonist is so overshadowed by her that she doesn’t even warrant a name.

SPOILERS

The new Mrs de Winter is at first cowled by tales of her predecessor, the beautiful, glamourous, vivacious Rebecca, and struggles to assert herself – especially when it comes to the housekeeper Mrs Danvers, who was devoted to Rebecca and resents the arrival of her replacement. She’s convinced that Maxim could never possibly love her as much as he did his first wife, but just over halfway through the novel the truth emerges: Rebecca was a cruel and manipulative woman with clear psychopathic tendencies.

Yet once you finally get the whole story, you can’t help but admire her just a tiny bit. As it transpires, Rebecca was terminally ill with cancer, and in order to spare herself prolonged suffering, she goaded her husband into shooting her dead by taunting him with a lie about how she was pregnant with another man’s child. Her plan worked perfectly: she got her relatively painless end, and her husband was left guilt-ridden and paranoid.

Even when the reality of Rebecca’s true nature becomes public, Mrs Danvers ensures Maxim and his young wife will never enjoy her true mistress’s home without her, and burns it to the ground. Rebecca has won, did win, and was always going to win.  

The allure of Rebecca is her unknowability – she’s dead before the narrative starts, so all our protagonist ever learns of her is second-hand. There are plenty of Sapphic undertones in her relationship with Mrs Danvers, and it’s made clear she was carrying on a love affair with her first cousin, as well as many others. Her husband says of her: “she was not normal,” and that she had told him things about herself that he would never repeat. To some she was a virtuous and charming woman, to others a pathological liar and narcissist. But the final word on her must simply be: “She did what she liked. She lived as she liked.” And ultimately, she died in the way of her own choosing.