In Forever England, Alison Light notes in du Maurier’s writing a
“romance with the past” that caters to the middle class women in need of escapist fantasies in the interwar period. With the profoundly atmospheric setting of grand Englishness, Rebeccacertainly provokes
“romantic Toryism, one which invokes the past as a nobler, loftier place where it was possible to live in a more expansive and exciting life”(156). The old-fashioned grandeur of Manderleyserves as a haunting vision of a forever lost past to be contrasted with a lack- lustre present. Readings in such a vein, however, often dismiss the textual undercurrents that revealan acute recognition of the constructed nature of this Englishness of the past that often places women in a precarious position within domestic space. The haunting power of Rebeccalies not in the façade of the grandeur of Manderley but in the nameless narrator’s fantasy of Rebecca who haunts Manderley, a house of dark secrets, as the signifier of mysterious, amorphous, contradictory female sexuality.
It is Rebecca who has created the mythical form of Englishness embodied in Manderley, both its bucolic landscape that its master once so dearly recalled in Monte Carlo and its grand and delicate interior so delicately ornamented with chairs and tapestry of choice that the butler shows “so proudly to the visitors on the public day”(274). Although she is the creator of glamorous mythical Englishness, Rebecca is representative of female desires that cannot be reduced to the confines of idealized Englishness. Executed by her husband and expelled violently from Manderley, Rebecca has made Manderleypart of her own -- her taste, her scent, her laugh, her
personality -- with the same ferocity and vitality as she had “slash[ed]
at her horse” and “seiz[ed] life with her two hands” (272):
She was in the house still. . . she was in that room in the west wing, she was in the library, in the morning-room, in the gallery above the hall. Even in the little flower-room, where her mackintosh still hung. And in the garden, and in the woods, and down in the stone cottage on the beach.
Her footsteps sounded in the corridors, her scents lingered on the stairs. The servants obeyed her orders still, the food we ate was the food she liked. He favorite flowers filled the rooms. Her clothes were in the wardrobes in her room, her brushes were on the table, her shoes beneath the chair, her nightdress on her bed. Rebecca was still mistress of Manderley. (233)
Rebecca traces the nameless narrator’s fantasies and imagined memories of Rebecca in which she decodes the cryptic signs that Rebecca has left, summons the specter of Rebecca, and finally encodes Rebecca in the narrative that she writes.
It is Rebecca’s signature that is most suggestive of Rebecca’s multifarious subjectivity as well as of the complicated nature of the narrator’s engagement with Rebecca. The narrator first finds Rebecca’s signatureon the fly-leaf of a book of poetry that she takes from Maxim’s car while driving in the south of France. The narrator reads out of Rebecca’s signature the writer’s confidence and strong personality, traits that she lacks: “‘Max -- from Rebecca. May 17th,’
written in a curious, slanting hand . . . . the name Rebecca stood out
black and strong, the tall and sloping R dwarfing the other letters”(33). The “tall and sloping R” in black ink is emblematic of Rebecca’s body, a “dark-haired” woman of the “tall and slim” figure.
Rebecca’s signature is also suggestive of the way she makesthe relation with her husband: “Max from Rebecca. . . Max was her choice, the word was her choice, the word was her possession” (43).
The motif of doubles is clear in the differences of the two women’s handwriting. The narrator notices her own handwriting is suggestive of her personal traits: “how cramped and unformed was my own hand-writing, without individuality, without style, uneducated even, the writing of an indifferent pupil taught in a second-rate school”(87).
Horner and Zlosnikobserve that the narrator’s handwriting, “small”
and “square,” reveals “the intimations of uniformity, immaturity and social inhibition” (114), while Rebecca’s writingsuggests a duality in the production of her subjectivity. If the household documents written by Rebecca testify to “both the acceptance of a social role of the ideal wife and the ability to carry it out with verve and sophistication,” the manner in which she writes implicates her in “a wayward, willful quality which runs counter” to the idea of a good wife(Horner and Zlosnik 114). “[T]he tall and sloping R” signifies the autonomous economy of female sexuality that freely crosses the boundaries of femininity -- both socially endorsed and tabooed.
After Maxim proposes to her, the narrator cuts, tears up, and sets fire to the page as a symbolic gesture to erase memories of Rebecca: “The flame had a lovely light, staining the paper, curling the edges . . . . The letter R was the last to go, it twisted in the flame, it curled outwards for a moment, becoming larger than ever. Then it
crumpled too; the flame destroyed it. It was not ashes even, it was feathery dust”(57). The tall and sloping letter “R,” however, embroidered or inscribed on the handkerchief, the leather book, and the nightdress case, erupts into the sanitized space ofManderley as if Rebecca has sealed the space of domesticity as her own with the signature. The narrator retrieves all the floating signs of Rebecca -- the signature, the scents, the dress, the handkerchief, sayings, gestures -- that lead her beyond the confines of the respectability and order of Manderley. The narrator’s journey into the past entails both the decoding of the mysterious sign of Rebecca and the encoding of her own female desires and sexual anxieties.
At the end of the novel as Manderley is set on fire,7 the narrator dreams:
I was writing letters in the morning-room. I was sending out invitations. I wrote them all myself with a thick pen.
But when I looked down to see what I had written it was
7 The burning of Manderley is certainly reminiscent of the burning of Rebecca’s signature. Malcolm Kelsall interprets the burning of Manderley as symbolic of
“purgatorial flame” and the ensuing exile of the de Winters as symbolic of
“progressive pilgrimage” away from England (183). In this reading, Rebecca becomes a symptom of cultural degeneracy that should be destroyed through fire. Indeed, the wartime experience in Britain entails readings of the novel in which “[t]he fire that destroys Manderley can stand for the fires of the Blitz that threatens to destroy England”(D’Monte 145). These readings see in Rebecca an allegory for the nation in crisis and emphasize the respectability of Manderley as an emblematic form of ideal Englishness while characterizing Rebecca as a sign of degeneracy alien to such Englishness.
not my small square hand-writing at all, it was long, and slanting, with curious pointed strokes. . . . I got up and went to the looking-glass. A face stared back at me that was not my own. It was very pale, very lovely, framed in a cloud of dark hair. The eyes narrowed and smiled. The lips are parted. The face in the glass stared back at me and laughed. And I saw then that she was sitting in a chair before the dressing-table in her bedroom, and Maxim was brushing her hair. He held her hair in his hands, and as he brushed it he wound it slowly into a thick long 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.
(379)
The dream condenses all the motifs of doubles and the mirror images that the novel unfolds so far. The contrasting differences in the two women’s writing are blurred. The nameless narrator unconsciously resignifies herself as the other woman by writing in “long, and slanting” letters. While the narrator’s projection of herself as a writing subject indicates the growth of her self-esteem in the production of autonomy and thereby places Rebecca generically in the literary tradition of Bildungsroman, the “slanting” letters imply the nature of the text that the narrator will produce, the narrative that becomes Rebecca. The mirror image in the dream completes the narrator’s search for the absent woman. It is reminiscent of the narrator’s previous evocation of Rebecca in her bedroom preserved in a grotesquely erotic passion: “In a minute Rebecca herself would
come back into the room, sit down before the looking-glass at her dressing-table, humming a tune, reach for her comb and run it through her hair. If she sat there I should see her reflection in the glass, and she would see me too, standing like this by the door.
Nothing happened” (165). At the moment the narrator is only able to capture Rebecca tantalizingly between presence and absence, between memory and loss; now Rebecca returns as she is desired and registers the female body in the erotically charged space of the narrator’s dream.
If the nightmarish dream in the opening of the novel locates Manderley, the mythical form of Englishness, in the terrain of the Gothic and transforms it into a house of secrets, the eerie dream toward the end of Rebeccareinforces the fluidity of feminine sexuality.
The dream resolves a series of the narrator’s differentiations from and identifications with Rebecca in fashioning her female desires and feminine sexuality in the domestic space of Manderley. The composite of the fragmentary signs of Rebecca shows her as a fluid subject with “the ability to shift between subject positions and across social and cultural spaces” (Harbord 102). Rebecca is both fascinating and menacing, for she produces the female subjectivity that is transgressive of the categories of class, gender, and sexuality. In the dream, the boundariesbetween the two women are blurred; the sexual subjectivity is imagined fluid; the Medusa-like image of locks is both erotic and deadly. In this dream, the narrator is transformed into the woman whose laughter is suggestive of her transgressive desires to mock the romanticized fantasy of the country house
version of Englishness and dismantle the security of its patriarchal foundation.
As the two women merge together in the eerieanderoticdreamtoward the end of Rebecca, du Maurier invites the reader to return to the other dream, also grotesque and deathly, that begins the novel.With Manderley, the house of dark secrets, turned into ashes, the narrator is now in exile away from England and takes on a journey into memories. Shedreams of the moon-lit ruins of Manderley and slips into secret reveries, awaiting for a woman in evening dress and satin shoes to return as Mrs. Danvers once did. The nameless narratorof Rebeccathus haunts Manderley, the ruins of fetishized Englishness, as she writes the story of Rebecca and herself, openingthe script with a sentence that haunts the reader:“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” In Rebecca, the fantasy of mythic Englishness is replaced with nightmarish visions of the ruins of Manderley wherein the narrator haunts the ghostly woman ina mixture of desire and terror and encrypts the enduring story of Rebecca, whose shadowy presence unburies monstrous female desires and embodies a mysterious, amorphous feminine sexuality.
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